I remember heading up to books to sit my final A-Level History paper. It was a misty morning, and I felt a quiet pre-exam apprehension as I walked out of Beloe’s. I arrived at School early and stepped into Chantry cloister. I sat down to give my hastily assembled revision notes one last glance, hoping to steady my nerves.
As I looked over my notes on the witch-hunting campaign conducted by ‘Witchfinder General’ Matthew Hopkins in East Anglia in the 1640s, I noticed marks in the Chantry stonework. Seventeenth-century pupils had etched their initials into the walls, and remarkably, one dated from the same decade as the events I was revising. For a moment, my thoughts drifted. There was clearly a distance between our worlds, between mine and that of the pupil who had carved his name into the stone. And yet we were connected; across centuries, we had inhabited the same space, that same cloister.
Of course, Winchester College’s history extends far beyond the seventeenth century. It is likely the longest continuously operating school in England. One of the great privileges of studying at the College was the sense of immersion in its surroundings. Some of my fondest and most vivid memories are of conversations with friends in the Warden’s Garden in summer; of walking back to House past the blossoming wisteria on Musā; and of trips with Mr Rattray (Co Ro, 2019 - ) up to Chapel roof, where we learnt to spot architectural features from different centuries.
A consistent feature of my time at the College was the support of dons. A close friend and I set out to write and edit a Winchester College History Journal. Mr Hallinan (Co Ro, 2018 - 25) and Dr Townson (Co Ro, 2012 - ) were immediately behind the idea. They gave us the freedom to explore subjects that interested us and to write independently. The first printed edition reflected that breadth of student interest, with articles ranging from the control of language in Japanese colonial Korea to the history of crime fiction and the administrative structures of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
We came to know the dons well as people, whether over house lunches or in extracurricular settings, and they came to know us in turn as students. I particularly enjoyed working with Dr Foster (Co Ro, 2012 - ) on curating the All That Glitters exhibition of silver in Treasury Museum. It was no small feat for us in VIth Book 2 to catalogue one of England’s most important institutional collections of silver.
