Alex Riley (G 61-65) recalls his years at school:

“I hugely enjoyed reading John West’s reminiscences in previous issues and they have triggered some of my own. Mind you, it took me a while to recover from the shock of discovering that he actually uses his FIRST NAME! Surname: no problem; even initials I could accept (my 50-year-old memory recalls J.A.), but a first name? There were only two or three boys out of the 250 at the school I called by their first name. I hope that has changed! (It has. Ed.)

Mind you, the fate of several was to be known throughout their school careers by nicknames. You had little privacy in those days. The dress code for the swimming pool was naked - a rule only waived for inter-school swimming competitions. A boy whose private parts were in any way unusual could expect a cruel nickname. I shudder at the memory of some of these.
John (this is a real effort!) and I led completely separate existences except that we both spent our first year at Meadow House. The legacy is with me to this day. I only have to hear the opening sequence of any Buddy Holly song and I am word perfect all the way through. Anyone who shared a dayroom with him will have had the same experience (I now have all these songs on CD!)

I enjoyed my time at St Bees. It was a healthy environment. I would play fives for two hours a day (including weekends). Punishments were invariably ‘runs’. We wore shorts all the year round. There was plentiful food (I was at Grindal). My fitness level, like most of my contemporaries, was phenomenal. When I had a chest X-ray recently they were concerned that I had an enlarged heart. They eventually accepted that this was due to my fitness level as a youth.

There was something otherworldly about the school. Alcohol, tobacco and television played no part in our lives. The internet, CDs, mobile phones, Personal Computers and electronic games machines had not been invented. Apart from radios and gramophones we had to entertain ourselves. My pocket money was £3 a term. Goodness me, how we missed girls! I am very envious of today’s St Beghians!

I share John’s view that we were lucky in our masters. I can honestly say that for every exam I sat there I could answer every single question. At university I discovered that everyone else had only done 70% of any syllabus, in order to improve their exam grades. St Bees should pride itself on the way it provided us with a real education. I still marvel at the commitment of the masters and the time most of them put in to extra-curricular activities. I was saddened to hear that three of them had recently died and I will start with them.

Tony Cotes (bizarrely, masters were often referred to, but never to their face, by first names). He taught me Latin and was my housemaster at Grindal. We both started there at the same time. He found it very difficult at first because he was following on from Sam Parkinson, who had been popular.  Gradually he and we bedded down. He was slightly gaffe prone, which was rather endearing. As in (Vth form Latin class): ‘Right, this is one of the most famous pieces in the whole of Caesar, ‘Gallia est divisa in tres partes’ (any errors are mine!). ‘Gaul is quartered into three halves.’ (indignantly) ‘Why are you all laughing?’ Not much was accomplished in the rest of that lesson. He also knew when to back off, as in the middle of a Latin lesson: ‘Riley, what are you doing?’ ‘I am dismantling my watch, sir’ (watches in those days were mechanical). ‘You will translate the next paragraph.’ This I somehow did with quite a degree of fluency. ‘Riley, you may continue dismantling your watch.’

I never had Herbert Batey as a teacher who, as a PhD nuclear physicist, found schoolboy maths somewhat trivial. There can be few more unenviable positions than that of school chaplain with a flock of cynical adolescent boys. No-one, however, ever questioned the sincerity of his faith. Even now, as a complete atheist, I remain impressed by the fifty-year-old memory of the religious belief that radiated from him. There are several instances of boys hearing him shout ‘Hallelujah’.

I had very little to do with Mr Lees, who became Head during my time. We saw him as a rather aloof figure - no bad thing for a Headmaster - and I was glad to read that that changed after I had left. I have one memory which encapsulated his enigmatic side. He encountered one of my Grindal contemporaries shortly after becoming Head. ‘You, boy, what’s your name?’ ‘McFee, sir.’ (for so it was. Then a slight pause, whilst staring deep into the boy’s eyes) ‘I’ll accept that’.
 
My main teacher was David Lyall. I loved maths and ended up doing pure and applied at ‘A’ level.  My goodness, it was not easy! I sat at the back while he taught the regular ‘A’ level class and then timeshared by coming across to teach me while they were solving a problem. What a treat: one-to-one teaching! He was an inspiring teacher who made the subject sound as if he actually found it quite challenging (it can be very discouraging if the teacher clearly finds it easy when you don’t). He played a major part in the love of mathematics that became my career.

