When I reviewed last week’s virtual gathering, I forgot to mention Paul Driscoll’s anecdote about the optional “prefect’s blazer” available to those of us who attained such giddy heights at Alleyn’s School. The blazer was emblazoned (pun intended) with the school crest and motto.
That motto was God’s Gift. Edward Alleyn no doubt meant that motto to symbolise education. But the phrase has a sarcastic meaning in modern parlance; e.g. “he think’s he’s God’s gift.” And as Rohan Candappa so ably puts it, “We are Alleyn’s. If you cut us we bleed sarcasm.”
Unsurprisingly, very few of us took up the offer of this optional, distinguishing garment. Beyond the sarcasm, such an emblem had every chance to land us in a heap near North Dulwich railway station, where the Billy Biros (pupils from William Penn School) needed little excuse to isolate an outlier from the Alleyn’s herd, taking severe retribution for invented sleights and offenses.
The main senior school uniform was a two-piece or three-piece suit. I have only one picture of myself wearing mine:
Me And Wendy Robbins, Autumn 1979, Westminster Bridge
In the late 1980s, just a few years after a left Keele, when Guinness had a particular advertising slogan on the go, some fine folk in the University of Keele Students’ Union produced the following tee-shirt.
It dawned on me that I am a very rare example of someone eligible to wear not only the Alleyn’s God’s Gift blazer but also the Keele Pure Genius tee-shirt underneath the blazer.
In the dying moments of the Trump US presidency, this suitably modest mental image should be shared with the world and saved for posterity.
It’s just a shame I was unable to model the two garments together back then. I would have looked magnificent; indeed it would have been the best look ever, anywhere, for anyone.
This lockdown business is nobody’s idea of fun, but Rohan Candappa has been putting in some hard yards in setting up some meaningful distractions and social interactions.
It wouldn’t be Alleyn’s School without homework. For this third session, Rohan (egged on by Nick Wahla) asked some exam questions:
Nick Wahla’s suggested a question to ponder: “What advice would you give to someone about to leave Alleyn’s?”
It’s a good question, and one which I am obviously going to claim credit for. But I’d also like to twist it around a bit. My question is: “What advice would you give yourself if you could go back and talk to yourself on the day you left Alleyn’s?
Anyway, loads of people turned up again…but not Nick Wahla – he of the exam question. Typical.
I took the headline screen grab more than an hour into the event, so several people had already come and gone by then.
Again we had participation from across the globe:
Neal “Mr” Townley in Sydney,
Andrew Sullivan in Phnom Penh,
Richard Hollingshead in Washington (desperately trying to convince us and himself that Washington State is a long, long way from security-alert-ridden Washington DC),
Mark Rathbone, claiming to be in Purley, then Purely and eventually confessing to living in Kenley, a totally different place noted for famous current and former residents such as Des O’Connor, Peter Cushing, Harry Worth, Karl Popper (ironically, given this empirical falsification of the “Mark Rathbone lives in Purley” theory) and Douglas Bader – all together now – Da, da-da, da-da-da-da, da-da, da-da, da-da-da-da…or do I mean da-da, da-da-da-da-da, da-da, da-da-da-da-da-da-da…?
…I digress.
It is hard to summarise the answers to the exam questions, not least because everyone had a slightly different take on them. One theme that ran through the answers is learning quickly post school how to be yourself and follow your heart/instincts in what you want to become. Many of us suspect that we had more freedom to “find our own way” back in 1980 than pupils finishing their ‘A’ levels have now – as the route from school to career via university seems to be a more defined path now.
Some raised the matter of careers advice (it’s lack or paucity), others the more informal aspects such as teachers instilling us with confidence, arrogance or in some cases diffidence.
Naturally this led the conversation on to discussion about memorable teachers, good, bad or indifferent. Mr Jones got off pretty lightly considering he wasn’t there…
…which is more than can be said for David Wellbrook, who should have known better than to defy the wishes of Rohan Candappa by going AWOL, if Rohan’s opening remarks were anything to go by. Rohan’s willingness to turn on a loyal follower for the slightest slight is almost Trumpian in its intensity.
