Tom Greenwood Memoirs Chapter 14 – Starting at LRGS

Started 2014-09-03

Chapter 14, Starting at LRGS

 

Preamble

So I’ve now written nineteen sections, grandly called chapters, it’s September 1947, I’ll soon be eleven and I’m about to start at Lancaster Royal Grammar School, (LRGS from now on). We could say it’s the end of Part 1 and that now we’re starting Part 2.

What do you think of it so far? No, don’t tell me, I know it’s not great. I know it’s a rambling jumble, far too much trivia, not much in-depth thinking and remembering. It’s taken me nearly two and a half years; I started in February 2012. But… But nothing. Here it is. You can say it’s like the whole of my life; not a huge success, not a huge failure, but my life such as it is. As Tom Chauvin used to say, at every moment we think we’re doing our best; well, perhaps not at every single moment, but I think most of the time. What Tom Chauvin actually used to say was a bit different. He used to say, more precisely, that with every decision which we take, at the moment we take it we think it’s the right decision, even if it later turns out to have been a bad decision. (I do try to be accurate with what I’m writing; and not to bend facts for the sake of making up a better story).

I’d still like to spend more time on part one, I keep remembering more things that I think could be worth writing down. (I spent about an hour this morning playing some of the folk songs we used to sing at Hollins Grove; I found them all on YouTube. “Heigh-ho come to the fair”; “Come lasses and lads”, “The Keel Row” – in fact the teacher started teaching us that and the chorus was OK, but the verses had a lot of Northumberland dialect words in them, which our class at the time just couldn’t manage to sing, so she gave up on us; “Ye Banks and Braes of Bonny Doon;” I never realised that this was written by Robert Burns till today, …

And what I need to do soon is the read each section through, just to check the spelling and grammar, and then to print it out, basically as it is, unedited, and to mail a hard copy to each of you.

There’s the whole question of how best to include all the photographs that are around; my attempts at scanning, then copying and pasting had a mixed success, I don’t know why. And it takes forever. And there’s some thinking and analysing to be done. What sort of a person was I in 1947? What influenced me significantly?

I keep reminding myself that I’m writing this primarily, in fact solely, because Johnny asked me to, and because he continues to encourage me to keep going. And Caroline also finds it interesting. At present I’m writing just for Caroline and Johnny, but with my grandchildren in mind as well. Let’s hope that there will be something here that will interest their grandchildren in 60, 70, 80 years time.

 

Why Lancaster?

My dad was the only person who ever spoke to me, or to other people within my hearing, on this topic. He said that he/my parents had decided that it could be a good idea to send me to a boarding school because they wanted me to grow up to be really British. There was a lot of German spoken at home, and my parents felt it would be good for me to get away from this. Also, this was never said, but I think my parents were aware that they were not able to help me much if I had difficulties with my school work, and I would be better helped at boarding school. And also, we lived in a smallish three bedroomed semi; six of us, my grandparents, my parents, Jimmy and me. Finding me a suitable environment for doing my homework would have been difficult.

My dad said that he spoke about this with the local education officer, whose name I knew but can’t remember just now (perhaps Halliwell), and he suggested LRGS. It was a state grammar school so there were no tuition fees, just boarding fees; my parents were in no position to pay private schools fees. (In 1947-8 the basic boarding fee at LRGS were £75 for the year, £25 per term, or say, £2 a week). LRGS at the time had about 600 day-boys and 120 boarders, to be precise, 117 in my first term. It was four form entry, so the intake was about 120 news boys each year, 30 per form. And in fact, LRGS was the only state school in Lancashire which took boarders. So it was in a way, the automatic choice. It was said to have a good reputation, and was about 35 miles from Darwen, so there probably was no reason to search any further. And it retrospect, I must say that it was a good choice, probably the best possible given our financial limitations. Also, Darwen Grammar School was seen as not bad, but also not great, and all the brighter neighbouring kids whose parents could afford it sent their sons elsewhere, mainly to Bolton School or Queen Elisabeth’s Grammar School, Blackburn, which were both fee paying. Commuting to and from Bolton School every day was quite a trek, so I’m glad that I was spared that.