My other ‘A’ level teacher was Eric ‘Stankey’ Middleton. Every once in a while you would walk into the lab and he would have completely covered a wide blackboard with equations in which the conditions for the chemical reaction were all specified, but virtually every compound on the board was a question mark. It must have been the most extraordinary labour of love for him to work all this out in advance, but for us it would lead to a whole period of detective work, which I adored. In the VIth you got your own small locker and personal set of test tubes. One day he asked me what was in the beaker in mine. Nervously I explained that I was keen to salvage the silver from old 35mm films (I was a keen photographer). The image was silver bromide and I reasoned that conc. Nitric acid should be just the ticket to dissolve it. So I had a few old films covered in this liquid. He explained very gently that the basis for film was glycerine and that nitroglycerine, a high explosive, might just result from my ‘experiment’. He managed to do this in a way that almost commended my initiative, rather than lecturing me for my recklessness. He was an inspiration and I would have loved to do Chemistry as a degree - except that I had taken against the (very capable) new head of Physics and wouldn’t do Physics ‘A’ Level.  Any university Chemistry course required Physics ‘A’ Level, so I had to pursue Maths instead. Which worked out OK!

Donald Leggatt, our choirmaster, was a very talented musician and the commitment he put in was phenomenal. We had weekly choir practices, local performances (e.g. in Carlisle), special services in the Priory and the St Bees Festival, where daily concerts were held during the Easter holidays. I also owe him a debt of gratitude for the time he spent working with me on a potential singing career. I remember his leaving a restless fourth form completely gobsmacked by playing a Tchaikovsky symphony on the piano from a miniature score. My key choral memory was being driven by Don with two other boys (Robinson, bass and Steve Lees, tenor, I think) to sing the Byrd three part mass at a retreat near Kendal. The whole evening was entrancing. Singing such music at one voice per part in a small chapel was amazingly intimate. The performance was followed by getting to know the participants at the retreat and a stunning meal afterwards. Wow!

Many of us were avid trainspotters and there were still steam locomotives around in those days. The engine that came up early in the morning would also head the 11.27 back southwards. Many is the time I got into trouble for being late for an 11.30 lesson when there was a special locomotive at the helm. One Saturday we had a supreme treat: 46100 ‘Royal Scot’, buffed up to the nines, spent the afternoon at St Bees’ station, prior to pulling a special. We were ecstatic, clambering around this exquisite and pristine machine. Anthony ‘Spiv’ Dearle, whom I knew quite well but who never taught me, was a great asset to the school. As well as being a stalwart of the choir he was a major railway buff and I hate to think how many ‘railway club meetings’ he sat through on Saturday evenings. He knew I was a steam fanatic and donated me a rich gift: an Ian Allen combined (i.e. all regions) locomotive manual from just before they started to scrap all the steam engines. I was amazed then at his generosity, and still am!

Languages were competently taught by ‘Lem’ Parkinson (French) and Philip Lever (German). Lem had the clever idea of creating his own nickname by inverting his own first name (Samuel). Having heard some of the boys’ nicknames this was probably a sound policy. He must have had a bit of a soft spot for me because he gave me a nickname - ‘Bentley’ - doubly precious because it was the only nickname in the school that constituted an upgrade! For all that, Lem was a fierce, old school, disciplinarian. I remember clowning a bit in one of his classes. He came up behind me and hit the back of my head with his hand as hard as he could. I was dazed for the rest of the class.

 ‘P L’ (I think also his own nickname) taught German (not without a few idiosyncrasies - as I found when I went to live there); but being able to recite the declensions of ‘der’ and ‘ein’ -  as we all could - was a fantastic starting point for really learning German. And how many generations of old boys still remember ‘und dann, verb, subject’?

I want to tell a story about a master called Mr Francis, because I have never seen this story told by anyone else. One Sunday evening at ‘shed’ the school was abuzz. The Mountaineering Society had gone out under him and one of the boys (I believe it was the elder Slack) had lost his footing and was falling to likely death. Mr Francis was at the top and held onto the rope even though it burnt his hand very badly. From that day on he was viewed with considerable respect. Would we have passed this test?