But then, as Rohan pointed out when the conversation turned to the vexed question of teasing, banting or bullying, we weren’t saints back then and we are hopefully a bit more grown up about it now. Well it was easy for him to say that AFTER the invective of his opening remarks.
Heck, I’m kidding. It was fun again and it seemed astonishing when Rohan pointed out that those of us who were around for the whole event had been gassing and listening for two hours.
Actually this was a very good idea. The face-to-face “40 years on” reunion had to be cancelled this summer, so Rohan figured we should have a “40 years on” virtual reunion through the good offices of Zoom instead.
Of course, back in the day, nobody used the phrase “back in the day”…
I paraphrase Rohan’s remarks in the form of a quote.
37 of us gathered, from a cohort of some 120. That’s about a third of us, which, 40 years on and with some of our cohort no longer with us…is a mighty impressive haul.
People joined from places as far afield as Ontario (Paul Deacon & Rich “The Rock” Davis), New Zealand (The Right Reverend Sir Nigel Godfrey), Phnom Penh (Andrew Sullivan), Australia (Neal Townley), Barcelona (Duncan Foord), Crouch End (Rohan Candappa) and Penge (somebody, surely?).
It seemed like a recipe for chaos, yet somehow the mixture of untrammelled chat and a little bit of structured “go around the virtual room for a memory each” worked surprisingly well.
Some of the people are friends I have seen relatively recently, one way…
…but many of the people present I had only corresponded with on FaceBook or not at all in the last 40+ years.
The array of memories was varied and fascinating. A lot of stuff about teachers, good, bad and (in some violent cases) especially ugly.
Some observations especially resonated with me and stuck in my mind. Paul Romain illustrated through readings from his first and last school reports that he was a keen scout at first, but by the end at least metaphorically semi-detached from the school…if not detached and several acres from the metaphorical school. That resonated with my experience.
It also brought back to me my lingering grudge against my late mum for throwing out my old school reports (and indeed all my juvenilia from that period apart from my diaries) on the spurious grounds that “no-one would ever want to look at that sort of old rubbish again”. When I challenged this assumption, by letting mum know that I was REALLY REALLY upset that she had done this, she said, “how was I supposed to know that you cared for that stuff?”. To which my simple answer was, “if you had asked me BEFORE you threw my things away, you’d have known.” No, I’m still not over it.
“Renée is an enthusiastic, diligent lass, but she sometimes allows her natural exuberance to mar her judgement”
I think it was Jerry Moore who held up some editions of Scriblerus (the Alleyn’s School magazine), threatening to scan and circulate some elements of them. I do hope he does that. David Wellbrook mentioned his first toe-dip into performing Shakespeare and the rather damning review Chris Chivers gave of his performance.
That all brought back to my mind my own somewhat involuntary performance in Twelfth Night, I think the year after David Wellbrook’s debut. I remember Mr Chivers’ Scriblerus review of my performance as Antonio; in particular I recall pawing over it on a train with my friend Jilly Black, trying to work out whether he was praising me or damning me with faint praise. I suspect the latter, but I would love to see the review again now that I am older and…well, just older.
Indeed I considered sending my apologies to the virtual reunion and spending the evening wallowing instead. But I thought better of doing that and Janie encouraged me to give the virtual meeting a go…I could always switch off the Zoom early if I really didn’t feel up to the gathering…
…anyway, I’m so glad I did join the group, even if I wasn’t entirely myself throughout the evening. It was great to see everyone and I learn that there is every chance that many of us will be doing it again.
I guess I need to dig out those diaries again and see what else I can find!
My diary, from forty years ago as I write, tells me that this was one crazy weekend, during which I zig-zagged my visiting Keele friends, Sim & Tim (Simon Ascough & Tim Woolley), hither and yon across London for a couple of days.
Sim was from Doncaster and Tim was from Moseley, South Birmingham. I have an inkling that they had never been to London before…or at least “not visited a Londoner” before.
Reading my diary and assessing the activities I inflicted upon them, they might have formed a lifelong skewed opinion on what London life is like. I’m not sure I had a weekend quite like it before or since.
