The interior of the School Room, now the Prescott Hall, with brass memorial plaques on the wall, 1919. promoted to Captain in 1917 and returned to Australia in April 1919. The Newingtonian reported his death on 18 March 1923 ‘at the very early age of 26, when he was on the very threshold The Sixth and Upper Fifth Forms, 1913: Eric St Julien Pearce sits cross-legged on the right. of a brilliant and useful career’. He had been wounded and badly gassed in France and had ‘never really recovered from the ill effects of this experience’. COME HELP CELEBRATE IN 2019 Later in 1923, the death was reported of Herbert Leslie Dill, who had entered 2019 will mark 150 years since Newington College played its first the College in 1908 and subsequently game of Rugby against University of Sydney. The Newington worked as a station hand at Condobolin. College Rugby Association will celebrate this special occasion Commissioned in the field and awarded the Military Cross, he had been severely at the Rugby Season Launch with the official launch of wounded in France in 1917. ‘He never 150 YEARS OF NEWINGTON RUGBY HISTORY BOOK. recovered from the effects of his wounds,’ The Newingtonianreported. The book is being authored by past Newington Rugby President William Joseph (‘Joe’) Colborne, from and renowned sports author and journalist Barry Ross, and will Burwood, was at Newington from 1903 be an exceptional record of Newington’s Rugby history. to 1910. After serving on the Western Front, he returned to Australia in Pre-orders for the book and a limited ‘Collectors’ edition September 1919, but ‘the high will go on sale towards the end of 2018. probability is that he carried with him the seeds of death’, The Newingtonian reported in 1924. His health had given way and he died after a long illness. All three appear on the Honour Roll in the vestibule of the Founders Building, but not, of course, on the four panels for the Fallen. The resigned war-weariness with which these deaths were reported in The Newingtonian was a continuation of the mood that was already apparent in the final years of the war. ‘Peace has come at last to an earth blood-weary,’ said the editorial writer in the December 1918 issue. Trying, like so many people around the world at this time, to make sense of the terrible conflict just ended, he asked, ‘Will war cease to trouble the earth?’ His gloomy conclusion: ‘Many generations must elapse, however, before it becomes a world ideal.’ Mr David Roberts Newington College Rugby team, c. 1870 Archivist GRATITUDE | NEWS SPRING 2018| 51