'But what has this to do with schools? My answer is that if we are to deal with the problems thrown up by science in our industrial system, and our close national and international contacts, the schools must be the seed grounds of the new thought and visions....' CHAPTER VII THE HOUSE OF VISION AND THE SCHOOL CHAPEL § 1 I come now to one of the most curious and characteristic things in Sanderson's later life, a conflict and interaction that went on between two closely related and yet in many ways intensely competitive ideas, the idea on the one hand of a new sort of building unprecedented among schools, a building which should symbolise and embody the whole aim of the school and the renewed community of which it is the germ, and on the other hand the idea of a great memorial chapel to commemorate the sacrifice of those who had fallen in the war. These ideas assumed protean forms in his mind, they grew, they blended and separated again. I will call the first, for reasons that will appear later, the House of Vision; the second, the school chapel. For though Oundle had thrown up a great cluster of houses, halls, laboratories, and other buildings during its quarter of a century of growth, it had never yet produced anything more than a corrugated-iron meeting-house for its religious services. The want of some more dignified chapel had long been evident, and even before the war was very much in Sanderson's mind. The idea of a House of Vision was therefore the later of the two. Very early in the war a boy of great promise, Eric Yarrow, the son of Sir Alfred Yarrow, the great shipbuilder, was killed at Ypres, and parent and schoolmaster met at the house of the former to mourn their common loss. Sanderson and Eric Yarrow had been close friends; they had discussed and developed the idea of a creative reconstruction of industry together; Eric Yarrow was to have played a part in the industrial world similar to the part that Roy Sanderson was to have played in the educational world. The two men sat late at night and talked of these vanished hopes. Could not something be done, they asked, to record at least the spirit of these fine intentions, and they sketched out a project for a memorial building that should be a symbol and incitement to effort for the reorganised industrial state. It should be in a sense a museum containing a record of human effort and invention in the past; a museum of the development of work and production and a statement of the economic problems before mankind. Sir Alfred produced a cheque more than sufficient to cover the building of such a memorial as they had planned, and Sanderson returned to Oundle to put the realisation of the project in hand. Probably the two of them also discussed the need for a memorial chapel and probably neither of them realised a possible clash between that older project and the new one they were now starting.