Unofficial Christ's Hospital Forum

chaosriddenyears wrote:[quote="Kim2s70-77"


Kim, was it you who wrote "sausages" or some such word in every sentence in physics prep because rumour had it that the teacher never bothered much about what we wrote? I seem to remember that rumour did not lie on this occasion.

I don't remember that one, although it is entirely possible - but I do remember Miss Riddiford was always game for some diversions in German class. She loved it if we took her off topic for some reminiscing etc and she was always the first to play German Bingo or sing Carols in German (end of term sorts of things) WAY before other teachers relaxed their strictness. She would always take great delight in BOOMING "Glucklische Geburtstag" (apologies for spelling, Lynn!) whenever someone had a birthday and this was a great diversionary tactic, especially from Fridays' vocab. tests. Having a birthday in August, I always felt gypped on the 'celebration with friends' front - so took it into my head that I was going to invent a birthday one Friday in order to a) avoid the vocab test that I hadn't learned b) GET SOME ATTENTION! and c) obtain the Birthday pencil that she kindly bestowed (what little crumbs we lived for!!). This was so successful a diversion that I repeated it the following Friday and the next successive 6 or 8 subsequent Fridays! I snagged quite a collection of pencils and had a gay old time. Whether she was really that vague - or just plain indulgent, I'll never know!!
Were you the other frontman, Lynn for the Great German/Latin class switch???? We wanted to see if the 'vaguer' teachers really paid attention (maybe 3rd form??) and so those who took german went to Mr Upton's latin class and the Latinites went to Miss Riddiford. I volunteered to translate a passage for DGS Upton - and I think the game was up by the time I had stammered through "The soldiers advance, wriggling on their bellies........." and he said something about "Bellum being 'war' ,not 'bellies'"..........and then, for the first time looked up, peered over his glasses at me and said in a confused tone, "aaahh..do I know you?????" What fun! We also used to get Wendy Jones to switch ties with her twin and put Barbara's glasses on, and play great tricks with those teachers who couldn't tell the difference. What little things delighted us!

It was definitely Jane Daly and the exercise book incident. She was convinced that Mr Watson did not mark any books, in that he ticked them but did not really read them. She did some prep and placed randomly chosen words(pork pie was definitely one of them) in between words in the legitimate homework. The book came back as expected with no corrections. He could have just been ignoring her but she was convinced that her plan had revealed the fact that he never read any pupils' work.

Kim2s70-77 wrote: We wanted to see if the 'vaguer' teachers really paid attention (maybe 3rd form??) and so those who took german went to Mr Upton's latin class and the Latinites went to Miss Riddiford. I volunteered to translate a passage for DGS Upton - and I think the game was up by the time I had stammered through "The soldiers advance, wriggling on their bellies........." and he said something about "Bellum being 'war' ,not 'bellies'"..........and then, for the first time looked up, peered over his glasses at me and said in a confused tone, "aaahh..do I know you?????" What fun!

Now I'm confused! There I was thinking what a tough old time you all had at Hertford, but I don't think we'd ever have got away with that at Horsham; there would have been Hell to pay!



Sausages... hmm, the words circumcised, teacher's desk and O'Meira spring to mind...

Ajarn Philip wrote:

Kim2s70-77 wrote: We wanted to see if the 'vaguer' teachers really paid attention (maybe 3rd form??) and so those who took german went to Mr Upton's latin class and the Latinites went to Miss Riddiford. I volunteered to translate a passage for DGS Upton - and I think the game was up by the time I had stammered through "The soldiers advance, wriggling on their bellies........." and he said something about "Bellum being 'war' ,not 'bellies'"..........and then, for the first time looked up, peered over his glasses at me and said in a confused tone, "aaahh..do I know you?????" What fun!

Now I'm confused! There I was thinking what a tough old time you all had at Hertford, but I don't think we'd ever have got away with that at Horsham; there would have been Hell to pay!


Sausages... hmm, the words circumcised, teacher's desk and O'Meira spring to mind...

That about sums up the range of experiences there! Perhaps because of the repression, minor rebellions abounded! Also sums up the ramdomness of staff responses - truly insignificant events received disproportionately harsh responses and sometimes vice versa.

Yes I do remember the Latin/German swap! It must have been 3rd or 4th form as we had Queenie for a year in Latin I remember and we would NEVER have dared do such a thing.
We did put an alarm clock in the teacher's desk though in one of her Latin lessons - these desks were monstrous things with a superfluity of little drawers and set on a dais. As we had planned, the alarm clock clanged loudly from the depths of the desk right in the middle of the Latin lesson. Queenie froze in mid-speech and we held our breaths in a mixture of terror and excitement. She paced around the desk staring at it until the sound of the alarm dwindled and died - you could have heard a pin drop. Queenie looked up and said in her sarcastic way, "Well! It hasn't got much stamina, has it".

It must have been in Lower IV (aged 12/13) when we put a stink bomb in a cupboard in the Form room. I don't know waht lessonit was, or who the teacher was but we all sat there pretending we couldn't smell anything while the teacher thought she was going mad/having a pre epileptic aura or something.

chaosriddenyears wrote:Yes I do remember the Latin/German swap! It must have been 3rd or 4th form as we had Queenie for a year in Latin I remember and we would NEVER have dared do such a thing.
We did put an alarm clock in the teacher's desk though in one of her Latin lessons - these desks were monstrous things with a superfluity of little drawers and set on a dais. As we had planned, the alarm clock clanged loudly from the depths of the desk right in the middle of the Latin lesson. Queenie froze in mid-speech and we held our breaths in a mixture of terror and excitement. She paced around the desk staring at it until the sound of the alarm dwindled and died - you could have heard a pin drop. Queenie looked up and said in her sarcastic way, "Well! It hasn't got much stamina, has it".

