Abingdon News No.59

The Abingdon Foundation, Park Road, Abingdon, Oxford OX14 1DE 01235 521563 • Edited by Jane Warne – [email protected] 01235 849123 • Design – www.petergreenland.com Abingdon Out of the Past @abingdonschool @abingdonschool @ abingdon_school linkedin.com/school/abingdonschool Sir Eric Anderson by Carl Cheek. The portrait of Sir Walter Scott in the background reflects Anderson’s admiration for the author whose journals he edited for publication. Sir Eric Anderson Memories of Sir Eric, who died on 22 April 2020, were evoked at his memorial service in Eton College Chapel on 8 October last year. Sir Eric was Headmaster of Abingdon between 1970 and 1975. This was a great time for the questioning of authority. It saw the newly created School Council discuss such subjects as the suspension of the prefectorial system, the installation of a pupil representative on the Governing Body and how to reduce the School’s expenditure by 10%. Surprisingly, a suggestion that corporal punishment should be abolished was overwhelmingly defeated. After Abingdon, Sir Eric became Headmaster first of Shrewsbury and then of Eton, Rector of Lincoln College, Oxford and finally Provost of Eton. He was knighted in 2003. On 6 July 1973 Mrs Margaret Thatcher, Secretary of State for Education and Science, turned the first turf for the new dining hall. This, and the extension to the biology block, were the two building projects completed during Sir Eric’s headmastership. The Mercers’ Company It was during Eric Anderson’s headmastership that the School rediscovered its association with The Mercers’ Company – or they discovered their association with us. Eager to protect the School he had endowed in 1563, John Roysse, a member of the Company, decreed in his will that the Mercers’ should receive twenty shillings a year in return for which they were to make an annual inspection of the School to ensure his ordinances were being correctly observed. There is no evidence that the money was ever paid nor that the Mercers’ ever visited. However, Mrs Anderson came across the reference in Roysse’s will, which gave her husband a reason to invite the Mercers’ to renew its connection with the School ‘in a small way’ – a reconnection that over the years has been of huge benefit to the School. To mark their association with Abingdon School, The Mercers’ Company has recently bought a portrait of John Roysse. It comes with no date and no provenance but is a copy of a contemporary portrait in the possession of Abingdon Guildhall. Five portraits of John Roysse (1500-1571), the School’s sixteenth-century benefactor, are known to have been painted. The whereabouts of only four of them is known. They are all based on a contemporary portrait (1), which dendrochronology shows dates from the 1560s. In 1763, the then Headmaster of Abingdon, Henry Bright, commissioned two copies of this original. One of these hangs in Chapel Corridor (2), the second is lost. The other two portraits both belong to the School, one was painted in the mid-1860s and the other in 1963. Could the portrait The Mercers’ have just bought (3) – see adjacent article – be the missing portrait? © Mercers’ Company © Ruth Bubb The Face of John Roysse 1. 2. 3.