What Keith Douglas got up to at CH

Anything that doesn't fit anywhere else, but that's still CH related.

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Katharine
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Re: What Keith Douglas got up to at CH

Post by Katharine »

I feel I can't comment on Hertford's efforts at career guidance. Once I had been identified as Oxbridge material that was it, as far as I was concerned. Yes I had to choose 6 universities for my UCCA form, but honestly can't remember much about how or why I chose them! (Would still like to know if I could have got in to Imperial London, it was rumoured it was harder for girls to go there for Maths than Oxbridge. I had an interview date, but it was made very clear you should not go if you had already accepted a place elsewhere)

As for LongGone saying he went for interview in full Housey, we were expected to go in uniform too, but of course it looked like many another school uniform. I did feel a bit of a prat that I was in uniform when nobody else was. One of people interviewing me, looked up and greeted me with something like "Ah yes, you're a Christ's Hospital girl aren't you?" as if she expected us to be in uniform, and nobody else.
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michael scuffil
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Re: What Keith Douglas got up to at CH

Post by michael scuffil »

Ah yes, full housey for interviews... Not that I really minded. I was quite vain in those days, and FHD made one feel very superior. One's fellow examinees were either amused or curious.
Incidentally, I think CH paid my train fare from Horsham to Cambridge and back.
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Re: What Keith Douglas got up to at CH

Post by postwarblue »

If I might put my oar in -

As of 1954 when I left, 1st Partings were Oxbridge candidates who had to put in an extra term to do the Oxbridge 7th Term exams and who would hope to nab a scholarship or an exhibition to eke out their otherwise impoverished Oxbridge years. They usually stayed the full year, probably as House Captains, 1st XV, School Monitors, CCF SNCOs etc, as 'gap years' were not practical then and would have been unaffordable anyway. There wasn't much redbrick about then but those who chose that path might leave as 2nd partings after A-levels. Whatever one's parting the entitlement to Buttons came with one's 17th birthday. Many of one's cohort would have left at 16 after O-levels (GCE replaced School Cert & Higher Cert 1952) and gone off to work.

How many Buttons in a house was a matter of luck and history mostly, give or take transfers previously discussed. The Col B 1954 house photo (which seems to have disappeared, but I trapped a copy ages ago) shows EIGHT Button Grecians (1953, seven) with one (Tigger Henes, then 3rd parting) in the back row and not on the monitorial bench at all. This meant that in some houses one could get one's Buttons but still have less status than a Dep or even GE in another house who was a monitor. btw Calam mentioned earlier would have made the 1954 total 9 if he had stayed on in Col B.

Army candidates only capable of reaching Sandhurst's written exam results [less intellectually demanding than those of Cranwell or the RN Special Entry (the last instituted by Fisher in 1913)] tended to be in a separate thing called Vth Form.
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sejintenej
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Re: What Keith Douglas got up to at CH

Post by sejintenej »

postwarblue wrote:If I might put my oar in -
Army candidates only capable of reaching Sandhurst's written exam results [less intellectually demanding than those of Cranwell or the RN Special Entry (the last instituted by Fisher in 1913)] tended to be in a separate thing called Vth Form.
Things must have changed between 1953 and 1958.
By 1958 the Vth Form was for those who were considered not good enough to get A levels but this form ensured that nobody left without at least 5 O levels. This was the "normal" entry demand for clerical jobs, even thosse with foreign service attached.
It was thus a bit of a dead end at CH though I was perhaps one of the few to fill up my dozen plus O levels there and then go on to escape a year late to Deputy Grecians and thence a couple of A levels - not too bad for someone with unconsidered dyslexia!
Somebody commented that I was perhaps the first to escape but I certainly never heard of specialised tuition for any of the forces colleges.
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Re: What Keith Douglas got up to at CH

Post by michael scuffil »

My memory of the Fifth Form (though I had no internal experience of it) accords entirely with sejintenej's. (I always linked it in my mind with the 'Remove' in the Billy Bunter books -- a form that didn't seem to fit in the regular scheme of things.)

I remember a time in the summer term of, I think, 1957, when Gordon van Praagh wandered around Hall at tea handing out buttons forms to 3rd partings like confetti. Four of these were in ThB, and two weren't monitors. (He wasn't very discriminating: at least one of these four eventually got a place at ICL, having been turned down by Cambridge, but was sent down for failing his first-year exams.)
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sejintenej
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Re: What Keith Douglas got up to at CH

Post by sejintenej »

michael scuffil wrote: (He wasn't very discriminating: at least one of these four eventually got a place at ICL, having been turned down by Cambridge, but was sent down for failing his first-year exams.)
I don't think being sent down like that was too great a disgrace. I know that Hertfordshire and UMIST (RIP) used to get rid of over 50% of their first years intake apparently deliberately to keep numbers down. My son failed after one year but they were allowed to have the final six weeks and exams at the end of the next year. Rob (?cheekily) asked a professor about attending lectures in the meantime and was told along the lines of "with so many students - wink eye - I can't recognise who is there and who is not!" Suffice it to say Rob passed second time, got his BEng and was asked to stay on for his PhD. After a year a couple of professors wandered into the lab to discuss what he was doing and on that he got his MSc - no exam. He seemed to travel a lot - sent by Warren Buffet's crowd to speak at conferences in the USA ane Western Europe before he eventually got his doctorate. Ergo failure can be the start of greatness.
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J.R.
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Re: What Keith Douglas got up to at CH

Post by J.R. »

michael scuffil wrote:My memory of the Fifth Form (though I had no internal experience of it) accords entirely with sejintenej's. (I always linked it in my mind with the 'Remove' in the Billy Bunter books -- a form that didn't seem to fit in the regular scheme of things.)

I remember a time in the summer term of, I think, 1957, when Gordon van Praagh wandered around Hall at tea handing out buttons forms to 3rd partings like confetti. Four of these were in ThB, and two weren't monitors. (He wasn't very discriminating: at least one of these four eventually got a place at ICL, having been turned down by Cambridge, but was sent down for failing his first-year exams.)

Sounds distinctly 'Bertie Wooster'-ish !
John Rutley. Prep B & Coleridge B. 1958-1963.
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