Who Knew What?

This section was setup in August 2018 in order to move the existing related discussions from other sections into this new section to group them together, and separate from the other CH-related topics.

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DazedandConfused
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Re: Who Knew What?

Post by DazedandConfused »

I am extremely saddened at the thought of CH’s demise and I sincerely hope this doesn’t happen. Whilst I am still struggling to reconcile the CH I thought I attended with the reality of CH in the 90s and that a particular member of the SLT who I liked and trusted has since emerged as a villain, I hope that CH has indeed become the school I thought it was and can continue to be so.
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Re: Who Knew What?

Post by michael scuffil »

CodFlabAndMuck wrote: Sat Aug 25, 2018 9:41 pm
Great Plum wrote: Sat Aug 25, 2018 9:38 pm
CodFlabAndMuck wrote: Sat Aug 25, 2018 9:22 pm Is there a full intake in September?
Why wouldn’t there be?
Because of all the bad publicity
While these scandals have certainly revived this forum, I don't really think they have made much of a splash with the public at large. For a start none of them occurred under the present leadership.

I think Ampleforth and Downside are far more endangered precisely because their monastic background makes them inherently closed off from the world (and if I am allowed to use the word, from 'normal' sex); that was the purpose of monasteries, after all.

The Odenwaldschule in Germany was forced to close, but that again was different. The abuse there was systemic. It was run from the top, and intimacy between pupils and staff was part of the ideology of the 'Reformpädagogik' which it embraced.
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wurzel
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Re: Who Knew What?

Post by wurzel »

i dont remember how true this now is due to changes in structure etc but I remember being told whilst there that the reason for the sale of Hertford was that although the school has loads of assets (this was around the time it was listed as the richest school in Britain) it needed liquid cash to pay for the update to modern boarding standards etc and the rules of the foundation/charity/bequests were that the school could only use the earnings of those assets and not the assets themselves.

If that is the case them it could be very hard for the school to actually release the liquid assets to pay for things shorts term (hence the requirement to sell Hertford etc in the mid 80's).

I know some of the historic assets are very valuable (the freehold on various properties in London) and others are now worthless (the right to issue licences to wagoners in the city of London I think it was or something similar) but the fact a property in Soho is worth £x is irrelevant if it is let out on a 99 lease with 85 years to run and you are not allowed to sell the asset
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Re: Who Knew What?

Post by wurzel »

michael scuffil wrote: Sun Aug 26, 2018 11:05 am
CodFlabAndMuck wrote: Sat Aug 25, 2018 9:41 pm
Great Plum wrote: Sat Aug 25, 2018 9:38 pm

Why wouldn’t there be?
Because of all the bad publicity
While these scandals have certainly revived this forum, I don't really think they have made much of a splash with the public at large. For a start none of them occurred under the present leadership.

I think Ampleforth and Downside are far more endangered precisely because their monastic background makes them inherently closed off from the world (and if I am allowed to use the word, from 'normal' sex); that was the purpose of monasteries, after all.

The Odenwaldschule in Germany was forced to close, but that again was different. The abuse there was systemic. It was run from the top, and intimacy between pupils and staff was part of the ideology of the 'Reformpädagogik' which it embraced.
yes to many people it is just "another one of those public school sex scandals", it might dissuade a prospective parent from choosing boarding in general but once a parent has made that decision they look more at the ethos/current attainment of the school not historic events of 20 years ago when it comes to choosing which school.
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Re: Who Knew What?

Post by TMF »

There is no difficulty with asset sales. The school can simply take out a bond and use a small portion of the investment income to pay it off.
Scazza
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Re: Who Knew What?

Post by Scazza »

J.R. wrote: Sat Aug 25, 2018 5:51 pm So, reading the above posts about Dr Hoskins, I now have to take it that Dr Scott had no such psychiatric experience or knowledge.

My personal view of 'Tommy' Scott was, "I can cure illnesses and warts, but I don't do 'personal problems'". Yes - I was a disturbed child at CH at 11 years of age. My father died when I was 7 and then I was sent away and abandoned, or so I thought by my mother.

"You have personal problems ? Then sort them out yourself !" That was CH in the late 1950's.

I could go on a lot further, but that would muddy the waters even further.
My experience was much the same in 1980s too!

I hope the current crop have proper pastoral care as it would make a big difference to kids outcomes. Just extra day to day support from house staff but i imagine they are as stretched as they ever were and any extra staff would cost money CH doesn't necessarily have.
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Re: Who Knew What?

Post by sejintenej »

J.R. wrote: Sat Aug 25, 2018 5:51 pm ...Dr Scott had no such psychiatric experience or knowledge.
My personal view of 'Tommy' Scott was, "I can cure illnesses and warts, but I don't do 'personal problems'"...
"You have personal problems ? Then sort them out yourself !" That was CH in the late 1950's.
Imagine being the ONE person having to sort out the mental problems of each one of 850 kids torn from their homes, many at the age of nine. Sorry but even if he were fully trained I think the job would have been impossible for one person.
I got to know Dr Scott fairly well during the lessons he gave to a small group of us; he was far more friendly under such circumstances and was not averse to the occasional joke. However he tokl his job extremely seriously.

ZeroDeConduite wrote: Sat Aug 25, 2018 9:36 pm After my AWOL experience in Summer 1960 I was seen by a visiting psychiatrist several times whilst in the sickbay. I rapidly realised that a) that the psychiatric profession had no idea how to help, and b) any 'cure' was going to be worse than the problem, so I feigned recovery. To be fair I was suffering an identity crisis rather than a real mental breakdown.
Those who have read Sylvia Plath's account of her treatment (ECT etc) will know how barbaric the psychiatric remedies were in that era.
, and even in the past decade. A family friend, a mental genius had a breakdown and the treatment virtually destroyed him. He ended up bent over like a 100 year old, shuffling around slowly, unable to even speak. Fortunately he went cold turkey, threw out the pills and recovered.
My company sent me on a communications course run by theosophists; on the face of it the course seemed straightforward but I ended the week terrified of everything, shaking like a leaf - in a right state. It took me months at home to recover. Was it theosophists? I don't know but never before or after have I been anywhere like that. Just keep the shrinks away
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Re: Who Knew What?

