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5. ‘Willingly to school’ Solihull School 1942-1950

I went to Solihull School in September 1942. There was in those days no induction of new boys, no preliminary visits, no need it seemed to put new pupils at ease. I knew nobody who was bound for the same form and found myself on my first day at the back of Big School surrounded by seeming giants. The Lord’s Prayer bellowed by half a thousand voices is my earliest memory. Allocated to 3B in Room 29 we were soon seated in alphabetical order; I was in the back left hand corner next to Robin Watkin. My form master was the Revd R.M. Goodfield, minister of Solihull Congregational Church since 1935, a Welshman who took up teaching as his form of war service and taught us for both English and Divinity. He was taking a Cambridge teaching certificate and his trial lesson with 3B, observed by examiners, was based on the poem My heart’s in the Highlands. He indicated how avant garde he was by requiring us to open our atlases in an English lesson so that he could show us where the highlands of Scotland were situated. He obtained the certificate with first class honours. He also coached the First Rugby XV of which his son David was a star member and ran the school Scout Troop. He ceased to be a permanent member of the staff in 1947 but continued part-time and taught me for Higher Certificate subsidiary Divinity. He was later ordained into the Anglican priesthood and David Goodfield, taught at Bryanston before becoming headmaster of Churcher’s College, Petersfield.

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Solihull School when I went there was a grammar school of about 550 boys serving the small but rapidly expanding Warwickshire town, usually still referred to as ‘the village’, and its surroundings. When I left in 1950, H.B.Hitchens had become headmaster and the school was well on the way to becoming a public school. It dated its foundation from 1560 when the endowments of the chantry chapels of St Mary and St Katharine, in the parish church of St Alphege, were used to found a school and pay a schoolmaster. The school song, sung with gusto on Speech Day, but in retrospect, like others of the genre, a piece of embarrassing doggerel, claimed - without justification - that the school was founded in the reign of Richard II.

When Richard II was ruling our land In days which have long passed away Arose a great founder who built a small school Which has grown and is famous today.

The modern history of the school began in 1879 with a new scheme of government, which led to the building of the school in Warwick Road which opened in 1882. The Revd Robert Wilson, headmaster from 1879 to 1908, was the school’s Arnold. In 1879 there were 13 boys in the school, a year later there were 45, by 1884 no less than 80 and by 1898 there were 120, as many as the buildings could accommodate. The first science laboratory was built in 1890 and in 1893 came the first County Council grant. Dr Wilson was responsible too for the school crest and for the motto, Perseverantia. In 1913 the governors asked the then headmaster the Revd Dr A.J.Cooper why the word ‘grammar ’, which they favoured, had been dropped from the name of the school; they received the answer ‘in accordance with the modern custom of schools of any status’. They acquiesced 1 When W.F.Bushell succeeded Cooper at the end of 1920 there were twelve assistant masters. 2 Bushell had been a

56 boy at Charterhouse where his father was a housemaster and chaplain for 50 years, and an undergraduate at King’s College, Cambridge. He came to Solihull at the age of 35, from a housemastership at Rossall, and was the first lay headmaster. His main legacy was the purchase of the magnificent fields which surround the school and made possible its later expansion. The story was that the governors had misgivings about these purchases and so Bushell left in 1927 to become headmaster of Michaelhouse, Natal. He returned to England in 1930 and was for the next 16 years headmaster of Birkenhead School. He was a frequent visitor to old boys’events. H.B.Hitchens, headmaster from 1947, approved of Bushell; they both came from a public school stable unlike Thompson, Bushell’s successor, who had little time for such pretensions.(Bushell died in 1974)

A.R.Thompson, who succeeded Bushell in 1927, was a mathematician educated at Collyer’s School, Horsham and was a scholar of St John’s College, Cambridge. He taught at Berkhamstead and Bedford Modern School before becoming headmaster of Dunstable Grammar School in 1921. He was a keen sportsman who had played cricket for Bedfordshire in his youth. He was short and rotund. He walked quickly, and spoke precisely and with authority. If he lacked charisma he had the respect and liking of his Old Boys. When he died in December 1973, after over 26 years in retirement near Haywards Heath in Sussex, there were Old Boys at his funeral. He lived in the Headmaster’s House next to the boarding house and during the war could be seen before school in his gum boots feeding his poultry. The school’s aesthetes regarded him as uncultured but they despised equally the smells made by scientists and the arcane calculations of the mathematicians. Mrs Thompson was also a figure in the village and during the war was commandant of the Red Cross division which she helped to revive in 1938. They had four sons who had left home by the time I went to Solihull.

It was during Thompson’s headship, between 1931 and 1937, that substantial new buildings were erected further from the Warwick Road. These included Big School with balcony, theatre style boxes and a music room and practice rooms, Masters’ Common Room, Headmaster’s study (used as a green room for school productions), Geography room and two blocks of six classrooms with an open cloister, in the style of the 1930s, when fresh air seemed more important than energy conservation, which housed the Preparatory and Junior schools and the Fourth forms. (The fourth side remained open until a further building was added in 1953.)

The staff list sent to my parents with the Prospectus (dated 1939) showed 24 assistant masters of whom 16 were graduates of Oxford or Cambridge, 10 were scholars or exhibitioners of their colleges and well over half had been on the staff for ten years or more. Many of those who had been appointed by Bushell remained at Solihull throughout Thompson’s headmastership and only retired in the 1950s. I have since wondered how he regarded the old guard – Havinden, Neale, L.J.Davies, J.L.Davis and Easterling – and how they regarded him.

The Second Master (the almost invariable title then of what later became the Deputy Head) was R.B.Wright, a Manchester graduate who was appointed in 1911, became Second Master in 1921 and retired in 1945.3 He was also Senior Science master and Bursar. He was the only man I knew who wore a wing collar. The notice given out by the head boy before assembly in the early days of term, ‘Letters for Mr Wright’,

57 was a sign for showers of letters containing cheques for fees for the term to descend from the balcony, a traditional part of the beginning of term ritual.

Masters in those days did not have Christian names, only nicknames, the product of generations of schoolboy observation of mannerisms and characteristics, often unmercifully accurate and sometimes cruel. The headmaster was ‘Stache’ from the luxuriant black moustache which had once adorned his upper lip but which by the 1940s was but a sparce, grey replica of its former glory. R.B.Wright was ‘Slapper’. L.J.Davies, a mathematician and a bachelor of florid countenance was simply ‘Boozer’. In earlier years he had been a Cambridge soccer blue, and played for Northampton Town in the football league and for Northamptonshire at Cricket. In the 1920s he was in charge of the First XI in both cricket and association football, which was then the school’s winter game. 4 J.Loxley Davis, a short, bald headed Yorkshireman who taught physics was ‘Dapper’.

P.R.Ansell, an old boy of the school, sometime senior scholar of Trinity College, Cambridge, was of short, slight build, and inordinately shy. He would go to any length, crossing the road if necessary, to avoid acknowledging parent or pupil out of school. Of legendary brilliance he was simply ‘Swotty’. It was well known that he never needed to consult the logarithm tables – he had them by heart. He was equally successful as a teacher with his own form, Shell A, with the mathematicians in the Sixth form and with a low set in the Fifth form where he taught me. He wrote at great speed on the blackboard, producing a permanent cloud of chalk dust and wore a short undergraduate gown, green with age and in tatters. He could stand in front of a boy’s desk and write upside down on his exercise book, legibly and quickly. An oft- repeated phrase was ‘Get it right, you fool, get it right’. He had a captivating smile and a dry sense of humour but was also capable of bursts of fury when roused by what he described as ‘idiotic behaviour’. He enjoyed watching Aston Villa in the winter and Warwickshire County Cricket Club in summer and would lend his Warwickshire membership card to boys, enabling them to attend cricket matches at the county ground at Edgbaston. He was a life-long bachelor who lived with his mother and was a devotee of the Lake District. When his mother died at a great age and he could no longer walk the mountains he was a lonely man who continued teaching into his 70s because by then life held little else for him.

J.A. Easterling’s subject was Latin but he also had a Cambridge bachelor of music degree and taught such music as was included in the timetable though without much imagination. Lessons consisted mostly of practising the hymns and psalms for the following week. We were issued with a melody edition of Songs of Praise and the words edition of the Cathedral Psalter and it was through music lessons that I learnt about the pointing of psalms. Easterling’s nickname,’Yarko’, was it seems derived from his initials combined with some obscure joke arising from a change in Latin pronunciation. Despite his qualifications he was not an artistically sensitive musician and one of H.B.Hitchens’ early moves was to ease him out of his music role. ‘Yarko’ conducted congregational practices with gusto rather than finesse. He too wore a gown in ragged tatters. He had perhaps a sadistic streak in his nature. Infuriated by some minor delinquency he would seize a lock of short hair at the back of a boy’s head and twist it repeatedly. The pain was excruciating but the resulting bruise was concealed by the hair. He was also the only master apart from ‘Mack’ (see next paragraph) whom I saw use a cane. One afternoon he became infuriated by a restless

58 class and when one of our number made a sarcastic but audible aside he sent him with the key to his classroom to get his cane. He bent him over the table at the front of the class room and beat him, watched by a cowed and hushed Shell B.

