from An Oxford Childhood by Tony Phelps (1933-41)
Note from Mike Chew at the time: Tony’s story runs into 54 pages. If anyone would like to read them all, please contact me. We shall “serialise” the most relevant passages. Herewith Part 1. (Ed. The other parts do not appear to have been published however)
In the 1930s the school still occupied its original site at the corner of George Street and New Inn Hall Street, though two or three temporary class-rooms had been added across the playground at the back of the school.
This part of Oxford was undergoing quite a bit of development at the time. Opposite the school was the new Ritz Cinema, an enormous building complete with broad staircases, a two-level auditorium, a stage, a cinema organ and a café; behind the Ritz, Gloucester Green, which had been the site of the cattle market, was being converted into a bus station; and higher up George Street towards my father’s church the old New Theatre was being pulled down to be replaced by a new one (if you see what I mean).
Changes of this nature, combined with the effects of the rapid growth of Morris Motors at Cowley, were altering the face of the quiet market-cum-University town which must have existed at the time of my birth. This reflection prompts a related thought. When I was young, Oxford (Town, as opposed to Gown) had two local heroes. One was Lawrence of Arabia, the other William Morris, later Lord Nuffield, the motor manufacturer and philanthropist. My family had connections with both of them in that my father was taught by Lawrence at Sunday School while Auntie Lou’s best friend, with whom she eventually set up house, was the sister-in-law of William Morris. I mention this not to claim that our family was especially distinguished but rather to emphasise the point I was just making, i.e. that the Oxford of my early days was quite a small community.
My school was essentially an old-style grammar school, with the emphasis on academic as opposed to vocational education. It was quite small – about 200-250 boys, I think – and it had a mixture of fee-payers and scholarship boys, roughly half and half. The fees were just over £6 a term. (See what inflation over 70 years has done). It sent quite a number of boys on to Oxford University; probably its geographical proximity to the University disposed boys to think in this direction when others from a comparable but more distant school might not have done so.
Certainly, I got a good academic training, though it could perhaps be criticised as being rather narrow. Looking back, I feel I got very little background in the way of art or music, but this may be an over-harsh judgment. I have to admit that by the late 20th or early 21st century standards the school was under-equipped. We had no gym (we did regular physical jerks in the playground), no swimming pool, and a playing-field a long way away in north Oxford. But it was a pretty happy place, with a good (if old-fashioned) relationship between masters and boys and a good esprit de corps.
I nearly made a fool of myself on my first day. I turned up in plenty of time and made straight for the playground to join the rest of the boys there. Fortunately one of my friends who was already a pupil in the school spotted me and told me that as a new boy I should have presented myself at the front door. This I did, and all was well.
The assembled company of new boys was addressed by the headmaster and we were assigned to our forms – the scholarship boys, including me, to the Remove, which was in effect a Form 2A. There was a Form 2B but the first form had been discontinued. Our form room was one of the temporary rooms just inside the back gate onto the playground; and our form-master was a Mr Searson, the geography master, who had a reputation for ferocity (probably rather over-stated) and saw it as his role to induct us into a proper way of things, e.g. to get rid of our local accents in favour of BBC pronunciation, to ask to “be excused” rather than to “leave the room” and so on.
He was also keen on boxing and used to arrange impromptu boxing bouts in the form-room during break periods, which we as members of his form were expected to join in. One of the first things we had to do was to collect a book-list. We scholarship boys got our books free, and we had to take the list to Thornton’s in Broad Street (long since absorbed by Blackwell’s) and collect all we needed – second-hand if available (to save the rate-payer money), otherwise new. I remember the amusement on finding that one or two second-hand copies of Kennedy’s Revised Latin Primer had been converted by previous generations into Kennedy’s Revised Way of Eating Prime Beef.
At the time of taking the scholarship exam I had not realised that I was doing so a year earlier than was necessary. Because of the accident of my October birth, the majority of the boys in my form at Phil and Jim were older than I was and this was their only chance at the exam. So the whole form had been put in for it together. The result was that I was again among the youngest in the form; but that wouldn’t matter as long as I could keep up with the work – and in the event it turned out to my advantage on two or three occasions later.
Life at the City School was different in many respects from that at Phil and Jim. We worked a six-day week, including sport on Wednesday and Saturday afternoons, and we had homework (“prep”) most evenings and weekends. The main holidays were longer but half-term was shorter. School uniform was compulsory – brown blazer and shorts to match (or long grey flannels), white shirt and school tie, brown cap with school badge (an ox on a ford with the tree of knowledge in the background). We had a school motto in Latin – Nemo repente sapit, or No-one suddenly becomes wise – a school song, written by John Drinkwater (an old boy, author and playwright), and an annual Speech Day and Prizegiving at the Town Hall. The masters all wore gowns over their suits – and, of course, they never wore casual clothes. Whereas at Phil and Jim we had all our lessons from the form master (or mistress in the lowest form), at the City School, while we still had a form-room in which we kept our books, we moved from room to room in the course of the day, taking our lessons in the rooms of the masters giving them. The main punishment was not, as at Phil and Jim, a blow with the cane across the palm of the hand, but detention for a period after school hours, often associated with “lines”, the requirement to copy out x times some didactic or admonitory sentence.
The big differences I had to face, however, were in the curriculum. For the first time I was tackling French, Latin and Physics. At the suggestion of the authorities, a friend already at the school had shown me his French book during the holidays. He translated the captions to the pictures, including Une Promenade dans la Forêt, which he rendered as A Walk in the Forest. So I had a good laugh when later we reached Une Promenade sur une Bicyclette – fancy taking a walk on a bicycle! Once school began, I made a hash of translating “The master teaches” into Latin; but I soon learned from my mistakes and got on well with language lessons, Physics gave me a few more problems because I had (and still have) difficulty in grasping such concepts as electric coils or electro-magnetic fields; but insofar as our physics contained a large element of maths I did well enough. So I soon settled in to the routine, found the work fairly easy going and got on well with the other boys.