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Articles 1998
Clayesmore. 1934-36 - A personal view
My first encounter with Clayesmore was on a platform at Waterloo Station in September 1934. My father was a snob, and any son of his should go to a public school, even if, as was the case, he was nearly bankrupt, and I could not get a scholarship anywhere, as I was not academic. Clayesmore was nearly bankrupt too, and so the meeting came about. They would accept me for some minimal sum, and I didn't have to pass any exam! That is how I came to be on that train. My mother was urging me to grab a good seat but I was far too shy. I seem to remember going down to Semley in compartments reserved for the school - our trunks already sent by 'Luggage in Advance' and delivered directly to the school. I have tried to recall how we managed to get from the railway to Iwerne, but I can't. It must have been a reserved bus.
Much happened in the next few weeks. Firstly I managed to break my wrist, slipping in the basement, where the tuck shop and the changing rooms were. Then I was examined by the school doctor and was told that I had a 'murmuring heart'. No games. An hours rest each afternoon. I minded neither of these restrictions. Since, in adult life I flew as air crew and was subject to strict medicals for some thirty years and they could never find a thing wrong with me, I am a little sceptical of the doctor's diagnosis - or else his cure was ideal! At about this time I was cast as Olivia in the school play - "Twelfth Night" - to be performed at the Shaftesbury town hall in December. Sir Toby Belch was played by the head of my dormitory, Michael Crichton-Balfour. He had a pock marked, wrinkled skin and a bulbous nose, and even then he looked middle aged. He looked no different after the War when, having dropped the Crichton part of his name, he was the lynch pin of every British gangster B-film for years. In later years he became a sculptor and only died in the autumn of 1997.
The head boy was Tristram Yelin. He overwhelmed me. He was a perfect. He was not only academically gifted, he was musically talented and captained all the Clayesmore sports teams. He was rumoured to be the son of an Indian/Russian marriage, the wife being a princess. When I spoke to him on the telephone just before he died in the early eighties, I asked him if this was so and he said 'No', but offered no other alternative. He was a Marxist and read me long tracts, I don't know why - maybe it was apparent that I was going to have an interest in Politics. I heard nothing of him after that first term (when he left), until he stood as an Independent candidate in the General Election of 1979 for Scarborough. It was then that I managed to find him but it lead to only one letter and a phone call.
As far as I can remember we were not allowed to enter by the main door, nor use the main staircase. Instead we had to use the entry at the far right hand end of the building and there was a staircase there. Inside the door there was a class room, where I seem to have spent most of my time. Further along the passage way there was the headmaster's study, then the library and eventually down to the huge hall, which seemed to serve as dining hall, assembly hall and cinema on Saturday evenings. I can't for the life of me remember where the kitchen was. Until I read Mackie's article on Evelyn King I didn't realise that the masters ate with us. For some reason, eating played little part in my life at the time. Though what has surprised me in later years is that the one food I can remember was roast potatoes (and nothing else) with gravy on them. I suspect the catering was quite good. On the first floor, there were dormitories, and a couple of masters had flats. On the top floor there were more dormitories and a needle room. So the boys and a portion of masters were entirely contained within the 'big house'. I can't believe that is so now days.
I arrived at Clayesmore having spent six years at King's College School in Cambridge. I had been totally miserable. We were not allowed out of the grounds, which consisted of two playing fields, and the main building which housed nothing but classrooms and our dormitories. there was absolutely nowhere to 'play'. The one saving grace was that I could visit my grandmother every Sunday, although she was a puritan virago. Anything was good if it got me away from the awfulness of that school. So you can imagine that when I arrived at Clayesmore I could hardly believe the freedom that was ours. We could wander over miles of glorious countryside.
