Here are a few random memories…
• The time when Ken Clements (I think) sat
through a whole lesson in his underpants and nothing else, for a bet. I cannot
remember who the accommodating teacher was.
• Drinking our 1/3 pints of milk in the
quadrangle during the mid morning break. In the winter they were frozen and in
the summer almost gone off in the heat. I particularly remember talking about
the Cuban missile crisis one such mid morning.
• Doing detention involved writing lines over and over, for an hour, I think.
I cannot remember my misdemeanours apart from ‘I must wear my school cap. I must wear
my school cap. I must wear my school cap……’
• I had previously been at St. Peter’s primary
school where I had been good at most things. When I started at FGS, I was put in
the top stream in class 1C. For many years I floundered at 30th or 31st out of
31 in every subject except woodwork.
• Latterly, I spent a lot of time involved in
the drama society as stage manager
and really enjoyed organising practical things. I think my only mention in any school
publication ever was in the 1966 FGS Annual Record which refers to the Browning Version play and
to ‘Webb, who proved himself to be a first-class stage director as well as a master carpenter’.
• The corrugated cadet building in which was the rifle range. Outside, people regularly
practiced the bugle, playing the same few notes, over and over, badly.
• Several of us started a recorder group instead of playing soldiers on Friday afternoons.
We got together in the music room outside the armoury. There was some reason why we thought it had been
agreed. We must have got away with it for quite a few weeks until Mr/Major
Thomas found us and we had to go back to marching and boot polishing. I don’t remember any punishment.
Maybe he understood why we preferred playing recorders to soldiers; but probably not.
• Staying at Holiday Fellowship accommodation on our geography field trip and singing ‘Big Fat Nat’ at the tops
of our voices to the accompaniment of the single ‘Big Bad John’ by Jimmy Dean.
Meanwhile, teacher Nat, whose surname I cannot remember, smiled benevolently.
• It was not until about the third form that we started wearing long trousers instead of shorts.
• An early sentence in the Latin book about the Roman Centurions thrusting their hands into the fire of a burning brassière (brazier).
How we sniggered. But it still seems a strange thing for Centurions to do.
• I was pretty good at running and was selected several times to run at the annual mixed sports at the army sports
ground mid-way between North Camp and Aldershot. The lunchtimes were
particularly interesting for innocent grammar school boys (like me) because
things happened in the absence of any apparent adult supervision.
• My school cap was buried at the top of Cader Idris in Wales. I went on a cycling holiday with
Tim Hughes, a year above me, presumably at the end of my last compulsory
cap-wearing year.
• I still have my very tatty school tie, complete with a ‘Webb’ label stitched
on the back and a school scarf. I have now also found my prefect’s tie.
Mike Webb - 11th August 2008