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So, six young lives cut tragically short, all men of great talent just embarking on their adult lives. They were among the 1,820 OMTs who fought in the First World War, and the 311 who died. It was a privilege and an honour to lay wreaths at the graves of fi ve of them on the recent OMT Commemorative Trip to the Ypres Salient, described elsewhere in this magazine. Questions remain, of course. What of the other fi ve members of that 1908 team? We know, for example, that the captain Kenneth Robatham went on to Caius College, Cambridge, where he won a hockey Blue. During the war he was a Captain in the 2nd Ghurka Rifl es, and fought in Mesopotamia. He played in a First Class cricket match in India in 1921, and died at the age of 75 in 1965. It would be very interesting to fi nd out what happened to the other four players (C. H. Wakely, W. H. Pridden, C. E. Spencer and I. F. Schooling).

And what motivated them to lay down their lives in war? How

infl uential, for example, for the younger players was the OTC in instilling military virtues? Lord Haldane certainly had high expectations of his new Corps; carrying out the fi rst inspection of his old school Edinburgh Academy’s OTC in 1907 he told the assembled ranks: “We thought that if we could get boys suffi ciently early to take a serious view of their future as citizens . . . to fi ght and, if necessary, to die for the empire . . . then we should have given them a piece of idealism and we at the same time should have given to the nation a reserve of offi cers”. The OTC movement might have fallen short of Haldane’s high expectations, but what it did do was to broaden the range of schools from which the army was to draw its offi cers; Merchant Taylors’ was not a school with a strong military tradition, but when the call came its Old Boys were to play a full part, not least as junior offi cers amongst whose ranks the casualty fi gures were to be so tragically high.

And then there are the team games that they played at school, and which since the days of Thomas Arnold at Rugby School in the mid-19th century had played a key role in a public school education. The 1908 1st XI may not have been the most successful, but no doubt its members learnt a lot about team spirit, and courage in adversity, which would have shaped their characters. Sir Henry Newbolt’s famous poem, Vitaï Lampada, is not everyone’s favourite, emphasising as it does characteristics which may seem outdated today. Written in 1897, about a schoolboy cricketer at Newbolt’s alma mater, Clifton College, who grows up to fight in Africa, it was well received at the time, and enjoyed a surge in popularity at the outbreak of war in 1914. As the war dragged on and its horrors became a reality, the poem fell from favour, but I can’t help thinking about that tragic 1908 team photograph when I read its words.

Concordia Merchant Taylors’ School

The first OTC Inspection at Charterhouse Square on September 28th 1908