Friday 7 August 1981 – A Mini Pub Crawl Following In My Alleyn’s School Footsteps
7 August – Work OK – Sim & Tim arrived -> ate -> Fox -> Dog -> met Mark from Keele -> his place ’till late
Mum will have given us all a hearty family meal on the Friday evening ahead of the mini pub crawl. I cannot remember whether we did all of our dashing around London by car or by public transport. I think it must have been the former; if so it must have been Tim who had a car with him.
That first evening, I wanted to show Sim & Tim the places I used to drink with my friends before I went to Keele. The Fox On the Hill (aka The Fox) on Denmark Hill and The Crown & Greyhound (aka The Dog) in Dulwich Village. I thought we might bump in to a few old friends from Alleyn’s in at least one of those places, but that didn’t happen.
Indeed, my most vibrant memory from that whole visit was my embarrassment in The Fox when, for the first time ever, the barman questioned whether I was old enough to buy drinks in the pub.
I remember feeling like saying…
…but I’ve been buying drinks in this pub for years…since I was fifteen… and no-one has ever questioned it before…
…but I feared that such an admission might prevent me from being served or get me barred, so I simply asserted myself as a University student down after my first year at Uni and had my word accepted.
No ID cards for pub-going youngsters in those days. Why The Fox had started asking questions all of a sudden back then I have no idea – perhaps they had experienced some youngster trouble since my previous visit.
As for “Mark from Keele” whom we met in The Dog, I’m not sure which Mark this might have been. I don’t think it was Mark Bartholomew – perhaps it was a mate of either Sim or Tim’s who lived in or near Dulwich and was named Mark.
Diary says we didn’t return to my parents house until late – in fact I am trying to work out what the sleeping arrangements might have been. There was a studio couch in the small (fourth) bedroom which was ample for one sleeping visitor but would not have been comfortable for a couple, let alone two individual sleepers. Perhaps one of them slept on the floor in a sleeping bag.
Saturday 8 August 1981
The Saturday really was a crazy day of haring around town. Allow me to translate that diary note – I needed a bright light, a magnifier and a cold towel around my head to work it all out:
8 August – Earlyish start -> Knightsbridge -> Notting Hill -> Soho – met Mark Lewis -> Ivor’s -> eats -> Hendon -> Ivor’s -> home (knackered).
Frankly, I’m knackered just reading about that day.
I’m hoping that this article will help me to track down either Sim or Tim or both of them – perhaps their memories of this day will help me to unpick it.
I suspect that we went to Knightsbridge because one (or both) of them had a crazy craving to see that place, with its Harrods & Harvey Nicks reputation.
Possibly the same applied to Notting Hill and Soho. Possibly I encouraged the Notting Hill idea, as it was, even by then, a place with a hold on my heart, not least for the second hand record stores, which I had been visiting for a few years by then.
What we got up to in Soho I have no idea. Given that, whatever it was, we did it with my old BBYO friend and now media law supremo Mark Lewis, I suggest that readers keep their baseless allegations to themselves.
…then Hendon, where I imagine we visited Melina Goldberg, as I don’t recall staying in touch with anyone else from that BBYO group…
…then back to Ivor’s – why the diary doesn’t say – perhaps Ivor had organised a bit of a gathering of old friends from Streatham BBYO – it wouldn’t have been the first time nor the last.
Sunday 9 August 1981 – Lunch & Then Wendy’s Place Before Sim & Tim Left London
Took it easy in morning -> lunch -> Wendy’s -> Sim & Tim left, I returned home & slept a lot!
What a bunch of wimps. We’d hardly done anything the day before.
Anyway…
…I’m sure mum would have wanted the visitors to have another hearty, home-cooked meal before heading off – otherwise what might they think of us?
Eat, eat…
Then on to Wendy (Robbins)’s place, in Bromley, for a final visit of the weekend.
Not sure whether any of the other Streatham BBYO people were there. Andrea possibly, Ivor possibly…
…in any case, Bromley is probably not the ideal location out of all the places we visited that weekend from which to head back to Birmingham and Doncaster on a Sunday afternoon – but those logistical details matter a lot less to 18/19 year olds than they do to me, forty years on, re-treading the tangled maze of visits that was our London odyssey that weekend.
