The "Arthur Evans" Letter

From: Arthur Evans (1941-1946)
Date: 20 November 2015
To: Webmaster
Subject:  Esmeduna

Hi Webmaster,

Herewith a snippet from Esmeduna for the Website.

Cheers Arthur

FOUNDERS’ DAY CENTENARY - LIVERPOOL COLLEGIATE INSTITUTION

As we are celebrating this year the 175th Anniversary of the Foundation of the Liverpool Collegiate Institution, it is of interest to read, from a copy of Esmeduna, a report on the celebration of the 100th Anniversary at the Liverpool Collegiate School, viz;-

For this year`s Foundation Day, on October, the 22nd (1940), the Rev. R.G. Lunt, the new Headmaster of our fellow school, Liverpool College, came to address the School (Liverpool Collegiate).

Our visitor began by expressing his pleasure at being called upon to talk to the School in his first year at the Liverpool College. Founders` Day he said was always the time when we reviewed the year gone by, to see how near we had got to our Target.

After sketching the proud history of the School and emphasising the admiration with which the building had originally been regarded, Mr. Lunt went on to review the aims of the Founders of the School and how far they had been fulfilled. Many things had happened which our Founders could not have dreamed – one of these was the education of women on an equal basis with men, and we now had our female equivalent in Grove Street.

But it must be remembered that the word education did not mean merely the absorption of facts or even the development of physique, but a far greater thing. The object of these enterprising men, as Mr. Gladstone had pointed out at the Opening Ceremony, was to develop soul and not just the mind and body. Mr. Lunt likened the School to a hot-house, and emphasised that we should pay more attention to the roots than we do to the fluids of its products. Education was to give qualities rather than qualifications.

After all Religion and the cultivation of character were vital for our well-being in the world today and if we recognise that there was a God as we should and realise that it was a difficult task that lay ahead of us, but if we refused to believe in His existence, then we might as well resign ourselves to the storing up of atom bombs and a reversion to Jungle Law.