On this day 70 years ago

[brian walling]

Today, 70 years ago, I arrived at CH. I wonder how many of the 100 or so other boys who joined on that day will still be alive, still interested in CH, and will read this post. Please say hello if you see this.

In my own house, of my year-group, two thirds have passed away, but I was recently in touch with the one other survivor.

My memories of joining CH are as clear as ever. It was 25 Sep 1953, in the still hard days after the end of the 2nd World War. The war was by then eight years over, but still very much in people’s minds – particularly due to the personal tragedies that touched many families, including mine.

Half the houses in my suburban London street had been destroyed by bombing, before I was born. 3 family relatives were later killed by bombing a short distance away. I have vivid memories still of taking cover in air raid shelters at night. Unfortunately I had to endure more war. I was caught up in two other wars later in life: in Lebanon the civil war and the Israeli-Palestinian conflicts in the 60s and 70s; in Saudi Arabia the Gulf War in 1990-91.

I arrived at CH as a nondescript suburban boy from a new suburb, just two decades old and that had no history, on the eastern fringe of London. I had been schooled in a makeshift primary school built of surplus materials available in the latter days of the war. It was CH and subsequently a university even older than CH that interested me in the ancient world, priming me to look, in my subsequent career and travels, at what lay behind and before everything in time – even though my career was fairly mainstream: economics, mechanical engineering, market research, oil industry and a few other things. All that is another story, except that persistent historical digging did finally allow me to establish a recorded family history going back as far as the founding date of CH. So I look back on CH, among all its other qualities, as a threshold that I crossed into the interesting world of ancient things.

I shall be celebrating this anniversary tonight, with my wife (married 51 years ago), by eating Beef Wellington at the old colonial hotel, the Eastern and Oriental Hotel, in this erstwhile outpost of British Empire, Penang.

[Katharine]

What an interesting post, Brian, thank you.

I can’t remember the exact date I joined in 1959, possibly 20 September. I think the very next day was St Matthew’s Day and the Mons who had been to London brought back greetings from my brother.

Enjoy your meal at the E&O, it is many years since I stayed there. Then the lift was very rickety, one of the things I remember. It must have been early 90s when we were in Sarawak.

[sejintenej]

I arrived 364 days before you to what appeared to be (and turned out to be) hell.
Apart from a few formative years I had lived in a tiny village many miles from nowhere. The schol had I think 7 pupils including me, all in one class, with a teacher who, in retrospect, should have been retired a decade before but at least she was an expert with the edge of a ruler on the joints of the fingers!
. She couldn't understand it and it took me a while to learn the local lingo; when I got to CH they were all impossible to understand and the number of people around was terrifying! Just as brits go on holiday abroad and don't really see the cdountry my housemaster had ben a tourist to where I lived and didn't undertand he language, beliefs, norms - no help whatsoever. One thing I had learne was organisation but it took the school eight years to allow that skill.

Not a nice introduction and then it got worse! One benefit was to show later when I was posted tto foreign places where (in several cases) nobody spoke any language which I did - I could get by and pick uo the local talk and manners.

[brian walling]

Katharine,
Thanks for comments yesterday. Happy to hear of someone else who passed through Penang and has memories. The E&O’s original 1920 lift is still there and still works (apparently the oldest working hotel lift in SE Asia), but it’s a treasured museum piece now, only operated on special occasions. The hotel dates from the 1880s, but was substantially rebuilt in the 1920s and that’s when the lift was added. I first stayed there on an early trip through SE Asia in 1978. I’ve had a few Old Blue visitors in Penang and they love seeing the hotel today.

[brian walling]

Sejintenej,
Thanks for your comments. By the way, these triggered one of those rare Eureka moments. I finally realised why you go under the name Sejintenej. Reminiscent of a vigorous old hymn at CH!

[sejintenej]

Sejintenej,
Thanks for your comments. By the way, these triggered one of those rare Eureka moments. I finally realised why you go under the name Sejintenej. Reminiscent of a vigorous old hymn at CH!

LOL. I'm not sure to which hymn you are referring. In fact possibly our (ex)Finnish contingent may have recognised it for what it is.

As you can probably realise, getting an email address in the UK with anything like my name is pretty impossible. After a week of frustration I decided "to hell with all this - I will choose something impossible".

