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RGS Remembers
from ONA 75
RGS remembers fallen Airman
The RGS Remembrance Assembly on 11 November 2008 was particularly poignant, as members of the school were joined by the daughter and family of John Robson Bell, a former pupil of the school who died in the Second World War but whose name was lost. When the circumstances of his death were rediscovered this year, his name was added to the names carved on the war memorial in the Hall. on a daylight raid.
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J R Bell was pilot of a bomber taking part in one of the enormous raids in November 1944 which caused devastation in Germany’s industrial cities but led to huge losses among the allied bombers. The exact circumstances of the loss of his aircraft are not known, but it was a particularly cloudy night, contact was lost between planes and it seems certain that some were hit by bombs dropped from other craft higher up in the cloud cover.
So it was a moving ceremony and Head of History Simon Tilbrook read out the following details of J R Bell: 183 Lancasters of No 3 Group made an
Every year the school holds its Remembrance Assembly. This year, saw a new name added to the list of Old Novos who fell in the Second World War, which had been unaccountably left off the memorial at the time.
John Robson Bell (26-31), also known as Jack, was born in 1914 and joined the RGS in featherweight boxing champion. He left, aged 16, like most boys did in those days, armed with his School Certificate and joined the civil service.
In doing so he was to make a vital contribution to the war effort by playing a part in the
The RGS War Memorial. creation of the Ministry of Aircraft Production. He then enlisted in the Royal Air Force Volunteer Reserve on Boxing Day 1941, a few weeks after the birth of his twin daughters. He became Flying Officer Bell, a navigator, in 75 Squadron of bomber command. The 75 flew more sorties than any other Allied squadron. One of those sorties was the fourth in a series of raids launched against an oil plant near Homberg, Germany; in all, 183 planes set off
As the official record says:
1926 being, among other things, the school attack on the oil plant at Homberg but the weather was stormy and many aircraft were not able to maintain formation with the aircraft on the bombing run. The bombing, through cloud, was believed to have been scattered.
Flight Lt Richard Perry of 218 Squadron recalled:
On this trip we actually saw three aircraft destroyed by bombs dropped from aircraft above them, and swerved away, ourselves, from beneath one that would have passed right over us with it’s bomb doors open. I’ll always remember our mid-upper, Dennis, yelling out the instruction to swerve right.
In all, five aircraft were lost, including three Lancasters of 75 Squadron.
On 20 November, 1944, John Bell of 75 Squadron was reported missing; soon, the official documentation, spoke of him as ‘presumed dead’. He is now buried in Reichswald Forest Cemetery, in Germany.
This year, his three children and other members of his family attended our Remembrance Assembly. Each year, we honour the fallen listed on the memorial; this year, for the first time JR Bell was there too.
An Anonymous Death
“Come into this cubicle” said the nurse and see a ‘B.I.D’ – “I’ll show you how we ‘look after’ them.” It was nineteen-fifty and my first day as a medical student in R.V.I. ‘Casualty’. I didn’t know that ‘B.I.D.’ was an acronym for ‘brought in dead’ and apart from anatomy dissection I had never seen anybody dead. There he lay – a stronglooking man with a strangely grey face. He was wearing a neat three-piece suit and tie – totally inert. He’d been lifting his suitcase onto the rack in a train in the Central Station when apparently he’d clutched his chest and fallen backwards.
“The body must be treated with absolute respect,” the nurse said. “You’ve to empty his pockets and put all the contents into a bag. Then check him over for injuries –turn him over – make sure there’s been no foul play”. I’m sure there were other procedures but after fifty years I can’t remember what they were.
Three days later my mother looked up from the Evening Chronicle: “Oh, here’s a bit of sad news – ‘Boiler’ Smith, your old Latin master has died – heart attack – he was just going on holiday…”
I hadn’t recognised him – death changes people – the still mask of death looks different from the animated mien of life. But I was happy an Old Novo ‘looked after him’.
Requiescat in pace. (I hope that’s right – I was never any good at Latin!)
Geoffrey Marsh (38-39, 44-48)
Three Old Novos Bring the Music Home
Renowned young cellist Jonathan Bloxham (99-04) is returning to the region next March to stage an ambitious chamber music festival, Northern Chords. Tom Rowley (01-08), who is helping to promote the festival alongside Chris StokelWalker (00-07), tells us more.
It all started, as so often these days, with an email. “You probably don’t remember who I am,” Jonathan wrote, before setting out his ideas for a “small festival of chamber music”. Of course, I did remember him, although my memory admittedly was not of him playing the cello, but sitting in the back of a car driven by the father of a mutual friend, while he related his plans to leave the RGS to continue his cello studies at the Yehudi Menuhin School.
