Year Eight Literary tour of Stratford-upon-Avon and Rugby
Year Eight pupils visited Stratford-upon-Avon and Rugby School as part of their preparation for the Common Entrance and Scholarship papers. They had earlier enjoyed a workshop and tour of the Globe Theatre in London. The visit to Rugby School was arranged to enable pupils to gain a wider understanding of Tom Brown’s Schooldays which is their ‘heroes and heroines’ set-work for the literature examination. It also enabled them to explore the story surrounding William Webb Ellis and the origins of an all-important game.
Shortly after arriving at Stratford, the school party visited Shakespeare’s Birthplace. The half-timbered house originally belonged to Shakespeare’s father who had moved there by 1552 and become a successful businessman in the town. In 1564, William Shakespeare was born in the house which was originally divided into two parts to allow John Shakespeare, a wool dealer and glove-maker, to carry out his business from the premises. The young Shakespeare, who would have watched his father at work, spent his formative years in the town and was educated at the local school.
There have been visitors to the Birthplace since the mid-eighteenth century. They enter through a small room that was once a separate house occupied by Shakespeare’s sister. A doorway leads to the parlour and then the principal living-room of the actual birthplace. Beyond it, the Oratory pupils entered a room believed to have been John Shakespeare’s workshop. It features a range of tools that were used by glove-makers at that time. In this and other rooms, expert guides enabled the pupils to gain a good understanding of one of Britain’s most famous houses.
One of the upstairs rooms has been described as ‘the country’s earliest literary shrine’. Amongst the exhibits is a window on which Sir Walter Scott and the actor Henry Irving amongst other nineteenth-century visitors scratched their names. The most important of the rooms is undoubtedly the one where researchers are fairly certain that Shakespeare was born in 1564. Pupils were told that the textiles, bed, curtains and wall-cloths were all based on examples from the sixteenth century. Stored under the bed is ‘a replica wheeled “truckle bed” of the sort used by children or servants’.
After visiting the rear wing of the house, everyone moved through the garden to the Shakespearean ‘exhibition’ centre. Displays include a desk from Shakespeare’s King Edward VI Grammar School and details of the playwright’s association with the town. His early life and education are depicted, together with his interest in the Warwickshire countryside and his marriage in 1582 to Anne Hathaway. There are also details of his later life and retirement to Stratford; his purchase of property and his death there in 1616.
On leaving the Birthplace, the pupils strolled towards the Avon River, a picturesque environment with swans and long boats. The view encompasses the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Bancroft Gardens and the Gower Memorial. The central point of the memorial is Lord Ronald Sutherland Gower’s statue of the Bard, cast in bronze and erected in 1888. At each corner are the smaller statues of characters from Shakespeare’s plays, namely Lady Macbeth, Hamlet, Falstaff and Prince Hal.
A visit was thereafter arranged to the Shakespearience, a relatively new attraction at the Waterside Theatre. The show is divided into two ‘Acts’ with the first part involving John Quentin Willson, a television presenter, taking his audience on a visual tour of the life and times of William Shakespeare. The second ‘Act’ is the lively part of the presentation which takes advantage of revolutionary technology to guide the audience through nine of Shakespeare’s plays.
‘It is a high-tech show,’ commented The Sun, ‘stuffed full of special effects.’ As advertised, it made full use of (virtual reality) actors, flashing lightning, blasting winds, moving scenery and surround sound in a beautifully-decorated theatre.
The next part of the day’s outing entailed a forty-five minute trip to Rugby. The pupils were met by Mr Rusty MacLean, the school’s archivist and librarian, who provided a most informative and highly enjoyable guided tour. Rugby, founded in 1567, is a remarkable institution. It possesses an impressive ‘Hall of Fame’ that includes former Prime Ministers of England and France, African hunters and adventurers, actors, artists, musicians, sportsmen and a number of famous writers such as Thomas Hughes, Lewis Carroll, Matthew Arnold, Arthur Hugh Clough, Rupert Brooke (twice winner of the poetry prize at Rugby), Arthur Ransome and more recently, Salman Rushdie and Anthony Horowitz.