At some time in 1947 we went to LRGS to speak to the headmaster, R. R. (Robert Raymond) Timberlake, about the possibility of my going there as a boarder. What I remember best is that we were driven there and back by my dad’s works foreman at Walker Litherland, Raymond Yates – or was it Eccles? He had a pre-war Morris 8 tourer (just like my first car, so it would have been the 1936 or 7 model). We were very squeezed together. The men in front, my mum and me in the back. I can’t really remember the meeting/interview with the headmaster, but I was offered a place provided I passed the 11+ exam. When it came to taking the 11+, I took it at Darwen Grammar School with all the other kids in my class at Hollins Grove on a Saturday morning in February? 1947, but I had a quite different serial number from everyone else, as also had James Maple, who was trying for Hutton Grammar School. And so the interview at LRGS must have been well before Feb 1947, so probably in autumn 1946.

 

Getting started at LRGS

And the next thing to tell you about was the school inventory. In due course, when it was confirmed that I would be starting at LRGS in the September, we received the inventory, all the things that I would have to bring with me (together with a health certificate, another mystery to be unravelled and my ration book). I had to bring a rug to go over my bed. We had no idea what this meant. What it meant, and what every other boy had with him, or in his trunk to be precise, was a wool rug, some sort of tartan or similar, a plaid rug in other words, the right size for a single bed, which was made with a bottom sheet and a top sheet and a couple of blankets, plus the rug which just tucked in nicely all round. And so I arrived when the time came not with a rug but with a thick brown Austrian blanket with leather edging all round, rather too long and much too narrow. Very very embarrassing. And I had that non-rug on my bed at school for years, or in fact I don’t remember, parhaps only in Storey House; your brain just blocks these traumas out, doesn’t it?

Other memorable items included:

* Three ties of modest design;

* Five shirts with Cash’s name tapes stitched on “below the front”, luckily my mother       guessed right what that meant;

* A Bible and a Book of Common prayer with Hymns Ancient and Modern, (no probs in fact);

* Rugger boots; (for the summer, cricket boots);

(I arrived without any school uniform, no cap – just my old green Hollins Grove school cap,          no school tie, no blazer, no rugby shirt, shorts and socks in the house colours; the sleepless     nights, well anguish anyway,  until that got sorted out – everyone else arrived with            everything as required, or so it seemed to me; how did they know? My parents knew nothing           about all this. And anyway, all this could only be purchased from the official school outfitter,          Scott Richmond in Lancaster. My mother later knitted me a school scarf, in the right shades             of blue and black, but the stripes were completely wrong). The worst anguish was about not             having a school cap for several weeks. In fact, the anguish was entirely inside my head. No           one showed any concern. Getting new kids – we were new bugs – kitted out at the beginning             of the school year must always have taken a few weeks. And probably I was not the only       one; that was just my great fear.

* One suit (for Sundays) and two sports jackets with grey flannels; at that time school       blazers were optional.

* One tuck box (see below).

 

I suppose that my parents took me to school that first day (boarders had to arrived during the afternoon on the day before term started), but I have no memory of that. In the first year, our trunks travelled by train (PLA = Passenger Luggage in Advance), later we switched to carrier (delivery by road), which was cheaper and quicker. My trunk was pre-war Austrian and orange but functionally OK. That “first day” was just before my birthday, perhaps the 14 September. The school year always started in the week before my birthday.

The next (for me) unpleasant little incident was concerned with our name change from Grünwald to Greenwood. When we first contacted LRGS we were still Grünwald, but we became Greenwood in 1947, well before the start of the Michaelmas term; my parents asked the school to be sure to use our new name when I arrived and they said that they would, but then they didn’t. So at every roll call in the first week, in the boarding house and in every lesson with a new teacher, I had to explain that I was now Greenwood and no longer Grünwald.

