Unofficial Christ's Hospital Forum

Beaky Davies was certainly an excellent teacher and a very pleasant man, who left CH to become the headmaster of various prep schools in turn. One item about him while at CH was an occurrence during a Harlequins match, in about 1954, when somehow he lost his shorts. The Daily Mirror published a pict...

In spite of the recent event at Twickenham, why limit this thread to Rugby? So then we could have mention of Cricket (and DRW Silk). Why stop there? There are Rowing, etc (and even Tiddly Winks) to consider.

I’m clearly missing something, but quite apart from me there are surely others who don’t know Tucker’s Law. Please enlighten us?

Of course I know what a ‘bum’ is, though I’m not sure if I learned it CH or not. What sort of strange question is that?

It’s an Americanism, someone who’s worthless, a hobo, tramp or vagrant.

Since the election of Harold Macmillan as Chancellor of the University of Oxford has been mentioned again, there is an important additional comment that has also been made previously. Macmillan was chosen purposely not because of who he was (although there was some degree of ‘payback’), but as a pro...

I think that you omitted Thursday from your list of lesson times. You wrote

MICHAELMAS AND LENT TERMS.
Monday, Tuesday, Friday.

Presumably Thursday should have been included here.

And Thursdays in the Lent and Michaelmas terms?

Another minor and rare disruption to the morning time table occurred when morning PT was officially cancelled. (There was no outside PT on Sundays, Saturdays or Wednesdays.) This could happen if there was continuous rain or snow at about 9 30 am. In that case the Big School bell would be wrung conti...

There was another hazard to having the trade of Tea Boy. (Was it called Kiff boy in other houses?). Some unpleasant seniors (very rarely monitors) would inspect my thumb after I delivered their tea, looking for “Thumb Juice”. If a wet thumb was detected, the tea was sent back and replacement bowl de...

There were other types of unsatisfactory teachers apart from those who couldn’t maintain discipline. (I leave out predators of young boys, for hardly surprisingly the moderators don’t like such references.) They included alcoholics and there was one present for many years around my Housey time after...

For those interested in this subject, there is some more relevant information in another thread, “CH and the Armed Services”. One item there bears repetition. While this was not on active service, one of Buckie’s WW2 exploits deserves to be retold. Archibald Hector Buck was an OB and housemaster at ...

I have noticed references to a few interesting things done in WW2 by some masters in other threads. It may be a good idea to collect them, to add as much as possible of additional masters’ war careers and also OBs’ exploits, all in one place – this thread. The following have already been mentioned ....

Housey slang is well known, but I suspect that it is steadily vanishing, because of the uniformity of modern popular culture and the ever increasingly efficient ways it is being disseminated with modern electronic communications. Or has this slang already totally disappeared in 2015? Slang words wer...

I don’t recollect the name ‘Brass arse’ for Rider in my days (end of the 50’s). Perhaps this only was used in the early post war days, because of the rumour. In my time he was called ‘Arthur’ or ’Chaps’. Yet he still had the same posture and walk as that already described

The newspaper article contradicts the Wikepdia entry on Dr Martens shoes. Wikepedia states that, “The first Dr. Martens boots in the United Kingdom came out on 1 April 1960”, [my emphasis] which is hardly surprising since they were invented immediately after World War 2, by a German in Germany. This...