by John Geach (1960s)
Memories of the Early Sixties by John Geach:
I was not happy at school and in general an unsatisfactory pupil. Living in St John Street I was the nearest resident to the school that I was aware of – and always late. As a Catholic I did not attend Assembly and in my sixth year “Pongo” sought (typically) to reform my unpunctuality by making me “Late Prefect” – I was indeed still “late”.
I remember many members of staff with affection: “Snoop” Atkinson who was Classics and read ”The Hunting of the Snark” to great effect if he had to take someone else’s class (so I heard it five or more times). “Wally” Walker taught me Greek and History; he was an accepting believer in the “Whig view of History” but a sound teacher nonetheless; I won my only prize in ‘O’ level history and disgusted the staff by requesting the writings of Baron Corvo – the nucleus of a collection which I still have, though I now regard Corvo with much less esteem.
Atkinson and Walker went out on a Friday lunchtime with “Eddie” Swire who taught me French, in Wally’s desirable Rover 75 – a car of the type with wings and running boards. Very jolly they were on return; but “Eddie” would ‘come down’ in the afternoon and exercise his skill in setting sadistically long-lined impositions. I was idle in his classes being already well-based in French; but I had a power of recalling what he had just said, and he used me as a teaching-aid:- “What did I just say, Geach?” You just said, sir: “Dans une rage le lion bondit de sa cage, et traversait la plage…” I can’t alas recall the rest of the sentence now.
For me – who went up to King’.s College Cambridge to read Art History – the school buildings by Sir Thomas Jackson were a great delight, and I feel sorry for the vast majority who are not educated in fine old buildings. From the splendidly detailed windows I observed the erection of Nuffield College, including the spire.
My interest in architectural history was not encouraged by the school, the worst offender being an “art” teacher whose name I think was Cummings but who was called “Hitler”. With great sarcasm he asked me if I knew of any building in the Ionic order; when I instantly said “The Ashmolean”, he said with great scorn: “No, no, not a local building” and when in a voice thick with fury I said “The temple of Nike Apteros” he made me look it up – he didn’t know – in the school copy of Bannister Fletcher. One of the things resented by him – and “Bonzo” Vaughan, the RI teacher who disliked me from “odium Fidei” – was that I possessed my own copy of this book and brought it to school. They tried to organise its confiscation by “Fred” who was moved by my unaffected tears to relent.
In the Bristol Building, now gone but in fact a pioneering work of modern architecture, were “Dug” and “Jock” and “Flea”. Dug, a Modern Linguist, took then preposterous “cap parades” – a fatuous apeing of Public Schools’ CCF parades. “Fred” ceased to attend, or to enforce them, when he reproached my form for failure to stand in straight ranks: “You look like a dog’s hind leg”, a voice from the second rank, just loud enough “And you look like a dog’s cock”. I challenge you to put that on your website! But many will recall it.
How it all comes back! As the son of two celebrated dons, my life outside the school was progressively absorbing and I left as soon as I had secured my Cambridge place.
I think it is a shame that the school is no more, it’s part of that modern “Kill the City” approach we see so much of. But I rejoice that the sententious school mottos were expunged from the buildings and the dignified Oxford University was substituted. “Fortis est Veritas” is a lot finer, and truer, than “Nemo Repente Sapit”; and as a schoolboy I didn’t know that the full line of the other motto is “sed nunc labor vincit omnia improbus” – quite other* than the meaning accepted in that emetic school song!
* Ed. trans: “But now, work conquers all, wicked man”