FORTITER DEFENDIT TRIUMPHANS

Royal Grammar School Newcastle-upon-Tyne

I don’t know whether it’s still the case but, back in 1957 when I entered the first form of the Royal Grammar School, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, every new boy was given a handbook containing a short history of the school, the words of the school song and the school rules. We were expected to learn every word.

Resplendent in our brand new uniforms – outsized to give us room to grow – we clutched our handbooks at school assembly and sang the school song.

‘Horsley, a merchant venturer bold, of good Northumbrian strain, Founded our school and built our school in bluff King Harry’s reign. Long shall his name old time defy like the castle grim that stands, Foresquare to ev’ry wind that blows in our stormy Northern lands.

. Fortiter defendit triumphans, etc …’

Mr Wolstenholme, Head of Music, accompanied the singing on the organ perched high above the platform on which the staff members sat. A quotation from the Latin poet Horace ran along the oak panelling behind them. Aged eleven, I was puzzled by its sentiment: Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori (It is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country). I doubted my great uncle Tommy and grandfather Bert, both killed during the First World War, would have believed their sacrifice to be sweet and fitting.

Senior boys occupied the pews in the hall’s main body – the ‘Remove’ (Fourth Formers), Fifth and Sixth Formers. Under the pillars on the righthand side, the prefects kept an eye out for bad behaviour, to be punished later in the Prefects’ Room. We ‘new bugs’ and the two years above us were relegated to the balcony from which the main classrooms led.

The School was proud of its traditions. Founded in 1525 by Newcastle’s Lord Mayor, Thomas Horsley, it was granted its charter by Queen Elizabeth 1. In my day, it was a ‘Direct Grant’ school, distinguishing it from other grammar schools by receiving direct government funding. Since then, it has become a wholly independent school, like all other ‘public schools’, and relies entirely on fees for its income. Back then, scholarships were awarded to those who performed outstandingly in the entrance exams. My friend Ian Gardhouse was one such. I wasn’t, so my parents had to cough up the £90 annual fees. Only later did my dad realise that his contract with Northumberland Education Authority would have obliged them to pay for my and my sister’s education – Catherine attended the Central High School, immediately opposite the RGS on Eskdale Terrace.

The RGS in 1957 was boys-only. The Central High and Church High were also single-sex, housed in buildings only yards from ours. However, our only shared facilities were the swimming baths. Given the RGS’s insistence that we swim naked, this led to some hair-raising near misses. It’s extraordinary to think that our swimming lessons – from when we were eleven right up to when we were gnarly sixth-formers with hairy chests – should have been conducted in the nude. There’s an apocryphal story of a set of twins who hid in the changing rooms until it was the turn of the Central High School girls. They snuck onto the highboard while the girls were lining up and performed immaculate swallow dives into the deep end – starkers, with all their pubic hair shaved off. It raised a laugh but earned them a suspension from school for the rest of the term. Now the school is co-ed I’m sure that rule has been rescinded.

As small boys, we quickly became accustomed to being naked, but when puberty reared its ugly head around the age of thirteen, it became painfully apparent who had developed what. The early starters strutted about, displaying their pubic growth, while those who remained stubbornly bald hid their deficiency under a towel. Richard (Dickie) Bainbridge was so anxious about the late onset of his puberty that he began spending his lunch hour at The Collingwood Arms, where he persuaded a sixth-former to buy him pints. Aged sixteen, he was drinking four or five a day. This had an inevitable tragic consequence. He was killed in a car accident a couple of years later.

In the swimming baths, our instructors indulged their latent cruelty with complete impunity. One teacher devised a disproportionately harsh punishment. He stood the wrong-doer in a racing dive position, i.e. with bare buttocks raised, then whacked him with a rubber flipper. The pain caused the boy to take off like a rocket and when he emerged at the far end, he had the red imprint of the flipper on his bum.

It took another thirty years for corporal punishment to be banned in British schools. Until then, it was a charter for sadists and perverts. Teachers could inflict whatever pain they liked on their charges. Not all our teachers wielded their authority in this way and they earned our respect and obedience in much subtler ways. MG Robinson, our English master, was also a master of sarcasm and irony. With a well-chosen phrase or cutting quip, he could reduce any rebellious soul to a quivering wreck. The Latin teacher, Anatole Theakston also had a wicked tongue. He also had a wig, which fascinated us. It sat like a dead rodent on his head, a chestnut mat surrounded by the silver skirt of his natural hair. In high winds, he would scurry across the space between buildings, gown flapping and hand firmly holding the wig in place.

