Uppingham by the Sea | Page 2

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,