And before I forget, more embarrassment. I arrived at Lancaster with my “Eisi”. This was my child security blanket equivalent. It was a small flat pillow, in fact a cot blanket? folded into four? and put into a small pillow case. I’d slept with this ever since I could remember and insisted on taking it to Lancaster with me. After the first night it was discretely put away and never seen again.

 

Storey House

The youngest junior boarders lived in Storey House, a big house adjoining the school, and that’s where I lived to start with. It was named after the Storey family who were industrialists who had owned, and at the time I suppose they still owned, factories in Lancaster; read all about the Storeys of Lancaster via Google. When I arrived, the school was just running down its prep department, I guess as a consequence of the education act of 1944. The prep department was for 8 to 10 year-olds (like Altrincham prep) and took boys for three years to prepare for the “scholarship exam” for the Grammar School. After 1944, grammar school places became free and there was no more scholarship exam, and LRGS just became a free Grammar School for 11 to 18 year olds. I’m pretty vague about that to be honest, (in Darwen at the time I was at Hollins Grove, no one spoke about the 11+ exam, it was always called the Scholarship Exam, at least by us kids), but in September 1947 when I arrived at LRGS, the first year of the prep department, called the Prep Class had disappeared but the second year (Lower 1) and third year (Upper 1) still existed. So at that time Storey House accommodated two kids from Lower 1, Hutchinson and Summers if you’re interested, eight kids from Upper 1, and 14 kids starting grammar school; and this explains why you went into the 2nd form in year one of secondary school. And so also, of us 14 kids in the second form, perhaps nine or ten were new, and four or five had come through the prep department and had already done for example some Latin.

Another thing about LRGS (and Storey House in particular), is that, as it was the only state grammar school in Lancashire with a boarding house, a succession of kids were sent there because it would thought that they would benefit from a boarding school environment, i.e. because they were “difficult”. So along with the kids for whom boarding school worked, there was a number of kids who arrived and after a term, a year or a few weeks or whatever, disappeared after having had various sorts of behavioural problems. (Brindle, Kirkham, Robin Bowman (with whom I was friends, very preoccupied by the fact that he was adopted, sometimes had uncontrollable rages), R. B. Brown with whom I practised Jiu-Jitsu, as Judo was called at the time, …) It was only years later that I realised that this explained these sudden exits. There were also “normal” kids who were boarders because their father had been killed in the war, or their mother had died and the mother/father couldn’t manage of her/his own, or again because their parents were working for the colonial service.

Storey House was on three floors. On the ground floor there was a big day room with our lockers where we kept all our school books and equipment, a sitting room with sofas and arm chairs, and a small library, and a “kitchen” with an open fire when it was cold, a big table where we all left our shoes to be cleaned, and a jumble of our 24 tuck boxes. The day room was big enough for all 24 boys to be sitting at tables or desks on Sunday mornings between after-breakfast, say 8.45, and the time to go to morning church, say 10.15, to write their weekly letter home. I think there was a table tennis table as well but don’t bet on it. A man called George Burrows, a WWI veteran with a few tales to tell, came every day to clean all our shoes.

Most kids had sort of standard issue tuck boxes which could be bought from shops which sold stuff like tuck boxes to the posh parents who sent their kids to public school. (Storey House had a bit of a public school aura, we used public school slang, people like the matron, Miss Dugdale had incredibly, yes incredibly posh accents…) But not all the kids had incredibly OK tuck boxes.  Greenwood for one. Mine was just about the right shape and size, about 2 feet by 1 foot by 1 foot, a bit bigger perhaps, but it was in fact a wall cupboard that had been adapted … and painted red. But it had my initials on it, not that it could be mistaken for anybody else’s, and it was lockable. And it had a handle at each end so that it could be lifted and stacked as needed. Anyway, we were allowed to keep tuck, biscuits, sweets, cakes, etc., in our tuck boxes, although most tuck boxes were empty most of the time. And we were allowed to receive tuck parcels from home. The arrival of a tuck parcel was a great but all too rare occasion, after all, everything with sugar in it was still rationed. And the best way to be unpopular was not to share out, more or less, your tuck.

