I managed something of a rarity: two or three days entirely to myself, tucked away in a (relatively) quiet corner of Cornwall. Amelie, my daughter, was at a nearby music festival and I was running ‘point’, but we crossed paths only fleetingly, leaving me free to drift around the north coast, unhurried. One morning, as I walked back from the sea’s edge towards the little beach café, I noticed a young woman standing quite still, gazing out to sea…and smiling. Not a social smile, not one aimed at anyone in particular, but a gentle, private expression of warm contentment. The image stayed with me. How seldom we see someone smiling to themselves, prompted purely by the scene before them. 

That moment returned to me this week as I thought ahead to Fireworks Night -perhaps the one occasion each year when large numbers of adults might find themselves standing in wonder, smiling - this time, upwards at the sky. There is something very human in being moved by beauty: the crash of a wave, the flare of colour against the dark. Yet the richest experiences often arise not from the immediate aesthetic alone, but from the layers of meaning, memory, and knowledge that lie beneath: a little akin to the difference between admiring someone’s looks and falling in love. 

When we stand at the sea’s edge, for instance, perhaps our appreciation deepens if somewhere in the back of our mind John Masefield’s “Sea Fever” stirs (I must go down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky) or if a half-remembered line from Francis Ledwidge’s “The Ships of Arcady” adds its own salty tang. Add a faint grasp of wave formation or the rhythms of tide and current, and what was once a simple view becomes something far richer, a small (re-)education in itself. 

So it is with fireworks. Knowing a little of their history - the thwarted Gunpowder Plot and the relief it inspired - lends a deeper resonance to the spectacle. To realise that the explosions of colour mark a moment when England had sensed its very order under threat is to see how our celebration sits, perhaps less incongruously than it risks being, alongside the solemnity of Remembrance. Both commemorate the overcoming of peril; both invite gratitude for peace and for those who preserved it. 

On Wednesday, I visited Sherborne and Canford, two of the senior schools to which a number of our boys move on. Both now have new Headmasters, and both - like Pilgrims’ - are preparing for their own acts of Remembrance. These are schools that, while differing from one another in character and setting, share a belief that education is not merely the accumulation of facts but of course the cultivation of discernment, empathy, and curiosity. They, like us, understand that the step from knowledge to understanding is the one that transforms learning into wisdom, and information into insight. It is this quality of reflection that allows young people not simply to know things, but to see through them; to connect ideas, to find significance, and to interpret the world with both intelligence and heart. 

At Pilgrims’, I am always struck by how powerfully this is embodied in the wonderful staff who teach here. One of our great strengths lies in their quality, commitment, and intellectual generosity. They do not teach merely subjects but, through them, the means by which boys learn to question, to imagine, to reason and to care. I have felt for some time that our parents and wider community should hear more from the classroom. And so, over the course of the year, I have invited our Heads of Department to take turns in writing this opening newsletter reflection, offering their own perspective on what and how we teach at Pilgrims’. It seems entirely fitting that next week, falling shortly after the sparks of Fireworks Night and the solemn notes of Remembrance, Mrs Bailey will write on History - a subject that so beautifully binds memory to meaning, and knowledge to understanding. 

Tim Butcher
Headmaster