The nickname of A.L.Mackenzie, ‘Mack’, was obvious. He had joined the staff as a young man straight from Cambridge in 1927. He was a modern linguist, and taught mostly German. A bachelor aged 35 in 1942, he lived in Bradford House, was rather camp, with a high pitched voice, and kept a cane on his desk in Room 22 which he used frequently in class to deal with minor delinquencies including low marks in tests. It would nowadays have been obvious that he was homosexual in orientation but I do not remember mention of the subject, an indication of innocence or reticence in sexual matters in those days. His cane disappeared after the arrival of Hitchens.. Mack was also an accomplished seamstress, who made his own MA gown, no mean feat. He became senior master in 1954. He retired to Scotland in July 1963 but was recalled by the governors following the sudden death of Hitchens during the summer holiday and was acting headmaster until Bruce McGowan took over in the summer term of 1964.

L.B.Hutchings was away on war service in India when I went to Solihull so I only knew him when I was in the Sixth form. He was a classical scholar of Magdalene College, Cambridge who was also a good musician and widely cultured; I found his Sixth form English lessons stimulating. He was commanding officer of the CCF and before the war coach of the Rugby team. He was a large, pompous man whose nickname of ‘The Bladder’ was cruelly appropriate. He ingratiated himself with the new headmaster and was appointed head of the Lower School in 1948 and second master in 1952. But not for long. He was deeply unpopular in the Common Room, reputedly because staff gossip found its way back to the head master. He was demoted in 1954 through the transparent stratagem of abolishing the post of second master. He applied for headships but, as he once told me, did not want those he could get and couldn’t get the ones he wanted. Solihull was after all a very pleasant place to live and work - he confided when I met him later at a conference in Oxford at which we were representatives of our respective schools. He was ordained in 1960 and left Solihull to become Vicar of Modbury in Devon in 1967.

The nickname of the woodwork master was unimaginative and predictable ‘Timber’ Johnson. He was however a man altogether out of the ordinary. Before the war he had owned a shop in Aston. He took City and Guilds at evening classes and entered the teaching profession. He came to Solihull in 1939 as master in charge of handicrafts. I received my first imposition from him – for talking - and did it on a Sunday evening when my parents were out rather than admit that I had been punished. Johnson wrote on my report at the end of my first year with commendable restraint ‘Weak. The subject does not appeal to him’. I was capable of planeing a piece of wood until there was nothing left to plane. The headmaster perceptively gave‘Timber’ Johnson an essay period with the Sixth form and it was here that I learnt of his unusual background which he contrasted, indiscreetly but truthfully, with the sheltered and privileged existence of most of the staff. I later came across his son, Colin Johnson, who read natural sciences at Oxford and came to teach at Bristol Grammar School when I was there.

59 The master in charge of the junior school – Third and Shell forms - from his appointment in 1928 until he retired in 1948– was B.M. Peek – ‘Bertie’. His enthusiasms were astronomy and sailing; he used to reflect ruefully on why he had chosen to live as far from the sea as it was possible to be. Though he ostensibly taught 3B for geography a mischievously placed question would lead to an entire lesson devoted instead to astronomy and this happened with such frequency that we learnt almost no regional geography of the British Isles. In Shell B I was in his mathematics set and he managed to keep to the subject. I remember the maths. lesson on the morning of the D Day landings when Bertie Peek suggested that this might be another rehearsal, like the Dieppe raid. In assembly he occupied a seat on the front row of the platform and in the summer would take his place wearing sandals and no socks. His wife taught at Malvern Hall and was reputed – like Miss Forster, the headmistress - to be a communist. Probably both held mildly left wing views, and voted Labour, quite sufficient in the Solihull of those years to be dubbed a communist.

In later years I had much to do with Eric Havinden. He was senior history master from January 1921, when he was 26, until his retirement from teaching in 1954 at the age of 60, when he became bursar and clerk to the governors. His longstanding nickname was Bun or The Bun, because of his prominent ears which made him resemble a ‘Bun’, (a dialect word for rabbit, hence bunny rabbit). I only knew his Christian name because the words Eric Havinden, Reigate Grammar School appeared on the title page of a historical novel The Conscript of 1812 he once lent me to read. Though I was for some time his star pupil at school and remained in touch in later years, he never once used my Christian name. He had gone from Reigate Grammar School to Emmanuel College, Cambridge in 1912. He was an exact contemporary of Edward Welbourne, senior tutor and subsequently Master of Emmanuel. It was as a result of this connection that a stream of Solihull historians went up to Emmanuel. Havinden’s career from 1915, when he took his degree, to 1921 when he came to Solihull, was a mystery. The received wisdom was that he had intended to enter the Indian Civil Service but had contracted malaria and been obliged to return home. He lived in Park Avenue opposite to the school with Ruth, his wife, whom he married in 1934. They had no children. He died in December 1973.

He was interested in and knowledgeable about church architecture. It was however an intellectual pleasure; he showed no sign of emotion or feeling about it. According to Welbourne, it was an interest he felt middle class people ought to have. There could be no doubt about his commitment to history but he never showed evidence of appreciating the glory of human achievement or the pathos of human failure. History was to him a cerebral activity, we were taught to think and reason, to ask why things happened and to analyse their consequences, disciplines for which I remain profoundly grateful. There was another dimension to his teaching which I copied later. We were all issued with a historical atlas and required to know where things happened which often gave a clue to why they happened.

He was the senior master by years of service and took assembly on the rare occasions when both the headmaster and second master were absent. He was however passed over three times for the post of second master - in 1945 for a much younger man, Colin Hey, in 1946 for an older man A.L.Gladstone and in 1952 for L.B.Hutchings, though by then he was only two years away from retirement. He was not popular

60 with younger masters; he represented a world which had passed away with the Second World War, if not earlier. By the 1950s he was however an institution. He expected masters to come exclusively from Oxford or Cambridge. ‘Why this run on Leeds?’ he is reputed to have said on seeing the qualifications of new masters appointed in the late 40s, and ‘They’ll be giving hoods for catching rabbits’, a remark attributed to him when PE staff from Loughborough wore academic dress. Perhaps fortunately he was never a form master. Instead he presided over the issue of text books with exemplary efficiency from the bookstore in Bradford House, assisted by minions selected from his specialist historians or favoured members of his house.

He figures in the reminiscences of every Old Silhillian of the period. Old Boys are convinced that it was he not Voltaire who coined the aphorism ‘ The Holy Roman Empire was neither holy, Roman nor an empire.’ He was slim, with pointed features and wore rimless spectacles. He made no concession to the idle or less able but would crush with withering sarcasm. He was housemaster of Pole from 1921 when the house system started, and was reputed to throw new boys in his house who could not swim into the baths, an obvious myth but sufficiently credible to be repeated down the years. I was certainly terrified of being put into Pole when I entered the upper school. His marking of essays was distinctive. If you achieved 4/10 you had done well and 6/10 was phenomenal. More often you would be awarded 1/10 or 2/10 as a reward for an essay written for prep. and sometimes the comment would be ‘To Me’ and the mark 0/10. I once wrote a long and detailed essay on the causes of the War of the Spanish Succession which had stimulated my interest. I omitted to mention in the final paragraph how war came to be declared. Havinden’s comment was ‘Was there no war then?’ and the mark 0/10.

He was perhaps inevitably my role model. I copied down his teaching timetable, carried my files as he did, covered my hymn book in black to conform with his and I should have liked rimless spectacles too! My father rightly felt that his influence on me was not a wholly good one – I inevitably picked up some of his coldness towards people.

By the time I went to Solihull, in addition to Hutchings, five other members of the staff had joined the services – O.C.Trimby, who had been headmaster of the newly formed preparatory school, J.R.R.Hunter, D.W.Franklin, E.T.Halstead, and E.H.Oakley. In their place came the first women ever to join the staff. In 1942 these were Margaret Isaacs, nicknamed ’Fanny’, a London graduate who taught English and produced plays, Miss Staveley (who never acquired a nickname) an Oxford historian who taught me in 3B, and Marjorie Williams, a tall and strikingly attractive London geography graduate. Under her tuition my geography flourished, her attraction for me sublimated into striving to succeed. I took hours over my geography prep., drew beautiful maps, learnt the names of trees in the tropical rain forests – lignum vitae sticks in my memory still – and calculated the time in Hong Kong when it was 2am in London. I was soon top in geography. The response of others to Miss Williams’ female charms was more natural. A member of the form who later went to the Royal Naval College, Dartmouth, dropped his pencil case just as she approached his desk and rather too obviously peered up her skirt as he retrieved it. After the lesson he was called back and she caned him – no doubt giving both of them a frisson of illicit pleasure! She soon married and became Mrs Allen. After the war the women departed as quickly as they had appeared. It never seems to have occurred to anybody that the

61 contribution they had made to the life of a boys’ school in wartime was a civilising one and might be equally valuable in peacetime.

By the time I went to Solihull School the war was half way through and it had little impact on my school life. Staff and senior boys had been placed on a fire-watching rota during the blitz but this lapsed as air raids became less likely. I seem to remember that the coke was delivered in a huge heap and we were required to shovel it into the boiler house. A refugee from Austria, Dr Ernst Kahn, joined the staff. He taught German and was an excellent violinist. He was a tall sensitive man, lacking perhaps a sense of humour. He was unmercifully ragged and his life made miserable by boys in my form amongst others. I remember two boys who were also refugees – Hertzfeld, who was in my year and Pichler, in the year ahead. I never knew the first name of either of them – we often didn’t in those days.

