A note to let you know how much I enjoyed reading your F.G.S.
web pages, especially the item about
Nuncs who tried to teach me Latin for three years.
Chris Drew and I once visited
Nuncs at his home in Crookham (possibly summer
1967). He had a pipe organ in his house. When I enquired if the noise upset his
neighbours he replied that the neighbour on one side was deaf and the one on the
other side was mad!
Regarding Dr. Sewell; I don't know if he was actually alcoholic, but when he took
our form for maths in our fourth(?) year (about 1963/4) the people at the front
of the class said he reeked of whisky fumes during first lessons after lunch. I
had a hard time with him. My arithmetic was always poor and he ridiculed me
publicly for it. On one occasion when I checked my work carefully and corrected
some errors, he accused me of “cookery” (i.e. copying from someone else) which I
found offensive, since it wasn't true. In general, he was very damaging to
moral. I think he was generally disliked.
I was put in detention by The Jab when I was a prefect. I was
greatly offended, and thought it was not my fault. A number of us had turned up
at Mr. Jones’ biology lab. For some reason he shouted at us very loudly (as was
his wont) when we arrived and told us to go away and do something else because
he was too busy to teach us (perhaps he had been asked to cover for someone
else). So we went down to the main field to play cricket, thinking it was
legitimate. Then The Jab walked down and got in a rage with us for playing
cricket during school time, ordered us up to his office, and put us all in
detention, prefects and all. As far as I can remember, he never gave us a chance
to blame Mr. Jones. I suppose we should have known better.
At the end of my first year, The Jab wrote very negative remarks on the end of my report, saying I was
almost bottom of the Form, and that I would have to work much harder if I wanted to stay in such a
good Form. My father was pretty annoyed about his attitude, and wrote back to say that I had been
working very hard and that Dr. Bourne obviously didn’t have a clue about about who I was or how hard
I was working (I don’t remember if I was really working hard, but I ended up at a better university
than a lot of the others in that Form).
You won’t remember Mr. Shaw, the German teacher - we used to call him the ‘Mekon’
in about 1964 because of obvious resemblances to the Dan Dare character. I had a detention from him
for muttering ‘Mekon’ too loudly.
I laughed aloud at the ‘Dikalogue’ - it brings so much back to mind. I remember
RK lessons in one of the temporary classrooms on the East Field (the
southernmost classroom). On one occasion we found it entertaining to push open
the fire door at the back of the room, slip out and come back in (repeatedly)
through the main door, probably apologising for lateness each time. On another
occasion, I remember the air being full of flying balls of screwed-up paper, at
least one of which bounced off Mr. Richard's nose (and he never commented). I
remember him saying once or twice how much he admired Jews. How on earth could
he have stood the job for so long? In my later years there, he seemed to address
himself exclusively to one or two “goody-two-shoes” sitting at the front of the
room, ignoring the mayhem going on all around.
He was replaced by Mr. Holley in about 1965/6. Mr. Holly was bearded. He was a
much sterner proposition. I remember Mike Webb having a philosophical argument
with him.
The first name of Mr. Smith (Reg or Reggie) was Reginald. He taught my mother
before he taught me. She said they were all scared of him, and I also found him
frightening. (He gave me a detention in my first lesson with him in my first
week at F.G.S., for poking a friend with a ruler through the
hand-hole in his lab
stool). I expect we found it entertaining (but wouldn't have dared to laugh)
when he taught us about “regelation” by suspending two weights joined by wire
across the top of a huge block of ice. Lessons with him were characterized by
silence and fear (not very good for learning). My mother was at school with Tom
Pascoe.
Mark Rayne : October 2011
Mark also contributed the invaluable photograph of The Jab which heads the Home page and may be seen in greater detail here.