The Jeweller’s Window Blue-coat Boys

Press, Volume CIII, Issue 30366, 15 February 1964, Page 10

The Jeweller’s Window Blue-coat Boys

(Specially written for “Tiie I HAVE vivid recollections of the “Blue-coat” school in the City of London and of football matches in which I played my part against Blue-coat teams. The bbys in their long blue coats, leather belts and yellow stockings could be seen .playing in their graver ground by passers-by in the busy street, but in after years the school was moved away into the country. We, boys of another school, believed that Blue-coat boys, because they .played on gravel instead of grass, were tougher than we were and to knock against them meant serious abrasions. There are other Blue-coat, that is charity schools, in England, but the Blue-coat School, also called Christ’s Hospital, is the most famous, having been founded by the boy king, Edward VI, in 1553, the year of his' death. Among famous pupils of this school were Charles Lamb, S. T. Coleridge, and Leigh Hunt in the late- eighth eenth century. There is a tenuous link between the school and New Zealand at this time for the master of the Mathematics

Press” by ARNOLD WALL) School of Christ’s Hospital, appointed in 1775, was William Wales, who had accompanied Cook on his second voyage as Astronomer and had seen quite a lot of New Zealand in its primitive state. Lamb describes him in his “Recollections of Christ’s Hospital” as “that hardy sailor, as well as excellent mathematician —a severe but genial man with a perpetual fund of humour, a constant glee about him,” and Leigh Hunt recalls him as “a good man, of plain, simple manners, with a heavy, large person and benign countenance.” Wales kept a journal which makes interesting reading for any New Zealander. He has a long and rather gloomy description of the long stay in Dusky Sound “this dirty disagreeable place” where Cook stayed “near Six Weeks” during which it rained nearly' every day. “Every Island is a Mountain and toe country a heap of Mountains piled one upon another, until'-you lose their Tops in the Clouds.” What stories he might ■ have told to Masters Lamb, Coleridge and Hunt!