I was as at FGS from 1966 to 1971 when I left at the age of 16 to start an
engineering apprenticeship with BEA at Heathrow.
My first year at the school wasn’t so bad as,
despite Latin and French lessons
started (which I hated), I could attend metalwork and woodwork classes
which I really enjoyed. I can’t quite remember the name of the teacher
in these areas (was it Pascoe?) but he was revered for having built his own
house in Farnborough.
Then things became a lot worse in the second year. Because I had a good
end of year result I was promoted to a higher stream which meant no more
woodwork or metalwork but extra languages instead. Compounding this
disappointment was the violent attitude of Jo Thomas (JT) who used to throw
hard blackboard rubbers at pupils for making even the simplest mistakes.
If memory serves I think JT used to teach Latin as well as lead the CCF. I
remember having a rubber thrown at me hard for stumbling over reciting all of
the many past participles of a Latin verb. This made me think the punishment for
not turning up at lessons might not be any worse than the risk of injury from
attending!
Attendance registers at individual lessons didn’t seem to be a great forté of
FGS and I found I could quite easily miss any lessons I didn’t like (mainly
Latin and German) and either pretend to be studying in the library or skip over
the fence to The Grange next door (defunct military accommodation from the war)
or walk up to Fernhill. Then, get back in time for the lessons I
enjoyed. I became quite expert at this and nobody really noticed.
As for the CCF I would have loved to have got into “Masher Mansfield’s MT
Section” but that was for the favoured few. In the end I got into the Duke
of Edinburgh’s Award (DEA) section and out of the CCF for good. DEA
was great. We rarely saw a master and more or less did what we wanted on
Friday afternoons, instead of CCF, or even walked home early ahead of the bus.
Back to JT though and I also remember a couple of the lads at school (I can’t
remember their names) started a “Jo must go” campaign. They arranged
things like a “bonfire arrangement of desks and chairs” and a “Jo must go”
message on the blackboard before his lessons started. The pinnacle of
their achievement was when they painted the message in white paint in two
feet high letters all over the CCF hut in the playing field! From memory I
think the whole school was punished for that one.
Dear old Jo used to say in his Latin lessons that, in Ancient Rome, the crime
wasn’t in stealing food when you were starving but in being caught. I
think a lot of us put this into practice so he did teach us all that at least.
Mike Clarke - 28th August 2020