Impeccably dressed Englishmen would certainly stand out from the crowd which, around here, appears to consist entirely of ladies in elderly though spotless housecoats and gentlemen who hold up their trousers with bailer twine. Sometimes I hanker after wearing a shirt and tie just for the hell of it, but I fear it would invite derision.
Doh !
I thought there was a certain amount of 'tongue 'n cheekness'...but didn't realise the whole thing was a fabrication.....
Rather than a book, I think these characters could be brought to life in cartoon form....(sort of posh and eccentric 'Bash Street kids'/Private Eye.....probably an underground version)....
Maybe not.......
Murky days indeed. There really were men in shabby macs and trilbies lurking around.
Hilary - I have it very well camouflaged, as if I don't I might become the victim of some mysterious "accident" following the sudden arrival in my isolated village of two impeccably dressed Englishman appearing to be musicians on their way to giving a violin concert.
I too did not enjoy school.
I spent very little time there and constantly had some kind of chill, cold, influenza
or whatever I could think of but secretly I was allergic to Boyson. There was just something
about him which I did not like or trust; he was living the part of a Dickens character with his stern and cold manner
and his appearance. The spelling side of school was always a problem for me which has followed ne
through life. I had no knowledge of darker side of Boyson which, is perhaps just a rumour.
Hilary, thank you. However, I must confess that it is an institution that exists only in my imagination. My school days I enjoyed even at the time - supportive and sometimes inspiring teachers.
There was no brutality, no kiddy fiddling teachers and not even much in the way of bullying. The showers in the PE block were, however, cold and the staff insisted that we did actually wash after games which was slightly unpleasant, but I put my continuing boyish complexion down to the habit fixed in those days of washing in cold water.
I did write a farcical novel once a few years ago, but was unable to get it published because - I think - it was totally lacking any literary merit whatsoever!
There are a few other alumni of my school around who will confirm this but we actually had a sadist whose surname was actually Thrasher! Reg Thrasher was not even a nasty bit of work comparatively speaking. It even went so far that a maths teacher who did a mass spanking of the plimsoll variety, I got 12, resigned (was possibly forced to resign) after complaints about the physical damage done to several boys. Our head, known as 'the Horse' because he had a face like... gave me six of the best (an oxymoron if ever) with the thin cane to make me that year's record holder. I never flinched once which he told me he admired when I had to go to him for my study application reference, which was glowing to my total disbelief. Another teacher who 'touched' the boys never had reason to punish me until I was about 17 but when he did and he demanded I remove my trousers I confronted him, refused when he ordered me and then told me I would be held by two prefects and my trousers removed. I bluffed that one out by saying I would go straight to the nearby hospital casualty, complain extreme pain, sexual assault and demand the police come to see me forthwith. He did his silly little 'try it on me sonny' laugh. I must have known where my career was going because I threw the old Sexual Offences Act 1956, being two years before repeal and change of law in 1967, plus I think probably the Indecency with Children Act 1960 because I was (under 21) a legal minor at him. Still smelling my bluff I added that after the police I would be contacting the local newspaper editor and our MP about what the school tolerated. He never spoke directly to me again until I left at the end of the school year. Several of the rest of the class who were equally rebellious raised me on their shoulders and paraded me around the quadrangle during break but the prefects kept at bay. That teacher never touched any of the 'political group' in our remaining months.
Furthermore, we had an unofficial school magazine that was produced in a father's office and smuggled in, in which a mocking story about various teachers with cartoons was included. One of the best caricatures was an ex-prime minister's favourite teacher who was actually a totally lazy, ignorant swine who was depicted as such with his nose in a trough. Well after I had left, a teacher who had been only a couple of years new and of an ideological and liberal generation in his trade and I met by chance. I was speaking about children's rights at a NUT conference in London, by which time he was a 'shop steward' or whatever teachers have. He told me, as he had others he had met previously, how it was our year that had begun the changes of regime, how all of the teachers over 65 trickled out over the next couple of years and then the head popped his clogs and was replaced by an anti-corporal punishment man for whom it was the last of the career or change, like it or not, for the old regime.
Boyson had just become a Tory councillor and was then head of one of the comprehensive schools he loathed with a high public profile at that time, already very vocal about maintaining schools having strictly enforced uniforms, all forms of beating including caning for misbehaviour and a compulsory house system. Although he was very vocally anti-gay, he would not have it that teachers and just occasionally the oldest prefects effectively raped and/or seduced boys (I am not omitting what happened at girls' schools, but was not at one) which still came under the IwCA 1960. Some of the outgoing teachers, I was told, tried to recruit his support (as did many other schools) since he was for maintaining the old regime but that hit a wall when there was a scandal involving sexual assault in a well known boarding school in the early 1970s (unnamed but in East Sussex, produced Boris Johnson among others, which was finally 'busted' a handful of years ago). After his outburst about AIDS being exclusively the outcome of gay activity, when it was emphatically pointed out that more women had HIV than men at the time, Boyson finally shut up about schools, gays and so on and remained so for the rest of his days.