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Until the 1944 Education Act introduced free secondary education, entry to Solihull School, like other grammar schools, was either by passing a not too demanding entrance examination and paying fees, at that time £7-7-0 per term, or by obtaining a Warwickshire County Special Place. I passed the entrance examination and was due to enter the preparatory school as a fee payer, when in July 1942 I heard that I had been awarded a special place. My parents would pay no fees and instead of entering the preparatory school I should, even though I was still only ten, be placed in the main school. I therefore went up the school among the youngest in the form. I took School Certificate at the age of 14 and Higher Certificate at 16. There were both advantages and disadvantages. Two shots at Cambridge entrance was a bonus. Being the youngest in the form, as well as somewhat unsure of myself was a disadvantage. My form mates were older and more worldly wise. I found some subjects difficult and had to start Latin in the Sixth form. I was probably the last in my year to go into long trousers, at the age of 13 when I was in 4A (Year 10 in current parlance).

The school uniform came from Manly Clothes in Warwick Road opposite the Barley Mow, where the manager regarded himself as personal tailor to boys from the school and their parents. We wore black shoes, grey socks with school colours – maroon and navy blue – dark grey trousers and navy blue blazer with school crest on the pocket. Shirts had to be white or grey and in those days had long tails – and were never worn outside the trousers! We wore a school tie – or if you had house colours, a house tie – tied in a tight knot and never removed even on the hottest day or on the way home - where the school’s writ still ran. I wore a school cap until I was 18 and in summer a straw boater which it was politic to remove before cycling outside the immediate environs of Solihull.

I cycled to school, as did all except the few who lived near enough to walk. Schools then had three amenities which are now obsolete: bicycle stands in covered sheds, cloakrooms in which outdoor garments were on the whole safe and desks in which text and exercise books were kept. We brought our books to school in a brown, leather satchel slung over our shoulders. There was a single text book for each subject. Until books became free as a result of the Education Act of 1944 we purchased them for the year and sold them back to the school at the end of the year, their value depended on their state of repair. Textbooks were usually written by

62 somebody who had years ago cornered the market. The most flagrant example was Kennedy’s Latin Primer, still in use after a century – its author, Benjamin Hall Kennedy had been headmaster of Harrow in the middle of the nineteenth century. Most of us wrote with wooden pens whose metal nibs were dipped in the inkwell with which every desk was equipped. Fountain pens were not yet universal and we were forbidden the use ballpoint pens which made their appearance in the late 1940s, because they encouraged poor hand writing.

Three B was a form made up entirely of ‘scholarship boys’. Although stationery was provided textbooks were not. ‘Special place’ boys had the pick of second hand copies since these cost less and it was assumed that our parents were less likely to be able to afford new books. (The 1944 Education Act introduced free textbooks). School began at 9am, lunchtime was 12.30 to 2pm, since many boys, myself among them, cycled home for lunch. School ended at 4.15. I did not stay for lunch until I became a member of the Upper Bench. (see below p.75) Tuesday and Friday afternoons in the junior school (Thirds and Shells) were half days when we played games in the afternoon. I would cycle home to lunch, change into games kit and cycle back. After games I would cycle home still in games kit. On Saturday school ended at 12.30 until you reached the senior school when there was compulsory games in the afternoon. For boys in the Fourth forms and the Combined Cadet Force (CCF) was also compulsory and occupied Monday afternoon. (The small number of boys who contracted out for conscientious reasons were employed on minor amenities round the school).

During the war the ringing of bells was forbidden. Their use was reserved for the dire circumstances of enemy invasion. The end of periods and of school was therefore marked by the blowing of a bugle outside Big School by a member of the CCF band.

School began with assembly. Each form was accompanied from its form room by a sub-prefect and seated in Big School, the Fifth and Sixth forms in the balcony. The head boy shouted ‘Silence’ and gave out notices about society and house meetings as well as naming any delinquents who were required to report to the prefects’ room at break, gowned staff filed on to the platform each occupying a seat allocated by rank and length of service. The headmaster entered. Thompson came in hurriedly from his study behind the stage without ceremony, showing his impatience if staff were not already seated. Hitchens at once introduced a ceremonial entry from the back of the Hall, clad in gown and mortarboard accompanied by the head boy.

The pattern of assembly was invariable in Thompson’s time. We sang a hymn, a prefect read the lesson, which followed the life of Christ, with occasional forays into the Old Testament. We sang a psalm from the Cathedral Psalter; on Mondays this was always, the school psalm, Psalm 121 I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills. The service concluded with a prayer and the Lord’s Prayer. Only the most unsuitable psalms were omitted. I always wondered what Neither delighteth he in any man’s legs, (Psalm 147.10) meant. Assembly was part of an immutable order, the hymns and psalms were printed on the termly calendar card, the prefects read in rotation, the head boy on Monday, and we sang lustily. Only if the headmaster were away would the second master preside. Assembly ended with notices and the occasional harangue from the headmaster if some particularly heinous offence such as theft or graffiti in the lavatories had come to his attention. The headmaster sat down, clapped his mortar

63 board on his head, the staff left, we filed out of Big School and lessons began. When Big School was needed for examinations in the latter part of the summer term, not in those days until July, assembly took place outdoors, in the Old Quadrangle, its walls covered in creeper, with swallows wheeling overhead. But we still sang a hymn which Yarko pitched with the aid of a tuning fork.

I was swept up into a routine which I found exciting and satisfying. I was delighted when I realised that gowns, in varying states of disrepair were not just the stuff of schoolboy fiction but were worn invariably by staff throughout the working day. Speech Day saw staff wearing hoods and I soon learnt to recognise the degree and university they signified. I found the rituals of school life absorbing. The prefects filed into assembly and sat in order of seniority of appointment with the lesson reader between the head boy and the deputy head boy. At the last assembly of the term we always sang, in addition to Psalm 121, the hymn Praise my soul the king of heaven (623 in Songs of Praise) and the reading was Joshua 1 verses 1-9, read of course from the Authorised Version of the Bible. – Now after the death of Moses the servant of the Lord it came to pass …. The Lord thy God is with thee whithersoever thou goest’. At the end of the summer term when many were leaving this could be a deeply moving experience with prefects damp eyed with emotion.

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I found my early weeks hard going. Solihull School was a new world. French, algebra, geometry, science taught in a laboratory, woodwork in a workshop, PE in a gymnasium preceded by taking your clothes off in front of other boys, fortnightly form orders, school uniform, ‘prep.’ - all were wholly new. Staff seemed to assume familiarity with subjects which to me were impenetrable. ‘Boozer’ Davies, I recall, arrived for the first mathematics lesson and introduced us to algebra with the arcane statement ‘Let x be a number’. No mathematics textbook ever seemed to assist clarity. Geometry was another subject which made no sense to me. I have never seen any practical use in either algebra or geometry; indeed all the mathematics I have used in adult life I knew by the time I was about ten, except estimating and that was not then considered important. French was difficult too but that may have been the fault of the teacher since once relegated to the bottom set with J.B.Neale, I flourished and ended the year top of the set and was promoted to set one the following year. English I enjoyed partly because R.M.Goodfield who taught us was a good teacher and a sympathetic character. We were expected to identify various sorts of subordinate clauses and even to parse – a skill which was based on Latin and was by the 1940s obsolescent. We read a selection of texts – Wind in the Willows, Peter Simple - a novel by ‘Captain’ Marryat, a much abridged Seven Pillars of Wisdom by Lawrence of Arabia, Shakespeare’s Macbeth and The Dragon Book of Verse.

My early reports make clear where my strengths and weaknesses lay. These were the days before staff were required to spread themselves on reports and could get away with a single word of commendation or condemnation. At the end of my first term handicraft and art were ‘Weak’ and by the end of the year art was ‘V. Poor ’. History in which I came first, and divinity, fourth were my best subjects. Every fortnight or three weeks there was a form order, a practice characteristic of grammar schools of that period, which was supposed to provide motivation by encouraging competition. Each subject was allocated a maximum mark of ten times the number of periods in the

64 week – so the boy who came top in history got 20, whilst the boy top in mathematics gained 50. The marks were scaled, added up and an order compiled and entered in your Prep. Book which had to be signed by you parent. The high spot of my first year was being runner- up in the Bernays Reading Prize competition for the junior school. My chosen poem was Newbolt’s Vitae Lampada - There’s a breathless hush in the Close tonight.

I had no aptitude for or interest in games. In the first year the winter game was soccer, after that rugby. When sides were selected for soccer games I was invariably one of the last to be chosen. In Rugby I had no idea how to tackle and was scared of being tackled myself; if I kicked the odd shaped ball it was quite unpredictable where it would go. My sole asset was that I could run. In my last year the master in charge of Rugby wanted to give me a trial for the First XV as a wing three quarter but by then it was too late. Had I earlier been taught the skills of either soccer or rugby I might at least have achieved competence. As things were I prided myself on not getting my knees dirty. At cricket too I was hopeless. I fielded at longstop, never bowled and was sent in last – if the innings lasted long enough. When the football pitches were water logged we were sent on a cross-country run – down to Elmdon Heath, then to Catherine-de-Barnes, Henwood, Ravenshaw and back to school, supervised by a master or prefect riding a bicycle round the course. Even if I started among the leaders I ended up among the stragglers.