Goodness only knows what Sim & Tim made of it at the time, nor what they might make of it now, if they see this piece and are reminded of the weekend. I’d be delighted if others, e.g. Sim and/or Tim, got in touch with their memories to help me enhance this Ogblog piece. If they do, I’ll publish a postscript.
Possibly Christine by Siouxie & The Banshees is the pick of the mix
Ahead of a virtual gathering of the Alleyn’s “Class of 1980” in January 2021, I have decided to share the mix tapes I made right at the end of my time at Alleyn’s School.
Rohan Candappa and Nick Wahla have asked questions for that gathering, which I answered here:
Those have led to some debate. Perhaps my “end of school” mix tapes will similarly cause some discussion. At the very least, I imagine they’ll spark some memories. Chart music was part of the soundtrack of many of our lives back then.
Effectively I recorded two batches right at the end of my time at Alleyn’s. One batch around the Whitsun long weekend (end of May 1980) and then another batch right at the very end – late June – mostly the weekend after the ‘A’ levels I’d guess.
Here’s a list of the first batch – the May 1980 batch:
Messages, Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark
Dance, The Lambrettas
Breathing, Kate Bush
I’m Alive, Electric Light Orchestra
Teenage, UK Subs
Let’s Go Round Again, The Average White Band
Over You, Roxy Music
The Bed’s Too Big Without You, The Police
Theme From M*A*S*H, M*A*S*H
We Are Glass, Gary Numan
Here is the list of the late June 1980 batch:
Everybody’s Got To Learn Sometime, The Korgis
Christine, Siouxsie and the Banshees
The Scratch, Surface Noise
New Amsterdam, Elvis Costello
Who Wants the World, The Stranglers
Play the Game, Queen
Breaking the Law, Judas Priest
Let’s Get Serious, Jermaine Jackson
No Doubt About It, Hot Chocolate
Funky Town, Lipps Inc
Crying, Don McLean
Two Pints of Lager and a Packet of Crisps Please, Splodgenessabounds
Given the amount of time I spent in The Fox On The Hill in that last Alleyn’s week, the final recording on that list comes as no surprise. (Although for sure I’d have been drinking bitter, not lager). Anyway, I don’t think “Two Pints…” will make it onto my Desert Island Discs list. Frankly, I can’t see any of the above making that list. Christine’s a great track, as is New Amsterdam. There’s some good stuff, but it’s not my best mix tape, that’s for sure. I was kinda busy with other stuff at that time.
I am writing this up in January 2021, in part as a response to a couple of “exam questions” set by friends Nick Wahla & Rohan Candappa, ahead of a gathering of the Class of 1980 in the “Virtual Buttery”.
In Rohan’s words:
Nick Wahla’s suggested a question to ponder: “What advice would you give to someone about to leave Alleyn’s?”
It’s a good question, and one which I am obviously going to claim credit for. But I’d also like to twist it around a bit. My question is: “What advice would you give yourself if you could go back and talk to yourself on the day you left Alleyn’s?”
So, the day I left Alleyn’s was not, by my own account, a good day for me. That whole final week doesn’t read brilliantly in fact:
To transcribe that final day:
What a horrid day!!! Chem (I) -> In comm -> Econ II -> Fox after and got pissed.
I’m guessing that “in comm” means “held incommunicado”, presumably because I took the Chemistry exam before others had taken it…or others had taken the Economics exam before I took mine.
There are three mentions of going to “The Fox” that week, not just the “getting pissed” session after the exams.
The Fox On the Hill, Denmark Hill, was the hang out of choice for Alleyn’s boys like me and Anil Biltoo. I don’t think they had twigged that these fresh-faced besuited youngsters were often well below 18…or if they had twigged, at that time they didn’t care.
That “got pissed” session on my final day would doubtless have included Anil and I suspect a few others who finished their exams that day. Anyone out there remember?
