Most poignantly, the memorial board shows the names of three brothers, all killed during the Great War

The Officers’ Training Corps was unconcerned with serious warfare although previous members like Archibald Wavell, commander of the British Army in the Middle East, Hugh Dowding, Air Chief Marshal and Commander of RAF Fighter Command and Charles Portal, Marshal of the Royal Air Force and British Chief of the Air Staff, were to win the top jobs in the British armed forces during the Second World War.

However, these men’s exalted status owed nothing to their careers in the school corps. For one of these three, his sole memory of Winchester College Corps was watching a colleague eat worms to while away the boredom of manning a defensive position.

The Corps’ purpose was not so much military but educational. It gave Angus an opportunity to pass “A Certificate,” the first test he faced in becoming an army officer.

I folded my uncles’ school reports and tidied up the books and documents. With the clatter of feet and the rolling of trolley wheels in the rooms below, Suzanne Foster reappeared. “I’ll take you to see Patrick Herring at Moberly’s.” She had kindly arranged a meeting with the house-master.

Genial man

Winchester’s 10 boarding houses are scattered in the old part of the city but within easy walking distance of the main school. As we arrived at the house’s front door I expected to meet a master with hooked nose, brandishing a cane in one hand and a Latin primer in the other.

But when it opened, it revealed a genial man, dressed in smart blazer and flannels, who looked more like a country lawyer than a Win Coll housemaster.

Originally an Elizabethan farmhouse with Georgian and Victorian additions, Moberly’s principal rooms are oak panelled. In the best sense of the word the rambling building resembles a private house.

Mr Herring led us to his study in which the southwest facing window permitted streaks of sunlight to stream in to the room. “Here are some house photographs!” He handed me a bundle. “Do you see him?”

I peered at the first with its group of boys, both old and young, many looking solemn, while others appeared belligerent or individualistic, their attitudes reminding me of the saying: “You can always tell a Wykehamist but you can never tell him much.”

The main reason for my visit was to view Moberly’s memorial, a wooden board attached to a wall in the dining room, inscribed with the names of all men from the house killed in both world wars.

As boys tuck into helpings of meat and two veg, jam roly-poly or prunes and custard they can peer at the names of Toyeites who fell. Most poignantly, the memorial board shows the names of three brothers, all killed during the Great War. Angus’s name is there as part of the toll of Second World War deaths.

After leaving Moberly’s, we followed a wall of brick, chalk and flint back to the college’s main entrance and strode towards the old cloister with its ancient graffiti, now a historical curio.

War Cloister is a traditional, sandstone structure, designed by Sir Herbert Baker, assistant to Edwin Lutyens in laying out the plans for New Delhi. After the First World War, the school required a fitting memorial for all 500 Wykehamists killed. It made sense to erect a covered walk so that the names could be viewed in comfort and a cloister corresponded well with an enclosed community like Winchester College.

Grieving

“Five hundred!” I tried to grasp what effect these deaths had had on those left behind and multiplied the figure by two for the grieving parents, then added more for sisters, brothers, sons, daughters, spouses and grandparents. The grief mushroomed.

When we stepped down one walkway towards a pillar carved with Angus’s name, I noticed on another the name of Tempest, Daisy’s youngest brother. Although I had only discovered very recently that my great-uncle Tempest was killed in the First World War, I knew little else as any mention of his name caused such sadness in the family.

When Suzanne Foster showed me a photo album of Wykehamists killed in the Great War, I saw for the first time what he looked like and it was clear that his nephews, particularly Jock, bore a striking resemblance to him.

In late September 1915 Tempest (second lieutenant, 3rd Battalion Grenadier Guards) was reported missing on the Western Front.

Early in the afternoon of September 27, BrigadierGeneral J. Ponsonby informed his officers that they were to attack Puits 14 (near Loos) that evening. Unaware that the rest of their company had retired, Tempest, a fellow officer and his men were surrounded by the enemy. They tried to drive them back but were outnumbered.

Most of the party retreated to safety but Tempest “was last seen standing on a wall throwing bombs at the enemy when he was killed”. It is unclear why my great-uncle made himself a target and whether this act was one of extreme bravery or utter madness.

Tempest’s end resembled that of John Kipling (Rudyard’s son), who joined the Irish Guards as a 2nd lieutenant. He was also killed, at the age of 18, in September 1915 near Loos. Like half a million other “lost boys” John Kipling and Tempest Crabbe have no known grave, the shellfire being so great that their bodies were blown to pieces.

Memorial

Their names are on a memorial that lists them as missing but “Known unto God”. I wanted to linger at War Cloister so that I could admire the stonework, the vaulted roof and the carved lettering by Laurence Turner. But it was all for the dead, for lives unable to have been led and I wished I could have waved a wand to make these boys come back to life.

Approaching the river Itchen I saw a boy rowing and, half-closing my eyes, imagined him as Angus. It wasn’t hard. Little here had changed and it made me see how tradition, although stultifying at times, also sustains. The boy’s boat was no different to the ones Angus had rowed, only it was plastic and not wood.

If the school had not quite won me over to the virtues of tradition, one of its songs succeeded in bringing a tear to my eye.

On the evening before my expedition, I visited Win Coll’s website and listened to a recording of Domum, a song sung in chapel at the end of the summer term. Domum dulce Domum is the refrain (Latin for home, sweet home), delightful words to sing at the end of a school year.

However, the irony of the word dulce struck me when I strolled through War Cloister and remembered Wilfred Owen’s bitter poem on the Great War, Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori.

More tomorrow