Over 100 Musicians to Get 900 Pupils to Lunch

Here is how they do it, set against how we don’t.

1868. When, the school says, a small group of pupils asked for instruments to accompany their drills. Children volunteering for more drill, and asking for a soundtrack. Ours have volunteered for nothing, and asked for extra equipment once, and it was a second PlayStation controller.

Over 470 years. How long the long blue coat and yellow socks have stayed, by the school’s account, virtually unchanged. They come with white neck bands and, since 1987, Dr. Martens, which the school calls “the perfect accompaniment to the Tudor uniform”. Our youngest comes to dinner in one sock.

95 per cent. The share of pupils who voted to keep the uniform as it was, in a poll reported by The Independent in December 2010. Jack Ferrell, then 18, made the case for everyone looking the same: “You can’t have a laugh at somebody wearing it when you’re wearing it yourself.” Phoebe Hames, a sixth-former, added that it was “incredibly warm, too.” I have tried the warmth argument on a fourteen-year-old about a school coat. It did not go to a vote.

Eleven. The age at which Molly, a pupil from 2013 to 2020, first marched out with the band. It was, she wrote later, her happiest memory of seven years: “the sun was beaming onto the Quad, I was attempting to march whilst playing a French Horn I could barely lift”. She was a full boarder, she said, and she was home. Our children are home already, and still will not come down.

Zero. Bands at our house. On Tuesday I bought a recorder for £3.99 and played something martial at the bottom of the stairs at 6.30pm. Nobody came down. The neighbour did, to ask whether everything was all right.

So I switched off the router. All three arrived at once, in step, in silence. A hundred and fifty-eight years of band tradition, and I did it with a plug.