My season was a brief one – the second half of the spring term was devoted to athletics. My strengths were 100yards, 220 yards and long jump. Here too there was no instruction – on the importance of warming up for example. I obtained house colours for athletics so was able to wear a Fetherston tie. When competitive athletics was revived after the war I was in the school athletics team and once competed in the school pentathlon. I was also good at physical education and joined the gym club, open only to invited gymnasts. When I was in the Sixth form a friend taught me to play squash, a game I played a good deal at Cambridge.

I did not settle down well. I was not clubbable, my accent must have appeared ‘posh’, since at home I was discouraged from acquiring a Birmingham accent. I was the sort of boy who cooperated with authority, was keen to answer questions in class, did his prep. conscientiously and was hopeless at games – all a sure road to social ostracism. I have no doubt that much of this was my own fault; I covered my insecurity with apparent arrogance. A friend whom I made through Crusaders during my first term at Solihull, Hereward Wynn, who was in 3A and lived in St Bernard’s Road, invited me to his house during the Christmas holiday in 1942. He used to call for me and we would ride to school together. Then one day he announced that he would no longer be calling; his standing in the school, he said, was suffering through association with me – which was at least honest if brutally so.

It never occurred to me to wonder why the Third forms were followed by the Shells, what a Shell was, nor why the C stream was euphemistically called the Modern form. It was all part of an immutable order. At the end of my year in 3B I was on the borderline of Shell A and Shell B and the decision went in favour of Shell B. I was disappointed but it may have been a blessing in disguise. In Shell B I flourished whereas in Shell A I should have struggled. Though almost a year below the average age of the form I was first in the form order throughout the year and in the end of year

65 examinations and gained my first school prize. I was even top in science taught by C.L.Duddington. He was working for a Ph.D which took him to a lectureship in botany at Regent Street Polytechnic in 1945. He did not believe in wasting his own time marking our books so it was done in form. We simply had to write up the notes he gave and copy the diagrams. My work was beautiful, written in purple or green ink and underlined in red and deservedly received full marks every time!

We began the study of German, a subject which I found difficult. Even when I had mastered German script, the word endings, cases and other grammatical conventions proved difficult. Class discipline was poor. Dr Kahn, who was frequently driven to distraction by our bad behaviour, taught us. ‘I will take my steps’, he once said and fell from the classroom dais injuring his arm. Handicraft had now disappeared from the curriculum but I was still 27th in art, - ‘Weak’, wrote the art master, who made little attempt, however, to teach us as distinct from watching us deploy what talents we already possessed.

It was in Shell B that I was first taught history by Eric Havinden. The syllabus was English history 1485 to 1714 – the Tudors and Stuarts. His lessons always took the same form. We started each term sitting in alphabetical order. Questions, often based on what you might expect to happen in particular circumstances and therefore requiring reasoning and imagination, were addressed to each boy in turn. If you couldn’t answer the question it went to the next person and so on until somebody could answer. He then moved up above the first boy who had been unable to answer. One correct answer could transform your position! The game started again at the beginning of each term and was characteristic of all classes taught by Havinden below the School Certificate year. The first in alphabetical order in Shell B were twins – Atkins G. and Atkins J., neither of whom displayed any aptitude for history and who looked baffled by the mere thought of answering a question. They started each term at the top and steadily worked their way down to the bottom of the form which Havinden referred to as ‘the sediment’. Since my name began with W, I started at the bottom apart from Windmill and Wildgoose, and worked my way steadily upwards as term went on.

Havinden’s lessons were planned to the last detail. After each section of the syllabus had been covered he dictated brief notes with indentations at half-inch intervals to indicate subsidiary points. He would occasionally ask whether anybody had read a particular historical novel; the boy who replied that he had heard it on the radio was treated to withering scorn.

For the second and third terms in Shell B I was form captain. R.L.Norwood, our somewhat undemonstrative but highly conscientious form master, had obviously suffered from democratic elections which produced a popular but not necessarily effective form captain so he decided that I would be a more acceptable holder of the office and the excuse was to appoint the boy who came first in the form order.

I entered IVA in September 1944; ‘Mack’ was my form master, with the cane permanently on his desk; I was twice caned, for low marks in a German test. Under the stimulus of his teaching and discipline my German began to improve. I was now in the upper school, allocated to a senior house, Fetherston, and though still only 12, obliged to spend Monday afternoon in the activities of the Junior Training Corps (as it

66 was when I first joined, later CCF) and Wednesday and Saturday afternoons playing games. A fast four-year stream to School Certificate had recently been introduced and I was in it. Science was now differentiated – physics, chemistry and biology taught by specialists. I found languages and mathematics difficult and physics incomprehensible. Even in English my term position was poor because most of the marks were allocated for learning poetry by heart which is something I have never been able to do. When in the yearly examinations literature, essay writing and comprehension were tested I shone. In my report, Colin Hey who taught us in 4A and Upper 5 Literary, expressed surprise that I had done so well in the examination but he never seems to have realised that the examination assessed quite different skills.

The following year 1945-46 I was in Upper V Literary whose form room was in School House, the far side of the Old Quadrangle. The other forms taking School Certificate were Upper V Science and Upper V Modern. The three forms consisted of a mixture of the previous year’s 4A and Lower 5A and Lower 5B who had taken an extra year to reach the certificate form. I was now well over a year below the average age of the form. The difference between the so-called literary Fifth and scientific Fifth lay in the emphasis on either languages or science. In Upper V Lit. we took two languages, French and either German or Latin and general science (though we still had two periods a week allocated to each of the three sciences taught by specialists) whilst the science form took three separate sciences and one language. Both forms took mathematics, the top set additional mathematics as well and all had a choice of history, geography or divinity. It seems a thin diet. In the School Certificate examination we took only seven subjects including both English language and English literature.

In June 1946, during my School Certificate term, I had peritonitis and was lucky to survive. I was taken into Solihull hospital and operated on within an hour. I was later given the appendix in a bottle, preserved in formaldehyde, complete with a large orange pip which had caused the appendix to burst – probably as an exhibit at the inquest! As a result I was not able to take School Certificate in July that year. It was agreed however that I should take it in December and in the meantime enter Remove Literary – the name then used for the first year Sixth. The School Certificate of the Oxford and Cambridge School Examination Board is a handsome document. My name, date of birth, school and the subjects which I passed are all inscribed by hand in copperplate writing. The levels obtained are also written in - Very Good (referred to in school as Distinction), which I obtained in English language, English literature and history, credit in mathematics, French and German and pass in general science.

* * *

Styles of teaching were predominantly didactic: the staff had the information and we needed to acquire it. In each room was a dais on which stood the master’s desk at which some would sit throughout the lesson, moving only to write on the blackboard. In many subjects there were dictated notes. In the 1960s a book was published called The Disappearing Dais, signifying the move to a more active, participative style of teaching. I only remember once being set a research project. Colin Hey, senior English master, set 4A an extended essay on one of seventeen subjects ranging from Education in Uganda to Television today and tomorrow. I chose Religious and

67 political sects in India and I remember trawling through the library for information. Even if the subject was of no subsequent use the method was.

Each year we studied a Shakespeare play: Julius Caesar in 3B, Macbeth in Shell B, Twelfth Night in 4A and The Tempest for School Certificate in Upper V Literary. The last was particularly memorable. I can still recall passages I learnt by heart: The dark backward and abysm of time…. Be not afeard; the isle is full of noises / Sounds and sweet airs which give delight and hurt not…. We are such stuff as dreams are made of / And our little life is rounded with a sleep. For School Certificate we also studied Chaucer’s Nun’s Priest’s Tale and The Pardoner’s Tale. Curiously despite my lack of talent for foreign languages, I found Chaucer enthralling and relatively easy. English also included grammar, spelling, comprehension, essay writing and even parsing, though by the time I took School Certificate the last had been dropped from the examination. We read selections from compendiums of poetry but were never asked to compose our own.

The history syllabus was exclusively concerned with British history, or rather English history since Wales, Scotland and Ireland only figured when the English encountered problems subduing the rebellious fringes – the campaigns of Edward I in Wales, the ’15 and the ’45 Jacobite Rebellions or the Battle of the Boyne at which the catholic Irish were ‘gloriously defeated’ by William III. Welsh, Scots and Irish were it appeared rebels and outsiders defeated by the superior skills of English kings, though it was sometimes a close run thing! It was only much later that such an Anglo-centric version of history came to seem inadequate. The School Certificate required a Special Subject and this was the only occasion on which we strayed outside the British Isles. The Special Subject chosen in my year was Germany 1806-1890 so I knew something about Bismarck and German Unification.

Divinity was the name of what later came to be called RE (religious education). It was regarded on a par with history and geography and allocated two periods per week. The content was exclusively Christian – Old Testament, New Testament, particularly the gospels, and an introduction to Church History. You could choose to take the subject for School Certificate but since it was an alternative to history I did not do so.