The sports teachers were most likely to resort to violent methods. The gym master ‘Capo’ Robinson had a sawn-off fives bat that he called ‘tickle toby’. He would make miscreants touch their toes, then whack them with it. ‘Spitty’ (so-called because he had overactive saliva glands) Meakin, who supervised the boxing, was equally liberal with his cane.

The Latin teacher Mr Owen, whom we nicknamed ‘Slinker’ from his habit of creeping up behind boys to catch them doing what they shouldn’t, was often exasperated by my inability to conjugate simple verbs. He would grab me by the long hair at the front of my head – styled into a fashionable teddy-boy ‘quiff’ – and punctuate the future tense of rego: rexero, rexeris, rexerit, rexerimus, rexeritis, rexerunt by bashing my head up and down on the desk. Since our desks were carved with the names and dates of previous incumbents, the repeated contact led to the word nosnibor being imprinted on my forehead (‘robinson’ reversed).

‘Spuggy’ Douglas, the maths teacher, also had a short fuse. I was perenially mystified by quadratic equations and would wool gather while the rest of the class diligently filled in their exercise books. ‘Spuggy’ would patrol up and down the lines between the desks, swinging the sleeves of his academic gown in which he’d concealed a ruler. Catching me daydreaming, he would bring me back to earth by cracking my knuckles with the thin edge of his hidden ruler.

The prefects were also allowed to administer physical punishment. Lindsay Anderson’s film IF contains a scene in which the rebel, played by Malcolm MacDowell, is given a merciless caning by his arch-enemy, the head prefect or ‘whip’.

At the end of my time at school, I was appointed a Senior Prefect and dedicated myself to tempering the extreme behaviour of my fellows. One particular unpleasant individual used the slightest pretext to haul unfortunates into the Prefects’ Room. There he’d administer the punishment allowed, bending them over the table and beating them with a ‘sandshoe’. One day, he overreached himself and beat six boys in quick succession. Enough was enough. He needed a dose of his own medicine.

I made a plan. He had an obvious Achilles heel – the skin of his face and neck was decorated with a ripe growth of pimples. From local chemist shops I collected as much promotional material for Clearasil and other acne preparations as I could find and, every day over three weeks, stuffed them into his locker. Thinking back, I realise his persecution of younger boys in no way justified my persecution of him; bullying is bullying, after all. But I delighted in the look on his face when the leaflets kept tumbling out of his locker.

In May 1962, we believed the world was about to end. Nikita Kruschev, president of the U.S.S.R., had indulged in some sabre-rattling by shipping ballistic missiles to Cuba. Assuming the U.S. President John F. Kennedy to be weak, he thought he’d steal a march on the Americans. Kennedy retaliated by blockading Cuba with warships. A face-off developed. The prospect of nuclear war was real.

We gathered outside the sports-changing block, waiting to see the mushroom cloud that would signal our annihilation. Every day for six days. Then Kruschev backed down, withdrew the weapons, and we resumed our lives.

We were perpetually hungry – the appetites of young boys have no bounds. Sadly the school’s catering service did little to satisfy them. At lunchtime, we’d trot to the dining hall wondering what inedible fare would be served up. I’m still not keen on liver remembering the boiled version with stringy bits included that the cook put in front of us. Isobel ‘Is-a-bell (necessary on a bike)’, the nubile dining supervisor, wore a perpetual disappointed expression at our leftovers.

Despite the sadism of our teachers, we became keen on swimming. To the extent of giving up our lunch breaks to train. We swam interminable lengths of the pool to increase our stamina and were introduced to interval training to sharpen our speed. The goal was to represent the school. Ian and I were keen competitors and eventually were rewarded with an invitation to wear the school colours at various galas, I in backstroke and Ian in the 100-metre medley. Neither of us distinguished ourselves.