When I left CH I went straight (next day literally) to my first job - in northern Norway. Now Norway has languages not too different to Swedish (which I understand is also spoken in Finland). I found the Nordnorsk easy to learn - it has a distinct musicality which I love. Years later a Norwegian Henry Higgins was at Finse (my base) and told everyone there where they came from; apparently I come from Bo ( a small village) in the Lofoten Islands - a good laugh!

Despite the hardships of that job I got to love Norway and took my wife there on our second honeymoon. THE hit tune at the time (no 1 in Norway, no 2 in Sweden) was the Swedish "Saj inte nej, saj ganshe, ganshe ganshe" which is still on Youtube (I suspect I mis-spelt the second half of that) and was the first 45 I ever bought.. I simply translated the first word into Norwegian to try to avoid copyright problems.

For the benefit of our English-only speakers the song is from a father to his daughter going on her first date. When the bloke gets a bit forward "Don't say no, say perhaps, perhaps, perhaps"

[Katharine]

For the benefit of our English-only speakers the song is from a father to his daughter going on her first date. When the bloke gets a bit forward "Don't say no, say perhaps, perhaps, perhaps"

I don’t remember my father ever saying anything quite like that!

Thanks for the explanation of your board name. I’d often wondered!

[brian walling]

Sejintenej wrote:
LOL. I'm not sure to which hymn you are referring. In fact possibly our (ex)Finnish contingent may have recognised it for what it is.

“Say not, the struggle naught availeth.....” was the CH hymn whose memory was triggered by my realisation that your Forum name meant SAY NOT NO.

It was probably my training as a Classicist at CH (although I switched to Economics at university) that was subconsciously running in the background when I puzzled over your SEJINTENEJ again. Under that severe taskmaster, Derek Macnutt head of Classics at CH, I became used to looking at swathes of unintelligible Latin and Greek words and dismantling them in different ways to discover meanings and grammatical relationships. My enlightenment with your name this time came when I suddenly pictured it broken into three separate pieces, SEJ INTE NEJ, which I instantly recognised as something Scandinavian (Danish/Norwegian/Swedish) for SAY NOT NO. I have a smattering of those Scandinavian languages through travel and interest in those countries. I’m delighted that my deduction was correct.

It was interesting to learn that you have a connection with Norway. I have a similar love of the place and travelled the length of the country in my younger days. I can probably claim to be the only Old Blue (not long after I left CH) ever photographed wearing an item of the CH uniform at the Arctic Circle (Polar Cirkel) in Norway. If I can locate this photo again, I’ll make it available somehow to viewers of this Forum. My father encouraged me, when I wanted to start Continental travelling as a student, to head north (Germany and Scandinavia) rather than the then conventional south (France and Mediterranean). He had spent time there with the British occupying forces at the end of the 2nd World War and believed that Germany in particular was worth seeing for me. I had learned quite a lot of German at CH as an optional subject on top of the usual French and so felt comfortable heading in that direction.

In thinking through all the rough and ready adventures, foreign travelling and expeditions that many of us, in the years around and just after when we left CH, undertook with our own limited resources, I really question why CH is obsessing so much at present with its new “expeditionary education” programme. Where is the push for this coming from? Is this something that CH has to have in order to continue attracting the £42-45,000 a year full fee rich kids?

By the way, I simply cannot find the tune (even the name of the tune) to which we sang that hymn “Say not, the struggle....” at CH in the 1950s. On the Web the words still appear in many hymn books today, but the tunes that come up in web search do not include the old CH tune. The predominant tune today appears to be St Clement (the usual tune of “The day Thou gavest, Lord, is ended...”). St Clement, incidentally, was always the last or next-to-last piece played at Beating Retreat at the end of Summer Term. It was played at full blast on the Chapel Organ, with the Chapel doors and windows open. It allowed the band a breather before the final march off.

So, does anybody have an old CH hymn book (The Public School Hymn Book with Tunes, dark blue cover) that will identify the tune used at CH for “Say not, the struggle....”?

[sejintenej]

Today, 70 years ago, I arrived at CH. I wonder how many of the 100 or so other boys who joined on that day will still be alive, still interested in CH, and will read this post. Please say hello if you see this.

In my own house, of my year-group, two thirds have passed away, but I was recently in touch with the one other survivor.

Seeing the monthly death toll in the CH email I am constantly surprised at the lack of people I knew in Col A. The only name I remember from thre was Ken Brown who arrived a year after me..

My memories of joining CH are as clear as ever. It was 25 Sep 1953, in the still hard days after the end of the 2nd World War. The war was by then eight years over, but still very much in people’s minds – particularly due to the personal tragedies that touched many families, including mine

For me it is the brother who died over Germany a month before I was born. My father was at Harland and Wolff during their blitzes and died pobably as a delayed result.