In retrospect, this certainly seems a shrewd move as many of the incredible young musicians who will be performing in the festival, Northern Chords, that he is now organising are friends he made during his time at that School. From violinists Vlad Maistorovici and Tetsuumi Nagata to pianists Ellena Hale and Tomoka Shigeno, the YMS name keeps cropping up.
After three very successful years at the Yehudi Menuhin School, where he won the Guilhermina Suggia Gift and a Pierre Fournier Award Grant, Jonathan transferred to the Royal College of Music to continue his studies with Professor Thomas Carroll. Though he was there for just a year (he has since moved to the Guildhall School of Music and Drama to continue his instruction under the supervision of Louise Hopkins), it gave him the opportunity to meet perhaps the festival’s most famous performer, Ben Johnson.
At just 25, Ben has already achieved much success in the classical music world, with his performance in last year’s British Youth Opera production of Albert Herring described by The Times as “raptly sensitive” and by The Independent as “masterly”. This year he augmented that achievement by winning First Prize at the Kathleen Ferrier Awards, the most prestigious singing awards in Britain. But there is more to staging a music festival than musicians, however talented, hence Jonathan’s email. Enter two supremely untalented musicians: myself and Chris StokelWalker. If ever there were a compelling argument why atonality should be treated on the NHS we are it. My primary school music reports invariably complained about my imperfect pitch, whilst my highest musical achievement so far appears to be mastering the maracas.
Before you all demand that your tickets be refunded, I ought to point out that we’re not actually performing. In fact, as business directors, you could say we’re responsible for everything but the music, from marketing and PR and finding sponsors to helping Jonathan liaise with the festival’s venues and front of house on the nights.
With such amazing musicians and venues (St Mary’s Church in Whickham, Hexham Abbey and Hall Two of The Sage Gateshead), our job isn’t really that difficult. But there has still been much pestering of journalists, haggling over advertising rates, negotiating over photo shoots and writing of articles and there are still three months left!
We were incredibly lucky to find some fantastic sponsors for the festival very early on. In fact, Watson Burton – the law firm with offices in Newcastle, Leeds and London – might even have been more enthusiastic about Northern Chords than us, if that is possible. They have been relentlessly supportive, with senior partner Rob Langley explaining that “as a firm which is passionate about the North East, supporting arts and young enterprise, this festival ticked all the boxes”. We have also benefited from the support of Hilton Newcastle Gateshead, our hospitality partner, and The Journal, Northern Chords’ media partner, but we are, of course, still looking for more sponsors as well as advertisers for our programme… so if your business might be interested, you know who to get in touch with! SPECIAL OFFER: As Old Novos, we would like to offer specially-reduced ticket prices to other Old Novos and their families. For concessions (students and OAPs), we are happy to offer a ticket to either the Friday or Saturday nights at £5 (usually £6) or the Sunday night at £6 (usually £7.50); concession tickets for any two nights at £8; or concession tickets for all three nights at £13. We can also offer normal tickets for the Friday or Saturday nights at £10
Chris, Jonathan and Tom outside RGS.
We are all now gearing up for three months of hard work to ensure that the festival runs smoothly and that as many North Easterners as possible get the opportunity to hear this world-class chamber music. I, for one, certainly can’t wait for March!
• The St Mary’s Church concert, at 7.30pm on Friday 27 March, is likely to include
Mozart’s Piano Quartet in G minor and
Schubert’s Piano Quintet in A major (The
Trout).
• The Hexham Abbey concert, at 7.30pm on
Saturday 28 March, is likely to include a selection of songs by composers affected by the Great War and Vaughan-Williams’ On
Wenlock Edge.
• The Sage Gateshead concert, at 7.30pm on Sunday 29 March, is likely to include
Mendelssohn’s Piano Trio No.1 in D minor,
Schumann’s Piano Quintet in E flat major and
a new composition by Vlad Maistorovici. (usually £12) or the Sunday night at £12 (usually £15); normal tickets for any two nights at £18; or normal tickets for all three nights at £28.
To take advantage of these reduced-price tickets – or if you have any queries about the festival – please email tom@northernchords.co.uk or call 07985 677013. There is also much more information about Northern Chords to be found at www.northernchords.co.uk.
The RGS Computer Society: Early Days
Michael Grant’s article on the RGS Computer Society in ONA Magazine issue 72 released a whole avalanche of memories, all very good ones. I believe I have the dubious distinction of being one of the dozen or so founding members of the Society in 1969 or so. It gave me a very good head start to my career (for want of a better word) in computing.
