This is the jacket worn by young Harry Grove during the annual Montem ceremony at Eton school.
Harry was born in 1803 in Waddon House, Dorset, the home of the Chaffyn-Grove family since 1226.
Eton held the Montem each year between 1561 and 1847. In it, young scholars were sprinkled with salt on top of Montem Mound, a hill two miles from Eton. The pomp and circumstance of this longstanding tradition gave the boys a sense of purpose and importance.
Pomp and circumstance are hollow and silly things, unless, of course, your goal is to cause men and women to rise up and accomplish the impossible.
Benjamin Disraeli described the Montem in his novel Coningsby in 1840:
Five hundred of the youth of England, sparkling with health, high spirits, and fancy dresses, were now assembled in the quadrangle. They formed into rank, and headed by a band of the Guards, thrice they marched round the court. Then quitting the College, they commenced their progress ‘ad Montem.’ It was a brilliant spectacle to see them defiling through the playing fields, those bowery meads; the river sparkling in the sun, the castled heights of Windsor, their glorious landscape; behind them, the pinnacles of their College. The road from Eton to Salt Hill was clogged with carriages; the broad fields as far as the eye could range were covered with human beings. Amid the burst of martial music and the shouts of the multitude, the band of heroes, as if they were marching from Athens, or Thebes, or Sparta, to some heroic deed, encircled the mount; the ensign reaches its summit, and then, amid a deafening cry of ‘Floreat Etona!’ he unfurls, and thrice waves the consecrated standard.”
Each year, a “Montem Ode” was composed for the occasion, consisting of doggerel punning rhymes that named the names of the chief personages in the procession and alluded to their individual characteristics. It was supposedly written by a local dignitary who was called the “Montem Poet”, but in reality it was written by the boys of Eton.
The office of Montem Poet was held from the 1770s until 1834 by Herbert Stockhore of Windsor, a local eccentric who had begun life as a bricklayer. Arrayed in a tunic and trousers of patchwork, an old military coat, and a chitz-covered conical head-dress with rows of fringe on it like the crowns on a papal tiara, he drove about in a donkey-cart, reciting his Ode. After his death, there was a contest for the vacant office, and a certain Edward Irwin was elected, the boys casting their votes as they came out of Church one afternoon.
The Montem ceremony was discontinued following the opening of the Great Western Railway, when the Montem began attracting large and unruly crowds from London.
Sigh.
Fortunately for Wizard Academy, our happy Vice-Chancellor is from the distinguished British family Whittington, true and proper custodians of ceremony, ritual and tradition. Elevated by Henry V to be The King’s Own Guardians of Pomp and Circumstance following the Battle of Agincourt in 1415, the family Whittington never quit their duty, never abandoned their post, never lost the magic.
Yes, it is alive and well
in the Eye of the Storm
in the tower at Wizard Academy.