The first and last periods of PE in each term were devoted to the tedious task of weighing and measuring each boy and determining his chest expansion. These statistics were duly entered on our reports. It was a procedure which originated before the First World War and was a government requirement presumably as a means of detecting abnormalities or the onset of serious disease. Nobody to my knowledge ever questioned the usefulness of the procedure or explained it to us. As a result I know that when I entered Solihull School, just short of my 11th birthday I weighed 5 stone 1½ pounds and was 4feet 8 inches in height. When I left just short of 19 years old I weighed 11 stone 4 pounds and had reached 6 feet. At the beginning of each term we had to produce a Health Certificate signed by a parent to say that we had not been in contact with any infectious disease during the holiday. Anybody who failed to do so was sent home to collect it.

PE consisted of formal exercises usually taking place in four teams, competitive indoor games such as basketball, and exercises on wall bars, gymnastic mats and a

68 vaulting horse. In the last period of each term we played a game called ‘pirates’, an activity which would certainly not be permitted nowadays. All the apparatus was put round the gym. haphazardly and you had to scramble over or under it without being caught or touching the ground in order to reach your base.

Since 1930 the school had possessed an open air swimming pool which, like almost all school baths of the period was unheated. Soon after the summer term began we started to clean it, supervised by the swimming instructor, Mr Shepherd, a huge man, well protected from the elements by surplus fat. This involved removing the dead leaves and accumulated detritus of the winter and scrubbing the sides of the bath clad in swimming costumes or bathing trunks. It was one of the most pointless chores ever invented. Not until nearly the end of the summer term, or so it seemed, would the swimming bath be usable and one of the week’s PE periods would take place there. Even on warm days we would shiver in the cool summer breeze and chlorine treated cold water. Hitchens tried to introduce what he claimed was the practice of other public schools, nude bathing, but to no effect – we wouldn’t have it!

Even science was not a practical subject. I remember our first lesson in 3B. It was the first time I had seen the inside of a laboratory. We had to draw the apparatus we would be using – Bunsen burner, flasks, burette, pipette etc. Physics which we began in 4A took place in a tiered lecture theatre, the latest thing in school architecture at the turn of the century but by the 1950s hopelessly outmoded. ‘Dapper’ Davis’s dreary lecture/demonstrations were enlivened only by the competition to guess how many times he would say ‘Er’, in the course of the lesson and whether he would notice that one member of the form had spent the entire period under one of the benches. Chemistry improved after the arrival in 1945 of George Harding, self-styled ‘Uncle George’, a bluff northerner. Biology was revolutionised by the advent in January 1946 of Dick Schardt, a recent Cambridge graduate. He was a highly qualified biologist and a gifted teacher who was a member of the Society of Friends and had not therefore served in the war. His lessons were a revelation – demonstrations, practical work and the use of statistics were all new to me. He was also a Cambridge cricket Blue but sadly soon left to teach at his own old school, Leighton Park, Reading.

It never occurred to me that modern languages were intended to equip us to converse with any natives of the countries concerned whom we might meet. They were to me a modern version of Latin, requiring grammatical accuracy and involving mastery of constructions of increasing complexity as well as vocabulary and idiom which were presumably used by the natives to communicate with each other. I never remember a lesson delivered in what we now call the target language though some masters would allocate a French nickname to each boy. Though there was an oral test in both school and higher certificate, practice was reserved for the last few weeks before the examination and carried few marks.

* * *

The Sixth form of the years after the war was, in common with that of similar schools, small. In 1942 only 14 boys obtained higher certificate. It grew in the late 1940s as more boys stayed at school beyond school certificate. I was one of fewer than 30 boys to obtain higher certificate in 1948 though some more had either

69 dropped out during the course or failed the examination. In 1950 The Shenstonian reported that almost all boys were staying on to enter the Sixth form. Higher certificate was a grouped examination: you took two or more related subjects – classics, arts, mathematics or science. At Solihull there was no classical course. About two thirds of boys took sciences and mathematics and about one third arts subjects chosen from English, French, German, and history. There were for example only four of us in the history set, one of whom left before the examination. I took history and French as my main subjects. I was always weak at French and should never have been advised to take it at higher certificate. My parents went to a Fifth form parents’ evening and were told by Havinden that I should aim for Cambridge to read history and that this would necessitate the ability to read French. I must therefore take French as a main subject. The matter was never mentioned again. It was simply assumed that I would take French. I struggled. I never had any feel for the language nor mastery of idiomatic French and found vocabulary hard to learn. I passed higher certificate in French on the strength of excellent marks in the literature paper which was of course written in English and was concerned mostly with set books dating from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century – Moliere, Racine, Maupassant, French poets etc. I later competed for and was awarded the Griffiths prize for French literature which required an examination in English on a French set book.

When we began the A level history course we were issued with scarcely any text books and those which were available were intended for undergraduates and proved hard going for fledgling Sixth formers. We used H.A.L.Fisher’s monumental History of Europe, David Ogg’s The Seventeenth Century, H.O.Wakeman The Ascendancy of France, G.M.Trevelyan England under the Stuarts and E.Lipson Nineteenth Century Europe. I seem to recollect that I gradually bought them as news reached us that a few copies had appeared in Birmingham bookshops. We did long outline periods of British and European history from about 1600 to 1914 and a special subject William Pitt, Earl of Chatham 1735 to 1778. For this last there were no books at all so we had dictated notes as our only resource apart from the set text, Edmund Burke’s Thoughts on the causes of the present discontents.

In addition to two main subjects we also took three subsidiary subjects. I took Latin, English and divinity. The last involved the study of selected chapters of Jeremiah and Ezekiel and the second half of the Acts of the Apostles. Once again there were no books and we were issued with, but asked to pay for, duplicated notes prepared by Revd R.M.Goodfield. English I enjoyed. We studied set books which included Hamlet, selections from Pepys’ Diary, Tennyson’s Poems of 1842, Shaw’s St Joan, Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield and Thomas Hardy’s novel Far from the Madding Crowd. This last led me to read almost all Hardy’s novels during the year.

Latin was a disaster area. I was not well taught, had no aptitude for it and in any case in the first term I was also taking School Certificate. After a sprint through basic grammar and vocabulary, which I never mastered, we were turned on to set books which included Vergil Aeneid Book VI. This we were required to translate in turn in class. Most people, myself included, acquired a crib by a man named Brodie. The only hazard was the possibility that Brodie and Vergil diverged and you therefore offered a translation of a passage which did not appear in the Latin text. For the most part however ‘Yarko’ Easterling, who taught us, neither noticed nor cared what we were up to. I failed Latin subsidiary in 1948. I must have stumbled through the Latin

70 translation in the Cambridge scholarship examination in 1948 and again when I gained an Exhibition in December 1949.

In those days a qualification in Latin was a requirement for anybody going to Oxford or Cambridge whatever subject they intended to read. ‘This subject is for him a race against time… The situation is almost desperate…’ wrote L.B.Hutchings who was by now responsible for my Latin, in my Lent term report in 1950. Tom Penny, an Old Cliftonian and History exhibitioner of Magdalene College waiting to go up to Oxford, spent the term at Solihull at Hitchens’ invitation and among his tasks was to get me through Latin. I took the so-called Littlego – the Latin paper in the Cambridge Previous examination - which was set four times each year. You went up to Cambridge to take it and were allowed to use a dictionary; I passed at the first attempt, in the summer of 1950. It was not difficult.

* * *

Until the late 1960s candidates for entrance awards at Oxford or Cambridge took the examination at the university and college of their first choice. Groups of about five colleges set common papers. If a college had a superfluity of good candidates in one subject it might hand them on for consideration by other colleges in the group. Most colleges examined in December after the university term had ended. As a result of your performance in the examination you could be awarded a Major Scholarship worth £100 per year, a Minor Scholarship of £60 or an Exhibition worth £ 40. You could also be offered a place or encouraged to try again the following year. I was only just 17 when I took the examination and did well enough to be encouraged to have a second try in December 1949.

It always seemed to me odd that of the five papers, each lasting three hours, set for candidates in history only two required a knowledge of history – Medieval and Modern European History and English History (there was not even a pretence that this was British History). The remaining papers were called General Questions, Translation and Essay. General Questions required you to write four essays on any subject under the sun for example: Defend either snobbery or football pools or Eire; The man who thinks he is a boiled egg is to be condemned only on the ground that he is in the minority were among the subjects which I encountered. The Essay paper was equally idiosyncratic, for example: Fashion; Political cartoons; ‘A bishop has nothing to do at a tippling house’. The theory was that Higher Certificate tested knowledge and the capacity to order it to compose essays; this examination was more searching and tested promise. There must surely have been a strong subjective element about the marking of such papers.

I travelled to Cambridge with other candidates from Solihull, the first time through London and the second the proverbially slow cross country route via Bletchley and was placed in lodgings though all meals were in college. The examination took place in the Senate House, an awe-inspiring building with desks covering its immense floor space. We wrote on unlined paper and a university don clad in gown and hood presided. There was of course a meeting with the Senior Tutor, my first encounter with the fabled Edward Welbourne, and an interview with one of the history dons, at that time the Revd J.C.Dickinson, a church historian who had left Emmanuel to become chaplain of Pembroke College by the time I came up to the college..

