Unofficial Christ's Hospital Forum

I wasn't a huge film fan either but one I do remember being shown was The Searchers starring John Wayne. To this day one of the best Westerns ever made. Director John Ford who later faced down McCarthy and his henchmen during the so-called communist scare. It featured white settlers versus indigenou...

I don't know why they're spending all this money on state-of-the-art sports facilities. When I was there in the 1950s, if they couldn't think of anything else to exhaust us with they resorted to heartyball. This was essentially the Eton Wall Game without the wall. Find a patch of rough ground and ha...

Indigenous tribal societies I believe have a "rite of passage" ordeal. Well mine wasn't quite so rugged. When the Housey Special disgorged me into Victoria station in July 1960 I took off down Vauxhall Bridge Road to the very first Picasso retrospective which was showing at the old Tate (b...

Reading Ruth's sad story it seems that the girls got the bum's rush. At CH Horsham, even in the1950s, we had some cultural capital (as it's called). There were choirs and an orchestra, a drama society who put on a full Shakespeare play every year (I can still remember Mr Keep explaining The Merchant...

I arrived in the same intake as Sejintenej in September 1952. He to Prep A, me to Prep B. All I remember is that I don't remember much. For the first few weeks it was all a blank. I'm told by psychologists who have studied boarding school education that this is quite common. The effect of being thru...

Some of the pics are by Tony Ray-Jones who was contemporary with me in Col B in the 1950s. He went on to be a renowned social documentary photographer and died tragically young.

In my day, the 1950s, we were certainly kept busy, with compulsory games as well. So we were knackered physically and mentally. This led to a lively discussion between the late Dr Scuffil and myself as to whether this was deliberate to keep our minds off sex, which then would have been of the homose...

I knew that I'd seen it called Christ's in some instance and, looking it up, it turned out to be by no less than Charles Lamb in an essay called Poor Relations. "Poor W_ was of my own standing at Christ's, a fine classic and a youth of promise. Many a quarrel have I had with him, when we were r...

The Freakster has made it to eighty,
An age that appears quite weighty.
He survived it at Housey
Where the food was quite lousy
But wouldn't go back again matey.

Thinking back to history lessons under Chern, I do wonder whether we were especially privileged. Christ's Hospital in the 1950s would surely have followed the elite boarding school pattern of bigging up our empire (remains of which were still floating about). But although we were taught about Clive ...

Yesterday I turned 80. The day before, Mick Jagger (and Katherine's brother P Hills), turned 80. What have we learned? Well I'm surprised that the private schools and the boarding schools are still with us. When John Le Carre ran away from Sherborne during the war he said that he thought that after ...

The Freakster rides again, after a long lay-off. My letter in today's Weekend FT is titled: "Home truths about the capital's unaffordability". About how the Thatcher/Lawson housing ideology has merely made housing (rented or bought) more expensive and left less money in people's pockets to...

This anti-semitism thing is a bit of a minefield. While in no way wanting to racially profile people (except in jest) it is a fact that the Jews do seem to have a strong ethnicity which people seem to notice (unlike for instance the Belgians, the Sudanese, or indeed the English).There's an old sayin...

Does anyone else have an actual memory of the 1953 coronation? I was in the old Prep B at the time. We were given a few days holiday. I remember my dad picking me up from Victoria station the day before the ceremony and walking back along the Mall where people were already camping out. We'd been inv...

Come on guys! Has no-one seen the Guardian's exposure of CH benefitting from slavery? Connections with Edward Colston? Dear oh dear! Are we all Daily Mail readers? Doesn't anyone read a proper newspaper?