OLD AZURIANS

Ray George (Angle 1951-59), a past recipient of the prize, has done some research into the origins of the prize. What follows is based on the original version of an article he wrote on the subject. The full text of the article can be viewed by clicking on the link button at the bottom of this page.

 

Ray had always supposed that the Shelley of the Shelley Memorial Prize was the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley but, as it had been suggested to him that the prize commemorated a boy at the school who had died young, he set out to discover the facts. His father A.F.George had started at Worthing High School on the day it opened and Ray still has all of his father’s Azurian school magazines which indicate that the prize was first awarded at the 1928 Speech Day.

 

The bookplate inside Ray’s copy of “An Elementary Course of Infinitesimal Calculus” by Sir Horace Lamb, the book he chose when he was awarded the prize in 1958, led him to the West Sussex County Record Office where he discovered minutes of meetings of the Higher Education Sub-Committee in 1927 recording the Committee’s consideration and recommendation of a proposal to award book prizes under The Shelley Memorial Fund. The recommendation was that:-

 

(i). A prize of the value of £2 may be given annually to one pupil in each of the Secondary Schools in West Sussex on the recommendation of the Head Master or Mistress.

(ii) The Head Master or Mistress shall make application for such prizes at their discretion.

(iii) Prizes shall be given solely for proficiency in any of the natural sciences that may at any time form part of any approved syllabus of Universities or other bodies recognised by the Board of Education for School Examinations, special preference being shown to those who express themselves best in English, but it shall not be necessary to hold a special examination for such prize.

(iv) If book prizes are given each volume shall contain the Shelley Book Plate.

 

Percy Bysshe Shelley was born at Field Place, Warnham, near Horsham, on 4 August 1792. He was drowned when his sailing boat was caught in a storm in the Gulf of Spezia on 8 July 1822. To mark the centenary in 1892 a Memorial Fund was set up with the aim of establishing a Shelley Library and Museum in Horsham. In the event, contributions to the fund were disappointingly inadequate to support any large-scale or expensive memorial scheme such as the one proposed.

 

Later, less ambitious, proposals were made for a lasting memorial, including the establishment of a literary prize at Horsham Grammar School, but, for various reasons not one of these suggestions was ever adopted. The money raised remained in a bank accumulating interest until 1927 when the Trustees of the Fund handed the residue of the Fund (£500 of War Stock) over to West Sussex County Council.

 

Ed: Ray is one of the many Old Azurians who, over the years, have paid tribute to Mr R P Macrae as a mathematics teacher. He explains his choice of book thus:

“I was introduced to this beautiful book by Mr R P Macrae. Throughout my time at Worthing High School for Boys, I had not had him as a maths teacher until my final year, when I was preparing for the Open Scholarship Examination at Cambridge. As a teacher of mathematics, he was in a class of his own for the exquisite clarity of his teaching.”