LANCING - - By B. W. T. Handford
Not only of surpassing interest to alumni of the school is Mr. Handford's Laneing : A History of SS. Mary and 'icolas College, 1848-1930 (Blackwell, 12s. 6d.), . a book faithfully and comprehensively executed and shot throukhoin with a pleasant humour, but it is also an important eons bution tp the history Of English education, and in a lesser degree that of architecture and the Church. The Woodard schails are id fact a stupendous achievement. Canon Nathaniel Woodard, half evangelical, half tractarian, with a strong dash of the mystic and an autocrat of superhuman drive, founded in his own- lifetime and without capital seven public-schools, and now sixteen schools flourish under hi name. Lancing, with its noble almost-cathedral which symbolises the unity of his foundations is the clilmination of his effort. Woodard set steadily before him the ideal of founding a group of differently graded but cheaply priced schools which should educate the middle classes in their varying social degrees and in them he anticipated many of the features which to:day are the last cry in educational methods—vocational training among them and the educa. tional ladder whereby a boy should climb through. some one of the lower-grade schools on to Lancing and so to the University. And may one note with interest that he regarded beer" as one of the necessities in the most economical dietary he could invent for his cheapest schools " ?
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