Unofficial Christ's Hospital Forum

I don't wish to go into details since John Rutley has already closed down the AH Buck thread after my intervention some time ago, but the "Exonerate AH Buck" campaign seems to have done a very good job in "massaging" this whole affair, with a long dead poet having unwittingly pla...

You're more up to date on Bob Rae than I am Robert. Certainly he was quite slim, and young looking, when I was in Col B. I guess there are two ways of looking at physical exercise. Some pursue it into later life. Then there is the Evelyn Waugh opinion: "After a while the poisons in the body hav...

RA (Alright! OK!) Hewitt certainly played club rugby for someone, quite possibly Harlequins, because on one occasion he got a less than favourable mention in a report in one of the national papers and protested that it was grossly unfair. Rather predictably, we were all massively amused. The other t...

One afternoon in the late 50s, a friend and I decided to play squash. We knocked on the door of Col B junior housemaster Bob Rae to ask for the squash balls. Rae eyed us darkly and wanted to know why we were not going to play fives. I was a rather shy and deferential youth back then so I failed to s...

Went to see "Suffragette" film this weekend. Compelling and harrowing by degrees. Better than any Hollywood crap. Things don't change. Powerful vested interests still use whatever means to protect their wealth and privileges. It would be nice to see some input from the ladies again but th...

Bryan Magee gets a mention in Adam Sisman's new, and massive, biography of John LeCarre. After Burgess and Maclean defected to Russia MI5 decided they needed to beef up their efforts to detect lefties in our universities. While at Oxford David Cornwell (LeCarre's real name) was recruited and asked t...

Went to see "Suffragette" film this weekend. Compelling and harrowing by degrees. Better than any Hollywood crap. Things don't change. Powerful vested interests still use whatever means to protect their wealth and privileges. It would be nice to see some input from the ladies again but the...

I can only say that there was NO house radio or television in Coleridge B when I departed CHin the summer of 1963. A public phone box in the corridor to the left of the dining-hall for pupils to phone home etc.. There was a house radio in the 1950s when I was there John. My first real political awa...

I was at CH in the '50s with Dave Carr (Prep B and Mid A) who became the keyboards player in The Fortunes who had chart hits, notably "This Golden Ring". I believe they're still playing oldies package shows but I don't know if Dave is still around.

Freaky does it again. Another letter in today's Grauniad (9 Oct) under the main heading "Contrast egg throwing with Tory personal attacks".

Sisters Uncut disrupt the opening of "Suffragette" in the West End tonight. Great stuff girls. The fight goes on. But there seemed to be a lot more coverage on social media than the national news channels. I maintain that the BBC lost its bottle after the Andrew Gilligan affair and never r...

One meeting of the Debating Society around 1955 was an address by Bryan Magee, on debating techniques. He was then President of the Oxford University Union (ie the prestigious debating society). I recall him saying that the secret to effective debating was frequently the converse of the structure o...

Can this thread include comments on OBs who become psychiatrists? I know of only one, Peter Agulnik (Ba A, 1948-56) who had a very distinguished career in Oxford, ending with a psychiatric facility being named after him. Few OBs ever attain that. At CH he won the Lamb Essay prize. This was another ...

Posh public schoolboys, the Bullingdon, Piers Gaveston, pigs heads, loads of champagne, insulting the poor........it's like going back eighty years to the time of Brideshead, isn't it? Does anything change in this country?

Does the school still have a debating society? I still have a vague memory of some of the debates that took place in the 1950s and one that sticks in my mind went thus: "This house would rather be a minor athlete than a major aesthete." Have I got that the right way round??? If so it woul...