Penguin-Bashers: Did They Really Exist or Were They a Myth?

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Mid A 15
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Re: Penguin-Bashers: Did They Really Exist or Were They a Myth?

Post by Mid A 15 »

Goatherd wrote:Beer lorries? Definitely after my time!
Deliveries for the Grecians Club and / or Common Room at a guess.

I missed Grecians Club by a year or so.
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Re: Penguin-Bashers: Did They Really Exist or Were They a Myth?

Post by HowardH »

Nope.... Scottish and Newcastle Breweries had a depot down by the railway station.
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Re: Penguin-Bashers: Did They Really Exist or Were They a Myth?

Post by keibat »

JR wrote:
The so-called penquin bashing in Horsham itself, and around CH must have become aproduct of the 70'a and thereafter.
I cannot remember any such incidents in the 60's near the school.
Nor me. In my day (2nd half of 50s, early 60s) I don't remember even Horsham as being a problem, and certainly not the West Sussex backwoods. (In those days it was simply Sussex.) We used to cycle into Horsham reasonably often – stocking up on non-Tuck-Shop delicacies (I was very keen on mussels, at one stage), wine from Peter Dominic, etc – all in Housey clothes.

We were also required to travel to and from school at the beginning and end of term in uniform. To be honest, I rather enjoyed the looks of puzzlement, mockery, etc, across London, on the Yorkshire train, and in Hull, and would try to invent suitably devastatingly-witty replies, but I don't recall ever having come up with anything as fine as 'Bless you, my child'. ;-)

BTW, the usually preferred spelling is penGuin ;-) !
[I spent over 40 years working in non-anglophone environments, one of my tasks being to try to get students' and others' spelling of English right. Linquistics, anquish, funny visitors called quests ...] 

So could Forum-posters indicate the Bashers decade in guestion?
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Re: Penguin-Bashers: Did They Really Exist or Were They a Myth?

Post by keibat »

Update to immediately previous post:
I asked:
So could Forum-posters indicate the Bashers decade in guestion?
Sorry, I'd got stuck on the first page of the thread. It's now clear.
Perhaps I'm rather glad i didn't live in the UK in the 1970s! (or 80s or 90s or 00s)

I also have no recollection at all about Muntham House.
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Re: Penguin-Bashers: Did They Really Exist or Were They a Myth?

Post by Phil »

I can take the record back another decade (mid 40s to mid 50s). Then I knew nothing of any bad feeling towards boys in Housey clothes in Horsham or anywhere else in Sussex (or the UK). Also the words “penguin bashing” and “Muntham House” were unknown.
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Re: Penguin-Bashers: Did They Really Exist or Were They a Myth?

Post by Spoonbill »

no.31 wrote:...the only differences being that your parents paid to put you in Care and the Council paid for us to be put in Care
No.31, very interesting to hear from you.

In the '70s, Christ's Hospital was closer to its charitable roots than it is today (it was founded as a charitable institution for the benefit of the children of the London poor). Back then, the parents of most of the kids either paid no fees at all or were means-tested by the school authorities and only required to make a contribution towards the fees. I only ever knew of one kid whose parents paid full whack. Also some of the pupils had all their fees paid by school governors, while others had theirs paid by local councils, by in-house bursaries or by organisations to which their parents had some kind of connection (e.g. the RAF). There was no shortage of kids with London or South-East working-class accents, no shortage of kids from broken homes and no shortage of kids who came from seriously deprived areas in Greater London. We were for the most part a scruffy, rough-and-ready bunch who mercilessly mimicked anyone with an allegedly posh accent and we took a pretty dim view of anyone who put on airs. Probably the pupils from Muntham House shared a lot of common ground with many Christ's Hospital boys, if only we'd realised it.

Check out this thread elsewhere on the forum: 'How Different Was Your Home Life From Your CH Life?' http://chforum.info/php/viewtopic.php?f ... 37#p103437

Hopefully your own life has taken a turn for the better since your Muntham House days.
Last edited by Spoonbill on Sat Nov 12, 2016 10:28 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Penguin-Bashers: Did They Really Exist or Were They a Myth?

Post by sejintenej »

Spoonbill wrote:
no.31 wrote:...the only differences being that your parents paid to put you in Care and the Council paid for us to be put in Care
There was no shortage of kids with London or South-East working-class accents, no shortage of kids from broken homes and no shortage of kids who came from seriously deprived areas in Greater London. We were for the most part a scruffy, rough-and-ready bunch who mercilessly mimicked anyone with an allegedly posh accent and who took a pretty dim view of anyone who put on airs. Probably the pupils from Muntham House shared a lot of common ground with many Christ's Hospital boys, if only we'd realised it.

Hopefully your own life has taken a turn for the better since your Muntham House days.
Living "below stairs" one was required to have a "proper" accent and I remember hours of instruction which of course did not go down well there - it is still commented on ;-(. Of course it was not proper to have a young kid downstairs so I was despatched to CH at the earliest possible opportunity - the entrance exam was well before I was nine. Can't say I was scruffy though almost all my clothes were mended castoffs - outside service and school I was always barefooted to save shoeleather.