My first year was the last of the years when de Selincourt was in charge, though he was still there as a master until I left after the second year. It was only when I read a biography of A. A. Milne a few years ago, that I realised the feud that was going on between two families. de Selincourt's sister, Daphne, married A.A. Milne and Aubrey (our headmaster) was in the habit of borrowing money and failing to repay it. Eventually Daphne, who had an intense dislike of Irene, Aubrey's wife, snapped and refused to speak to him for the next twenty five years. It was only at the marriage of her son Christopher Robin to Lesley, Aubrey's daughter in 1948 that they broke their silences. From my viewpoint he was a gentle, civilised man, whom I admired. His wife I do not remember at all. With the advent of Evelyn King, I felt, the school became a little less civilised. I had been briefly taught by King as far back as 1929, and I also knew Mr Appleby, who had been at King's for all the six years that I had been there. I worshipped him. I tried to copy everything he did. He did not reciprocate - and I can't blame him as I was an obsequious little boy. With his Waterman pen (or was it Parker dufold - it was brick red with black ends) he wrote impeccably, I never managed to attain his style. At King's we had been allowed into his study on Sunday nights, to listen to music, and it was an oasis in that desert of a school.
I have tried to analyse my reaction to Mr King. I am not really sure whether it was anything at Clayesmore or his public persona after the war that put me off him. I think the answer is that he had no passion - or at least he didn't show any. I like people to show a bit of feeling whether it is good or bad. I could never understand how an adult could float from being a Labour minister to a Conservative M.P. There are others who have done it, but it still astonishes me.
On Saturday nights we paid 6d and were shown a film and I managed to see an enormous selection of the silent films that, even now, have escaped Channel 4. In my last year there was a showing of "Battleship Potemkin" and I felt surprised that King had allowed it to be seen as it was banned from public exhibition at the time. A year after I left, I was told that they had talking films. One of the films was "First a Girl", a most innocuous film with Jessie Mathews about some girl dressed as a boy. Nobody bats an eyelid when it is shown on television these days. (My video guide gives it a 'Family viewing' certificate) Yet Mr King wrote to all parents apologising for it being shown. His reaction to each film doesn't seem to add up.
The more I think about my school days, the more I realise one doesn't, in one's old age, remember things as a whole. There are swathes of time that I cannot recall, yet there are isolated incidents that impinge on the mind with a diamond brightness. One such was when Mr King announced that his wife had lost a ring in the garden. (This was an enclosed area at the back of the school, which is now opened up.) It was getting late and being a rather nauseous little boy who loved nothing more than to find lost objects and then to reap the reward of a stroke to indicate how appreciated I was , this was to be my finest hour! It was past dark before I gave up. Nobody had found anything. Some weeks later I asked Mr King if it had been found, and was told that Mrs King had found it on her dressing table. I felt deeply hurt that nothing had been said and it may be that was one of the reasons I found Mr King a little unsympathetic. Or perhaps it reflects more on the fact that I needed reassurance.
In my two years at the school, we had two extra half days, one was for the marriage of the Duke of Kent (I have an idea that we also had one on the marriage of the Duke of Gloucester) and one for the elevation of the Earl de la Ware to being Minister of Education. I never could fathom out why this earl had anything to do with Clayesmore. He went to Eton. There were also two visits to the theatre in Bournemouth. One was to see 'Night Must Fall' and the other to see Sybil Thorndyke (who was governor of Clayesmore). We also spent one whole day down at Studland Bay, when I got horribly sunburnt.
I remember too that Crowfoot, who arranged the showing of the films on Saturday nights, asked me to find out the 'recipe' for grass seed for sowing a golf green, as he was planning a golf course which was to run around the spaces which surrounded the main building. he asked me because he knew my father was a landscape architect. In due course my father came up with the answer, but in my time at the school I never saw the course's completion.
The term after I arrived at the school we were joined by Stephen Joseph. His mother was Hermione Gingold, an actress unknown to any of us and his father was a little known author, Michael Joseph. Whilst I was still at Clayesmore, his father became a book publisher, but it was another five years before his mother erupted into stardom. They had divorced acrimoniously in the early twenties and the children were never allowed to see her again. but they did. The summer holidays of 1936 were spent with H.G. on a farm in Gloucestershire. Unfortunately when writing his usual Sunday letters he put them in the wrong envelopes and his stepmother was thanked for the wonderful time they had had on the farm. She was not amused. Stephen tried to find out why he was not allowed to see his mother. He wrote to Selfridges' Information Bureau (in the thirties you could write to them for the answers to obscure questions) but they replied that personal queries were beyond their function.
