Tom Hughes and the other Rugby, in Tennessee

Part Two of Tom Hughes' School Days

There’s a breathless hush in the close to-night —
Ten to make and the match to win —
A bumping pitch and a blinding light,
An hour to play and the last man in.
And it’s not for the sake of a ribboned coat,
Or the selfish hope of a season’s fame,
But his Captain’s hand on his shoulder smote —
‘Play up! play up! and play the game!’

The sand of the desert is sodden red, —
Red with the wreck of a square that broke; —
The Gatling’s jammed and the Colonel dead,
And the regiment blind with dust and smoke.
The river of death has brimmed his banks,
And England’s far, and Honour a name,
But the voice of a schoolboy rallies the ranks:
‘Play up! play up! and play the game!’

This is the word that year by year,
While in her place the School is set,
Every one of her sons must hear,
And none that hears it dare forget.
This they all with a joyful mind
Bear through life like a torch in flame,
And falling fling to the host behind —
‘Play up! play up! and play the game!’

Henry Newbolt – Vitai Lampada (1892)

I love this poem. My father, who was a public schoolboy, but only for the very few years until my grandfather went bust and the money ran out, would recite this poem when in sentimental mood, and I suspect it was a regular part of the English curriculum in the days of Empire, along with Newbolt’s other classic, Drake's Drum. Vitai Lampada means The Torch of Light, and the poem manages to encapsulate the power of the public school ethos, the team spirit which would inspire the British soldier all the way from the playing fields of Eton and Rugby, via India and South Africa, into the trenches of the First World War, where it met an ugly end in blood and mud. But it would be wrong to confuse this martial call with the message that Dr Thomas Arnold taught at Rugby, or that Tom Hughes wanted to preach to young boys when he wrote his classic text, Tom Brown’s School Days.

It is not that Hughes was a pacifist, or frightened of fighting: there was nothing he liked better than a good boxing match, after all he was the one who introduced the sport into the Working Men’s College, slightly to the alarm of some of the more intellectual Christian Socialists. And when England was worried about a French invasion in 1859 and formed local militia, Hughes and Ludlow led the drilling on Wimbledon Common, and Hughes was the Honorary Colonel of the Volunteer Corps based at the College. But he was not an Imperialist, and he chose his battles carefully.

Together with many other Christian Socialists, he was a fierce opponent of slavery as practised in the Southern States of America, and in the prelude to hostilities had become personally friendly with leading American abolitionists such as James Russell Lowell. He followed the 1860 American Presidential Election campaigns closely, hoping that the newly formed Republican party would be victorious and would move swiftly to abolish slavery across the Continent. This might have seemed a topic on which all British churchgoers and liberals would agree, particularly as it was the British who had led the world in prohibiting the Atlantic slave trade in 1807. However, the economic interests of the Manchester mill-owners, dependent on the cotton trade, made matters complicated. For most British papers, the easiest position to take was non-interventionist, with pronounced sympathy towards the Southerners who seemed to be better friends and active trading partners. In return, the Unionist press attacked the British for sitting on the fence.

The September 1861 issue of Macmillan’s Magazine saw Thomas Hughes contributing an article, written in the aftermath of the North’s first major defeat at Manassas, when British support for the South was gathering pace. Alarmed and saddened, he wrote that ‘the tone of all our leading journals… has with the single exception of The Spectator, been ungenerous and unfair, and has not represented the better mind of England.’ He acknowledged that as yet the North had not made an avowed aim of abolishing slavery, but concluded ‘It is the battle of human freedom which the North are fighting…If the North is beaten it will be a misfortune such has not come on the world since Christendom arose.’

Eventually, of course, the war swung Lincoln’s way, much to Hughes’ relief. But now there was another issue to galvanise the British Radicals, of whom Hughes was seen as a leading member, being that of a certain Governor Eyre, who had brutally suppressed a rising by the black population in Jamaica in 1865 and was subsequently dismissed from his post. Back in England, it was Tom Hughes and John Stuart Mill who formed the Jamaica Committee, campaigning for Eyre to be prosecuted for murder, while Charles Kingsley and Thomas Carlyle were leaders of what became the Eyre Defence Committee. Thomas Huxley and Charles Darwin rushed to support Hughes and Mill, while the surprising trio of John Ruskin, Charles Dickens and Alfred Lord Tennyson lent their weight to the Eyre team. The Defence Committee supporters were a mixed bunch: some held openly racist views; others, such as Dickens, seemed to be more concerned that a Government official should not face prosecution for upholding law and order at a time of potential civil unrest across England as well as its Empire.  In the end, no prosecution succeeded and the controversy faded from view.

From 1865 until 1874, Hughes served as a Member of Parliament, having already been instrumental in the drafting of the Industrial and Provident Societies Partnership Act of 1852. He was passionately devoted to the cause of the working classes, proposing and drafting legislation that covered not just Provident and Friendly societies, but the co-operative movement and trades unions. He founded a scholarship at his old Oxford college, Oriel, open only to members, or sons of members, of some Co-operative Societies.

Perhaps most surprising, and bravest of all, was the project Hughes began in his late fifties. In researching the co-operative movement he had developed an interest in the concept of the model village, and in 1880 he bought land and founded a settlement in America which was designed as an experiment in Utopian living for the younger sons of the English gentry. It was situated on the Cumberland plateau in Tennessee, and Hughes named it Rugby. The colony probably reached a peak in 1884, by which time it boasted over 400 residents, including members of Tom’s family, more than sixty frame public buildings and houses, a tennis team, a social club, and a literary and dramatic society. In 1885 Rugby established a university, Arnold School, named, of course, for Tom’s old headmaster Thomas Arnold. There were even plans to build a cricket pitch: after all, Hughes had played cricket for Oxford University.

However, the colony was beset with problems from the outset, including a typhoid epidemic, lawsuits over land titles, and a population unaccustomed to the hard manual labour required to extract crops from the poor soil. By late 1887, many of the original colonists had died, including Margaret Hughes, Tom’s mother. The rest moved away to easier settlements. However, a few carried on into the 20th century: the village still exists and is listed on the U.S. National Register of Historic Places.

The Tom Hughes Library, Rugby Tennessee, built in 1882: photo by Brian Stansberry

Tom Hughes died in 1896, aged 73. Dr Arnold, his headmaster at Rugby, had the avowed aim to create a school of Christian gentlemen; in Tom Brown’s School Days, Hughes put similar words into the mouth of old Squire Brown: ‘If he’ll only turn out a brave, helpful, truth-telling Englishman and a Christian, that’s all I want.’ Looking at the career of Thomas Hughes, one can only say ‘mission accomplished’!

If you missed the first part of his life story, you can find it here:

Tom Hughes' School Days