DavidRawlins wrote:I used to have a booklet about CH which contained various facts. Included in this were all the house mottos. In my time no one knew, or worried about them.
If this is the booklet I think you're referring to, it has an interesting story.
In the UF (3rd year) we had Gad Malins for English. He produced a booklet which he said had been produced by our predecessors about 20 years earlier (i.e. c. 1938). He thought it would be a good idea to update it, and devoted a fair proportion of our lessons to this project, which was very popular because it involved "field work". We wrote up quite a lot, but by the end of the school year, it wasn't finished. At the beginning of the next school year, when we were on the GE, our English master was David Jesson Dibley. He'd heard of the project from Gad, but in the very first lesson he explained to us, with some regret, that there was not much point in continuing it, because it would soon be very out of date. He then went on to give us our first intimation that senior and junior houses would "soon" be coming. (It took another six years, in fact.)
I too thought of this booklet in connexion with house mottos, because it was the only place I'd ever seen them listed (with translations), along with other curious information, such as the resonance of the echo in the Sharpenhurst reservoir, and how a boy had been killed by a one-off flash of lightning on Big Side.
Th.B. 27 1955-63