Half the houses in my suburban London street had been destroyed by bombing, before I was born. 3 family relatives were later killed by bombing a short distance away. I have vivid memories still of taking cover in air raid shelters at night.

I went back a few years ago to a previous home and found area of Belfast which looked like the bomb destroyed Ludgate Hill when I first went to London. At least the cobblestoned street had been covered over, the horrible front non-gardens done away with but otherwise as I knew it in 1948

[Ruth]

I too arrived at Hertford September 1953. I remember being stripped naked in the wardrobe room of 1s and re-clothed from starched knickers up. Clapham (long before gentrification) was also bomb damaged. Coal was delivered by horse drawn cart. I brought my ration book to school but rationing ended soon after. My Clapham Parochial primary school was wonderful, a fantastic sound and caring education with ambitions to get us into the best London schools via the 11 plus. It was an age of social mobility and around the time of the Coronation, a freshly minted “Elizabethan Age”. Before Hertford and in the holidays London was an education in itself. Free - museums, galleries, libraries, Festival of Britain, Battersea Fun Fair, children’s concerts. None of that culture at Hertford.

[rockfreak]

I arrived in the same intake as Sejintenej in September 1952. He to Prep A, me to Prep B. All I remember is that I don't remember much. For the first few weeks it was all a blank. I'm told by psychologists who have studied boarding school education that this is quite common. The effect of being thrust into a large, and it seemed to me, hostile environment is so overwhelming that you close down, get your head down, and concentrate on getting from day to day. When I tell people today that at the age of nine you were expected to make your own bed with proper hospital corners, help clean the house - and then learn to march like soldiers (dress from the right, left foot out, etc etc) they are aghast. We were that generation which would have been expected to do our national service at the end of our schooldays - to go out and put out fires around what remained of our empire. I left in 1960 just as it was being abolished. Thank God. I had no vocation for the military. Eight years of discipline at CH was quite enough.

[sejintenej]

. When I tell people today that at the age of nine you were expected to make your own bed with proper hospital corners, help clean the house - and then learn to march like soldiers (dress from the right, left foot out, etc etc) they are aghast.
[/qu.ote]
When I mention it people are equaly amaxszed that at six years of age not only were we doing long multiplication and division but we had to do that in copperplate writing. At eight and in preparation I had to write two page historical accounts - in the end I did not have to do it at the CH interviews but I could have done so. (Mine was the srory of Grace Darling!)

[rockfreak]

Reading Ruth's sad story it seems that the girls got the bum's rush. At CH Horsham, even in the1950s, we had some cultural capital (as it's called). There were choirs and an orchestra, a drama society who put on a full Shakespeare play every year (I can still remember Mr Keep explaining The Merchant of Venice to us in our English classes and having us read out bits of it in preparation to seeing the older boys act it out)) and in the art school Nell Todd told us that paintings didn't have to look like a photograph. As a rock n' roller in 1956 I was introduced to Mozart by an older boy and was surprised to learn that classical music could sound like a lyrical, well-ordered, mathematical equation. At Horsham I got the impression that there were two sets of masters at work. Those who still bought into the boarding school recipe of muscular Christianity, competitive games and the cadet corps: and those who understood that you can't keep adolescent boys in a monastery for ever.

[Ruth]

Yes, at Hertford we did have high standards of music and drama. But it was all in-house obviously. I missed the outside culture that I’d started to enjoy in London - galleries, concerts, festivals, theatre and film. In 7 years I only remember being shown 2 films at school, The Dambusters, of course, and The Inn of the 7th Happiness.

[rockfreak]

Indigenous tribal societies I believe have a "rite of passage" ordeal. Well mine wasn't quite so rugged. When the Housey Special disgorged me into Victoria station in July 1960 I took off down Vauxhall Bridge Road to the very first Picasso retrospective which was showing at the old Tate (before it became the Tate Britain), This was my symbolic discarding of prim, grey, overwhelming Christ's Hospital and my embrace of an eye-slapping orgy of bold form, colour and Mediterranean light - a landscape which I wasn't to visit for a few years yet, and indeed swinging London wasn't quite set to swing yet. But we got there in the end. The Lady Chatterley verdict, the Beatles, our tired old grey, class-ridden world eventually opened up into technicolour - a bit like the film where Dorothy and her friends suddenly go over the rainbow.