Lovely!! I'm surprised anyone chose to do it in her lesson though!

Ajarn Philip wrote:

Kim2s70-77 wrote: We wanted to see if the 'vaguer' teachers really paid attention (maybe 3rd form??) and so those who took german went to Mr Upton's latin class and the Latinites went to Miss Riddiford. I volunteered to translate a passage for DGS Upton - and I think the game was up by the time I had stammered through "The soldiers advance, wriggling on their bellies........." and he said something about "Bellum being 'war' ,not 'bellies'"..........and then, for the first time looked up, peered over his glasses at me and said in a confused tone, "aaahh..do I know you?????" What fun!

Now I'm confused! There I was thinking what a tough old time you all had at Hertford, but I don't think we'd ever have got away with that at Horsham; there would have been Hell to pay!

Philip, I wasn't involved in the incident described, but I think we could have understood punishment for such incidents it was the inconsistencies etc that made life tough, as well as the petty, petty rules. We had to kick against them whatever way we could!

Hear Hear! Like all young creatures, we didn't care much for being punished if there was some fun to be had out of it! Oh Ajarn! Did you think we were such poor creatures?

Unfortunately we were often subjected to enforced obedience through a system of petty rules that invaded our privacy to a highly personal degree and flayed by annihilating sarcasm that often centred on the spots, greasy hair and general hormonal upset of puberty.

Unforgivable!

But now I have to tell you about something that is very shocking - prepare yourselves, my brave souls!

Monty was - although a dreadful Maths teacher and a total bore - a sweet old man and never bothered us much. But one day he went into a sort of gobbling rage, the like of which is seldom to be seen.

Imagine this, my stalwart hardies! In the middle of the maths lesson, one of us - and I think it was Charlotte Lycett - TOOK OFF HER PULLOVER!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

There! I knew you would be shocked - but I did warn you!

Monty was so enraged that he almost lost his breath and became completely unintellible on the subject of "slipping standards, young ladies and the fact that we were all beginning to to behave like "children from comprehensive schools".

Hooray for social equality.

I mean, what was Edward VIth thinking of for God's sake, whe he founded this school?
A nutter, obviously.

Ah, the joys of misbehaving - I remember fondly a LIV prep when someone twanged their ruler in the side of the desk ( we were doing maths prep) and the teacher taking prep ( not sure who it was) confiscated said ruler - immediately the whole class followed suit, all rulers confiscated - no prep done ! I mean, how can you do geometry without a ruler?
how we laughed...
( my mother was a teacher and I suffered mountains of guilt for playing up - she had drummed into me " respect" for the teaching body)

chaosriddenyears wrote:I mean, what was Edward VIth thinking of for God's sake, whe he founded this school?
A nutter, obviously.

I'm ashamed to say I've just spent a couple of seconds trying to work out who Edward Vith was...

Well it late in the day for you Philip

chaosriddenyears wrote:Hear Hear! Like all young creatures, we didn't care much for being punished if there was some fun to be had out of it! Oh Ajarn! Did you think we were such poor creatures?

Unfortunately we were often subjected to enforced obedience through a system of petty rules that invaded our privacy to a highly personal degree and flayed by annihilating sarcasm that often centred on the spots, greasy hair and general hormonal upset of puberty.

Unforgivable!

But now I have to tell you about something that is very shocking - prepare yourselves, my brave souls!

Monty was - although a dreadful Maths teacher and a total bore - a sweet old man and never bothered us much. But one day he went into a sort of gobbling rage, the like of which is seldom to be seen.

Imagine this, my stalwart hardies! In the middle of the maths lesson, one of us - and I think it was Charlotte Lycett - TOOK OFF HER PULLOVER!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

There! I knew you would be shocked - but I did warn you!

Monty was so enraged that he almost lost his breath and became completely unintellible on the subject of "slipping standards, young ladies and the fact that we were all beginning to to behave like "children from comprehensive schools".

Hooray for social equality.

I mean, what was Edward VIth thinking of for God's sake, whe he founded this school?
A nutter, obviously.

That's funny, he lost his rag with me once for exactly the same thing. It wasn't being without a pullover that bothered him, it was diverting my attention from his lesson for the few seconds it took to work out I was too warm and slip my pullover over my head. He told me I should decide at the beginning of class whether I needed it on or not, and then leave it alone.

Monty gave me my first disorder, sometime in my first year. I'd gone down into the school block basement during All Out with Helen Smith and someone else - possibly Helen Osborne, and he was on playground duty. I don't know whether he'd seen us slip into the school block, or whether it was a regular route on his patrol, but we heard the door go above us, so we huddled together under the stairs, then heard his footsteps on the stairs....... I was a real goody-goody at that age, so I was terrified, particularly as I didn't know him then as he didn't teach me. Eventually he came round and ordered us "out into the light where I can see you", in his slurpy, sibillant voice. Disorders all round. I was terribly upset - though I think I got over it fairly quickly

He was a funny old thing - most of the time he was really harmless but some trivial action would set him rampaging.

He sucked his breath in through his teeth before he started speaking.
Is it my imagination or was there an unusual number of staff there that either had speech defects or very eccentric ways of speaking?

We used to notice with Queenie that if you got her going on a tale of classical mythology, she would lose the "voice" and just speak normally. She was a very astute teacher, and we often wondered whether she had adopted her inimitable voice on purpose to give pupils something obvious to laugh and and mimic, to avoid them delving deeper and laughing at anything more personal (who knows what? But still....).

In hindsight, I suspect that's a bit fanciful - it would have required an enormous conscious effort to maintain what would have been an acting performance through every lesson.

I'll never, ever, forget "oh Sophie! Can't you run away and cook, or something?" Priceless