Collected Letters Volume One: Family Letters 1905–1931. Walter Hooper
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was Jack’s study-mate in School House. On leaving Malvern he went to Hertford College, Oxford. While serving in the First World War during 1916-19 he joined the Royal Air Force and became a professional serviceman. He was promoted to wing commander in 1939, air commander in 1941, air commander of South East Asia 1946-47, and was chief of air staff and organization 1954-57, retiring in 1958.
13 Edward Anderson (1898-1928) was a member of School House 1913-17. After leaving Malvern he served in the war as a 2nd lieutenant. He later moved to Northern Rhodesia, dying there in November 1928.
14 Kenneth Ernest Lodge (1899-?) was a member of School House 1913-17. During the war he served overseas as a 2nd lieutenant with the Duke of Lancaster’s Own Yeomanry. He was promoted to captain and remained in the army.
15 Fitzgerald Charles Cecil Baron Hichens (1895-1977) was at Malvern 1909-14 and was the head of School House when Jack arrived in 1913. From Malvern he went to Exeter College, Oxford, but soon left there for Sandhurst from where he passed into the Duke of Cornwall’s Light Infantry in 1915, becoming a captain in 1918. Following the war he resigned from the army and obtained a regular commission in the Royal Air Force, in which he became a wing commander. He retired in 1943.
16 ‘Smugie’ or ‘Smewgy’ was Harry Wakelyn Smith (1861-1918) who taught Classics and English to the Upper Fifth and for whom Jack was to have great affection. He had been educated at St John’s College, Oxford, and he joined the staff of Malvern in 1885. In SB/VII, Lewis said: ‘Except at Oldie’s I had been fortunate in my teachers ever since I was born; but Smewgy was “beyond expectation, beyond hope”. He was a grey-head with large spectacles and a wide mouth which combined to give him a froglike expression, but nothing could be less froglike than his voice. He was honey-tongued. Every verse he read turned into music on his lips…He first taught me the right sensuality of poetry, how it should be savoured and mouthed in solitude…Had he taught us nothing else, to be in Smewgy’s form was to be in a measure ennobled. Amidst all the banal ambition and flashy splendours of school life he stood as a permanent reminder of things more gracious, more humane, larger and cooler. But his teaching, in the narrower sense, was equally good. He could enchant but he could also analyse. An idiom or a textual crux, once expounded by Smewgy, became clear as day.’ This deeply loved man died in his little house in the school grounds, where he lived alone, on 13 November 1918, a victim of the influenza sweeping Europe that year.
17 Harry Richard Lucas Cooper (1899-1936), of Oxford, entered Malvern as a minor scholar in 1913. When he left in 1918 he ranked as the second boy in the school, head of School House, a cadet officer in the OTC and a football star. From Malvern he went to Christ Church, Oxford, where he took his BA in 1922. He worked for the Imperial Bank of India, and in 1924 was employed in the Calcutta office.
18 Douglas Spencer Montague Tassell (1872-1956) took a BA in ‘Greats’ at Christ Church, Oxford, in 1894 and began teaching classics at Malvern in 1905. On the retirement of the geography master in 1928 he took over the teaching of geography. Perhaps his greatest work, and that which gave him most satisfaction, was with the Officers’ Training Corps. In 1909 he was put in charge of the Malvern contingent of the OTC, which he commanded until 1919 when he was awarded the Territorial Decoration. Warnie wrote of him: ‘In appearance he was a jaunty, dark haired, short mustached, dark eyed little man, very much the soldier with a permanent expression of busy irritation’ (LP IV: 73). It was he who first reported Warnie for smoking.
19 For whatever reason his article did not appear in The Malvernian.
20 Stanley Forrester Browning (1896-1917) became a member of School House in 1910 and by the time he left at the end of summer term of 1914, he had been a house prefect and in the second eleven at football. In 1914 he joined the Royal Flying Corps, and was a captain in that branch of the service when he was killed in action 3 May 1917.
21 John Arthur Watson Bourne (1896-1943) was at School House 1910-14, during which time he was a house prefect. During World War I he was a captain in the RAF. He then worked as an engineer in the technical and research department of a petroleum company. During World War II he served as a captain in the Royal Signal Corps. He died in March 1943.
22 William Walter Lowe (1873-1945) entered Malvern in the winter of 1888. When he left in 1893 he was junior chapel prefect, captain of the football eleven, and had been four years in the cricket eleven. From Malvern he went to Pembroke College, Cambridge, where he received a BA in 1896. He returned to Malvern as an assistant master in 1896, and was house master 1913-32. He retired in 1932 and died in May 1945.
23 i.e. Canon James, the headmaster.
24 ‘The Fish’ was Henry Geoffrey Curwen Salmon (1870-1933) who went up to Jesus College, Oxford, in 1888 on a Classics scholarship. He joined the staff of Malvern College in 1901 and taught French and German to the sixth form. In 1914 he helped prepare the third edition of the Malvern Register, and he was entirely responsible for the fourth edition of 1924. When he retired from teaching in 1929 he was appointed secretary of the Malvernian Society, which work he undertook with enthusiasm for the rest of his life.
25 In his Glossary of Words in Use in the Counties of Antrim and Down (1880), William Hugh Patterson (1835-1918) defined ‘cod’ as ‘(1) sb. a silly, troublesome fellow. (2) v. to humbug or quiz a person; to hoax; to idle about. “Quit your coddin.” ’ (p. 22). Warnie said, ‘It has however a third meaning, namely an expression of humourous and insincere self depreciation; an Ulsterman will say of himself, “Amn’t I the square oul’ cod to be doin’ so and so?”’ (LP IV: 306). Jack Lewis used the expression often, and he seems to have invented the diminutive ‘codotta’ or ‘Kodotta’ which appears occasionally in his letters. A notebook of his poems written about this time was entitled ‘Metrical Meditations of a Cod’.
26 Edwin Cyril Jervis (1896-?) was at School House 1911-15. On leaving Malvern he went to Sandhurst. He joined the Duke of Wellington’s Regiment in 1916, was made a lieutenant in 1917 and during the war was seriously wounded. He received the Military Cross.
27 Charles Edward Bristow Bull (1900-77) was at School House 1912-15. During the war he served in the OTC. After the war he was private secretary to Aylesbury Brewery Co. Ltd, and also an actor.
28 This was the younger brother of Jack’s study companion. Wallace George Hardman (1897-1917) was at School House 1911-14. After leaving Malvern he was a 2nd lieutenant in the Manchester Regiment, and was killed in action near Kut on 9 January 1917.
29 The Rev. Gerald Peacocke, who succeeded Thomas Hamilton as rector of St Mark’s, was leaving. He was the son of the Most Rev. Joseph Ferguson Peacocke, Archbishop of Dublin, and was educated at Trinity College, Dublin where he took the Hebrew Prize in 1892. He was ordained priest in 1894, and was curate of Carnmoney, Co. Antrim, 1893-6. After four years