Algemon Gifford painted this watercolour of Pumpkin Cottage in the 1930's. A large, bearded man with a 'perpetual twinkle about the eyes', Gifford was a talented and popular teacher and was known affectionately to more than a generation of boys as 'Uncle Charlie'. His enthusiasm for astronomy was contagious. He was responsible in 1911 for establishing Wellington College's observatory, which when completed in 1913 housed a fine 5⅛-inch equatorially mounted Zeiss refractor, used by many pupils over the years for serious astronomical observation. A number of these pupils later went on to achieve national prominence in amateur and professional astronomy circles.