THE LILY, p. 146
Old Boys and Benefactors: 5. Haldane Campbell Stewart
Anyone who reads recent numbers of THE LILY will be struck by the wide and increasing variety of the School's activities. He will also see that a healthily large number of Old Waynfletes go up to Oxford, many of them to the College, and that some reach the heights in Schools and in Sport. In short, in an age of specialization and of competition between large numbers of young men, the tradition of M.C.S. is being upheld in spite of great changes.
What might be found surprising is that this tradition existed when the School was very much smaller, small enough to exist within the walls of the college. In 1879 a chorister entered the School whose record of all-round achievement will surely never be equalled. H.C. Stewart, the son of the chief of a Scottish clan, served his apprenticeship to music under Parratt. He had at this time no marked bias. Like any schoolboy, but with far greater talents than most, he entered into the life of the School wherever his inclination lay. When he left he was a leading figure in every School activity. The classics, music, athletics and games of every kind all came alike to him, as the 'Lilies' of his decade at School show. Though he did everything without apparent effort, he had great powers of concentration on whatever he was doing at the moment and was never content to do anything slipshod. It is recorded of him that one of the sights of the School which newboys were showing was Stewart, calmly preparing a classical author or writing a prose in the hubbub of the old Big School during a break.
After a brilliant school career he went up to Oxford as a classical exhibitioner of Magdalen, and at Oxford too pursued (though that is not the right word to use of one so inherently modest) athletic honours and was well in the running for three blues; he played soccer for the University, and after stroking the College VIII in his second year was urged to stick to rowing with the virtual certainty of a blue; but his first love was cricket, as his later career shows, and in the light of later glory it is hard to see why he was invited to Lord's only as twelfth man. However diffused his energies were, he certainly used them to the full. He played both codes of football, lawn tennis and rackets, became an expert figure skater and a plus 2 handicap golfer and could run up a billiards break of over 100. He could even beat all comers in the bitterly competitive game of croquet.
When he went down, it was to teach music, first for five years at Lancing, during which he played soccer for Brighton and rugger for Sussex, and then for two at Wellington, before going in 1898 to Tonbridge. Here he was musical director for twenty-one years. Stewart used himself to say that he took up music by accident. This, while it illustrates his unassuming character, was not really so. Rather it had been crowded out for a time, for he had a natural gift for it and in due course proceeded to an Oxford doctorate and took his place on the Council of the Royal College of Organists. Until his arrival at Tonbridge music there was very much a Cinderella subject: the master taught the piano and little else, except that he 'took' the occasional 'sing-song'. Stewart unobtrusively changed all this by exposing his charges to music at organ recitals and then forming a school choral society. It was also through his initiative that the town orchestral society came into being. He showed that music was something to enjoy and proved a great and patient interpreter of it to the inexpert. At the same time he set himself and demanded from others the highest standards and compelled attention by a natural authority, whether music was the subject or classics, being perfectly capable of taking over the classical sixth for a colleague at a moment's notice.
While at Tonbridge he still found time for sport. He won the singles competition at the Tonbridge Tennis club year after year and staked a claim to being Kent's finest amateur cricketer. He had been playing for the county during holidays since 1892 and fitted in seventy-five games up to 1902, as well as turning out for the M.C.C. and the Free Foresters for many years. Perhaps 1897 was his greatest season: he scored 853 runs with a highest score of 142 and in the Gentlemen v Players match made 22 out of his side's total of 67 against Richardson, fastest of bowlers, in 'a wretched light' as Wisden recorded. In 1899 he was top scorer for the county with 71 and 15 not out when Kent beat the Australians. Cricket gave play to his natural grace and economy of effort, the perfect balance which led C. B. Fry to publish a picture of him at the wicket with the single word 'Elegance' as caption, a tribute from one great all-rounder to another. A Tonbridge colleague put it another way: 'I think H.C. lights a cigarette better than any man I know.'
