Unofficial Christ's Hospital Forum

Hannoir wrote:I dont recall ever hearing the word Jew used as an insult when I was there.
I know there was a jewish kid there when i was, and a hindu student too. They seem to give bibles to everyone, didnt ask us if we were of no faith or whatever.

if you don't remember "jew" as an insult then either you weren't there very long or you have some rather rosy-tinted specs!
it was used throughout the time i was there.

apparently they give out other faith books to those of other faiths. something they kept very quiet, bibles are cheaper presumably as it is en masse. i would have gone for something interesting like the baghavad gita, sure i'm not alone on that one.
it stands to reason, if you have had bible stuff shoved down your throat for seven years, wouldn't you rather receive something different for a change?

asians really got the sh*t end of the stick when it came to name-calling, especially from the blacks. something i still don't undertstand.

I found bokka quite offensive, even back then... I felt sorry for them, we all used to behave like Little Lord Faunterloy towards them..

Precocious little sh1t that most of us were..

Racism IS slowly being defeated in this country, (Thank God ?)

However, you don't have to look very far to see more extreme forms of racism in our own land, and between very near relative religions.

Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland, for instance ?

I whole heartedly agree with Hendrik's statements, but one particular religious faction, ever increasing in this country is doing nothing to further it's cause in the world.

I'll say no more.

definitely un-pc, yes, but 'jew' (developed to 'yid', etc), 'gay', and so on are definitely still a part of CH parlence.

Interestingly, comments referring to sexuality as a general insult are far more likely to be called out as un-pc, while race-related comments - tongue-in-cheek, but nevertheless very prevalent over the course of the World Cup - seem to be acceptable to all but those of the 'offensive' origin.

CH pupils can get very defensive though, when accused of even unintended racism, expecting everyone to assume automatically that no offence is even dreamt of.

well i was only there for two years.

I m ay be looking back with rose tinted spectacles but I don't remember any of this from my time at Hertford. There were other ways of being nasty.

Hendrik wrote:

Hannoir wrote:I dont recall ever hearing the word Jew used as an insult when I was there.
I know there was a jewish kid there when i was, and a hindu student too. They seem to give bibles to everyone, didnt ask us if we were of no faith or whatever.

if you don't remember "jew" as an insult then either you weren't there very long or you have some rather rosy-tinted specs!
it was used throughout the time i was there.

Is it possible that this was a 'boys' insult? I don't remember it being used within my circle of female friends, neither by the boys in our presence (and I was there for 7 years, God help me!!). Girls are nasty in very different, and often more insidious, ways.

When I was at CH, there were comparatively few black or mixed-race kids there by today's standards. Two facts stick in the memory:

(1) Lads like Gerard Hall and Alan Maxwell were very popular, partly because they were black. Some houses had no black kids in them at all, so being black had rarity status and was seen as kinda winsome.

(2) Even if a black kid was your very best mate, you'd still call him a nignog or a wog or say (ridiculously) Wraa wraa wraa! to him. This was in a very real sense not racist as such; that's to say, it wasn't said insultingly or as a deliberate way of denigrating him. True, we were saying it because of a difference in skin colour - but no malice was involved. So were we actually being racist?

God, the 1970s were a right old mess.

Spoonbill is correct in every way here. I suppose we just didn't know any better. This was the '70s, remember, when popular TV shows included "Love thy neighbour" and "Mind your language" - programmes full of crude racial and national stereotyping which were, nevertheless, intended to break down racial barriers.

Oh yes, and in 1969 Spike Milligan had appeared in "Curry and Chips", in which he was 'blacked up' as a Pakistani character, and "The Black and White Minstrel Show" was still running until 1978.

It was a very confusing time!

It was racist behaviour, of course, but, as Spoony says, for the most part it was never intended as such. Most would have seen it as a form of friendly banter.

Boys with pronounced regional accents or bright ginger hair, or who were very short, for example, were treated in a very similar manner by their peers. Indeed, any 'standout' characteristics would have received similar attention.

Sad but true - nothing to be proud of, but a reflection of the environment and the times in which we lived.

Latest PC B0llox.

Apparently, if you call a Scotsman 'Jock, a Welshman 'Taffy', or an Irishman 'Paddy', you are being racist.

I ask you !!!!!

exactly, it's completely harmless, like "f*ck off home you posey English c*nt"

and who could say that wasn't just a celebration of our regional differences...

Katharine wrote:Ruth Deech was the most prominent Jew in my time at Hertford, and I only just overlapped with her.

wasn't there a Deech at Horsham in the 70s? Russell Deech.?? or was that John Leech........I'm getting confused

sport! wrote:

Katharine wrote:Ruth Deech was the most prominent Jew in my time at Hertford, and I only just overlapped with her.

wasn't there a Deech at Horsham in the 70s? Russell Deech.?? or was that John Leech........I'm getting confused

Two brothers - Russell and Royston Deitch.

sport! wrote:

Katharine wrote:Ruth Deech was the most prominent Jew in my time at Hertford, and I only just overlapped with her.

wasn't there a Deech at Horsham in the 70s? Russell Deech.?? or was that John Leech........I'm getting confused

Deech is her married name, I think her maiden name was Fraenkel. I should have been clearer - she is now so well known under her married name (is she a Dame or a Baroness I forget?) that I used that.

I wonder if Gene Simmons overheard kids calling each other 'Jews' whilst at CH?

Can't imagine he'd have been very impressed, being of four-by-twoish descent himself.

And it'd have been damnably hard to explain it all away to him. 'A harmless tradition'? 'Not at all racist'? Sounds more like 'one rule for us and another rule for everyone else'. Seeing the verb 'to jew' in the dictionary ('swindle') makes me feel very uncomfortable - so really it's outrageous that pejorative Jew-terminology is still in use at CH.

Imagine if a tabloid picked up on it. To the outside world, CH'd look like some kind of school for trainee BNP-supporters.

And then there's that business of boys walking round with their hands shoved down the front of their trousers.......Try explaining that away.