Post by michael scuffil »

I got to know Dr Scott fairly well during the lessons he gave to a small group of us; he was far more friendly under such circumstances and was not averse to the occasional joke. However he tokl his job extremely seriously.

So did I during the First Aid lessons he gave as part of some CCF programme. I would agree entirely that he was extremely conscientious.

He was not a trained psychiatrist any more than housemasters or chaplains were, nor was psychiatric counselling any part of his job description. As we must all have realized in the course of these discussions, that was a different world, and one difference was that it was far less psychiatrised altogether.
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J.R.
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Re: Who Knew What?

Post by J.R. »

Don't get me wrong. I never intended to imply that Dr Scott was a hard inefficient man.

At the end of one school term I and a few others were recovering from some bug in the sicker after the rest of school had gone home. We were all put together in one ward with a TV, (rare in the early 1960's), and Tommy Scott was regularly on hand to cheer us up and distribute treats.

And on the Sicker subject, I've been trying to think of the name of the school dentist who came in from time to time. Pearson seems to ring a distant bell.

He definitely DIDN'T have a pleasant dental chair manner.
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CodFlabAndMuck
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Re: Who Knew What?

Post by CodFlabAndMuck »

J.R. wrote: Mon Aug 27, 2018 11:51 am
And on the Sicker subject, I've been trying to think of the name of the school dentist who came in from time to time. Pearson seems to ring a distant bell.
In my day it was Mr Wiffen, and his wife was the nurse.

Very pleasant people.

I've never seen someone tuck into chocolate cakes as enthusiastically as he did on Speech Days
Donsimone
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Re: Who Knew What?

Post by Donsimone »

Lately the contemporary cultural conversation has come to regard as unpalatable what has really been an open secret since time immemorial - that putting people into situations of enforced intimacy breeds bad stuff. It doesn't matter whether it's the closed faith of a religion, the vaulting ambition of a corporate structure or the homosociality of a boarding school, we've had astonishing clerical abuse, the sickness at the BBC and some very dodgy forms of 'mentoring' at CH but it's all part of the same pattern and that is that institutions, failing to reform themselves, are a great place for psychosexual vampires to flourish under the cover of some kind of omertà: it's not that dissimilar to what happens in gang culture. Blue Velvet, anyone?
The collective narrative of most, if not all, boarding schools of the late C20th is probably peppered with dark and dispiriting violations of one sort or another. Looking back in candour at CH, you wouldn't describe it as a hearts-on-sleeves kind of place, more WASP temple where some pretty rough justice prevailed - you needn't have been an advanced gnostic to notice what a beleaguered pall hung over it during the '70s for example.
It's with a not particularly salutary mixture of melancholy and glee that I recall Newsome's blinkered brand of debased Victorian academia which infused CH to such a depressing extent and just how much must have been swept under the carpet through the years. You'd have to have been supernaturally zen - or at least aggressively boorish - not to have been touched by it in some way. Of course there were a handful of excellent teachers there but all too many were rhinos, winos and lunatics!
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Re: Who Knew What?

Post by TMF »

Thank you for your eloquent old blue post. No sane parent or pupil signed up for the open secret of 'unpalatability' for the prospect of 'great benefits' to come. The secret was kept to the institution and its staff.
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Re: Who Knew What?

Post by Donsimone »

I very much doubt whether 'sanity' ever had anything much to do with any of it!
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Re: Who Knew What?

Post by Mid A 15 »

J.R. wrote: Mon Aug 27, 2018 11:51 am Don't get me wrong. I never intended to imply that Dr Scott was a hard inefficient man.

At the end of one school term I and a few others were recovering from some bug in the sicker after the rest of school had gone home. We were all put together in one ward with a TV, (rare in the early 1960's), and Tommy Scott was regularly on hand to cheer us up and distribute treats.

And on the Sicker subject, I've been trying to think of the name of the school dentist who came in from time to time. Pearson seems to ring a distant bell.

He definitely DIDN'T have a pleasant dental chair manner.
I THINK it was Pearsall rather than Pearson.
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Re: Who Knew What?

Post by rockfreak »

Yes, the dentist was Pearsall.

I agree with Donsimone. I don't see how an enclosed institution like CH can mimic the broad spread of age, sex, cultures and situations that exist in the outside world. What happens when you try to do this by getting up school discos and little soirees in masters' studies with alcohol and adult talk is that you attract weirdos and children are naturally drawn into it because it's such a welcome relief from the everyday school routine and they get to feel adult. A recipe for trouble in my opinion. He's made the point that this kind of thing can exist in other circumstances. Yes, as in the Catholic church where even in a day school situation parents have put their children under the sway of other senior, respected figures (priests) and withdrawn. My thoughts would be (and I've often seen this) that even if youngsters are going away to camp with the day school or scouts or a youth group it's a good idea if a parent or two strings along. I once accompanied a group of venture scouts run by a neighbour for a couple of camping and climbing weekends - one at Harrisons Rocks in Kent and one at Stanage in the Peak District. Several parents joined the trip and the locals said "what a nice idea, giving the kids a challenge". This was before they'd seen the trailer being loaded up when it became obvious that the ropes and climbing gear were outnumbered by the crates of beer going in. But the kids didn't get any!
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