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School died. Clearly there are major differences, with the obvious one being that while the disaster of the ferry struck in one blow, the losses at schools like Dulwich were much more drawn out, with the peak being reached in 1918, (it is often forgotten that month-on-month the British army suffered its heaviest losses in the final, victorious months of 1918). How did the College and its families respond? One of the remarkable survivals of the War is the archive of McCulloch Christison, who created the College’s War Record. He kept meticulous records, and in each file are the letters from officers, friends and the families of the College’s dead. What strikes the reader about so many of these letters is how any sense of Edwardian formality dissolves in the face of such grief. For many, institutional and personal grief blended into one. The Master, George Smith commented that the war years were ‘one long nightmare’ of ‘anxiety, strain and sorrow’, with the personal blow falling in late September 1918 with the death of his own son, Captain George Smith MC, near Ypres. 1 Smith’s predecessor, Arthur Gilkes, captured that sense of collective loss when he said in the Chapel in 1915, ‘I know that they would have wished to be loved and remembered here.’ Dr. Nicholas Black Head of Middle School
1 Piggott, J., Dulwich College, A History 1616-2008, p. 232-3
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