The diary even for that final week of school is peppered with BBYO stuff. I was on a small National Executive with a large portfolio that year. A lot of difficult stuff had kicked off that spring, not least our sole full timer, Rebecca Lowi, was leaving on 30 June. I had agreed to run the office temporarily over the summer, while a successor was recruited, so started work on the Monday after leaving school to have a handover day with her.
It seems I spent the weekend in between leaving school and starting work with Ivor (Heller), Simon (Jacobs) and Caroline Freeman (now Curtis) on the Sunday.
But at the “day I left school” stage, that Keele element of my past was still in the future.
So, to answer Rohan’s question, “What advice would you give yourself if you could go back and talk to yourself on the day you left Alleyn’s?” I think the nub of my answer is that I would advise myself to be more reflective and thoughtful about the moment.
Yes, I had a lot going on at that time. Yes, I was psychologically in a rush to move on to fresh challenges. But I think I should have paid a little more heed at that time to the significance of the moment and reflected on that major, albeit natural, transition. And reflected on what those seven years at Alleyn’s had been about.
I have reflected on it since. Frankly, I’m not sure that reflection would have been all that profound at the time. I think it was much later that I started really to appreciate what that Alleyn’s education and those friendships, some enduring, others that resumed oh so easily, had done for me. Partly that appreciation came from growing up and partly from re-engaging with friends from school decades later. People like Rohan, Nick and many others.
But still I think that, at the time, I missed out on a “life moment” to which I can never return, by rushing away from the school that day and not looking back for years.
So, to answer Nick Wahla’s question, “What advice would you give to someone about to leave Alleyn’s?”, I’d simply say, “read this piece about the day I left Alleyn’s and try not to do it my way.”
With thanks to Mike Jones for this photograph of Bernard Rothbartnursing Mike Jones’s foot on a 1975 school field trip
In the first term of my last year at Alleyn’s School, one of our teachers, Bernard Rothbart, took his own life at the school. As I understand it, he had ingested cyanide and was discovered in his car in the school car park by some of my fellow pupils who got more than they might have bargained for when sky-larking around out of bounds. Mr Rothbart was a biology and chemistry teacher, so he must have known what he was doing in a scientific sense, but what the poor fellow’s state of mind must have been at the time is a matter for conjecture.
But the purpose of this piece is to get my personal recollections down. I remember nothing about learning of Mr Rothbart’s death, but I do clearly recall being asked to attend and then attending the funeral, at Bushey Jewish Cemetery.
I was reminded of my resolve to write up Mr Rothbart’s funeral when I received an e-mail, “out of the blue”, early summer 2020, from one of the scallywags who discovered poor Mr Rothbart, wondering whether I had got around to writing it up yet. I promised to do so, but it wasn’t until late September 2020 that I steeled myself to the task.
Sunday 9 December 1979: Went to school for rock practice and on to Mr Rothbart’s funeral. Easyish evening.
I’m struggling to recall what “rock practice” was about, but I do remember one occasion spending some weekend time in the old gym watching Mark Stevens, Neil Voce and some of their mates practicing in their nascent rock band. I’m guessing that this was that very visit and that I was taking the opportunity to see the lads rehearse as I needed to be at the school in order to join the school’s funeral party.
I’m hoping that Mark, Neil and possibly others can fill in the rock practice bit.
But a more important question in this context is, “why was I, one of Mr Rothbart’s least-distinguished chemistry students, asked…almost begged…to be one of the pupils to attend the funeral?”
The answer is almost solely based on ethnic profiling. I’m pretty sure it was John “Squeaky” Newton who asked me to attend and I’m pretty sure he fessed up to the fact that none of the teachers had the faintest idea what a Jewish funeral was about, so the brains trust had concluded that I might help them in that regard. They also thought that my presence might help put Bernard Rothbart’s poor grieving parents/family a little more at ease with the Alleyn’s School contingent.
There is an adage in the medical (surgical) world, “see one, do one, teach one”, encapsulating the need for (and sometimes disputed benefits of) trickling down experience and knowledge at high speed. Unfortunately, in this instance, by December 1979, I hadn’t yet been through the “see one” phase of attending a funeral. It is not the done thing in the Jewish tradition for minors (under 13s) to attend the funeral itself; in the four years after my 13th birthday, my family had, inconveniently, been bereavement free.
