for many years. We look forward to seeing him around blithe and well in the next few weeks.
This has been a busy year and, despite the loss of so many esteemed colleagues with which these notes began, it is possible to end on a note of positive optimism. The weekend after Grand Day, the Pipe Band has been invited to play at the Jubilee celebrations of the Royal Army Educational Corps at the Army School of Education, Beaconsfield. The following week, The Boyfriend is to be presented. The week after, the World Pipe Band Championships are to be held in Aberdeen. So often we have come really close to winning our division. What a splendid way it would be to push the clouds aside and let the sun through if we were to pull it off this year.
As I wrote that sentence, the clouds drew apart. I really think we shall win.

Staff Changes

There can have been few, if any, years since the last war in which so many changes have occurred as will have been the case during 1970. While these changes, like all others, will be absorbed in course of time, and what has come to seem the familiar and durable organisation of our key staff has been replaced by another pattern which will, in its turn, seem to acquire the characteristic of changeless stability, it must be admitted that the coincidental upheaval of 1970, taken as a whole, appears a trifle abrupt.
Such an appearance of stability is in any case, of course, an illusion. While we are lucky enough to retain a small "hard core" of staff who have been here a long time, and whom we hope will continue to be here a long time yet, if one compares, for example, the Common Room Roll of only five years ago to the present, it will be seen how many important individual changes have been successively absorbed without loss of continuity or diminishment of function. It is when so many come together that there is a slight sense of shock, a feeling that the School is changing gear, if one may put it so, in the course of its steady progress through the century.
The first departure of the year was Captain Bull, in April, on his retirement from the Army, after an unusually long posting, for an RAEC officer, at the School. Among the achievements for which he will be remembered perhaps the most memorable, and certainly transcendingly the most important for him, was winning the hand of the Art Master's charming daughter. He has been much missed in Wavell and his kindly and sensible manner with the younger boys should ensure his success in his present post in charge of a primary school. He has been replaced

by Captain King, who will certainly make his own individual contribution to the School and who, to the Commandant's relief, has taken over the Admiralty of the School Fleet from Captain Bull.
Most of the changes to which we now have to adjust have been long foreseen; but the Headmaster took us all by surprise, in announcing his retirement from the Army in September, so cutting short his expected tenure by at least a year. To say more, while he is still here, than that we greatly regret his departure to the civilian academic world, would only embarrass him. In the December issue we can be less reticent. He is being succeeded by Lieutenant-Colonel Evans, RAEC, who is at present at the Army Institute of Education.
Our Senior Master, Mr Hugh Brown, will have retired ten days before the publication of this issue. He has been such an integral part of the modern growth, change, and evolution of the School, and such a dominant influence on the lives of so many generations of Victorians, that only a separate article could do him justice. And this, since we know he will not be here to call us, characteristically, over the coals for producing such nonsense (and probably point out a few grammatical errors into the bargain) we dare to include elsewhere in this number. As Senior Master he is being replaced by Mr Le Maistre, and no Old Victorian who has been at the School these past seventeen years will require any further introduction. As Head of the English Department Mr Brown is being succeeded by Mr Kelly, from Edinburgh, who joins us in September.
Another casualty of the calendar is Mr Robertson, Head of the Mathematics Department. One cannot help wondering if he has not, for the first time, committed an arithmetical error, since it seems barely credible that so vigorous a personality, and so fit a man, should have reached retiring age. In the class room or on the sports field he will be a hard man to replace, and we have not yet done so. In the common room he will be much missed. But since he, too, has not left us quite yet, we will say no more; until the next number.
This journal loses its Editor, Mr Wright, this term. Although this column is not (really not) being written by the Editor himself we can hardly praise him in this issue, or he may go as pink as one of his recent covers. Please await the December issue for full justice. But he will be a great loss, and not only to The Victorian. We do not have a replacement for him yet.
Nor are changes confined to the teaching staff. We have had to say goodbye to some members of the Administrative Staff, each well known and highly respected in their different spheres. Major Kislingbury, our Administrative Officer for seven years, was in any case due to retire in August. To our sorrow, through ill-health, he has had to leave us a couple of months earlier and so will miss the "send-off" we should have liked to have given him.