A year after the Great War Stewart came back to Oxford and the College, succeeding Varley Roberts as organist. A choir used to Varley Roberts, down-to-earth, emotional in his approach to music and to people and essentially a Victorian - in short, a 'character' - must have found life under the new organist very different. Doctor Stewart was a first-rate choir trainer who endeared himself to generations of choristers and quietly handed on to them an all-round musical education. A number of them went on to the universities as choral scholars, some read music and all owed to him a lifelong enjoyment of music. Back at Magdalen the Doctor, as the choir styled him, joined as vigorously as ever in the life of the University and became one of its most popular figures, at high table, in the faculty and as a member of the College tennis and golf teams. He unobtrusively contributed to the City's music by the programme notes he wrote for the Oxford subscription concerts. For the School he set Miles Christi to new music and wrote the beautiful setting of the Lilies of the Field. In music his taste was always discriminating and always enlarging. Big names per se meant nothing to him; great music was what mattered. The choir learnt what was best in the old and the new. The College Carol Service and the singing in the cloisters (which was started in 1920 and always took place on the Sunday of Eights' Week) became outstanding contributions to the University's musical calendar: the Doctor had the lay clerks singing in French - Tessier's 'To Lovely Groves' and Ravel's Trois Chansons - and the Volga Boatsong in Russian: they probably did not know that in the Great War he had taken up Russian only to be nearly dismissed [from] the class by his Tonbridge colleagues, having quickly outstripped them. Of what he wrote himself much, and among the best, was for the choir - his service in C♯ minor, and mystical setting of Veni Creator Spiritus, both 'difficult' but extremely rewarding, and his robust treatment of an old Oxford poem, in which his exact ear caught precisely the complex tones of Tom chimes. Owing, perhaps, to his fastidious self-criticism, little that he wrote was published. But what there was is pure gold.
Music was also an integral part of Stewart's family life. Himself being a viola player and his wife a 'cellist, he was after his marriage in 1913 much drawn to chamber music which he approached with an intimate knowledge of both technique and musicology. Brahms particularly appealed to him both as scholar and performer. His two children grew up with music and used to wake him on his birthday with a miniature recital. His daughter played the viola and joined one of the outstanding quartets in contemporary English music. For his wife he wrote a 'cello sonata and a fantasy for 'cello and orchestra; for his family and friends an operetta, 'Aucassin and Nicolette'. His music shows a freshness and sincerity and a sureness of taste that mirror the man. He was, in the words of Sir Hugh Allen, a highly sensitive and accomplished musician who produced many charming compositions and set himself the highest standard in all he did.
Although Stewart attempted so many things with such success, without ever being a 'careerist', it is as the servant of music that he is best remembered, and here he had an influence which he would perhaps not have admitted, an influence exerted with the greatest courtesy and gentleness. He served the College in different capacities for nearly half his life, and died in harness after coming out of retirement during the war to take up his duties again. His last service to the College and to Oxford was the 1942 singing in the Cloisters, a programme nicely combining the best in music and poetry old and new. He was at once reticent and generous, a man whose own humility belied his outstanding achievements, and who, once known, was the warmest of friends.
D.L.L.C.
Anyone who reads recent numbers of THE LILY will be struck by the wide and increasing variety of the School's activities. He will also see that a healthily large number of Old Waynfletes go up to Oxford, many of them to the College, and that some reach the heights in Schools and in Sport. In short, in an age of specialization and of competition between large numbers of young men, the tradition of M.C.S. is being upheld in spite of great changes.
What might be found surprising is that this tradition existed when the School was very much smaller, small enough to exist within the walls of the college. In 1879 a chorister entered the School whose record of all-round achievement will surely never be equalled. H.C. Stewart, the son of the chief of a Scottish clan, served his apprenticeship to music under Parratt. He had at this time no marked bias. Like any schoolboy, but with far greater talents than most, he entered into the life of the School wherever his inclination lay. When he left he was a leading figure in every School activity. The classics, music, athletics and games of every kind all came alike to him, as the 'Lilies' of his decade at School show. Though he did everything without apparent effort, he had great powers of concentration on whatever he was doing at the moment and was never content to do anything slipshod. It is recorded of him that one of the sights of the School which newboys were showing was Stewart, calmly preparing a classical author or writing a prose in the hubbub of the old Big School during a break.
After a brilliant school career he went up to Oxford as a classical exhibitioner of Magdalen, and at Oxford too pursued (though that is not the right word to use of one so inherently modest) athletic honours and was well in the running for three blues; he played soccer for the University, and after stroking the College VIII in his second year was urged to stick to rowing with the virtual certainty of a blue; but his first love was cricket, as his later career shows, and in the light of later glory it is hard to see why he was invited to Lord's only as twelfth man. However diffused his energies were, he certainly used them to the full. He played both codes of football, lawn tennis and rackets, became an expert figure skater and a plus 2 handicap golfer and could run up a billiards break of over 100. He could even beat all comers in the bitterly competitive game of croquet.