Having neither “seen one” nor “done one” before, my only available source of sage advice on such matters was my parents. Like most people in their 50s, they had experience of funerals which they were able to impart. Unfortunately,they had a significant difference of opinion as to the type of funeral I was about to experience.
Mum was adamant that, as Bernard Rothbart had committed suicide, that we would experience a much scaled down version of the funeral, as the burial of suicides in the orthodox tradition cannot take place on consecrated ground and are consequently minimal.
Dad was equally sure that there was no facility for such burials at Bushey. He suspected that the authorities in such situations often agree to a compassionate coroners’ verdict of “accidental death” in order to spare the bereaved loved ones of the further suffering resulting from a verdict, perceived to be shameful, of suicide.
Dad even consulted with his coroner friend & neighbour, Arnold Levene, who concurred with Dad’s view. They were right. Arnold was nearly always right.
Leatrice & Arnold Levene, 1975
These discussions led to several family conversations on the various ethical aspects of this matter. I’m not sure if we were philosophical/theological/logical or whatever, this was 1979 after all, the year of The Logical Song.
Anyway, it was my job on the day of the funeral to be acceptable, respectable, presentable, (but not) a vegetable. I did my best.
I was at least presentable in my Alleyn’s three-piece suit when I scrubbed up purposefully:
Me & Wendy Robbins On Westminster Bridge, Autumn 1979, the only photo I have of me in “that suit”
I remember briefing the Alleyn’s teachers and my fellow pupils as best I could. I have a feeling we went from the school by coach, but perhaps we assembled for a conversation before leaving the school and then went to the funeral in several teachers’ cars.
I don’t recall which of my fellow pupils attended. I think Chris Grant was there. I don’t know why but I can visualise Paul Driscoll being there. I suspect that this article will trigger some memories in other people who attended; I’ll amend this paragraph in due course if need be.
I do recall feeling quite numb and feeling that I didn’t really belong there. I felt a bit of a fraud, as the supposed fount of ethnic knowledge, for having had to mug up on the topic, about which I had been ignorant, in order to be that fount. A career in the professional advice business since has taught me to have no shame or fear of such situations, as long as you put the effort in to the mugging up on your subject in time.
I also felt a bit of a fraud in my capacity as one of Bernard Rothbart’s pupils. I knew I was pretty hopeless at the organic chemistry Mr Rothbart was supposed to be teaching me. Some of that hopelessness might be attributed to the teacher but most of it was down to my unwillingness to acquire the available knowledge from him.
Indeed, I remember the pangs of guilt from musing, I now realise foolishly, that it was possible that Bernard Rothbart had been driven to suicide by my utterly dismal organic chemistry mock exam paper that was (presumably) on Mr Rothbart’s desk when he died. “If I can’t even get any of this stuff across to a pupil like Harris…”
But of course I will have gone through the process of being a non-principal attendee at the Jewish funeral correctly, followed by other pupils and teachers “seeing one and then doing one” at each stage of the ceremony. Of course I will have said the right sort of thing to the principal mourners. I knew how to behave. Hopefully still do.
I know that Bernard Rothbart’s death weighs on many Alleyn’s alum’s minds. The self-violation of his mode of death. The fact that it was the first time in many of our juvenile/young adult lives that we encountered death. And that feeling of guilt, almost exclusively misguided, as Mr Rothbart had not been a popular teacher amongst the pupils. But of course we hardly knew him…or rather we only knew him in his capacity as a teacher, a career we have learnt subsequently did not please him at all. That is very sad.
I really like Mike Jones’s Lake District field trip photos from 1975. Bernard Rothbart has a smile on his face in one of them and is performing an act of kindness in the other.
Great play/production btw. The play is about the Second Red Scare in the 1950s.
It brought back to my mind a memory of playing Call My Bluff in an English class. That simple panel game had teams of three trying to convince the other team of three that “bluff” definitions of unusual words were actually true…and that true definitions were in fact bluffs.