Thank goodness those days are broadly speaking long gone. No thanks to his like. Do I have a bee in my bonnet about him and that regime? No, I simply remember it and all the victimisation and injustice. Contextually because I despised school and rebelled in every way I could, I probably 'deserved' what I got (as horrific as it was) but if any of it had happened to any child of mine I would probably have paid some thugs to beat the living daylights out of whoever had done it and believe me I am somebody who abhors violence and lawbreaking!
Why ....because he was part of my childhood.
I would like to discover some good things about him.
You people on SF are a store of knowledge....
A great collection of characters,
Jon,
You have my sympathies, but I had to read this twice.....and both times I found your description..all of it, very funny....
You should write a book, maybe in the style of say a 1930's/40's 'boys own' spoof and use these characters, Vaseline Spinks.......and Splinter Binns, etc. for literary ends. You might make a fortune...you know what they say, "Dont get mad, get even".....
If your bad memories and concience prevent you from making money out of the process, then you could always give it to a charity of your choice....(trying to think of something apt......perhaps I'll leave it to you..)
David,
I think wthout you naming the place, I may know to which place you could be referring....?
I once accepted a late invitation(from a work colleague & friend, whose son had got a music scholarship to the place), to an end of term concert, where 'floreat xxxxxxx', was the chorus of the school song......
I remember hearing a lot of crashing of symbols (pomp ?)..and thinking that it sounded odd, like the national anthem of some tin-pot eastern European republic.....
Hi Barbara,
He was a very high profile Tory minister...In charge , I think, of Education for a while....strict....in favour of corporal punishment....but also, I think caught up in some sort of scandal.
Just Gooling the name will turn up some info....
But, why would you want to know about his private life...?
Jon- I have a suspicion that you may have been to my house at some stage, as you seem to be very familiar with the conditions we live in. It's clear that I found it very difficult to adjust to life after St Nasty's, apart from a brief encounter with the Royal Navy, and ultimately I found it impossible to continue to live in the UK, due to the ceaseless opprobrium to which the deeply wounded people of my background have become accustomed.
And the thing is, David, that people who have not been to institutions like this just don't understand how we haven't been affected by the pointless brutality, cold showers and damp beds.
Don't mention the word "toast". It brings with it quite appalling memories of my secondary school. Of an evening whilst quietly revising with Kennedy's Latin Primer there would suddenly be a contorted shriek from the study door of one of the prefects.We, lowly squits, would as one have to race to make present and the last to arrive was given the dangerous task of preparing hot buttered toast to the precise requirements of the vile pustulating adolescent commanding it. The filthy kitchen and hissing gas rings provided were a far cry from Masterchef. Woebetide the hapless youth who failed to deliver the perfect article. A sound thrashing was the most pleasant fate that could possibly await the miscreant. "Alaric the Bold sacked Rome in the year 410" written long hand several hundred times still haunts the recesses of my mind. My primary school boasted a glazed rack outside the head master's study, where a full range of canes of varying severity, each carefully labelled with appropriate sobriquet, testified as to the nature of the daily regime. many of the teachers were newly retired military figures, relishing as they did in the firm principles of order and discipline. In such places were educated the future leaders of our great nation. I mention no names as the Secret Society of St Nasty still exists to protect the pristine reputation of the place. Floreat St Nasty's!
St Nasty's sounds much like my alma mater (motto "Spank Out the Bad, Spank in the Good, Spank with Leather, Spank with Wood.") which I decline to name for legal reasons. It was something of a tough billet. The head boy in my day was a character called "Splinter" Binns following an unfortunate incident involving a first former and a cocktail stick. The masters were terrified of him, even "Vaseline" Spinks, the RI master who was decorated during the Boer War for tearing an Afrikaner's wind pipe out and beating the poor sod to death with the tonsil end. Speech day was the worst. The Old Boys would turn up en masse for the ceremony of the "Toasting of the Buns". I don't recall Old Mutton Chops Boyson being amongst their number, but then they all looked the same from that angle.
Yes I rememeber old "Thrasher" as we used to call our Head of Classics at St Nasty's. He would broach no nonsense on casual or facile misinterpretation of Hellenistic practices. From the moment I met him back in the fifities I realised that he was intent on drawing us in to the evil web he inhabited, accompanied as he was by a circle of vicious and obsequious underlings, many suffering strange affectations. From time to time well known politicians, judges, war heros and mysterious orientals were invited down to give us a lesson or two. Forelock tugging was endemic. Ritual naked and dawn baptism in the icy school ducker was just one of the perversions to which we innocent fags were subjected. As for Rhodes Boyson- who is he? Never heard of him! (PS are there any benefits going? Someone called ID-S has just snitched my WFP to bolster up the resources needed to remedy the situation in Rotherham).
Dinner party conversation?
Mea culpa Celeste. I can resist everything except temptation.
And thus the Karen Blixen of catering drifts on.
Sorry to learn that you think this is an odd question.
There any people on SF with in depth knowledge and contacts.
Not wishing to look on articles written by journalists or wiki....
I remember a member telling me that all that Wiki tells you is not
to be relied upon.
It is often difficult to understand why people ask unusual questions.
But on this site live many well travelled and informed people with a host
of questions and answers. You could say it is part of a world of freedom of
speech.
But never mind.
Let us move on and pass this request,