On the first floor there was a big bath-room, Miss Dugdale’s room and Dorms 1 and 2, with 4 and 6 beds respectively and on the second floor there was the so-called Dorm 3 which was in fact the sick room, and Dorms 4, 5,and 6, which had respectively 4, 4 and 6 beds. The ten kids that were still in the Prep Department in 1947/8 slept in Dorms 5 and 6. Everyone had a bedside locker which held a chamber pot (a pee-po), and a Mrs Baker came round every morning to empty them and (I hope) to rinse them out.

There were lots of rules, no doubt necessary, but one, (certainly I) was often just anxious that one was about to be punished for breaking some rule that one didn’t know about. The whole of upstairs in Storey House was out of bounds during the day. We were woken by a hand bell rung by Miss Dugdale, always called Nix, at 7.30, and we had to put on our vests and underpants and run down to the bathroom to wash our hands and faces and to clean our teeth; then to get dressed and to make our way up to the boarder’s dining hall in time for breakfast at 7.55. Am I going to describe the whole school day? Well at least it’s worth saying a bit about the food.

Most things changed very little between 1947 when I arrived and 1955 when I left, apart from the cooks. And one more aside: the main cook when I arrived, I soon found out, was a Viennese woman called Mrs Engel, like us a Jewish refugee; I arranged for my parents to see her the first time that they came to visit me, and it turned out that they had known each her slightly in Vienna and had had a number of mutual acquaintances. Don’t say, “What a small world!”

We sat at tables of about ten in the dining hall, everyone was assigned to a table by seniority. There was three Storey House tables, not the same size, and there was a prefect at each (Storey House) table. Not at all the others. On about my second day, the prefect at our table, called Haw, took one look at me and called me Froggy. I don’t know why, I wore glasses, perfectly normal ones, but so did several other kids. And I was Froggy, in the boarding house, for the next eight years. No one was called by their Christian name, either you were called by your surname or your nickname. And at Old Lancastrian gatherings even thirty years later, people who had been boarders and had known me, still automatically called me Froggy. We only got onto first name terms with people who were real friends and only when we were older, e.g. sixteen or over. There were exceptions but not many.

Anyway, breakfast consisted of porridge four days a week and corn flakes the other three. The porridge was cooked overnight in steamers – that’s what we thought anyway. There was no porridge on Sunday and Monday mornings, presumably because there was no one to make it the previous evening, and for some reason also on Wednesdays. It wasn’t too bad, and was served, as the corn flakes, with milk and sugar. This was followed with something to be eaten with a knife and fork. Always on half a slice of toast or fried bread, scrambled egg, or baked beans or fried tomatoes or bacon or a sausage or … Never very much. Occasionally a few lucky people got seconds. Plus plates of buttered bread and big jugs of disgusting stewed tea with milk and sugar already added. There was a revolt against the tea at one time, and then they took care to make the tea at the last minute and it was served black with milk and sugar separate so you would add as much as you wanted yourself. There was also a revolt against the awful, often old, bread and butter, and after that reasonably fresh loaves of bread was put on each table with a bread board and a bread knife, with a butter/margarine mixture in a separate dish. The person who served out the meals, and was generally in charge of the dining room was Agnes, a middle aged woman whom we mostly tried to get on the good side of, because that way you sometimes got more to eat. She prepared the butter/margarine dishes for every breakfast and tea (the evening meal) by putting first the butter then the margarine on top and squashing them together so that no one could just have butter. Tea, at 5.45 p.m. I think was like breakfast but with no porridge or corn flakes. Something on toast/fried bread and bread and jam. There was also a piece of cake each on Sundays. You were allowed to bring your own jam/Marmite/honey/fish paste/etc., with you at breakfast and tea time. There was a special jam cupboard where the Storey House kids could keep theirs in the dining hall. Lunch, at 1 p.m., was some sort of meat and two veg (of which one was almost always boiled potatoes) plus something and custard. Everyone went to first prep after tea, from something like 6.30 till 8.00, when you did your homework.