Concordia

Concordia Winter 2019 9 Concordia Winter 2019 8 When Merchant Taylors’ School was founded in 1561, the curriculum was dominated by Latin and Greek, for everything that an educated man would want to read had been written in those languages. In 1509, in the foundation statutes of St Paul’s School, it was laid down that the High Master should be a man learned in “good and clean Latin literature, and also in Greek, if such may be gotten”. This was copied word for word in Merchant Taylors’ School statutes fifty-two years later, with historic results. In the field of Classical learning, one of our school’s greatest triumphs was achieved by some of its earliest alumni. To the King James translation of the Bible, no school, except perhaps Westminster, made a greater contribution than Merchant Taylors’. Lancelot Andrewes, Thomas Harrison, Ralph Hutchinson, John Perrin, John Spenser (no relation of Edmund) and probably Ralph Ravens had attended the school in Suffolk Lane. The work of Andrewes and his team very quickly became the English Bible for Anglicans and dissenters, and remains so today. Among the first scholars to come from the Merchant Taylors’ School site in Charterhouse Square was George Gilbert Aimé Murray. Murray was appointed Professor of Greek at Glasgow at the age of twenty-three, and later held the Regius chair at Oxford for twenty-eight years (1908-36). He was responsible for the Oxford Classical Texts of Euripides and Aeschylus, and he published verse translations of at least twenty-one Greek tragedies, and three of Aristophanes’ comedies, many of which were performed on stage and radio. Meanwhile Murray was becoming an early example of the “public intellectual”. He was the Alan Sommerstein Alan Sommerstein (1958-1965), Emeritus Professor of Greek at the University of Nottingham, came back to Merchant Taylors’ School this spring to give a talk to OMTs, current staff and students on the Classical scholars who have been associated with the school since its foundation. Professor Sommerstein entertained all present with a collection of painstakingly-researched notes, as well as a number of personal recollections, with none left in doubt of the school’s academic pedigree in the Classics. Here follows an abridged version. “Since 1899, when Thomas Rice Holmes published the first edition of Caesar’s Conquest of Gaul, there has never been a time when one or another branch of Classics did not have an OMT among its world-leading figures.” Professor Alan Sommerstein pictured with former MTS Classics Master Martin Drury and OMT Cambridge Classics Scholar, Tom Nelson (2002-2009) most prominent British advocate of the League of Nations, and he chaired its Commission on Intellectual Cooperation for eleven years, until 1939. It will have been as much for his League work as for his scholarship that Murray was made a member of the exclusive Order of Merit on New Year’s Day 1941. Since 1899, when Thomas Rice Holmes published the first edition of Caesar’s Conquest of Gaul,