When he went down, it was to teach music, first for five years at Lancing, during which he played soccer for Brighton and rugger for Sussex, and then for two at Wellington, before going in 1898 to Tonbridge. Here he was musical director for twenty-one years. Stewart used himself to say that he took up music by accident. This, while it illustrates his unassuming character, was not really so. Rather it had been crowded out for a time, for he had a natural gift for it and in due course proceeded to an Oxford doctorate and took his place on the Council of the Royal College of Organists. Until his arrival at Tonbridge music there was very much a Cinderella subject: the master taught the piano and little else, except that he 'took' the occasional 'sing-song'. Stewart unobtrusively changed all this by exposing his charges to music at organ recitals and then forming a school choral society. It was also through his initiative that the town orchestral society came into being. He showed that music was something to enjoy and proved a great and patient interpreter of it to the inexpert. At the same time he set himself and demanded from others the highest standards and compelled attention by a natural authority, whether music was the subject or classics, being perfectly capable of taking over the classical sixth for a colleague at a moment's notice.
While at Tonbridge he still found time for sport. He won the singles competition at the Tonbridge Tennis club year after year and staked a claim to being Kent's finest amateur cricketer. He had been playing for the county during holidays since 1892 and fitted in seventy-five games up to 1902, as well as turning out for the M.C.C. and the Free Foresters for many years. Perhaps 1897 was his greatest season: he scored 853 runs with a highest score of 142 and in the Gentlemen v Players match made 22 out of his side's total of 67 against Richardson, fastest of bowlers, in 'a wretched light' as Wisden recorded. In 1899 he was top scorer for the county with 71 and 15 not out when Kent beat the Australians. Cricket gave play to his natural grace and economy of effort, the perfect balance which led C. B. Fry to publish a picture of him at the wicket with the single word 'Elegance' as caption, a tribute from one great all-rounder to another. A Tonbridge colleague put it another way: 'I think H.C. lights a cigarette better than any man I know.'
A year after the Great War Stewart came back to Oxford and the College, succeeding Varley Roberts as organist. A choir used to Varley Roberts, down-to-earth, emotional in his approach to music and to people and essentially a Victorian - in short, a 'character' - must have found life under the new organist very different. Doctor Stewart was a first-rate choir trainer who endeared himself to generations of choristers and quietly handed on to them an all-round musical education. A number of them went on to the universities as choral scholars, some read music and all owed to him a lifelong enjoyment of music. Back at Magdalen the Doctor, as the choir styled him, joined as vigorously as ever in the life of the University and became one of its most popular figures, at high table, in the faculty and as a member of the College tennis and golf teams. He unobtrusively contributed to the City's music by the programme notes he wrote for the Oxford subscription concerts. For the School he set Miles Christi to new music and wrote the beautiful setting of the Lilies of the Field. In music his taste was always discriminating and always enlarging. Big names per se meant nothing to him; great music was what mattered. The choir learnt what was best in the old and the new. The College Carol Service and the singing in the cloisters (which was started in 1920 and always took place on the Sunday of Eights' Week) became outstanding contributions to the University's musical calendar: the Doctor had the lay clerks singing in French - Tessier's 'To Lovely Groves' and Ravel's Trois Chansons - and the Volga Boatsong in Russian: they probably did not know that in the Great War he had taken up Russian only to be nearly dismissed [from] the class by his Tonbridge colleagues, having quickly outstripped them. Of what he wrote himself much, and among the best, was for the choir - his service in C♯ minor, and mystical setting of Veni Creator Spiritus, both 'difficult' but extremely rewarding, and his robust treatment of an old Oxford poem, in which his exact ear caught precisely the complex tones of Tom chimes. Owing, perhaps, to his fastidious self-criticism, little that he wrote was published. But what there was is pure gold.
Music was also an integral part of Stewart's family life. Himself being a viola player and his wife a 'cellist, he was after his marriage in 1913 much drawn to chamber music which he approached with an intimate knowledge of both technique and musicology. Brahms particularly appealed to him both as scholar and performer. His two children grew up with music and used to wake him on his birthday with a miniature recital. His daughter played the viola and joined one of the outstanding quartets in contemporary English music. For his wife he wrote a 'cello sonata and a fantasy for 'cello and orchestra; for his family and friends an operetta, 'Aucassin and Nicolette'. His music shows a freshness and sincerity and a sureness of taste that mirror the man. He was, in the words of Sir Hugh Allen, a highly sensitive and accomplished musician who produced many charming compositions and set himself the highest standard in all he did.
Although Stewart attempted so many things with such success, without ever being a 'careerist', it is as the servant of music that he is best remembered, and here he had an influence which he would perhaps not have admitted, an influence exerted with the greatest courtesy and gentleness. He served the College in different capacities for nearly half his life, and died in harness after coming out of retirement during the war to take up his duties again. His last service to the College and to Oxford was the 1942 singing in the Cloisters, a programme nicely combining the best in music and poetry old and new. He was at once reticent and generous, a man whose own humility belied his outstanding achievements, and who, once known, was the warmest of friends.
D.L.L.C.