71 The experience provided a flavour of what three years as an undergraduate at Cambridge might be like. Even with the strain of examinations it proved seductively attractive. I should have been deeply disappointed had I not obtained a place. During the fleeting days in Cambridge I did as I had been advised - went to Evensong in King’s College chapel and when the examination was over took a bus ride in order to visit Ely cathedral. On the day term ended in December 1949 I received a telegram informing me that I had been awarded an Open Exhibition. It was one of the turning points of my life.

* * *

In 1941 the Officer Training Corps was renamed the Junior Training Corps (JTC), recognition that commissions were not the automatic right of grammar and public school boys. In 1948 it was renamed yet again and became the Combined Cadet Force (CCF). I was a member first of the JTC and later of the CCF for no less than six years. We were issued with uniforms; when I joined the wearing of puttees, worn during the First World War, and peaked caps had just been phased out and replaced by gaiters and forage caps, which were in turn replaced by berets. We wore rough khaki shirts and at first a battle dress which was done up to the neck. Only later were blouses with lapels introduced worn with a khaki tie. Every Sunday night I pressed my army trousers with a hot iron, polished my boots to a high gloss, blancoed my gaiters, and applied brasso to my cap badge and the buckles of my gaiters, in order to satisfy the NCO who inspected us on parade on Monday afternoon.

The first skill we learnt was drill and this required hour after hour of mind numbing practice. Weapon training meant first learning the parts of a rifle. We were then each issued with a Lee Enfield rifle, DP (demonstration purposes only). This had to be taken from the armoury weekly and cleaned using a pull through with oiled rag. This too was inspected by the platoon NCO and those whose rifle was not satisfactory were placed on fatigues and required to report for further inspection during the week. Map reading was the most congenial as well as the most useful activity. When I first joined, the PSI (Permanent Sergeant Instructor) was RSM Barnes, a career soldier who had served in the First World War and possessed all the attributes of the traditional sergeant major including a truly terrifying parade ground voice. He died during the Easter holiday in 1945. 5

We had the occasional route march through the country lanes ordered to break step over bridges in order to prevent their collapse. There were night operations and specialist courses at local barracks. I attended one held at Budbrooke barracks near Warwick on one of the coldest weekends of the winter. There were two field days each term when we would spend the whole day in manoeuvres in the local countryside, singing First World War songs, as we marched. We learnt to shoot: there was a miniature range at school and I became a first class shot and on the annual Open Range day we went to the army range at Kingsbury. On Remembrance Sunday we paraded at the war memorial outside the parish church in Solihull village.

I passed Certificate A parts 1& 2 in March and June 1947despite jamming a bren gun during the part 2 test! The certificate, which I still possess, lists proficiency in drill, weapon training (rifle and LMG), map reading and fieldcraft and section leading.

72 I was then placed in the signals section, which consisted of those cadets who had not been made NCOs. Having an antipathy to all things technical I loathed the signals section and found Monday afternoons unspeakably tedious.

Only when I was at last promoted and became lance-corporal and corporal in quick succession did my interest revive, for the same reason that a friend of mine told me he only became a keen Scout when he became a patrol leader. I was not a natural subordinate. One of the most useful aspects of training were visits to Cateswell Barracks, Hall Green for a course on instructional techniques taught by regular army NCOs. Under the Hitchens reforms giving greater prominence to the house system, CCF platoons were to be organised by houses. I became an instructor of the Fetherston platoon and subsequently Company Sergeant Major (CSM), in which capacity I called the entire contingent on to parade on Monday afternoons and before I left Under Officer and Cadet Captain.

In 10th June 1949 the CCF was inspected by Field Marshal Montgomery, whom the headmaster had encountered during the war. Needless to say the inspection took precedence over everything else in the weeks before hand, including preparation for examinations. Boys were sent off to get their hair cut, which provoked the resignation of the senior English master, Freddy Wickens, who was already critical of the public school and right wing tendencies of the establishment. A full-scale dress rehearsal was held with the headmaster, in brigadier’s uniform, as inspecting officer.

I attended two CCF camps. The first was under canvas at Poulton airfield near Chester from 26th July to 3rd August 1949 when we were the largest contingent in camp with 138 cadets and were trained by officer cadets from the nearby Officer Cadet Training Unit (OCTU) at Eaton Hall, (once the stately home of the Duke of Westminster and sadly since demolished). The second was at Park Hall camp, the royal artillery depot two miles from Oswestry where, according to The Shenstonian, we were ‘molly-coddled’ with hutted accommodation and hot water to wash in. I was now an Under Officer and found myself in command of a full scale company in attack. Once more our training was in the hands of young national service officer cadets. Their example was impressive and had I undertaken National Service before going up to Cambridge as I intended I should have opted for the army with the intention of obtaining a commission.

* * *

During and after the Second World War school frequently organised harvest camps, to provide additional labour for hard pressed farmers at harvest time. I attended the last one in which Solihull School took part for two weeks in late August 1948. It was held at Bearley near Stratford-on-Avon and we were billeted in a hutted camp. Each day we were taken by three ton truck to farms within about 20 miles of the camp. The work varied. We harvested potatoes and gathered or sorted plums and damsons. Our least popular assignment was weeding and thinning cabbage plants. We hit on the bright idea of pulling up everything in sight and then replanting every fourth cabbage. Whether the farmer ever wondered why his cabbages languished after our visit we never knew. We felt he deserved it since he paid us a mere 6/- for the day’s work compared with up to 15/- which we earned on other days.

73 We took advantage of proximity to Stratford-on-Avon to visit the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre (as it was then called). During that fortnight we saw Troilus and Cressida and Othello. Sitting in cramped gallery seats after a hard day’s work in the open air I slept through the last act of Troilus, awoken only by the applause at the end. Stratford was enjoying a vintage year and the cast of Othello included Godfrey Tearle, Paul Scofield, Anthony Quayle and Diana Winyard. 6

* * *

February 1947 was the coldest month of the twentieth century and for weeks I walked to school almost every day and went to the British Restaurant in Mill Lane for lunch. It was not safe to cycle on icy roads and the chance of getting on a bus was slight. On 6th March I wrote in my Diary: ‘Snowed all night and drifts are now very deep and transport impossible. Walked to school and helped to dig paths in PS [private study periods], as [there are] drifts against school buildings, particularly Big School and in the angle between the main corridor and the cloisters. Roads are like footpaths and nearly everybody is walking.’

Two days later on Saturday 8th March I stopped on my way to school to buy The Warwick County News (only later renamed The Solihull News). It contained the announcement of the name of the new headmaster of Solihull School accompanied by a photograph, a cutting I still possess. The paper described him as Brigadier H.Butler Hitchens. He was aged 36. He had been scholar and prizeman of St Catharine’s College, Cambridge, had a first class in both parts of the modern languages tripos and was modern languages master at Clifton College, Bristol. During the war he had risen from the rank of lieutenant in the territorial army to be brigadier and director of British intelligence in Austria and south-east Europe. Only a handful of men had risen so far. They included Selwyn Lloyd and Enoch Powell. Hitchens held the OBE (Order of the British Empire), the United States Legion of Merit, the French Croix de Guerre avec palme and had been mentioned in despatches twice.

I was to know Hitchens well particularly during my last two years at Solihull and count myself fortunate to have been at school during the first three years of his regime. He transformed the school and the early years were perhaps the best and certainly the most exciting. He was a bachelor and came to School House with his widowed sister Norah Martin, who acted as hostess, and her daughter Mary. He was a man of outstanding ability who could have run much more than a school but he chose to be a headmaster. After a few years at Solihull he could have expected to become headmaster of one of the leading public schools, as did his two successors. He was however unmarried. It seems likely that it was known in the tight circle of public school headmasters that he was homosexual and that this prevented his promotion. He was headmaster of Solihull for 16 years. In August 1963 tragically he committed suicide rather than face prosecution for an alleged homosexual offence.

I had a ringside seat and as editor of The Shenstonian was the chronicler of the early stages of the Hitchens project. The school had been refused direct grant status by the Labour minister of education, Ellen Wilkinson. An appeal against the decision failed and the school was faced with becoming a local authority grammar school or going independent. The governors decided that the school should become independent. It was the most important decision in the school’s history. Hitchens was almost at once

74 elected to the Headmasters’ Conference and Solihull became officially a public school.

Public schools had boarders and house systems. There were boarders at Solihull but they were few and dwindling; the number must be increased. By September 1950 the number of boarders had risen to 74; School House was full and a boarding house for 15 junior boys opened at Kineton in Warwick Road with E.T.Halstead as housemaster. School House took its place alongside others for competition purposes though for a few years some dayboys were allocated to it. Meantime the other houses were strengthened, new house masters were appointed, inter-house competitions were increased and house masters contributed to termly reports. In 1950 house caps were introduced.

