At the end of lent term it became known that Rutherford intended to make me one of the four school monitors. Both James the present Q.S. captain & Bompas went to him to try & induce him to reconsider his determination but he simply wouldn’t listen to them. On the last day the monitors names were read out in school mine amongst them when it was our time to take the rod, James went up to Rutherford & told him that I did not wish to be made a school monitor. Rutherford however made me come up & accept the rod. I went to him again after school but he absolutely refused to listen to my objections & cut me short by turning away & beginning to talk to an Old Westminster who happened to be there. I cannot regard this new arrangement as at all a good one. It is of a piece with the systematic abolition of old customs that there has been since Rutherford has come here. The change was neither denied by Q.S.S. nor T.B.B. & the position of a T.B. who is made monitor in this way is an extremely awkward one. In numerous little points difficulties are apt to crop up & render this the present system practically amounts to making the four head fellows monitors. In a Vith in which there are as now a lot of fellows of barely 15. This will probably result some year in the monitors being an excessively small lot who will have no influence in the school.
J. I. Stirling. Prin.Opp