The annual culmination of the school’s swimming calendar was ‘Newts Night’, where inter-house competitions were held. Every boy belonged to a house – Eldon, Stowell, Horsley or Collingwood, each distinguished by a colour. My house, ‘Collingwood’, was yellow. Ian’s ‘Eldon’ was green. Perennial show-offs, we asked whether we could present some halftime ‘entertainment’. Professional wrestling, commentated by Kent Walton was a regular Saturday afternoon television draw. Together with a boy called Spooner, who’d recently joined the school from Australia, we built a wrestling ring, complete with ropes, to float in the pool. Spooner, introduced by ‘referee’ Ian as ‘The Dirty Digger’, and I, ‘The Ginger Geordie’, wrestled for three minutes. Like the pro wrestlers, we’d rehearsed our moves to prevent serious injury. One was where he grabbed my wrist and performed the ‘whip’, spinning me in a somersault. I drop-kicked him and he went down like a sack of potatoes. Ian called it a sportsman’s draw and we chucked him into the pool. All good fun.

In one respect the school laid great store by its pastoral care – the lesson in human biology, aka the mechanics of reproduction. The responsibility of enlightening us fell to George Pallister, the diffident Biology master. I already knew the basics from H.G. Wells’s and Julian Huxley’s THE SCIENCE OF LIFE, which my mum had left on my bedside table to avoid the embarrassing ‘facts of life’ conversation. George had an unfortunate habit of clearing his throat when he came to words he found difficult to pronounce. So his account was rendered almost unintelligible by his persistent coughing. And he wasn’t helped by our sniggering. We saw what he couldn’t. He had omitted to check his dress before class and was standing before us with his fly open and manhood exposed.

The chemistry teacher was a Scot by the name of George. He was a heavy smoker, as evidenced by the brown stains that ran up the thumb, forefinger and middle finger of his right hand. His party piece was to recite the periodic table: ‘chlorine, fluorine, iodine and (miming a drag on his Players Weight) nicotine.’ It always raised a laugh. Apart from that, I couldn’t see the point of chemistry.

When I reached the sixth form I left behind all the subjects I couldn’t do – maths, physics, chemistry and woodwork – and concentrated on those I was good at. English, French and Latin were my A-level choices. My engagement grew in proportion to my interest, and I stopped messing about.

My French teacher was Colin Hunter. He’s entirely responsible for encouraging my interest in French literature. The A-level set books were Racine’s PHEDRE and Balzac’s EUGENIE GRANDET. Colin’s erudition was extensive and he inspired me to read beyond the required texts. He introduced me to the poetry of Verlaine and Rimbaud and enthralled me with his account of their relationship. Christopher Hampton’s play TOTAL ECLIPSE covers the same ground. Since Hampton was twenty-two when he wrote it, it’s conceivable he had a similar introduction to the subject at school.

Colin was an impressive individual all around. Severely handicapped with Disseminated Sclerosis, he walked with difficulty and supported himself on walking sticks. Despite his disability, he faced a daily class of twelve adolescent males. It can’t have been easy. Favoured students would be invited to take tea in his Osborne Road flat, where he lived alone. I shall be eternally grateful for encouraging me to read French at University and for writing a testimonial that earned me an interview and later a place at St Peter’s College, Oxford.

(Lower Sixth Formers. Me with quiff far left, Ian next to me, George Hogg and Ian Wade, with Sheila and Diane from the Central High School)

This coming October, our intake (1957-64) has been invited by the present Headteacher for a black-tie reunion and tour of the School. I’ve been to one of these before, which I enjoyed despite being reminded of my advancing years in the mirror image of my now elderly contemporaries.

The School has changed immeasurably since 1964. No more naked swimming now that girls have been admitted. No more corporal punishment since 1986 (I wonder what sanctions the present crop of teachers apply to keep order).

Even the physical buildings and grounds aren’t the same. When ‘Our Friend in the North’, T. Dan Smith, allowed the Great North Road to be diverted from the centre of Newcastle, the Council compulsorily purchased a swathe of the RGS playing fields and built a flyover. This was what we knew as the ‘Penfold’, where a screen of shrubbery concealed our puffing away on surreptitious ciggies. Where do the kids go now to satisfy their nicotine cravings? I suppose they all carry vapes now.

It’ll be interesting to find out.