Public school lingo, some imported shamelessly from Clifton College, was introduced. The First XV Rugby pitch and the First XI Cricket square were named Big Side. Prefects became benchers – upper, middle and lower - the last completely new introduced in February 1948. Members of the Upper Bench wore blazers edged with red ribbon in addition to the traditional silver pocket and cap badges. I was one of the first members of the Lower Bench, joined the Middle Bench in September 1948 and the Upper Bench in February 1949. In September that year I became Senior Bencher, third in the hierarchy, and in January 1950 Deputy Head of the School when Mike Gibbs succeeded Brain Lewis as Head of School. The Upper Bench was the school’s elite, entitled to use the drive from the Headmaster’s House into Warwick Road, a considerable saving in time for anybody coming from the west along the Warwick Road and of course to use the Prefects’ Room in Bradford House. All ranks of benchers were allowed to set ‘impots’ (impositions which involved writing an essay on some specified subject or copying out ‘lines’).

After the arrival of Hitchens only the headmaster used corporal punishment though in practice few masters had done so in recent years. It is therefore curious that the head boy was still allowed to cane, though he would do so no more than three or four times a term. When there was to be a beating the Upper Bench would assemble in the Prefects room at break and sit in a semi-circle to witness the ritual. I doubt whether it did much harm to either the victim or the Head Boy but by the late 1940s it was an odd survival of more barbaric days. Solihull was not however alone as I was to discover when I went to teach at Brentwood ten years later. As a bencher I was unquestionably on the side of authority. I reported three middle benchers for smoking in the roof space above Big School and they were reduced to the ranks. Sneaking it undoubtedly was but perhaps not entirely unjustified since a fire in the wooden rafters could have been catastrophic.

At his first Speech Day Hitchens floated the idea of a group of pupils undertaking a number of self-help projects round the school. The object was to encourage good citizenship but it was also no doubt born of frustration with post-war restrictions which stood in the way of building projects for several years. The Amenities group, as it was called, began work in the Spring of 1948, redecorating the cricket pavilion so that it could be used to entertain visiting teams. Its major project however was the levelling of the area surrounding the First XI cricket square. It involved extending the playing area to the west by moving large amounts of soil and providing a raised spectator area to the east. It soon became clear that the work was beyond the scope of

75 voluntary labour without large-scale earth shifting apparatus. Though work began in the autumn of 1948 it had to be accepted that the cricket square could not be used at all in the 1949 season and alternative arrangements were made. Eventually external help was sought. I wrote in The Shenstonian of January 1950: ‘The Gordian knot which the Amenities group has so far failed even to loosen was cut this term when an excavator arrived on the scene and in a week achieved, with a great deal more ostentation and noise, what the Amenities group has been striving to achieve for twelve months. Big Side has begun to look less like a sewage farm and more as it was intended to look.’ 7

Public schools had chapels and chaplains and some of their old boys were ordained. Solihull had no chapel and had never had a chaplain. Both deficiencies were in due course rectified. Emphasis was at first placed on the link between the school and the parish church of Solihull, the two ancient institutions of the village. The rector of Solihull, the Revd A.E.Fraser, became chairman of the governors in 1948. In December 1947 the first Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols, not then as well known or popular as it has since become, was held in the parish church. Soon afterwards came ‘the New Term Service’ when the whole school marched to the parish church forming a continuous procession; it soon became ‘the traditional procession from school to church’.

Changes were made to assembly. A panel of lesson readers was introduced in the Spring term 1949, drawn from all parts of the school; the criterion for inclusion no longer status but the ability to read well. A printed booklet with prayers, which the school could say together, was drawn up. Services were composed round themes. Local clergy and lay people were invited to contribute a brief address at Assembly. Short voluntary evening services were held on Fridays in the library. The school corporate communion was moved from Sunday to Wednesdays three times per term and was followed by breakfast in School House. It was only corporate in the sense that boys and masters from Solihull School alone attended. Participation would have been unthinkable; the Rector was an old fashioned Anglo-Catholic.

Not until 1951 was a chaplain appointed when the Revd R.W.Hallett came from Worksop College. The Revd C.H.Sellars succeeded him in 1953. Soon afterwards a wartime hut was bought for £30 and after a series of mishaps it was erected on the upper Hampton Lane field and consecrated as a pro-chapel in September 1955. In the 1950s several old boys were ordained to the priesthood, two of whom later held prominent posts in the Church of England. David Tustin became Bishop of Grimsby in 1979 and Peter Berry, Provost of Birmingham in 1986. In its early years the churchmanship was recognisably Anglo-Catholic. Only with the arrival of Lorys Davies as chaplain in the mid-60s when Bruce Mc Gowan was headmaster did the churchmanship become more middle-of-the-road. In 1960 Solihull celebrated its Quater-centenary with the dedication of the permanent chapel, a distinguished building on the lower Hampton Lane field. It must surely be the last purpose-built chapel ever to be built in an English public school. It is also a fitting and tangible memorial to the headmastership of H.B.Hitchens. 8

Hitchens made an immediate impact on the Sixth form curriculum. It had been largely utilitarian, confined to subjects to be taken in the Higher Certificate, together with an essay period, divinity and PE. The remaining time, up to ten periods out of 35

76 was devoted to private study, which meant for the most part desultory conversation and socialising. On Thursday mornings for example the ice-cream van called at the Headmaster’s House next to the library. We would call to the deliveryman who was only too pleased to add to his customers. Hitchens introduced compulsory English for all, taught in mixed sets across the arts-science divide. I remember reading The Ascent of F6 by W.H.Auden and Christopher Isherwood and The Dog beneath the Skin by W.H.Auden in lessons which Hitchens took himself. I was also in his divinity set in which we were expected to cope with Charles Gore’s Philosophy of the Good Life. He introduced a weekly lecture when staff or visiting speakers would attempt to widen our horizons. I still possess notes on lectures on Vincent Van Gogh, What is literature and why should we read it? (F.C.Wickens), Animal Nutrition, The Modern Orchestra, The International Monetary Fund, India, and The German War Effort and its Failure. I recall too a morning when the Sixth form went by coach to the Barber Institute of Fine Arts at Edgbaston.

* * *

The school expanded in the years after the war but at first changes to the buildings were necessarily modest. Three army huts were renovated and became classrooms for the Shell forms. When the CCF moved into its new headquarters in 1951 the erstwhile armoury became a classroom whilst the lecture room was gutted and turned into a classroom. In 1950 the air raid shelters, hurriedly dug at the beginning of the war but scarcely used, were removed. In January of the same year the first tuck shop was opened. The staff meanwhile moved in summer 1948 from cramped accommodation at the end of the Big School corridor to the former geography room opposite Big School. The first major building scheme was the completion of the Quadrangle which had been built in the 1930s. The centrepiece of the new wing was a War Memorial. It contained additional classrooms but was not complete until after I had left Solihull. 9

There were countless smaller changes, which between them contributed to the sense of exciting innovation. The libraries hitherto junior and senior – the former adjacent to the preparatory and lower school classrooms and the latter in School House – were reorganised. The lower school library became a Sixth Form library and the home of Upper VI Arts. A school diary, with its own editor, replaced the calendar card. The games committee was reorganised and careers advice was improved. The number of boys who could be accommodated for lunch was increased from 120 to 360 by having several sessions. In the autumn of 1948 a School Council was introduced, not at that time a feature of schools like Solihull. It provided an outlet for pupil opinions no doubt, but it also proved to be a way in which the headmaster could feed his own ideas to the boys and then get them back as their suggestions. This was how he got the name of the Old Boys Association changed to the Old Silhillians. A Chapel Committee was introduced as a standing committee of the School Council.

In my early years at Solihull I was taught by scarcely any master below the age of 40, with the exception of R.W.E. Ingram, the PE master and Colin Hey, senior English master, neither of whom had joined the forces. Colin Hey became commanding officer of the cadet corps. From 1947 onwards younger men straight from university or college began to appear. They were closed in age to the Sixth formers they taught

77 their methods of teaching were more inter-active, they had careers to make and responded to Hitchens’ leadership.

One of the first was Freddy Wickens appointed senior English master in 1946 though Solihull was his first appointment. He was an inspiring teacher who had imbibed the rigour of the Cambridge English school of F.R.Leavis and purveyed the ideas of I.A.Richards’ Practical Criticism. He expected those specialising in English to read widely and quickly and to become conversant with the whole field of English literature before settling down to the study of set texts. He did not conceal his impatience and disagreement with the establishment nor his support of a Labour government. It was he who first raised in our minds whether the allies had been right to drop two atomic bombs on Japanese cities at the end of the Second World War. At the time even to ask the question seemed to some treasonable. Freddy Wickens found the growing public school ethos increasingly irksome and left after only three years. Some parents were viewed by some parents with suspicion and thought by some boys to be subversive. I found his independent outlook stimulating and I was one of those who organised a farewell party for him.

Derek Burrell had a double First at Cambridge in English and history and was also a highly competent musician, an accomplished Methodist local preacher and an excellent teacher. He went on, after a brief period as senior English master at Dollar Academy, Clackmananshire to be headmaster of Truro School at the early age of 33, There he remained for over 27years. After his retirement he was elected Vice- President of the Methodist Conference. (He died in 1999)

Guy King-Reynolds came from Emmanuel College, Cambridge to teach geography. He was an outstanding Rugby player and coach as well as an excellent actor and a flamboyant character. His first wife died of polyomyelitis in 1950. After his remarriage he left Solihull to go into business but concluded that his real love was teaching and he returned to Solihull and in 1963 became second master before moving on to become headmaster of Dauntseys School, Lavington in Wiltshire.