I remember seeing a small poster on a board, authored by Mr. F. Budden, the Head of Mathematics, inviting those who were interested in learning to program (or was that programme?) to attend an inaugural meeting of the proposed Computer Society. There was no way I could resist the call.
At that time a computer cost hundreds of thousands of pounds, occupied at least 25 feet square, drew huge amounts of power to run and even more power to keep it cool. Not the kind of thing you’d have kicking around at home. My first hands-on introduction to a working computer was to the LEO 2 used by the Department of Health and Social Security in Long Benton, not far from my home. It was HUGE, and SO impressive to a budding science fiction fan. If I wasn’t hooked on computers before then, I certainly was as a result of that meeting.
Mr. Budden had managed to strike an arrangement with a local company (British Paints, I believe) to make use of their small IBM 360 system on a couple of evenings each week. This presented an extremely rare opportunity for school aged children. Few other schools were lucky enough to have any kind of access to a computer, let alone the ability to program it and even to hang out in the machine room watching the blinking lights.
We started off learning FORTRAN under Mr. Budden’s tutelage. The mysteries of the 3-way arithmetic “if” statement were unravelled, and the complexities of “format” were sketched out as we all sought to understand his prime number calculating program. Then came the struggle to write programs of our own. What to compute? I think I started with a program that produced a Fahrenheit to Celsius conversion table. We all bought pads of coding forms so that we could be sure to get our program source laid out according to FORTRAN’s restrictive rules.
Once we were convinced that our programs were perfect we would troop off to British Paints. There we would invade the keypunch room and practise our one-fingered typing on IBM 029 keypunch machines. After some considerable clunking and cursing we would have what we thought was an accurate rendition of our programs on 80 column cards. Now what? Well, don’t you just shove them in the card reader and push the start button? Not quite. This was the point at which we found out about JCL, IBM’s Job Control Language. A control deck to surround the FORTRAN source took about 10 or 12 cards to identify the job, compile the program and invoke the executable - if it ever got that far.
It came as a complete surprise to me when I found out that my program had to be “compiled” before the computer could run it. “Wot’s a compiler, then?” was the question on my mind, but I didn’t want to reveal my ignorance by actually asking anyone. I eventually concluded it was the big blue box with all the lights on the front in the machine room. It was some weeks later that, having let this observation slip, I was introduced to the idea of a program that could turn FORTRAN into machine code and found out that the Big Blue box was the CPU. Live and learn.
Most of my programs failed to compile with a rather general indication of the difficulty and a terse message like “SYNTAX ERROR” which, especially at that stage of my learning, was almost completely useless. It often took hours of experimentation and many job runs to get a compilation to work.
The next hurdle, of course, was to get the actual program to run. Most of them ended abruptly with an “abend” dump (ABnormal END in IBMese) to the line printer. This yielded pages and pages of hexadecimal output. We all got very adept at recognising the screeching sound the line printer made when this happened, and there were often collisions at the main console as we all simultaneously tried to hit the Attention button to cancel the job. So, back to experimenting. Usually many more runs were required before something sensible began to appear on the printer.
There was often competition for the keypunches too and because of the relatively brief time we had at the facility to run our programs the Computer Society eventually acquired a Hollerith card punch. This enabled us to edit our programs back at the RGS so that we were ready to throw them straight into the card reader at British Paints. The Hollerith punch was a very primitive device. There were 12 keys various combinations of which had to be pressed to punch the alphabetic and special characters making up the FORTRAN source text. I remember that left and right parentheses “(“and ”)” were both common and thumb-dislocatingly hard to manage.
After some months of practice with FORTRAN some of us discovered PL/I which had a much more sophisticated and user-friendly compiler. This was not without its pitfalls however. It had a tendency to try to “correct” what it thought were “simple syntax errors”. This would often result in a sequence of messages like:
LINE 10, CHARACTER 34: UNBALANCED ")"; INSERTING "(" AT CHARACTER 27
LINE 10, CHARACTER 30: INVALID ARITHMETIC EXPRESSION; DELETING LINE 10 And so on. Watching the PL/I compiler build a mountain out of a molehill was almost more fun than actually getting the program to work, which it very occasionally did.
I left RGS in 1972, after completing my Olevels, to emigrate to Canada. On arrival at my new school I fell in with a bunch of people who had access to a Digital Equipment Corp. PDP/8 system running TSS/8 at the University of Calgary. This was a very small, primitive system supporting only BASIC and FOCAL, much less sophisticated than PL/I and FORTRAN. But that didn’t matter because we no longer had to use cards: we had 10character-per-second Teletype machines! For me, the age of interactive computing had dawned.
