Unofficial Christ's Hospital Forum

Thanks, but I am so computer illiterate that I have no idea what an "EXAXT thread link" is. If you put "blotto" in the search box, press "Search", then all the posts that contain "blotto" and are in the thread called Masters' Nicknames will lead you to the dup...

There is another thread, also entitled, “Masters’ Nicknames”, which has a larger content than this one and some duplication. It can be found by searching for “Blotto”, which appears there, but not here. Both were started by Kit Bartlett on 4 Sept 2013; this one at 10:56 am, the other at 11:00 am. Pe...

D.S.R. once mentioned in a Sermon that his grandmother promised him £100 if he abstained from drinking alcohol or smoking until he was 21 years of age which he did. That date would have been reached in 1921. £100 at that time would I suppose have been worth about £5,000 today. My recollection is so...

Each junior had a bath once a week One result of the unavailability of a daily bath, meant that it was a great privilege at CH. Something similar for me was the privilege of eating the crust of the loaf. Since there were relatively few crusts, because CH loaves were about four times the length of t...

There was at least one other upper house bed wetter, not in Col B, who left quietly after his first term at CH. Unfortunately he was teased somewhat, perhaps in part because his surname began with W, so immediately giving rise to a nickname of "wee wee W... ". I don’t recollect any urine s...

... am submitting more names under a new thread. I.R. McConnell Marlborough Considering masters’ education in the broadest sense, it is worth pointing out that Ivor R McConnell was the son of a parson, so it was not surprising that in addition to maths he taught divinity to junior forms during his ...

Of course there are 'alternative' words, especially to Christmas carols, which did get sung I only remember one ‘alternative’ Christmas carol, and it was very much a CH creation. ‘Noel, Noel, …’ was sung as, “No ale, no beer, all stout sold out. Born was Fred H* with his tongue hanging out”. I don’...

I am surprised that postwarblue did not mention “Algebra” (Longmans, London) by C.O. Tuckey and W. Armistead (head of mathematics at CH for many years) published in the 50s, for I suspect that he used it at CH in his own schooldays. Other books by the same pair of authors are “Coordinate Geometry” (...

It hasn’t been mentioned that house bathing was a great pleasure for many people, apart from being refreshing during hot summer days, hence the desire to encourage house masters to make the effort early on Sat and Sun to permit extra swimming. Sgt Usher, often supervised house bathing and when he bl...

Concerning evening Duty,CME Seaman (headmaster & OB) once told me that when he was a house captain, in the 1920s, he had requested permission from his housemaster to read a passage from the Koran at Duty. Permission was granted. (But whether for more than one occasion, or whether the housemaster...

Taking my 12 year old granddaughter to a gym class and watching the class at work, I naturally thought about the annual house (fortnight long?) gym competitions at Horsham. It was taken very seriously and the points every member of the house gained were entered in a prominent list in the dayroom. I ...

There were indeed such dancing classes, held in the Court Room. They were organised by D Chaundy, junior housemaster in BaA I think. He was a strange chap who taught physics, not that physics is particularly strange. He was also very keen on folk dancing, sometimes taught English folk dancing to int...

Two more masters without nicknames were JC Tod and JD Swale. The nickname ‘Pongo’ for EA Littlefield has as a possible explanation that his walk was penguin-like and the French word for penguin is pingouin, which sounds somewhat like ’pongo’. It seems that over the years some masters’ nicknames appa...

Thanks very much David and Michael for the correction. I apologise. Clearly I mixed Emmanuel College, London (a high school) and Emmanuel College of Cambridge University. Incidentally the Guardian obituary writer, Martyn Berry, was one of GvP’s former pupils, from Mid B. In the 40s or 50s Peggy van ...

No David I am not volunteering, but I hope that someone else will. You are quite right Kit, it was Mr Gerrish, a part time cello teacher. Thanks. I hope that I have not made other errors. As for schools, I can offer the following: R Rae (Solihull Grammar), DCF Chaundy and MT Cherniavsky (Westminster...