Unofficial Christ's Hospital Forum

Many of the brewers from King and Barnes went and formed their own brewery near the station, naming it Hepworth Brewery. They took many of the beers with them, but renamed them, so as not to be sued. Good beers to try are Iron Horse, Pullmans, and the traditional Sussex. Whenever I go back to visit my parents, I always get a good supply of beer to take back to London!

This has veered a long way from corporal punishment!

"Old Speckled Hen" - 99p per pint whilst I was at Aston Uni in Birmingham, and that was in a normal pub - didn't taste at all bad either.....
Is it still available??

jtaylor wrote:"Old Speckled Hen" - 99p per pint whilst I was at Aston Uni in Birmingham, and that was in a normal pub - didn't taste at all bad either.....
Is it still available??

very much so...

Harveys Sussex Bitter
Tanglefoot
Batemans XXX

All go down well...

palgsm93 wrote:We need a beer topic!

But seriously, you beat the Scottish ale:

Deuchars IPA from Caledonian Brewery
Wayfarer IPA from Atlas Brewery

now I'm thirsty and 400 miles away from the Scotland

This has almost become a beer topic, hasn't it? Nothing wrong with that. It's a subject close to many of our hearts.

Anyway, for the benefit or far-flung and nostalgic Old Blues, we now have three breweries in Horsham. They are W.J.King (as in King & Barnes), Hepworths (run by Andy Hepworth, ex-head brewer at K & B), and Welton's (moved here from Dorking). They all concoct some great stuff.

The very wonderful Beer Essentials in East Street in run by the bloke who used to be in charge of the King & Barnes shop.

By the way, it may (or may not) interest you to know that Deucharse features fairly regularly in several Horsham pubs.

Deucharse features fairly regularly

What an unfortunate name for a beer...

Theakston's Old Peculiar. aahh. There used to be a pub in Beverley, Yorks run by two 90 year old sisters in the mid 1960s. Wonderful place, real Victorian relic. Lit by gas, no bar, no pumps but with the barrels on a table and the beer drawn from the wood. I think it was usually called Nellie's though it did have a formal name

Weltons beer - i haven't heard of that one - where's their brewery?

Great Plum wrote:Weltons beer - i haven't heard of that one - where's their brewery?

It's on the industrial estate off Foundry Lane.

They have beer launches there sometimes.

I went to an evening there last year to launch the "Old Ale" for winter.

Barbecue and Morris Dancers (!) in attendance, it was the proverbial, drink-all-you-like, piss-up in a brewery.

Richard Ruck wrote:

Great Plum wrote:Weltons beer - i haven't heard of that one - where's their brewery?

Barbecue and Morris Dancers (!) in attendance, it was the proverbial, drink-all-you-like, piss-up in a brewery.

My mother was probably there...

i thought this thread was supposed to be all about punishments and homosexuality and stuff like that which looks at the dark side of CH, which was all of it as far as I was concerned. I'm glad to see a few gents from my era putting in their 2 cents(I live in N. America) worth. Where are the Hertford girls from the 50s? We had hormones too - and mostly they were directed towards suggestions that we should serve the Lord, preferably in a leper colony. Miss DR West, whom I had the misfortune to suffer as my headmistress at the time, said in her abominable autobiography that she was aware that girls had 'glandular disturbances' that made then aware of the opposite sex, but she soon sorted them out and the phase soon passed. Her great literary work is worth reading as a grotesque testimony to her perverted regime. She does, for example, describe the attempted suicide of one pupil, who jumped off a building, as inconvenient because she did it on a sunny day when lots of girls were looking out of the windows and could see her.
Oh for a good pint or two whenI think about it! Perhaps more than two.

You are supposed to have an "unknown gender" - perhaps in deference to your erstwhile Headmistress? Where in NAmerica? It's abit large. The boys from the 50's (of whom I am one) had a theory that the school deliberately put bromide in the kiff to stop them thinking "impure thoughts". It's almost a relief at this stage to know the Hertford lot felt the same way. I remember the panting excitement of the trip to the Mansion House when we actualy got to talk to you lot - the high spot of the year. Thank God, economics made them see the light and merge the two again.
There was some homosexual activity at the boys' school, but I seriously doubt it was any more or any more obvious than out in the real world. As this thread points out, they were much more offended by the heterosexual stuff. Sorry to hear about the attempted suicide - I cannot recollect the same event at Horsham - a murder yes, but not suicide.

rebel wrote:i thought this thread was supposed to be all about punishments and homosexuality and stuff like that which looks at the dark side of CH, which was all of it as far as I was concerned.

Back to the beatings and buggery, then......

The general feeling seems to be that at Horsham nefarious deeds among the boys were no more or less common than in the outside world, given the circumstances and any run-of-the-mill pubescent experimentation which went on. And as someone else mentioned, there could be an amount of "faux-gay" banter among pupils, but this did not mean that those involved were bona fide "friends of Dorothy".

I'm sure that boys who had phases of sitting under trees scattering rose petals and reading the poems of John Donne soon got over them.

What about Hertford, then? Obviously the regime there seemed to be a good deal more rigid than at Horsham, but did girly crushes lead to more Sapphic behaviour?

And what would be the attitude to homosexuality since the school became mixed? Given that a certain percentage of the general population are gay, and that general attitudes have changed a great deal during the last couple of decades how do gay pupils manage? Do they happily "come out" or do they keep quiet about it?

menace wrote:The boys from the 50's (of whom I am one) had a theory that the school deliberately put bromide in the kiff to stop them thinking "impure thoughts"....... Sorry to hear about the attempted suicide - I cannot recollect the same event at Horsham - a murder yes, but not suicide.

The bromide theory was still around in the 70s.

Re. suicides, a couple of masters topped themselves while I was at C.H.
One, the head of Classics, contrived to drown himself in a bath in the Infirmary. Of course, we were never given any likely reasons for his action.

The bromide theory

That accounts for why the tea tasted so awful. The trouble with bromide is it only works on the mechanics, not the thought processes - a sort of anti-Viagra.

the dark side of CH, which was all of it as far as I was concerned

I'm curious as to why someone who was unhappy at school is picking at the scabs by partaking in a forum like this.

In retrospect, CH in my day (49-54) was fairly grim. I had my unhappy moments but overall it didn't seem too bad - probably because I didn't know any better.

My arrival at CH was unusually traumatic because I came from a small "dame school" in Derbyshire, mornings only, where the highest number of pupils had been 12. To find myself in a school of 850 was a bit of a shock.

Sorry, I'm digressing from the beatings and buggery again...

Lamma looker wrote:
My arrival at CH was unusually traumatic because I came from a small "dame school" in Derbyshire, mornings only, where the highest number of pupils had been 12. To find myself in a school of 850 was a bit of a shock.

Sorry, I'm digressing from the beatings and buggery again...

Please excuse my ignorance, but what is / was a "dame school"?

Sounds like pupils were being prepared for a bit of cross-dressing in the Pantomime season....