Another master I had very little to do with was Mr Johnson (‘Jonce’), who taught History. I never did History until the L VI Sc when we had to do it ‘to broaden us’, I presume. It took me a while to realise that in his lessons there was a curious undercurrent, and occasionally there would be ripples of excitement. I asked an old hand. They were playing ‘Um cricket’. A run was scored for every time he said ‘um’; a wicket every time he said ‘on this one’ or ‘on that one’. Some boys would continue the same match over many lessons. An Ashes test was a popular choice. He earned my undying respect for my History report one term: ‘This subject is beyond his proper understanding’.

Revd. Chalice was not a universally popular chaplain, but in fairness it was going to be difficult for anyone to take over after the hugely-respected Herbert Batey. However, he did not help matters by taking three boys with him to Scargill House, a religious retreat, for the day. On their return he demanded rather a lot of money for petrol from each of them. He was never forgiven for this (and there were no takers for future pilgrimages). After this incident his purple Morris Minor 1000 was promptly christened ‘The Transport of Delight’ by Gavin Robertson, a far-sighted witticism. Fast forward a couple of months to Sunday evening ‘shed’. This was an august event because there was a goodly smattering of parents and a guest sermoniser. The fateful moment had arrived. As the school started to belt out the hymn verse that ends ‘And oh what transport of delight/from thy pure chalice floweth’, there was a complete melt-down which no amount of glowering from Mr Lees could stem.  How we spat those words out! The rest of the service was constantly interrupted as one by one different boys could contain themselves no more. Thereafter this hymn was always sung with ‘omit verse 5’, still generating much mirth.
 
After A-levels we stayed on for the rest of the term and it was a tradition to lay on a sixth form play, which understandably, since it was totally run by the demob-happy, would push the limits. Gavin followed up his previous masterstroke by finding a play which had a grand total of (I could be wrong here) six clergymen. He played the lead and gave a memorably wicked performance. The staff turned out and enjoyed it as much as the boys, though the chaplain and Mr Lees were notable by their absence. Moral: Whatever you do, don’t alienate the pupils!

The Combined Cadet Force (CCF) was, for me, a necessary evil which I only escaped when in the VIth. Our first experience of RSM Herring was his first parade in September ’62. He had just retired from the Paras and assumed we were like Para trainees. He was screaming instructions at us. Well, we were helpless with mirth. We had never experienced anything like it. He was - as we said - so ‘swotty’. In reality he was a kindly man, as I found out when I was given a disproportionate punishment for a minor offence by one of the motley crew of ‘officers’ (i.e. masters). I have one unforgettable memory of him. It was CCF day, so we were all dragged out in full kit for a day of exercises. I was in a group of a dozen 15-year-olds who were manning a sandbagged ‘garrison’ with, I believe, blank .303 rounds in our Lee Enfields. Mr Herring told us he would go off thirty yards or so and charge us. We had to defend our fortress. I have never known anything like it. He charged us (he didn’t fire a shot), constantly screaming, his face contorted with adrenalin and aggression. We all threw our loaded rifles down and ran away. That’s the difference between men and boys!

One summer’s Sunday afternoon, I went off for a long walk with my best friend Jonny Adams (who stayed on at St Bees rather longer than I did!). On our return we exercised our right to Sunday cooking. Our tea consisted of: 1 tin Heinz Mulligatawny soup, 1 lb. plain rice (boiled), 1 large sliced white loaf with loads of margarine, washed down with copious Grindal tea. I’m still staggered that we managed this. The dieticians amongst you will have their views, but would find it hard to fault in terms of economy (We ate it all, of course)!

Jonny and I also went off for a week’s camping in Eskdale after A-levels. That tin of soup was the most complicated thing we had previously cooked. Our touching fantasy was that I would catch brown trout from the tarn that we camped next to (final tally: 0).We learnt several lessons. Not cooking a pound of Cumberland sausage in half a pound of butter being one of them (unless you want to feel ill). We had promised Tony Cotes that we would keep in touch and he was constantly ‘bewildered’ that we seemed to ring him up at exactly the time he was taking part in the House evening service, the only phone box being outside the local pub. Happy days!

If this set of reminiscences has given the reader anything like the pleasure it gave me to write down, then I am well pleased!”

 

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