Unofficial Christ's Hospital Forum

... the Coleridge A tradition that reading the valley of dry bones passage at evening duty was hysterically funny? Of course, it was absolutely taboo for any member of the house actually to laugh (or even smirk), otherwise the mighty wrath of Kit Aitken would descend. Consequently it was impossible...

I did notice Michael's " te absolvo." above - were the Romans that way inclined or is the French, Spanish, Portuguese, Romanian avoidance of the second person singular a recent invention? I'm trying to stop myself picking nits, but slapping my own wrist doesn't seem to be helping ... so I...

... in rationing times before the catering manager was changed and the food was pretty awful. Meat - what you actually got of it - was pure gristle as an example. I agree with sejintenej. I arrived in 1954, and the food was dire, but quite normal for a big institution. In, I think, summer of 1955, ...

Their faces are covered, so nobody knows who they are. Why would they care who sees their willies?

I seem to recall understanding that Exhibitions were founded in 1851 or soon thereafter to mark the Great Exhibition of that year, probably encouraged by Prince Albert. I'm fairly confident that the word "exhibition" was used to mean something like a scholarship well before 1851. The OED ...

... if you took it, John, how long a delay did you give it? You're there in the top row, which must have involved a climb. Well spotted, Michael. Actually there was no delay. I used a camera with no such sophistication. I had to get somebody - fortunately, I forget who - from Col B to fire the shut...

michael scuffil wrote:By becoming a Grecian, you left the Mathematical School.

Just so. The RMS was training you specifically for the Royal Navy, and by your early teens you should have been a midshipman. If you were still at the school, you would be, to put it mildly, a disappointment to your sponsors.

I can see that the badge system might create social distinctions, but at Christ's Hospital there is not much reason for any pupil to be looked down on because they have rely on charity to keep them at the school. The whole idea of the school is that nearly everybody is in that position. Only a small...

Since nobody else has responded, I'll try to dredge up my memories from 60 years ago ... -what are they actually called? The thing was called a plate -what percentage, approximately, of the students have them? (I saw very few in Google Images) I never counted, but I might have seen one or two plates...

Were these places just very large versions of Craggy Island with a few lonely matrons dotted around like token Mrs Doyles? I had never thought of that, but now I will never be able to get rid of the idea! A few years ago, on one of my first visits to Ireland, we stayed in a hostel on Achill Island....

... A whole wedge of our culture lost, lost for ever! Not really. They're in many published song books, in all kinds of arrangements. Some of them did indeed have a previous life as folk songs, but before we got to sing them they had been tidied up for "community singing" as approved by t...

The aim now is to set-up an online Petition 1552 and Katharine is helping. I would like to sign the petition. I would prefer to sign on paper. I don't in general sign on-line petitions, which have become very much devalued. It is too easy to set them up. There are thousands of them, and they can ge...

HowardH wrote:He is a buffoon if he thinks that anyone with an iota of intelligence will take him seriously.

He doesn't care about anyone with an iota of intelligence. He thinks that they are outnumbered by the followers of sound-bites and clowning. He may be right. Plenty of other politicians share that view.

Boris - I have seen more brain cells in a puddle. The man's a buffoon of the highest order. If only that were true! The buffoon is a pose, or, if not a deliberate pose, a facade that comes easily to him. Boris is clever, and ambitious, and he uses his cleverness and his buffoonery to distract peopl...

The system is slightly more complicated than Martin says, as if there was just one token it might end up at the wrong end of the section. The basic token system which Martin describes is very safe, but so restrictive that it is virtually useless for anything more than a simple slow shuttle service....