Call My Bluff was “appointment to view” stuff in the 1970s – certainly in our household. Mind you, there wasn’t exactly a lot of choice back then.
The class version of the game was to split into teams of three and try to convince the rest of the class to vote for bluffs rather than the true definitions.
My team was given the word MCCARTHYISM. I must have recently learnt a passage of Hebrew in Hebrew classes with the word “machar” (מָחָר) in it. I quoted the short passage and explained that the word “machar” means tomorrow. I then strung out this small truth into a flight of fancy that there is a sect of Judaism, known as MCCARTHYISM, that venerates the future.
I know what you are thinking. The word would surely be spelt MACHARTHEISM if it had that definition. But such subtleties were probably beyond almost all of us at that age. I must have made the idea seem convincing.
When the class voted on the three definitions proposed for the word MCCARTHYISM, the true definition came second and my bluff got the most votes.
For some reason, this moment of smartarsed glory must have resided at the back of my memory all these decades, only to be revived by seeing Here In America.
But I also recall that, even at the time, I learnt quite a lot from this tiny episode. I learnt that using a grain of truth to disguise a lie (or bluff) is a very effective method of concealment. I learnt that nobody likes a smartarse, because the episode, while momentarily pleasing the teacher, did not make me popular with my class. And I subsequently learnt that my possession of a moral compass and my lack of a poker face would make me a very bad candidate for a future in bluffing.
But did we play that game in 1S, with Ian Sandbrook, or in 2AK with Miss Lynch? I don’t recall.
Still, McCarthyism is all about naming names and I have named names for both of those classes:
Although my 1974 diary fell silent for a few months in April 1974, I recall some aspects of my musical education from that period rather well. Alleyn’s School played a major part in that, but not the only part.
Pop Kennard, our Alleyn’s music teacher, did not do a great deal for my singing voice that year either. I recall him getting us to listen to and then try to sing Schubert’s Das Wandern in an English translation “To wander is the miller’s joy…”, which did not sound like the following in our unbroken and untrained voices:
“Take me to your lieder” – that’s what I would have said had I been familiar with the word “lieder”
My contribution to such singing in those days would have provided enthusiastic volume but would have lacked desirable sound, I am pretty sure.
I have subsequently been taking singing lessons by Zoom with “Miss Honey” since early in the pandemic and have improved beyond measure – my early efforts at improvement blogged about here:
I noted in my diaries early in 1974 that my dad invested in a high quality hi-fi at that time. He plumped for that ahead of a colour television set, which we did without for another couple of years while he saved up for one of those as well.
A fair chunk of dad’s enthusiasm for a hi-fi will have been to do with my musical education and the sense my parents will have had that my most impressive musical skill would be listening to music rather than performing it.
I’ll write separately about the small but neat collection of classical gramophone recordings my parents acquired for me and helped me to acquire. Mostly middle-brow stuff, getting me familiar with the conventional classical canon.
But one evening, dad spotted a concert being broadcast on BBC Radio and decided to get busy properly rigging up the hi-fi so that the concert might be recorded to a (then) high quality on the reel-to-reel for future listening.
Connect this beauty to the tuner and the speakers and the Sony TC377 depicted above. Simples.
Monteverdi’s eighth book of madrigals – The Madrigals Of Love And War – performed by the Monteverdi Choir and Orchestra under John Elliot Gardiner.
Why dad was so keen to record this particular broadcast I don’t really know. I think he liked the sound of Renaissance music but found it hard to relate to sacred music from that period. High quality secular music of that period was not to be heard on the radio every day.
Dad made this recording on a 5 3/4 inch spool which I still have in a dungeon somewhere and have digitised along with all of the other spools from the Harris collection.
If you want to hear what those madrigals sound like, the following recording by the Consort of Musicke is a very decent quality version – frankly more to my taste now than the Eliot Gardiner style.
Anyway, fact is that this stuff became my ear worms at the end of my first year at Alleyn’s.
What Were Supposed To Be My Ear Worms In Early June 1974? The Top Five In the Charts, That’s What.
To close this piece, here are the top 5 UK chart hits from that week in 1974.
