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St Edward’s:
150 Years
Chapter 6 / St Edward’s and the Wars
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many, saying, ‘it should be recorded with pride that the
following were OSE: Guy Penrose Gibson VC, Arthur Banks
GC (Posthumous), Edmund Goddard CGM, Charles Alfred
George Cook GM, and Sam Preston Haighton GM. Haighton
was a Seaman in the Royal Navy and was awarded his George
Medal for ‘courage and coolness during an enemy air attack’.
The end of the Second World War came at midnight on
8 May 1945 and there was a Service of Thanksgiving in the
Chapel. In the evening there had been a sing-song in Big
School followed by the floodlighting of the Chapel for the
first time since the summer of 1939. Warden Kendall spoke
saying that he felt there had been ‘no time during the war
when he had called for the help of the boys when they had
not responded to the call’ and he said of the OSE generally
that ‘they, including those who had fallen, would be present
in spirit under the reflection of the floodlit Chapel’.
Commemoration in 1945 was attended by over 200 OSE,
most still in uniform, many wearing their decorations and
many obviously wounded. The
Chronicle
said ‘All that we
felt found its fullest expression in Chapel on Sunday. We
remembered our founders, benefactors and absent friends
with a greater intensity of feeling and devotion than ever
before. As we stood while the Warden read the names of
the OSE who had fallen in the war, pride and sorrow were
mingled in our hearts in that greatest paradox of the Christian
religion, the glory of the Cross.’
Once again the School had to decide how to commemorate
those who had lost their lives or been incapacitated by the
war. There was to be an apsidal wall in the Chapel, giving the
names of the dead; grants were to be given to educate sons of
OSE killed or incapacitated during the war at the School and
lastly a building to house a library and speech hall were to
be built, if possible. The ‘New Library’ was opened in 1953 at
Kendall’s last Gaudy by the Bishop of Exeter, Robert Mortimer
(B, 1916–21), and was used from Autumn Term 1954. The
Royal Air Force gave a memorial window (now installed in the
Old Library), which was dedicated in 1955.
The two world wars had certainly had their effect on our
School, and the Wardens of the time must have found it very
hard to bear, losing men to the wars who so recently had been
walking across the Quad as boys.
Left: Wartime PT
c.
1942.
Below: VE Day on the Quad.
Opposite: Memorial Chapel plaque to
those that died in the SecondWorldWar.
WARDEN KENDALL
‘… there is hope (of peace). From the knowledge of the quality of the
service you are giving at home and overseas, by land, by sea, in the
air, in prison camps, and in hospitals and far-off jungle swamps. From
everywhere there comes the story of duty well done, sometimes with high
reward, sometimes just a passing mention in some friend’s letter home; or
a card from a prison camp.’
– Warden Kendall, in a letter to OSE in March 1944.