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 unprecedented¹ among schools, a building which should symbolise and embody² 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 chapel³ to commemorate⁴ the sacrifice of those who had fallen in the war. These ideas assumed protean⁵ 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[Pg 132] 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 dignified⁶ 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 reconstruction⁷ 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 sketched⁸ out a[Pg 133] project for a memorial building that should be a symbol and incitement⁹ 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.
 
It was in the early stage when the Eric Yarrow memorial was to be nothing more than a museum of industrial history and organisation¹⁰ that Sanderson set afoot the building at Oundle which is now known by that name. Apparently¹¹ he did not get much inspiration over to the architect, and at any rate the edifice¹² that presently rose was a very weak and dull-looking one, more suitable for a herbarium or a minor¹³ lecture-hall than for a temple of creative dreams. It was a[Pg 134] premature¹⁴ materialisation, done in the stress and under the cramping¹⁵ limitations of war time. Long before it was finished Sanderson's imaginations had outgrown¹⁶ it. I think this unconfessed architectural disappointment probably played a large part in the subsequent development of the idea of the school chapel, still to be planned, still capable of being made a spacious¹⁷ and beautiful building. To the latter dream he transferred more and more of the ideas that arose properly out of the germ of the Eric Yarrow memorial.
 
At first the House of Vision was to have been no more than an industrial museum. It was not to be used as a class-room or lecture-room. It was to be empty of chairs, desks, and the like, and clear for any one to go in to think and dream. About its walls, diagrams and charts were to display the progress of man from the sub-human to his present phase of futile¹⁸ power and hope. There were to be time-charts of the whole process of history, and a few of these have been made. As his idea ripened¹⁹ it broadened. The memorial ceased to be a symbol merely of industrial reorganisation and progress,............