Why run a BGS website?

The register of the answer depends on the tonality of the question.  

For Gordon Hindel, who raised the question:      As Sun Ra said, “F*** the ghetto, let's go to the Stars!” It’s the possibility for multiple spaces and multiple times to co-exist together inside one’s head, at any one time, and at your calling, and to explore and enrich oneself in them all: none takes away for the other. It’s like loving lots of people – and sometimes women - all at the same time. Loving one doesn’t mean you don’t or can’t love the others, or that you love them any the less. It’s just “Adding to the Universe of the Possible”, as Sun Ra might have said – or perhaps he said, “Space is the Place – Time is the Line”. 

Well that is one explanation and a true, if rather general one. More prosaically, it started from a need to acknowledge what the School had given, and in particular Ezra had given: those doors to new perceptions. Ezra had moved away and then died before he could be thanked. Starting the website was simply a guise for a public declaration of gratitude to him: as close as I could come to thanking him - and perhaps in some Sun Ra universe, it works. The site then grew and took on a life of its own. An interest in cartography and economic development fuelled the collection of maps and associated photos – And the maps are by far the most browsed and downloaded area of the site. And, anyway, nowadays since I live my life so much in writing and, that to a great extent, on the net, there is little marginal effort for the great pleasure and interest which the site provides me with.  

But let’s get this straight. The school failed in much. The site is not a panegyric. Most notably, enthusiasm, commitment and a belief in the importance of knowledge, outside four or five of the blessèd souled, were in short supply. I consciously remember being cornered one morning by Vic Roebuck and intensely questioned as to my interest in playing rugby, which had evaporated by the Third Year. Finally, and somewhat shame-facedly, but with total resolution, I stated that I had no interest remaining. As I walked away, I truly wished others had had Vic’s character and commitment to their own subjects.

 The treatment of music – indeed our own Lord of the Flies approach to those with musical talent – was appalling. The mechanistic, text-based learning of languages, which we seemed to suffer, did not necessarily exist in other schools: my first year, many years later, living in France, was the unlearning of incomprehensible, unintelligible, inappropriate French and an astonishment at a wonderful and expressive new language, music and cinema. To have had Bill Read teach a year of Euclid followed by two years of George Cooper’s didactics qualified one for the mental asylum and an empirically sound hatred of maths – not for O Levels. English became the language of intellectual liberation only by chance, in that sop to a rounded education for us proto-scientists in the Sixth, “General Studies”. And that through the wonderful mind of the so unjustly hated, by some, Norman Roe. History was mostly a fact-file of the degenerate, supposed royalty of the land – brightened only by the additional fact that they often murdered each other or died of syphilis – and the smirk, being Irish, that English royalty was, as yet another fact, either French or latterly German and only relatively recently able to speak an English of any sort.

But all that said, I, we, owe the school, and them, much. And I, being Irish, am intensely grateful to have been educated in liberal England, away from the then, and sometimes still, repressive ethos of Holy Catholic Ireland.