As the Oratory pupils entered the Rugby School grounds, they were made immediately aware of the setting of Tom Brown’s first taste of ‘Rugby’ football. The game that took place in Tom Brown’s Schooldays was a contest involving fifty to sixty School House representatives in white trousers taking on the rest of the school, some 120 boys. The playing-field was spread out over a large area that was bisected by trees and included a pond. The scene of a rugby match was not unlike that of a war zone. At the time, it was believed that ‘heroism on the sports field was transmuted into heroism on the battlefield’. When old Brooke leads the School House football team, Hughes refers to him ruling over worshipping subjects with the look ‘I hope to see in my general when I go out to fight’.
The sports-field known as the Close is also remembered for the moment that changed Rugby’s football from a kicking to a handling game. Mr MacLean said that it ‘originated with a Town [House] boy or foundationer of the name of Ellis. William Webb Ellis …’ The Oratory group gathered eagerly around the ‘stone’ which appears on the Doctor’s Wall and ‘commemorates the legendary exploit of William Webb Ellis who with a fine disregard for the rules of football as played in his time first took the ball in his arms and ran with it thus originating the distinctive feature of the Rugby game AD 1823’. It is rugby’s most famous landmark and members of the Oratory First XV were photographed next to the plaque.
Arnold had been both headmaster and chaplain, determined to make the chapel the focal point of school life. Through his important Sunday sermon, he listed the three qualities he most prized in a boy, placing ‘religious and moral principles’ first; ‘gentlemanly conduct’ second and ‘intellectual ability’ third. Baron de Coubertin, founder of the modern Olympic movement, read Tom Brown’s Schooldays, when it was released in France in the 1870s. He then visited Rugby School and, alone in the chapel one evening in 1886, experienced a life-changing revelation. He wrote: ‘My eyes fixed on the funeral slab on which, without epitaph, the great name of Thomas Arnold was inscribed. I dreamed that I saw before me the cornerstone of the British Empire.’ The encounter did not just change the course of de Coubertin's life; it led to the staging of the first Olympic Games at Athens in 1896. Alongside the field is the chapel, where pupils took their seats in one of the pews.
On leaving the chapel, the Oratory pupils glanced to the area behind it because that is where the fight took place between Tom Brown and ‘Slogger’ Williams. There was then a stop-over at the ‘Old Big School’, a nineteenth-century classroom that is currently used as a theatre. Charlie Skipwith was delighted to discover that a ‘distant relation’, ‘Mouse’ Skipwith had been an early Rugby ‘rogue’ and had inscribed his name on one of the wooden panels in the classroom.
The tour party was taken to the classroom of Thomas Arnold – ‘the most famous headmaster in English history’. In the early part of the nineteenth century, Arnold reformed the boys’ public school system by his innovative ideas and his moral and religious teaching. His classroom has been maintained in its original state and much interest was shown in the tradition whereby pupils of Rugby (sometimes with the help of the school carpenter) were allowed to carve their names into desk lids and wooden panels. In the quadrangle below the classroom, Mr MacLean spoke about a well that had once existed beneath the paving. It was also used for washing. Not surprisingly, the boys drank beer at that time because they could at least be certain that the water content had been boiled.
A quick walk was made to the statue of William Webb Ellis. It was erected in 1997 and is said to have been ‘climbed and kissed by a number of weighty rugby players, but so far is bearing the load very well’. There was also a pause outside the gates of School House where Tom Brown had alighted from his coach 150 years earlier. Like the pupils of the Oratory Preparatory School, the young ‘hero’ of the famous novel made the journey from Berkshire. The creator of Tom Brown was from Uffington and, with much of the writing autobiographical, Thomas Hughes would no doubt have been pelted with fruit during the coach ride to Rugby School.