Much later on, after my mother's death I was well looked after by the family and by their younger son with whom I kept in touch until his death this year

Going back to someone's suggestion that nobody paid the full cost in the seventies (and I read that as up to and including the seventies) there was the policy that once in the school you did not leave if the family fortunes changed. If their income increased then fees increased accordingly so it is not inconceivable that some parents paid full whack. I was there on a presentation but after my mother's death the fees for me should have increased greatly.
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Re: Penguin-Bashers: Did They Really Exist or Were They a Myth?

Post by J.R. »

With regards to 'accents', it's very strange how some people adapt to their surrounding.

When I left CH and joined 'plod' I got a fair amount of 'stick' and was called 'posh;

Later in life, I spent many years working in different parts of London which has variations of speech accent, including East End cockney/Docker; North London gutteral, and Sarf London drawl and have since learnt that I can adapt my speech to suit the arera.

In fact I am still often asked by people who haven't me me before, which part of London I hail from. Very strange, being born in West Surrey and moving to central Surrey around the time my CH life began.
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Re: Penguin-Bashers: Did They Really Exist or Were They a Myth?

Post by gneuss »

I do recall one sort of incident back in the 60s. in 1965 Geoff Russell (Maine A?) and I managed to find ourselves two local girls as ‘girlfriends’. We used to ‘entertain’ them in the back projection room in Big School as I used to do the lighting for the school plays and had a key for the very cramped (but very private) room. One day I was with one of them in a café in Southwater and a local lad started to have a go at me. I was actually in the summer outfit (blazer etc. rather than the bluecoat) which even then probably looked quite ‘posh’. The local girl soon saw him off!!!
As regards talking ‘posh’, my housemaster Chris Miller was always trying to ‘correct’ my south London accent.
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Re: Penguin-Bashers: Did They Really Exist or Were They a Myth?

Post by sejintenej »

J.R. wrote:With regards to 'accents', it's very strange how some people adapt to their surrounding.
I used to be able to do Belfast (I lived there for a while) and a Norwegian language professor actually told me that I came from Bo in the Lofoten islands - that was where a girlfriend came.
What I can't do even now is the Spanish rolled 'r'. Just try rolling each 'r' individually in "ferrocarril' !!!!!!! Julian?
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Re: Penguin-Bashers: Did They Really Exist or Were They a Myth?

Post by Chrissie Boy »

sejintenej wrote: Going back to someone's suggestion that nobody paid the full cost in the seventies (and I read that as up to and including the seventies) there was the policy that once in the school you did not leave if the family fortunes changed. If their income increased then fees increased accordingly so it is not inconceivable that some parents paid full whack. I was there on a presentation but after my mother's death the fees for me should have increased greatly.
There was a lad named Mark Window in Barnes B whose parents supposedly removed him from the school (c.1973) because his dad had had a significant pay rise and didn't wish to make a larger contribution to his son's fees than he was already making. A shame, because I remember Mark Window fondly. He was the kind of lad who was prepared to be friends with everyone and anyone. Heaven alone knows what became of him thereafter. Can't seem to spot him on LinkedIn or Facebook, but then maybe he's just too grown up for that kind of tomfoolery.

I also remember three brothers who passed through Barnes B at various times in the '70s and whose father was rumoured to be paying full fees for them all. He was an Old Blue and simply wanted his sons to attend the same school that he'd attended.
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Re: Penguin-Bashers: Did They Really Exist or Were They a Myth?

Post by keibat »

On fees: My mum was a war widow, working as a schoolteacher. At one point she got a pay rise; her income tax went up, maybe something else as well, and then my means-tested fees for CH. She would have ended up worse off than before, so she wrote to CH explaining – and my fees went down again.

I don't know what she had been paying, but at Christmas 1962, when I left – having just got a university place for the following autumn – I went and spent half a year with family friends in California; my mum paid, if I remember right, £140 for my 2-way crossing over the Atlantic with Cunard (this was before the days when ordinary folk took the plane), and £51 for my flight from New York to San Francisco.

But this tells us even more about inflation than it does about CH fees!

And crossing the Atlantic by sea was considerably more comfortable than cooped up in a trans-Atlantic airliner these days :-)
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Re: Penguin-Bashers: Did They Really Exist or Were They a Myth?

Post by no.31 »

?
Last edited by no.31 on Wed Nov 23, 2016 5:09 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Penguin-Bashers: Did They Really Exist or Were They a Myth?

Post by J.R. »

NO31.....

A question.

Where was MHS and when was it founded ?

I have absolutely no recollection of it during my time at CH, (58-63). Nice to have you aboard on the forum.

JR.
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Re: Penguin-Bashers: Did They Really Exist or Were They a Myth?

Post by jhopgood »

J.R. wrote:NO31.....

A question.

Where was MHS and when was it founded ?

I have absolutely no recollection of it during my time at CH, (58-63). Nice to have you aboard on the forum.

JR.
http://www.muntham.org.uk/
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