Unofficial Christ's Hospital Forum

I think she was a genuine dietician, with college qualifications and all that. The school employed three, I think, under one Miss Dawe. Belinda went off to America for a year. One Saturday morning, THK appeared in class in a suit. It turned out he was off to Southampton to meet her. Incidentally, th...

My wife (a physicist) needed a calculator for her degree course. It was a Texas Instruments model, and cost about 150 pounds in 1974. A lot of money (say about 2000 in today's money). But I used it a huge amount for my PhD, which involved a lot of statistics. It had an LED display, which was both fa...

I must admit that WPC Davies was my junior housemaster and I never realized his (very nice) wife had been a CH nurse.

Yes, I noticed from the CHOBA news emailed to me today that David Swale had died, which is sad, but he had a good innings. And yes, now that I come to think of it, I did know that he married Nurse Barnitt. In the same edition of the CHOBA news there is a pic of the E. Midlands OB lunch, which featur...

A science master, the late John Osborn, married a Norwegian kitchen au pair in 1966 or thereabouts. Her colleague married an OB, my ThB contemporary Wyn Parry. (Whether Mrs J. knew about either of these liaisons, conducted clandestinely*, at the time the girls were employed at the school is a moot p...

How many other CH masters married infirmary nurses? I can only think of one 'almost' example: Peter Brotherton called his marriage off at the last minute. An indecently late minute, in the view of many.

Tom Keeley married dietician Belinda.

FGM is not (generally) a Muslim practice. It is more widely performed in Christian Ethiopia and in traditional and/or Christian parts of West Africa.

If you asked my opinion on a variety of social issues, you would probably be surprised at how reactionary they are, and I too have serious reservations about self-conscious diversity-mongers. However, the most serious problem facing mainly Europe, but other parts of the world too, is nationalism, an...

I have worked in France, speak the language, studied in french, and one of my degrees is from a french university, and I'm very glad to see the tricolor flown from every town hall. My local council will not allow the St George to be displayed in pubs on St George's day, but the flying of other nati...

my wife of 52 years is officially classified as "coloured". In which country? There are no 'official' ethnic classifications in the UK. Apartheid South Africa had its Pass Laws, which stated criteria for official classification by race, including the get-out phrase 'obviously by appearanc...

Ref baths.Before 1955 Th.B had showers and a tiled trough bath in the changing room. We used to unscrew the shower heads and let hot water rain down after rugby. We could also fill the bath to overflowing to get a bath about 1 ft deep! THE tiled trough was also useful for keeping carp,caught in the...

As for Outlook, never heard of it.

Well you should have done. It was published at least twice a year and possibly termly the whole time you were at CH. Sold about 200 copies each time, I believe. As school literary magazines go, it was quite good. (Perhaps it's still going -- anyone know?)

Somehow it then got round to how frequently we were allowed to have a bath (3 times a week, no showers at Hertford in my day). Three baths a week would have been a luxury in most households in those days, and it was well into the 1970s before most homes had a shower. (It is said that the first show...

That was the delectable Nena, was it not?

She's still around, though I believe she makes her living as a comedian these days.

The Christ's Hospital Book (1953) opens with an extract from the Report of the Schools Inquiry Commissioners (1867/68) which states 'Christ's Hospital is ... sui generis'. These days one has to translate even common Latin phrases, but this is where 'a school like no other' comes from.