Another day of surprises as the assault upon St. Oswald’s goes on. The first came just as I reached the School gates, which, as of today, are flanked with a billboard as big as a barn, depicting two young Spartans in St. Oswald’s uniform, apparently conducting some kind of experiment involving test tubes, smoke, and crème de menthe, below the giant slogan PROGRESS THROUGH TRADITION.

I took a few moments to remember where I’d heard the phrase before; then I identified it as part of Harrington’s opening speech. Is this what he means by “rebranding” the School? And what kind of a slogan is Progress Through Tradition?

There were more of the photographs inside the School—the lobby and the Porter’s Lodge—all framed in light oak and depicting schoolboys engaged in a variety of exciting-looking extracurricular activities: theatre; sculpture; trampolining; training with the Army Cadets; competing in cricket and rugby. None of the boys were pupils of ours, being clean, well dressed, and suspiciously lacking in skin blemishes of any kind. But it will impress the parents, of course—which, I suppose, is Harrington’s plan.

Personally, I prefer the battle-scarred lines of Honours Boards along the Lower and Middle Corridors, dating back to 1885 (not the School’s Foundation, of course, but when the New Building was opened), inscribed with the names of our old boys, in gold leaf, on a dark oak ground.

Over the years, some of these boards have faded in the sunlight, and the combined effects of damp and heat have caused the wood to warp and shift, breaking the varnished surfaces into a honeyed crackle glaze. This is most obvious in the boards that happen to face a window; with the result that the corridors have become checkered in light and shade, passing from gold to amber, to black, shifting like the seasons. Some of the names on the sunniest boards have faded into transparency, becoming insubstantial, legible only in sunlight. Others are almost as fresh as the day they were painted—traditionally, by a Sixth-Form boy studying calligraphy—and if you look under the frame, you’ll often find the signatures of the young artists, in Latin:

J. Jordan, scripsit.

P. Jolly, scripsit.

There is something very poignant about those names; those hopeful dates; those lists of awards. Boys who were dead before I was born immortalized in gold leaf, linking us all with past glories, every name a shared triumph, every scar a story. The School stopped commissioning Honours Boards when old Shitter Shakeshafte began his reign; but if you look on the Middle Corridor, opposite the window, you can still see, in the top right-hand corner, the name of R. H. Straitley—almost entirely faded away except for the last three letters, tucked into the side of the frame, gleaming out defiantly from a wedge of shadow.