Louis Morgan came from Loughborough College and Keith Berridge from Carnegie to teach PE and games. George Paine, who had played for Warwickshire and England, was appointed the school’s first cricket professional. He was also head groundsman and ran the newly opened tuck shop – another traditional feature of a public school! In 1950 a school marshal was appointed combining this new role with that of PSI (Permanent Sergeant Instructor) in the CCF. Hitchens became in his later years something of a martinet, remote from junior staff and more like a commanding officer than a headmaster. He would send a message via the senior master if he felt that staff should have their hair- cut or moderate what he regarded as inappropriate dress.

* * *

I was neither a games player nor a musician but I took part in several plays though I had the major disadvantage that I had great difficulty learning by heart. The pre-war tradition was that the school play, produced in the spring term, was in rotation, Shakespeare, an eighteenth century comedy and a modern play. The first play I attended with my parents in the spring term 1943 was The Admirable Creighton by

78 J.M.Barrie. I remember the performance of W.R.M. Horton as Lord Loam and B.D.L.Coghlan as Creighton. In 1944 the play was A Midsummer Night’s Dream and in 1945 The Rivals. I played Don Pedro in Much Ado about Nothing in March 1947. After that the play was moved to the autumn term and in December 1947 the play was St Joan produced by Freddy Wickens in which I played the Dauphin. The Shenstonian reported ‘Watkins dithered and doddered to good effect as the Dauphin’. In the spring of 1949 there was a Sixth form play in which I took part. I was reported to have coped well with ‘the love-lorn maunderings of the angular Tilburina’ in Sheridan’s The Critic. In 1950 I helped to produce the Sixth form play, Bernard Shaw’s Androcles and the Lion. 10

From very early on I had two ambitions: to be Secretary of the Literary Society and to edit The Shenstonian, the school magazine. I held both posts for my last two years at school. The Literary Society was formed in 1930, under the presidency of E. Havinden. It is hard now to imagine earnest Sixth formers sitting in the hard desks of a form room after school in order to listen to a paper by one of their number or a member of the staff. That however was the purpose of the society and each term three or four such meetings would take place. I read two papers, the first entitled Bygone Solihull and the second Samuel Pepys.

It was under the auspices of the Literary Society that I first visited London and Oxford. The London expedition took place in May 1946 and was a first outing after the restrictions of the war years. We travelled by train and underground, itself an adventure. The newly elected MP for Solihull, Martin Lindsay, showed us round the Palace of Westminster where the House of Commons was still meeting in the Lords’ Chamber with its red upholstery, because their own had been bombed early in the war. We had lunch at the Lyons Corner House, then situated at the junction of Parliament Street and Bridge Street, and in the afternoon went to Westminster Abbey and the Tower of London. Until then my knowledge of the topography of London was derived from The Forsyte Saga – Park Lane and Bayswater Road - and the monopoly board! The visit to Oxford took place when I was secretary of the Literary Society and we were hosted by J.A.D.Owen, then an undergraduate at Brasenose College, later Sir John Owen, Dean of the Arches.

My two-year tenure of the secretaryship of the society saw an unprecedented number of meetings as well as an expansion of its activities to include half day expeditions and theatre visits. In the autumn term of 1949 for example we visited Warwick Castle and went to see King Lear at Stratford-on -Avon. On occasions such as visits to Oxford or Warwick the president of the society, Eric Havinden, would entertain members of the committee to tea, his enthusiasm for which became a scarcely concealed joke. When he retired from teaching in 1954 A.L.Mackenzie, who was vice-president, wrote an appreciation of him, which included the remark that as president of the Literary Society, ‘he never failed to arrange for tea at some delectable café of his choice’. 11 September 1949 saw the hundredth meeting of the society and I invited Sir Barrie Jackson, founder and director of the Birmingham Repertory Theatre to the meeting which was held in Big School.

I collected society secretaryships as a dog collects fleas. In the summer term 1945 the Christian Discussion Circle was founded. The impetus for the society came from Crusaders. A.R.Thompson was not prepared to have a Christian Union, which he

79 feared might become a hot gospel pressure group and so insisted on its being open to all and intended to encourage discussion rather than conversion. It proved very successful gaining the support of Christians of all persuasions, Crusaders, alongside Baptists like David Roberts, high Anglicans like Francis Allen and middle of the road Anglicans like David Wigglesworth and David Mole. In September 1947 I became secretary and remained so for over two years.

The Debating Society was unusual in that it met twice a term in school time occupying the second half of the morning for Fifth and Sixth forms. It thus provided an opportunity to learn the formal skills of debating and to address a large audience from the platform. I made my first paper speech in a debate in October 1946 on a motion that Cinema does not have a desirable effect on the public. I apparently attributed the rising divorce rate and the increase in petty pilfering to the cinema. We won the vote handsomely though what authority I had for the speech I made is a mystery. Two terms later I argued that wars could not be prevented. I had always been opposed to capital punishment, which was once again on the national agenda in the late forties, and it was debated in the autumn of 1947. Richard Yorke outmanoeuvred me by presenting the opposition case and then demolishing it before I spoke. It was probably not only the success of this ploy which produced the overwhelming majority in favour of capital punishment – it reflected the opinion of the district and perhaps of the country at the time all too well.12 In September 1948 the Debating Society ceased to meet in school time and became voluntary and like all other school societies one which met after school. I added the secretaryship of this society to my impressive collection!

* * *

The work of which I am most proud and in which I obtained the most fulfilment was my editorship of The Shenstonian, a post I managed to hold for two years, 1948-1950. I owed my appointment to Roger Fry a fellow Crusader. I in turn appointed my own friends to the editorial staff. John Wall, another Crusader and fellow Methodist whom I made sub-editor, spent a year at Peddie School in New Jersey and so never became editor. I appointed Francis Allen, by then a close friend, as sub-editor and he eventually succeeded me as editor. I was a creative editor. I had a policy for the magazine. I wanted to change it and I succeeded. I wished to restore some of the features of the pre-war magazine for example the coloured crest on the front. I wanted more varied photographs, not just formal team photographs. I greatly enlarged School Notes, changed the printer, introduced Readers’ letters, reintroduced accounts of individual 1st XV rugby and 1st X1 cricket matches, reduced the type size and increased the number of pages. I was fortunate that Hitchens made more money available and appreciated the liveliness of the magazine as a good advert for the school. The Shenstonian had a new staff advisory editor in John Way who succeeded Freddy Wickens as senior English master. I used to cycle over to King’s Heath to see him when the proofs arrived during the school holidays but he gave me complete freedom to edit the magazine as I liked.

* * * I was fortunate to be at Solihull School during the Second World War and the years of austerity which followed. It was an age of innocence. Christian values were taught, assumed and exemplified. Conventional morality was unquestioned even if

80 not always practised. Choices and temptations were few. Drink meant beer and cider not gin and vodka. There were no drugs to abuse and no pill to heighten sexual temptation. My generation smoked, though I did not, because there was as yet no hint of a link between smoking and serious disease. Clothes like food were rationed so the distinction between rich and poor was not evident. Adolescence was not invented until the 1960s.

What sort of school boy was I? My reports from Solihull School contain hints about how I was seen by staff. As an eleven year old my form master wrote ‘He takes himself too seriously for a boy of his age’. There are few further comments on my personality until I reached the Sixth form. My view of life it appears still lacked subtlety and nuance. ‘He is about to go through a phase in which things are either black or white’, wrote the new headmaster at Easter 1948. A year later he commented: ‘He is acquiring increased confidence and smoothness without losing the vigour and sincerity which always characterised him’. By December 1949 when I had reached the age of 18: ‘He is mellowing in his attitude to others and I hope will come to see that, without lowering his own standards, he can do much to raise that of others by encouragement rather than criticism’. My last report repeats the same note: ‘A loyal and fervent leader – I hope he will develop a little more toleration without abandoning his very high standard of achievement.’

* * *

The two most distinguished Old Silhillians of the twentieth century were contemporary with each other and had left the school three years before I entered. W.J.H.Butterfield was head of the school and J.O.Wright was deputy head in 1938- 39. John Butterfield was, even as a boy at school, one of those rare people who excelled at everything he did. At school he was captain of rugby, hockey rugby, hockey and cricket. At Oxford he gained a blue in all three and was the university cricket captain. He read medicine and had a most distinguished career becoming Vice-Chancellor of Nottingham University, Regius Professor of Physic at Cambridge, Master of Downing College and Vice-Chancellor of the University. He was created a life peer as Lord Butterfield of Stechford in 1988. Oliver Wright also entered the school in 1930 and left in 1939. After taking his degree at Christ’s College, Cambridge he entered the diplomatic service, was private secretary to two prime ministers, Alec Douglas-Home and Harold Wilson. He became ambassador to the Federal Republic of Germany. Due to retire in 1980 on reaching the age of 60 he was pre-elected master of Christ’s, his old Cambridge college. Two months later he withdrew. He had been asked to go to Washington as ambassador to the United States, a post which he held from 1982 to 1986. Not many small grammar schools - as Solihull was in 1930 – can boast two such distinguished old boys in the same year.13

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