In the autumn of 1935, the school play was John Galsworthy's "A Bird in the Hand". The plot escapes me now, but the cast of 'Twelfth Night" had the addition of Stephen plus Kenneth Mackintosh, who went on to grace the National Theatre for many years. If my memory serves me right, there was no play in 1936, and I wonder who would have come to the Town Hall to see plays. When was the next school play, and where did it take place. I know not.
One teacher whose name I forget, lived somewhere in the stable block. He taught History - always with his coat off, his braces showing, and a rubicund complexion from too much drinking. He gave us a mnemonic. Simply Guessing Will Not Do These Rules Must Be Learnt. Take the initial letter of each word. Give each a number from 1 to 0. If you wished to memorise a date, you knocked off the 1 from the start, and left with three figures you made up a sentence from the initials. LTT was the example given. This you made into 'Landing of Terrible Tyrants' (i.e. 1066). The only one that I created was 'Death of Wolsley at Leicester'. So now I can always remember that Henry VIII's Lord Chancellor died in 1530.
The School Certificate that we took was - as far as I can remember - similar to ''O' levels. 33% for a pass, 50% for a credit and the subjects were in three classifications. Science, Mathematics and Language. You had to pass in at least one subject in each group. Where it becomes more difficult than 'O' levels was that a failure to get, say, a language pass, but nine credits in other groups, it would mean total failure and the whole exam would have to be taken again. Mr King was a bit petulant when I succeeded, because he had predicted failure, and he added that it would be useless to study for Higher Certificate.
One of the ideas on which Clayesmore then prided itself, was 'Manual Labour'. On two afternoons a week, we had to do a task assigned to us that had some advantage to us all. Sawing and stacking logs for the school fires was one such task. But the biggest job that we accomplished was the digging of the swimming pool. It took us most of the summer, and I cannot remember ever swimming in it. (Perhaps that was because that was the summer I took my School Certificate.) As far as I could find out, the pool no longer exists - and I would love to find out who had the job of filling it in again! Manual Labour was a tedious chore, which I think most of us hated, but I am now looking back on it with satisfaction. Today, too many people equate aspirations with rights. We didn't necessarily have a right to a warm library or a place in which to swim. We aspired. We sawed. We dug.
That autumn we met in Mr Mackenzie's sitting room, the only place in which there was a wireless, where we had met in the previous January to hear the 'Kings Life is drawing to a close', to listen this time to the Abdication speech. At about this time I realised how perilous was the financial state of our family. I went to Mr Appleby and drew all the pocket money I had. It was 3 shillings and 7 pence, and I sent it to my mother. When I returned home for the Christmas holidays that was it. I had to go out and earn my own living and no longer be a burden on the family.
When I look back, I realise how very happy I was during those two and a bit years at Clayesmore. I do accept that there was a sharp contrast to the unhappy time at King's and that may have contributed to the contentment. Both de Selincourt and EMK believed that the function of a school was to teach it's pupils to "learn to learn'. It was not to be the place where you learnt a trade. Ken Fisher and I asked if we could learn to type and we were told that that was the function of our employer, not the function of the school. When you grow older you realise how right it was. We spent a lot of time learning about that all-embracing word Art. About music and architecture and painting and theatre. I never earned a brass farthing from it, but I am eternally grateful for it. I have been able to appreciate so much better what I have seen, what I have read, and what I have heard. There is one other very important thing that we learnt. We learnt to question - not from suspicion, but from the point of view of research. If it is said that "the government tells us......" or that the "newspapers tell us......" we ask "Why?". And I believe that is as it should be. For my part it has lead me to have an interesting, exciting, fascinating life. What more could one ask?
Gavin Maclean (34-36)