5: There’s A Ghost In My House by R Dean Taylor became an ear worm of mine many years later, when I got into Motown and Northern Soul, but I doubt if it even entered my consciousness in 1974:
4: The Streak by Ray Stevens went on to be number one for a while and was certainly the subject of our schoolboy chatter back then. “There seems to have been some disturbance here” was a catch phrase that did the rounds then, along with the Monty Python ones. I wonder what Pop Kennard would have had to say about the music therein:
3: Hey Rock ‘n’ Roll by Showaddywaddy was most certainly an ear worm back then. This number had entirely escaped my consciousness until I reheard it just now. Now it is stuck in my ear again. It was a seriously retro number even in 1974, although not as retro as Monteverdi madrigals, obviously:
2: This Town Ain’t Big Enough For The Both Of Us by Sparks. In truth, I don’t remember this track from that 1974 period. A few years later I had a copy of this track on a compilation album and then sought out a copy of Kimono My House (the album from whence it came) which was and remains an all-time favourite of mine. Kimono My House was very much my earworm in March 1981, when the story described in the following ThreadMash performance piece was live:
1: Sugar Baby Love by The Rubettes. Another ridiculously retro sound topped the charts that week.
How did that get to number one in the charts in 1974? Yet – listen closely. Do I detect a variant of the folia progression in there? Is Sugar Baby Love, in a sense, a setting for six voices based on a tradition pioneered in 17th century madrigals? Might Paul de Vinci of the Rubettes possibly have been related to Leonardo?
Monteverdi and Pop Kennard might be turning in their respective graves.
Back then, if I wrote “Herbie” I meant this anthropomorphic vehicle…
I ran out of steam for diary entry writing towards the end of April 1974. Well, I had been doing it for nearly four months by then. I suppose I had earned a sabbatical, or perhaps I was afflicted with juvenilia-writer’s-block.
When I returned to diary-writing at the end of November 1974, I think my efforts were pretty much continuous for a further 15 years. I regret the absence of entries between May and November 1974, but there’s not much I can do about that now.
Ian Sandbrook (who was my 1S form master and is now my e-mail-pen-pal) suggests that I could ask a chat-bot to make up some entries. But that strikes me as a rather low grade task for such a pinnacle of technology. If vast amounts of processing power is going to produce confabulatory text, it should do so on matters of greater import than my 11/12 year old’s diary entries.
I might try trawling my memory and the memories of other Alleyn’s alums for tales of derring-do in the summer term of 1973/74 and the autumn term of 1974/75. I certainly have a few summer holidays memories to share from that year.
Anyway, let’s make the most of what we have left, a few rather sketchy days bringing up the end of the Easter break and the start of the summer term:
Sunday, 21 April 1974 – Classes morn. Afternoon G[randma] Anne.
Monday, 22 April 1974 – Russell [Holland] – Herbie and Run Cougar Run. A good day.
Tuesday 23 April 1974 – New [term] at school, G Jenny afternoon, Classes.
Wednesday, 24 April 1974 – Sports – fives and tennis – uneventful – all ok.
Thursday, 25 April 1974 – Latin ok.
Russell Holland was a friend from my primary school, Rosemead.
There’s Russell at our Rosemead passing out parade, left of picture. Alan Cooke (both Rosemead and Alleyn’s) is the other boy in this picture
It’s quite a childish idea, an anthropomorphic car with a mind of its own, but then the Herbie movies were Disney films. My anthropomorphic car, Dumbo, writes sensibly about all manner of things when the fancy takes him, sometimes on my blog and sometimes on King Cricket, such as the following piece about his run in with the police…
It seems I played a bit of tennis as well as cricket that summer term at Alleyn’s and it seems we started learning Latin, I think with Doggie Johnson, the junior school head.
Perhaps I am confusing my Hebrew classes with my Latin classes, but I think the lessons might have gone a bit like this:
OK, in truth my memory fades, but I still find that Life of Brian sketch one of Python’s very best. If other alums from my year wish to chime in with memories from that third term at Alleyn’s, real, false or just funny, now would be a good time.
If you need a musical memory jogger, the following was Number One and a sound you just couldn’t avoid at that time:
