Started 09/07/2015
Chapter 16 LRGS 1947-1949 What else?
So what else was there besides school classes and boarding? Well there was sport. In the winter, the Michaelmas and Lent terms, there was – officially – rugger, cross country running,… and that was about it. Unofficially there were endless games of soccer when and wherever the opportunity presented itself, every day of the week, mornings, afternoons, evenings. I found my natural position as left full back. That way I was never expected to take shots at goal which I would certainly have botched every time.
The walls of the Bell Room – the first classroom on the right on entering Big School, and where we had maths with Lemmy, and where the RCs and latecomers waited during morning assembly, and which had a side door which opened onto an outside staircase where there was the bell that called the boarders to their meals – the walls of the Bell Room were covered with school team photographs going back to – I can’t remember – but a long time, perhaps to 1910. These included photographs of school soccer teams, – the jerseys were in halves (like Blackburn Rovers but presumably in the school colours of blue and black). But these were photographs from long ago. Soccer had long since been abolished, and was never mentioned and strongly disapproved of in official circles, in other words, within hearing distance of RRT, Joss.
In the summer term there was cricket, swimming, athletics, and later on, rowing.
How did this affect me in the first two years? Well, I spent a lot of time doing sport because, especially for boarders, much of it was compulsory. There were the “organised games” on the time- table (only in the first year and possibly the second), then pretty well every Wednesday and Saturday afternoon all the time I was at LRGS, (runs if there was nothing else), and informal non-compulsory soccer or cricket whenever there was some spare time. I was never the worst, but was one of the group just better than the worst. I knew exactly where I’d be picked in pick-up games. There were table tennis tables here and there, ditto darts, later tennis, and, I could say: etc., etc., etc.
I liked games well enough but just lacked the necessary coordination between hand and eye in ball games, and was also mediocre at running, whatever the distance, athletics, swimming… I had a moment of glory in my first year in the school sports; I qualified for the final of the Under 12s 100 yards. However, on the big day at the school sports, even in borrowed running spikes, I finished fifth out of six. A kid in my form called Iain Geddes won and the dreaded Brindle (more later) was last. The last I heard about Iain who was a contemporary of mine at Cambridge was that he got thrown out because he repeatedly failed a not very difficult chemistry exam that all medics at the time were required to pass. As I’ve already said and as is a well known fact, being undistinguished at games is to put it mildly no fun at all. I would so much have liked to be reasonably good. So I’m not going to write a lot about that.
One memorable moment, memorable to my Mum anyway, was when I was competing in the heats for throwing the discus; this would have been something like May 1949. My parents had come to see me that day, no doubt a Saturday afternoon, and they saw my first effort with the discus and then heard the master say to me, “You can go now Greenwood; there’s no need to come back”. (I was entitled to two further attempts, but I didn’t insist).
We also had to watch the school teams playing against other schools for all their home games; this was compulsory for us boarders; and we were expected to provide vocal support, but only in the form of a repeated long drawn out “Schooooooooooooool”.
Then there were punishments; and of course, offences which were said to merit punishment. There were two regimes, one for everyone during school, and one for boarders everywhere else.
There were very few incidents of bad behaviour during school. If you were late for school you sometimes got a detention, referred to as a drill, when you just had to sit in the Bell Room for half or three quarters of an hour. Similarly, if you fooled around during lessons for example, you might have to come back after school for a detention. All this was extremely rare. Masters dealt with their own misbehaviour problems but there really was very little misbehaviour. There were very occasionally fights and even here the protagonists with just separated by the first master on the scene.
There was one delicious incident much later, during a chemistry lessons perhaps in the 5th or Lower 6th form. It happened in my year but not in my form. (It happened in the Science stream; I was in the Biology stream). So this is all second hand, I think from John Meeks, and then from everyone else. They were in the New Chemistry Lab, and the master, Jasper Files, went out of the class for some reason. One kid, a boarder of course, called Robinson, climbed onto a lab bench, with his back to the door, and began reciting Eskimo Nell. He was know to be able to recite all 40 is so verses. I’ve no idea what sparked this off this recitation. But there he was, verse after verse of the most disgusting obscenities, when Jasper quietly came back in. Everyone saw him except Robinson, who just carried on, until he sensed something. Then he turn round and saw Jasper… who just told him to go back to his seat. And the chemistry lesson continued. And Jasper was known to be very strict and not to tolerate any misbehaviour. End of delicious incident.
In the boarding house things were different. The boarding house rules were very numerous, and mercilessly enforced by most of the prefects. Some (a few) prefects were more relaxed, as were most of the masters. In the junior school, i.e. for the “under 14s”, there was the notch system. A notch was a black mark. There were four notch lists on the main house notice board, because there were four house-masters and all of us were allocated to a house-master. There was Buxton and Dickenson already mentioned, my house-master Cheesy Randall, a maths master, and one more who I can’t remember. You were given notches for offences such as horse-play, talking after lights-out, lateness, running in corridors, insubordination, bad manners, being “out of bounds”…, and double notches for more serious offences like insolence, (even “dumb insolence”) laughing during prayers. Now that I’m trying, I can’t think of so many offences, but there were plenty. At the end of each week, it was the time for the reckoning. If you had no or one notch, it was OK. If you had more than one, you were summoned by your house-master. For two or three notches, you was given some lines to write or a poem or a passage from Shakespeare to learn off by heart. If you had four or more, you were normally tanned, typically four shots. On the other hand, things were unpredictable and you, at least I, never knew where you/I stood. Once at the end of prep, Joss wasn’t there and Cheesy Randall took the prayers. I giggled a bit with the person I was with, and I was straight away made to come to Randall’s study and tanned.
After you’d been tanned you had black and blue stripes on you bum for quite a while though it didn’t hurt for very long.
There were rules for everything. No doubt mostly reasonable. You were allowed to go to three designated local shops to buy ice cream, buns, etc., between 4.15 and 5.30 pm on week days, (sweets and chocolate were still rationed). You were allowed to go into Lancaster once a week, after getting permission, also between 4.15 and 5.30 pm; you had to sign out and in again. Otherwise you were not allowed out at all unsupervised. You were not allowed in the dormitories except for the night. You were not allowed even to touch someone else’s bed.
There were rules about always arriving on time wherever you were meant to be, about not talking or whispering or giggling or bad language, about anything like pushing, queue jumping, etc, etc.
(There was no way of telephoning anyone by the way).
Parental visits were allowed ad hoc, but were mostly on Sundays. My parents would come one or twice a term, also mostly on a Sunday. These visits were allowed between from after (not bad, “ between from after”) church, say, 12 noon until before evening service at 6.30 pm. Jimmy was born in April 1947, and so was about five months old where I started at LRGS and two when I moved up from Storey House to Big School. I can’t remember him coming with my parents when he was so small, so I guess he stayed at home with my grandparents and it was just my mum and dad who came. All the kids being taken out would be waiting in East Road, having signed out, (the juniors in front of Storey House) for their parents to arrive; some parents were already waiting as we came out of the morning service, but my parents were never early and usually one of the last to arrive. Very frustrating for me!
Being taken out would begin a drive to somewhere, mostly Morecambe, firstly for lunch, then perhaps a walk or a look around, some sort of “tea” and back to school. As I sit here thinking hard, I can remember very little about these outings. I, everyone, or so it seemed, would look forward to these parental visits with great longing and excitement, and afterwards, one said one had had a marvellous time, but objectively, I would say they were OK but really not so great.
Apart from school lessons I was exposed to “culture” in a way that didn’t happen at home. A number of plays were produced in the school each year, the school play, often a boarders’ play and/or a staff play. All good stuff which I liked very much. In the first two years, I saw “Arms and the Man” by G. B. Shaw, “Tobias and the Angel” by James Bridie (didn’t know the name of the playwright till I just looked it up!), “Julius Caesar” (Shakespeare’s), “The Government Inspector” by Gogol,.. In those days, all these plays apart from the the staff plays, where wives and girl friends were co-opted – I think – had an all male cast. This provoked surprisingly little mirth, and was, to me at least, largely successful and satisfactory – in the circumstances. A boarder called Pigg played the Chocolate Cream Soldier in Arms and the Man, and he took a bit of ragging about that. Other possibilities like joint productions with Lancaster Girls’ Grammar School (LGGS) only came much later. So all in all, over my seven years and two terms at LRGS, I must have seen getting of for twenty decent plays. A good thing.
In my first or possibly second year, (1947-1949), – or possibly, in fact definitely, later, a light opera was produced for the first time ever, “The Pirates of Penzance”, by Gilbert and Sullivan; the following year “HMS Pinafore,” … and on to Smetana’s “Bartered Bride”, a joint production with LGGS in early 1955. Again, I really enjoyed all these a lot, and was very pleased to have become familiar with them all in some detail. Some of the parts – in the plays as well as the other productions were acted/sung by friends… The Pirate King, definitely not a soprano part, was sung by John Foulds, not a great friend, but in my form all the way through school including the Biology sixth – he went on the do medicine. And he was not in the Alpha stream to start with. (I’m trying to be accurate even when it’s trivial and unnecessary, just for the sake of being accurate.) He sang bass, so must heve been at least fourteen.
As I’ve already mentioned elsewhere, there were also visits to hear the Hallé and Liverpool Phil on tour – mostly the Halle, but also the Boyn Neel String Orchestra, always in Lancaster Town Hall; and opera and ballet in Morecambe – I guess Carmen and Les Sylphides were in the the early years. But I must say the years do blur. There was no school orchestra till later, after I’d left.
I can for example remember a kid called Ian Howie, aged eleven; I’d have been twelve at that time, raving about Greig’s Piano Concerto (a very young Peter Katin was the soloist with the Hallé). That was the first time that I’d heard wild enthusiasm about “classical” music and I was impressed. A significant step in growing up.
Another thing is that quite early on, the school acquired a decent film projector, and then once or twice a term there would be a good quality French film for the boarders (no English sub-titles). Dr Knock, Kameradschaft (a 1931 drama about German-French cooperation after a coal mining disaster on the French/German border)…
So, all in all, I really can thank LRGS to giving me an introduction to live drama, opera and operetta, ballet, orchestral music, French cinema in a way that I found very positive and enjoyable.
Next door to Storey House there was another house called Lee House, which was where the biology department was located. As well as classrooms, there was a small collection of live animals there, always referred to as the menagerie. Perhaps this was what sparked off the craze in Storey House for keeping rodents. All of a sudden the cellar in Storey House had been cleared, redecorated and made decent, and many of us acquired cages, some with treadmill style wheel, plus two or more pet mice or hamsters – all obviously with permission. I had a cage and two mice, a black one and a white one; perhaps they had names but I don’t remember. For some weeks I fed and watered them, took them out to stroke them or to play with from time to time, cleaned out their caged and changed their bedding. We played with them in the Storey House cellar where their cages were kept, in the kitchen and occasionally of the roof of the air raid shelter which was adjacent to the back wall of Storey House in the Headmaster’s garden. You could climb onto that back wall easily enough and then jump across a small gap onto the air raid shelter roof. Sometimes there were lots of mice and a few hamsters running around on that roof.
One morning I found my two mice dead, cuddled up together in the sleeping compartment of their cage. What a horrid surprise! They were fine the previous evening and now they were dead, for no apparent reason. So I threw them into the kitchen fire which was conveniently blazing away at the time, end of story. Except to say that there were many mouse deaths in Storey House at that time, and apart from mine, the vast majority got a decent Christian burial. There was a row of graves marked with crosses by the air raid shelter, and regular funeral services using the book of Common Prayer. Final end of story. End of craze.
We were kept healthy in Storey House through regular visits from the chiropodist, a Mr. Midgeley – a wiz at spotting and cutting out verrucas – and the daily check on our bowel movements. And all the way through school we were given a daily cod liver oil capsule and a vitamin C tablet at breakfast; and also two or three mornings a week, a fruit at breakfast. I’m glad to say that I had no health problems at the time. Dental check-ups and treatment was for the holidays. I did have chilblains on my toes quite badly every winter, I would say from the age of 7 to 14; then I seem to have grown out of them. Once I was prescribed some tiny pink pills that made me go very hot all over. I suppose they were meant to boost the blood circulation to the extremities. I must say that I’m very glad that you two never had that to suffer from (the chilblains, not the pink pills.) Maybe it was just because you didn’t have such freezing cold feet so much of the time.
What else do I remember vividly? All the excitement and passion about football teams and football results, mainly Preston North End, Blackpool, Burnley, … the only other Blackburn Rovers supporter was a kid in my year and class called Hindle. Ditto cricket; we mostly were crazy about Lancashire. Lots of games of “Owzat”, a cricket game with two … never mind. I’ll explain if you really want me to. All the scores were immaculately recorded in real cricket scoring books.
How did we know the scores? I seem to remember that there was a Rediffusion radio in Storey House, a mains radio on which you could just receive two programmes, the BBC Home Service and the Light Programme. (Read all about Rediffusion – cable radio – on Wikipedia if you’re interested.) That’s where we heard the football results
Greenwood family history 