Winchester College has never had a headmaster famed for flogging. Distinction in that regard is contested by Westminster and Eton: the former boasting Dr Busby, who flogged 16 future bishops while they were under his care, and the latter Dr Keate, who, it is said, flogged 30 boys in one session before discovering that they were his confirmation class expecting to be catechised in matters of the faith.
Winchester has for the most part relied not on the severity of magisterial punishment for its discipline but on the solidity of its system of life – though, it has to be recognised, not always with great success. Dr Joseph Warton, for example, was a gentle scholar and poet who lost control of the school and was forced to resign. His successor 40 years later, Dr Moberly, invented the newfangled “headmaster’s birching”, a Victorian reform which in the end ensured the general odium of the school community.
But Dr Goddard, who could send a boy flying with a box on the ear, but forgave and was forgiven instantly, ruled moderately and effectively. Winchester’s system influenced his pupil Thomas Arnold, who, famous as he became as the first headmaster of Rugby, was Goddard’s inferior as a classical scholar and cribbed most of what he did at Rugby from Goddard’s Winchester.
Winchester was a spartan place when Goddard was a boy in the school. Even half a century later, Dr Moberly could describe his own boyhood as “rough”. He recalled that “delicate boys could not bear it, and I only managed to stand the life by being excused Morning Hills and compulsory cricket.”
You got a scholarship by family or personal connection, not by any potential for scholarly distinction. Increasingly fees had to be paid by parents to augment the limited emoluments of the headmaster and the second master, excluding the really poor boy of promise, whom patronage at its best encourages. It was the inability to pay these dues, and the consequent scorn of his peers, that broke Anthony Trollope’s heart at Winchester, and determined his poverty-stricken father to remove him.
Life was tough for the masters too. It is difficult to exaggerate the burdens of teaching at Winchester, understaffed and underfunded, when Goddard took up the headmastership in 1793. Attitudes were extraordinarily provincial. It is difficult, too, to comprehend the snobbery Goddard suffered as a non-New College man in those days: the poor man had only been at Merton. And Moberly was a despicable Balliol man. Heaven knows what they’d have made of me, a Lincoln man via Keble, a Catholic and an Australian – whatever next?
In 1834 Goddard donated £25,000 from his personal fortune to assist boys in circumstances like those of Trollope to come to Winchester. In 1845, he endowed the Goddard Scholarship to New College, the first step which led to the opening of scholarships to competitive examination in the 1850s and the redirection of funds to revive the founder’s intention of giving boys with parents of limited means access to the school’s education. That project has continued: today just under 20 per cent of the boys have places assisted by the school’s endowment.
William of Wykeham, Bishop of Winchester from 1364 to 1404 and twice Chancellor of England, built and endowed New College, Oxford and Winchester College to provide Church and state with a supply of educated clergy to improve ecclesiastical order and restore the realm after the ravages of the Black Death.
Dr Goddard knew that the founder had designed Winchester as a place for scholars and angels. The angels were, of course, a feature right from the beginning. The founder made sure of it.
More than 600 years later, 16 choirboys (quiristers), singing angels in the sanctuary, still sing services in the chapel through the week.
Many English cathedrals and churches have purchased work by the contemporary sculptor Peter Eugene Ball. Thanks to a generous Catholic benefactor, Winchester possesses six of his sculptures, worked in wood and metal and dressed in vibrant colour, housed in its chapels and library. His work was recently displayed at Southwell Minster.
In September 2014, in an exhibition entitled Scholars and Angels, Ball had a show in Fromond’s Chantry, the exquisite 15th-century chantry chapel nestled in Wykeham’s cloister at Winchester.
The central figure was a piece called The Scholar Christ. That sculpture now stands in the school’s library. It is a living reminder of the school’s Catholic roots and its intellectual and spiritual inheritance, dedicated as Wykeham’s foundation is to the Blessed Virgin Mary of the Annunciation.
It was entirely fitting that the exhibition was mounted in Fromond’s Chantry, a place in which prayers for the generous dead are raised, and where our thoughts naturally turn to matters of eternity.
As the first Catholic headmaster of Winchester since the Reformation, I have felt entirely at home.
Areas of Catholic Herald business are still recovering post-pandemic.
However, we are reaching out to the Catholic community and readership, that has been so loyal to the Catholic Herald. Please join us on our 135 year mission by supporting us.
We are raising £250,000 to safeguard the Herald as a world-leading voice in Catholic journalism and teaching.
We have been a bold and influential voice in the church since 1888, standing up for traditional Catholic culture and values. Please consider donating.