Uppingham by the Sea: A Narrative of the Year at Borth

"O what have we ta'en?" said the fisher-prince,

"What have we ta'en this morning's tide?

Get thee down to the wave, my carl,

And row me the net to the meadow's-side."

In he waded, the fisher-carl,

And "Here," quoth he, "is a wondrous thing!

A cradle, prince, and a fair man-child,

Goodly to see as the son of a king!"

The fisher-prince he caught the word,

And "Hail," he cried, "to the king to be!

Stranger he comes from the storm and the night;

But his fame shall wax, and his name be bright,

While the hills look down on the Cymry sea."

Finding of Taliesin.

Elphin, son of Gwyddno, the prince who ruled the coasts between the Dovey and the Ystwith, came down on a May-day morning to his father's fishing-weir. All that was taken that morning was to be Elphin's, had Gwyddno said. Not a fish was taken that day; and Elphin, who was ever a luckless youth, would have gone home empty-handed, but that one of his men found, entangled in the poles of the weir, a coracle, and a fair child in it. This was none other than he who was to be the father of Cymry minstrelsy, and whom then and there his rescuers named Taliesin, which means Radiant Brow. His mother, Ceridwen, seeking to be rid of her infant, but loath to have the child's blood on her head, had launched him in this sea proof cradle, to take the chance of wind and wave. The spot where he came to land bears at this day the name of Taliesin. On the hill-top above it men show the grave where the bard reposes and "glories in his namesake shore."

* * * * *

There is something magnetic in a famous site: it attracts again a like history to the old stage. Thirteen centuries and a half after the finding of Taliesin, the same shore became once again an asylum for other outcasts, whose fortunes we propose to chronicle.

But since the day when they drifted to land the cradle of the bard, the waves have ebbed away from Gwyddno's weir, and left a broad stretch of marsh and meadow between it and the present coast, where stands the fishing village of Borth. The village fringes the sea-line with half a mile of straggling cottages; but the eye is caught at once by a massive building of white stone, standing at the head of the long street, and forming a landmark in the plain. This building is the Cambrian Hotel, reared on a scale that would suggest the neighbourhood of a populous health-resort. But the melancholy silence which haunts its doors is rarely broken, between season and season, by the presence of guests, unless it be some chance sportsman in quest of marsh-fowl, or a land-agent in quest of rents.

When, therefore, on the 15th of March, 1876, a party of four visitors-the Rev. Edward Thring, Headmaster of Uppingham School, one of the Trustees of the school, and two of the masters-were seen mounting the steps of the porch, it was a sight to make the villagers wonder by what chance so many guests came to knock at the door in that dead season. Had the wind blown them hither? It blew a hurricane that day on the bleak coasts of Cardigan Bay; but it was a shrewder storm yet which had swept this windfall to the doors of Borth.

The story must be briefly told. On November 2nd, 1875, Uppingham School was dispersed on account of a fever which had attacked both town and school, not without fatal casualties. On January 28th, 1876, the school met again. In the interval the school-houses had been put in complete sanitary order, and though the efforts made to amend the general drainage of the town had been only on a small and tentative scale, it was thought that the school, if secure on its own premises, might safely be recalled, in spite of remaining deficiencies outside those limits. But, tua res agitur-the term began with three weeks of watchful quiet, and then the blow fell again. A boy sickened of the same fever; then, after an interval of suspense, two or three fresh cases made it clear that this was no accident. An inspection of the town drainage, ordered by the authorities, revealed certain permanent sources of danger. It was clear that the interests of school and town, in matters of hygiene as in others, were not separable; perhaps the best fruit of the sequel has been the mutual conviction that those interests are one.

Meanwhile the new illustration of this connection of interests had a formidable significance for the Uppingham masters. Men looked at one another as those do who do not like to give a name to their fears. For what could be done? The school could not be dismissed again. How many would return to a site twice declared untenable? But neither could it be kept on the spot: for there came in unmistakable evidence that, in that case, the school would dissolve itself, and that, perhaps, irrevocably, through the withdrawal of its scholars by their parents from the dreaded neighbourhood. Already the trickling had begun; something must be done before the banks broke, and the results and hopes of more than twenty long working years were poured out to waste.

When the crisis was perceived, a project which had been already the unspoken thought in responsible quarters, but which would have sounded like a counsel of despair had the situation been less acute, was suddenly started in common talk and warmly entertained. Why should we not anticipate calamity by flight? Before the school melted away, and left us teaching empty benches, why should we not flit, master and scholar together, and preserve the school abroad for a securer future afterwards at home?

In a space of time to be measured rather by hours than days, this project passed through the stages of conception, discussion, and resolve, to the first step in its execution. On Tuesday, March 7th, a notice was issued to parents and guardians that the school would break up that day week for a premature Easter holiday, and at the end of the usual three weeks reassemble in some other locality, of which nothing could as yet be specified except that it was to be healthier than that we were leaving.

The proposed experiment-to transport a large public school from its native seat and all its appliances and plant to a strange site of which not even the name was yet known, except as one of several possible spots, and to do this at a few days' notice-was no doubt a novel one. But the resolve, if rapidly formed and daring, was none the less deliberate and sane. Its authors must not be charged either with panic or a passion for adventure. All the data of a judgment were in view, and delay could add no new fact, except one which would make any decision nugatory because too late. It was wisdom in those with whom lay the cast of the die, to take their determination while a school remained for which they could determine anything.

It was a sharp remedy, however. For on the morrow of this resolve the owners of so many good houses, fields, and gardens, all the outward and visible of Uppingham School, became, for a term without assignable limit, landless and homeless men, and the Headmaster almost as much disburdened of his titular realm as if he were a bishop in partibus or the chief of a nomad caravan. It was a sharp remedy; but those who submitted to it breathed the freer at having broken prison, and felt something, not indeed of the recklessness which inspires adventure, but of the elation which sustains it:

Why now, blow wind, swell billow, and swim bark;

The storm is up, and all is on the hazard!

There was cited at this time a somewhat similar event in the history of Rugby School. Dr. Arnold, in a like emergency, had removed the school, or all who chose to go, in numerous detachments under the care severally of himself and others of his masters to various distant spots, among others his own house in the Lake country, where they spent some two months, and returned to Rugby when the danger was over. It was felt, however, that this incident furnished no real precedent for the present venture. What we were proposing was not to arrange a number of independent reading-parties in scattered country retreats. Such a plan would hardly have been practicable with a system in which, as in our case, the division of the school for teaching purposes has no reference to the division into boarding-houses. It was proposed to pluck up the school by the roots and transplant it bodily to strange soil; to take with us the entire body of masters, with, probably, their families, and every boy who was ready to follow; to provide teaching for the latter, not only without loss in the amount, but without interruption of the existing system in any branch; and to guarantee the supply of everything necessary for the corporate life of three hundred boys, who had to be housed, fed, taught, disciplined, and (not the easiest of tasks) amused, on a single spot, and one as bare of all the wonted appliances of public school life as that yet uncertain place was like to prove, of which the recommendation for our residence would be that no one else cared to reside there.