Unofficial Christ's Hospital Forum

Does anyone remember Hennessy, the terror of the Thornton B dayroom? Not because he was vicious, but because he slobbered so much that everything got drowned in saliva. H. was a bulldog owned by WPC Davies, aka Beaky (because of his nose). (WPCD played rugby for the British Lions. Incidentally the o...

MKM wrote:I've got as far as 50 (670 grains of rice) briefly.

Same here, but then I am a professional translator. I keep falling back after 50 too.

Jo wrote:ROFL !!!

Thanks Jo, I had to look that one up.

(I haven't ploughed through the whole of this thread, so apologies if it's here already.)


Descartes is sitting in a café. "Will you have cream in your coffee, Monsieur?" asks the waiter.
"Er.. I think not," replies Descartes. and vanishes.

Thornton chimp: If you still live in Shelley's Wood, how come you manage to avoid the place at all?

Unfortunately the reasons for going to war in 1914 were not spurious (at the time).

And Neville Chamberlain, a decent and honorable man, drew his conclusions from the Menin Gate and the war cemeteries and thought that anything would be preferable to a repeat of that. He has been vilified ever since.

Certain things get impressed indelibly in the memory. Apart from my mother's Co-op divi number (296216) I can still repeat verbatim (with the capital letters) the words: Boys are STRICTLY FORBIDDEN to loiter or play in or around these buildings. Cutting or writing on the woodwork or walls is also ST...

On the school special train to Victoria at the beginning of the summer holidays in 1958, we flew bog-roll streamers from the windows. When we arrived back for the Michaelmas Term, we found that all the simple bog-roll holders had been replaced by a patented device called "Toi-Lok", which m...

DavebytheSea wrote:There is, I believe, also a Christ's Hospital at Abingdon, near Oxford.

I believe a party of them visited us while I was at CH. We stared at them as if they were some alien species. Their uniforms looked rather like ours, but weren't. In a way they were stranger than ordinary visitors.

tortfeasor

as in Married Women and Tortfeasors Act 1935

under which married women could be sued in tort (previously they could hide behind their husbands)

The figure of 2058 for those who served is quite high. Eligible for service (by age) would have been those admitted to the school between ca. 1885 and 1912. Assuming an intake of 120 per year, that makes ca, 3250 OBs eligible for service. (Given the number turned down nationally on grounds of health...

I didn't see either of these, but I know the feeling. You say: Never again!, but you watch again after all. I used to watch Silent Witness (the series about pathologists). Then I saw one dubbed into German, and I could only say: What drivel! The plot was rubbish, the acting was bad. The only good th...

I suspect that many if not all of those boys would have fought in the First World War This thought arises with all pictures of young men taken between c. 1890 and 1918. It should also be possible to estimate how many of them did not survive it. One would need to know the total number of OBs killed ...

The boys are on the front steps of the National Gallery. That much is clear. I really don't think there's the slightest doubt they're from Newgate Street and not Hertford. They're clearly showing people around, and have an air that they know it all. Not what you'd expect from 10-year-olds who didn't...

I see I'm reviving a dormant site, but never mind. There's one item of housey slang we use in our household because we can't think of a better word, namely "skiff-plate". A skiff-plate is a plate for skiffage (food scraps, see above). Normally the skiffage went into a skiff pan at the end ...