Another addition to the many grievances which arouse the indignation of all Westminsters has lately been made. On the Friday before Good Friday, a rumour was afloat that no leave out was to be given from Thursday till Easter Tuesday night, as has always been the custom. This, I am sorry to say turned out too true. Leave was given from Thursday night to Good Friday night, & again from Saturday to Sunday but we were required to come into school Easter Monday & Tuesday. When Liddell came up school some fellows hissed him without intending him to hear. But I suppose that his sense of having done us an injury caused him to be on the look out, and sharpened his ears, for he afterwards sent a polite message, intimating that the captain was to loose his election, & that I was to be expelled, if any more demonstrations of sulkiness was made. I of course could do nothing but laugh at this empty threat, for I can hardly suppose that he could think I shd endeavour to impress on the fellows, that ‘‘obedience to your master is your first duty’’ & ‘‘that whatever your masters do is all for the best’’ with such like moral effusions, to save myself from an expulsion in which for such a thing I shd rather glory. Another thing in which I thing Liddell behaved badly is this. He did not come forward publicly & declare that the Easter Holidays were stopped, & I give his reasons for so doing, but as it were, let the affair be bruited about, & indeed I can hardly tell how it was made known to the school. One feels, I think, that when a Head Master declaims to speak openly about a thing like that, that he must be conscious that he has rather overstepped his proper bounds, or that he is consulting his own interests instead of those of the school, which, I fear, is how a course of proceeding wh our present master seems resolved to adopt. It is reported that we are to have an extra wk at Whitsuntide, or Bartholomew tide, but I really think that we have a right to a voice in a matter wh concerns us chiefly, & I do not see why we are to go home, & come back, at the call of a ‘‘fashionable’’ master, in defiance of the rules & customs. Besides most of us if not all wd greatly prefer a break in a long uninteresting term, to an abbreviation of our best term; & next, supposing he does give us an extra wk at either of the above named vacations as far as I can learn, we have already become entitled to one, wh was obtained at the end of the Xmas half/50. I believe that, in extenuation of this abolition of the Easter holiday, it was brought forward by the masters, that many parents complained that they were so bothered by their sons to allow them to come home at Easter, as all the others did so, that it was distressing to them to refuse them, though they did not wish to have them home. However, I suppose this was but a lame excuse, got up for the occasion, for I think that out of every ten parents, nine would wish the Easter holidays to be continued. I may however be wrong, but I leave my readers to judge.
J.M. Murray
Princeps Oppidanus