Senior FAQ's

Is there anything quite like it in the world?  We rather think not.  What inspires a group of otherwise (relatively) sane young men (and some young women) to dress up in outlandish attire,  paint their faces or adopt other disguises,  arm themselves with implements which resemble large flat wooden spoons and pursue a ball around a large playground, urged on by the enthusiastic vocal encouragement of younger pupils who aspire to participate in a similar ritual in future years?

The Hailes Match is an Edinburgh Academy tradition.  The point about traditions is that no-one can really remember how they started or what they are supposed to achieve,  but it would somehow diminish everyone if they were to stop. Everyone knows that the Leavers play the Ephors,  and that there is a method of deciding who has won,  but,  apart from this,  knowledge of the rules is sketchy.  In part this results from a thoroughly praiseworthy,  but sadly recently discontinued,  sub-tradition of appointing the youngest and newest member of staff each year as the referee.  Another Academy tradition was that no-one explained the rules to the referee beforehand,  but the oldest and most senior member of staff would upbraid him afterwards, more in sorrow than in anger,  bewailing how far short of the desired standard he had fallen.  In this way the referee was obliged to make up his own rules and then maintain his authority before the assembled multitude by expressing astonishment that any one of them could possibly be ignorant of the vital principle in question.

Health & Safety

Somehow along the way political correctness, health and safety or some other such nonsense took a hand and it became irresponsible for the limited number of ephors to play all sixty or so leavers simultaneously.  This clearly defeated the whole point of the exercise,  which was a glorious opportunity to get your own back for all the real and imagined slights that you had suffered at their officious hands during the year.  The only advantage now retained by the great unwashed is that temporarily non-combatant leavers waiting can now replace any exhausted comrades in what has latterly become an anaemic ten a side fixture.

As seen today the match resembles a sort of hockey cum lacrosse cum freestyle tennis.  The participants,  so few that they seem lost in the vastness of the yard,  compete to wear the most inappropriate possible attire and assume that smiting a ball against the appropriate piece of wall is a "goal".   Rumour hath it however that no-one has actually scored a goal in the last twenty five years because a former head of PE sadistically declined to pass on the information that in order to score it was necessary to hold the ball against the wall with the clacken.  (Folklore does not recall for how long,  or what one's opponents were entitled to do the while.)  The aforesaid teacher then took grim satisfaction in watching successive generations of Hailes players trying to achieve they knew not what.  Indeed,  no-one apparently informed the Court of Directors of this pertinent fact when they decided to embellish the library frontage with raised and stone clad flower beds.  In order to score a Hailes point at the library end you now need to be eight feet tall with arms like an orang-utan.  Come to think of it though,  it seems that it won't be long before the average male sixth former,  each generation of which is larger than its predecessor,  will amply fill such a description.

Chivalric romance

Rumour also hath it that in legendary days of yore the dexterity of the Hailes players was such that they could catch the ball on the clacken,  and then run with it as though participating in some frenetic egg and spoon race.  Nowadays the "air shot" wherein clacken and ball fail even to come into close proximity is more common.   "Ah," as Homer would have put it,  "The lamentable degeneration of the human race.  Achilles lifted above his head a huge boulder;  even to raise such an one from the ground would be beyond the strength of any two men born today."  Yes,  well,  we all know Homer was an old fibber and Achilles was just a spoiled brat who wouldn't have lasted five minutes in a proper Hailes match.

All participants are expected to autograph the clackens of all other participants at the end of the game in order to celebrate the ceremonial ending of their school careers. In principle these are preserved for posterity and taken out thirty years thereafter in order to remind oneself which of one's contemporaries became what. In practice it is believed that most are left on trains within six months and that a large collection currently resides in the lost property office of Waterloo station, though allegedly genuine examples have been unearthed over the years in remote places such as Ulan Bator, Masu Pichu and British West Hartlepool.

I wot not what

Will we ever see a proper Hailes match again?  Are we lesser mortals of the latter days doomed for ever to perform pathetic and emasculated memorial rituals in which "there were no wrecks and nobody drownded ,  fac' nothing to laugh at at all"?  Has the last bloodied corpse been dragged from the field of gory glory?  Will we never again witness heroic events such as the immortal MacSpraggon's (EA 1898-1904) celebrated five points followed by public flogging awarded by the referee for hitting the rector as he observed from the balcony of the staff lodge?  Never again historic sacrifice such as the valiant last stand of Featherstonehaugh-Cholmondeley's ephors (1877)  who formed square around their fallen leader,  defending him with their clackens and their lives whilst simultaneously holding the ball against the library wall?  Well readers,  you must decide.  Let's be reasonable now.  What's one child more or less?  It is a tradition after all.
 

PBH