In 1900, Chips briefly moves into the role of Acting Head of Brookfield when Meldrum, Wetherby’s successor, dies. Soon, however, the governors appoint Ralston, a young, ambitious man with a more prestigious academic background, mostly to the relief of Chips, who sees himself as too “mild” for the “ferocious” role that now seems expected of the Headmaster. In the years that follow, a gallery of events, great and small, become enshrined in Chips’s memory, including the sudden death of King Edward VII in 1910, and a railway strike near Brookfield, when he shocks many by introducing some of his students to a striker. (Katherine, he thinks, would have approved.)

Brookfield, Chips believes, has an age-old role to play in the dignity and steadiness of England, for whom the new century bodes unprecedented losses, dangers, and hardships. Through the Edwardian years and beyond, he sees some of these reversals play out, including strikes, unemployment, civic unrest, and crises in India and Ireland. In 1912, danger strikes close to home when a “quiet, nervous” student of his almost loses his father in the sinking of the Titanic. However, this is just the beginning of the hardship Chips will witness.