When I arrived in Mead’s House, George Riding had been Headmaster for two years. He had been appointed, we understood, to reverse the atmosphere of decline in Headmaster Beck’s final years. My first impressions in September 1935, were certainly of a new broom hard at work.
Life in the house was exactly as described on page 77 of the 1997 Register, cold baths, straw hats, corporal punishment on rare occasions and so on. But also a strict pecking order and dress code (all jacket buttons done up until one’s seventh term), a great camaraderie and, with one exception, no bullying. The one exception in Mead’s was a strange custom, held once a term, called “New Men’s Singing” (all boys were called men in those days). Each new “man” was required to sing a song standing on a table before an audience of middle ranking “men” but not Praepostors. This fairly mild ordeal was intended, I believe, to put new boys in their place, especially those who had been academic or sporting stars in their prep schools. You chose your own song, and one boy caused a stir by singing, “Today I feel so Happy”. The custom was abolished about the start of World War 2.
Nine of us arrived as new boys that term, and with a few exceptions we found a Spartan life, but a happy one. My friend, Johhny Williams, and I were delighted with the sense of freedom. When not playing games, or in class, we were supposed to be out of the House on a cross-country run. The route was vague and never checked up on, so a wide stretch of country between the railway to the east and the Watford by pass to the west was open to exploration. There was even a framed ordnance survey map in the cloisters, which perhaps is still there. In an earlier age, bicycles had been allowed. Legend had it that a junior master taking a lady to a London nightclub, had been surprised to see a row of bicycles outside, and an equal number of Aldenham boys inside. When war broke out in 1939, I asked the Headmaster if he would consider lifting the ban on bicycles, “because of the war, they might be very useful for communications” I said, hopefully. He looked at me thoughtfully, “communications with what?” he asked. I accepted defeat.
These impressions of early life in Mead’s House would be similar in the other out Houses, Allsop’s (Beevor’s) and Cox’s (McGill’s), but my friend John Hamley (of the toy shop family) used to tell me that life in School House was a tougher experience, with much more fagging. I expect he was right.
The 1997 Register paints a picture of a closed society in the ‘thirties’, with limited progress and missed opportunities for improvement. This may be true of the ‘twenties’, but from a boy‘s viewpoint, it does not really match my memories. Teaching was in the hands of a competent team, remarkably good, I would imagine, for a small school. “Tibby” Mead and the young Bill Kennedy in Classics, Fred English in Modern Languages, Rupert Clift in English, Webber and Lesley Jones in Mathematics and “Wooley” Green in Physics were all splendid examples. By modern standards Science was probably the weakest link, but those were not modern times. The “closed society” impression was probably created by the usual public school practice of those days, where the majority were boarders for seven days in the week, and only a handful were dayboys.
The fashion today for weekly boarding obviously creates a very different society. We would be allowed two or three Sundays out each term, though I believe in theory they were not limited. In my five years at Aldenham we had one weekend when we were allowed to sleep away from School; that was for the coronation of King George V1 in 1937. Sundays out, for boys like me, without a car in the family, began after Chapel with a longish walk to the Green Line bus at the end of Butterfly Lane, and again in the evening the walk back.
If we were a “closed society”, we were certainly aware of the outside world. The gap between the two World Wars was only 21 years. Most of our fathers had fought in the War of 1914 – 1918, and most of us were the right age to serve in 1939 – 1945. Military training in the OTC Corp at Aldenham was voluntary in theory, but compulsory in practice. Most boys took a quiet pride in looking slightly absurd in uniform, and it was important not to be labelled a “corps derve”, or military enthusiast. John Butler was a good example, who rose to the rank of sergeant in the OTC, yet managed always to make fun of it. As a gunner subaltern in Italy in 1943 he won a DSO which his fellow officers described as a “near miss VC”. In Cox’s House was the quiet and unassuming L T Manser, who was later to be rejected by both the Navy and the Army, and later awarded a posthumous VC in the RAF. Not all of us, however, who polished buttons and boots and wound on our knee length puttees, had such distinguished military futures.
When war come during the summer holidays in 1939, life for a while seemed unchanged. An early German bomb did land on the pub in Letchmore Heath, and air raid drills joined the termly fire practices, but not much more happened. This was the period we called “The Phoney War”, which ended abruptly with the German invasion of France through Holland and Belgium in the Spring of 1940. Working in the quiet top floor of the Library at Aldenham, I remember the gentle shaking of the windows during the B.E.F battles during the evacuation of Dunkirk. Invasion was feared all that summer term and some rather implausible tank traps were built between the new Chapel and the road. At the end of that term, my last, I gathered a party of Aldenham friends to help with the harvest near my home on the Welsh border. Of those five, the younger ones, John Burkart, Kenneth Snaith and Frank Duncan are sadly no longer with us, but the older ones David Pockney and I are still going strong, and have met once or twice recently to recall farming days without combine harvesters, and the earliest land girls over 60 years ago!.
Finally, two more memories of the past. In 1938 we were invited to receive a visit at Aldenham of a touring group of the Hitler Youth Movement. It was, I think, before the German occupation of the Sudetanland part of Czechoslovakia, which so nearly precipitated war, but there was already deep national suspicion of Hitler’s motives. At the same time, there were those who, remembering the abject poverty and economic distress in Germany in the 1920’s, admired the positive attitude of Adolf Hitler since he became Chancellor of the Reich in 1933, and the new hope and pride he had given the German people. So it was with mixed feelings that we met the large party of young German boys and girls who arrived at Aldenham. We played them at hockey, and won, and they put on a very polished show, with much patriotic marching, singing and the like, all in their brown shirted uniform. They were polite, correct, but did not smile very much. The real revelation, however, came in the evening, when the boys were divided up to sleep in Houses. We had three in our dormitory, and - horror of horrors – they went to bed with their underclothes under their pyjamas! Our friendliness turned to scorn at that, and some politically very incorrect things were said about German habits thereafter.
The final memory was at the very end of the war in August 1945. Some of us had taken over a Japanese prison camp in Thailand from our former jailers, who were disarmed and living a quiet life in a corner by themselves. There was a rumour that parachutists had landed during the previous night, perhaps to “rescue” us, but we had heard nothing more. We had taken over the former Japanese office as an Officers’ Mess and, after lunch (it was the hot dry season), we all went to sleep under some of the hundreds of Red Cross mosquito nets we had found in the Japanese stores. One of our number, unable to sleep, went for a stroll outside, and was amazed to see two young men in strange green uniforms crawling long a drainage ditch. These were our rescuers! We were quickly roused to greet them – an Indian Army Captain and a Signals Corporal. They had had an anxious time after their parachute drop, and a sleepless night, so after a glass or two of some horrid Siamese whisky, they were quickly asleep on the floor. Looking quietly into the officer’s haversack, I noticed the name ‘C J M Ross’. Since we never used christian names at Aldenham, we tended to remember initials, so I was pretty sure that I’d been rescued by the young Ross of English’s House, a scholar, rather good at hockey. When he woke up, rather dazed, I found I was right. Twenty years later he was New Zealand’s Ambassador to Peru, but that, of course, is another story.
These are some of my memories of Aldenham in the thirties. Perhaps we were conformist, old fashioned, primitive even by today’s standards, but there were plenty of wonderful characters, both staff and boys, but of course no girls!