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OPUS • Issue 6 • Spring 2012

Portsmouth Grammar School • www.pgs.org.uk

Latter House Saints and Sinners (1952-3) It was a fascinating, though slightly embarrassing discovery. Asked by Mike Shepherd for my recollections of science teaching at PGS in the 1940s and ’50s for an article he was writing for Opus (Spring 2011), and hoping to jog my memory, I recalled that my Sixth Form science notebooks were lurking somewhere in the basement. Retained originally for their voluminous notes, and later through inertia, they had in fact lain unopened for over fifty years. But the meat of the book is its record of the achievements and misdemeanours of each of the 112 members of the house.

There were a dozen of them, standard PGS issue at that time, sturdy hard-bound items with 128 lined pages and identical (and anonymous) dark blue spines. It was only when I opened one with no outside label that I realised that there was a cuckoo in the nest - and a very different and entertaining cuckoo at that - the Latter House Book 1952-1953 (incorporating the Eastwood House Book 1952-1953). The opening pages are bland enough, merely listing the masters and prefects. The Housemaster was W.T. (Bill) Tweed, also senior chemistry master, a bluff but genial teacher, reputed to have been in charge of an explosives factory during WWII. The House Tutor was W.H. Hore, senior geography master, whom I remember amazing us in the Lower Fifth with the ultra-modern 35mm colour slides he had taken on a trip across North America.

Bill Tweed and W.H. Hore, 1950

The House Captain that year was Richard Sotnick, later Lord Mayor, founder of the Portsmouth (now London) International String Quartet Competition, and recent author of a study in royal history, The Coburg Conspiracy.

Each double-page spread is divided into columns, with the left-most listing the names, ages and forms of up to five boys. Then come columns for Rugby, CrossCountry and Cricket, and on the righthand page for Scouts, CCF and Discipline. The latter, naturally, is the widest, with subdivisions Essays, E4s (the prefects’ court, named for the room in which it was originally held), Punishment, Late, and (most ominously) Housemaster.

Richard Sotnick, when he was Captain of the 2nd XI in 1952

The Sports columns dutifully record membership of School and House teams, and the CCF column section and rank. But the most interesting entries are of course those under Discipline.

We find that Sixth-Formers were generally fairly law-abiding, though a few were awarded essays (for what, one wonders - the misdeeds are not specified). Lateness also remains common. But the lower years provide a richer harvest. In the Upper Fifths ‘3 slipper’ begins to appear. In the Lower Fifths a star sportsman (Colts rugby, 1st XI cricket) gets ‘3 slipper’ twice and also ‘2 cane’, while a boy with no other achievements manages a record in beatings - four over the year. (The ‘slipper’ used was actually a gym shoe - lighter, more flexible and easier to grip than a modern trainer.) The Eastwood House Book section is organised in a similar way: ‘Housemaster: F.M. Fogarty [who brought rugby to the school]; House Tutor: J. [Jasper] Nowell [modern languages]; House Prefects: A.J. Payne/N.J. Coombs. The House numbers 56’.

A crucial difference in the boys’ listings, though, is that no sports or CCF achievements are recorded, leaving lots of space for details of their crimes. Typical of these, perhaps, is a miscreant in 4A, given a 50-line essay for ‘Insolence’ and ‘1 slipper’ for ‘Chewing and disturbance in prayers’. (I’m hoping that the current distinguished President of the OP Club won’t object to this advertisement of his normalcy.) The most common charge seems to have been ‘Talking in form’, usually rewarded by a 400-word essay. Other misdeeds penalised by essays ranged from the mundane to the daring:

Diamond Queen While the school has had many distinguished visitors over the years, Her Majesty the Queen has never visited. She did pass by in June 1947 when, as Princess Elizabeth, she was part of a royal visit to the city that included King George VI, Queen Elizabeth and Princess Margaret. They are seen here being driven past the war-damaged Lower School after disembarking from HMS Vanguard.

- General nuisance - Walking in front of D Block - Throwing chalk - Throwing paper pellets with elastic band - Throwing apple at prefect. E4 offences usually resulted in two or three with the slipper: - Talking in prayers - Kicking stones in playground after repeated warnings - Fighting in form room - Misbehaviour in public - Causing disturbance on Guildhall steps. An even more evocative find than the book was a batch of four impositions that I’d apparently collected the following year. All were the same - writing out Psalm 1 - only six verses, so the crime, unknown now but presumably a group one, cannot have been too serious. But the most interesting feature was that the three culprits whose names I could decipher (not all in Latter) had all gone on to highly distinguished careers: one as a university lecturer in maths, another as Her Britannic Majesty’s ambassador to Peru and later Brazil, and the third as Chief of the Air Staff. What conclusion should be drawn from this? That my timely correction had saved them from lives of criminality? Or that they had achieved success despite a police-state upbringing, where sadistic prefects were forever watching for infringements of the myriad rules, and opportunities to mete out punishment? The former, of course! But why did I have the House Book at all? Presumably because I’d borrowed it as a model for the 1953-54 volume when I took over as House Captain the following year. Then, indistinguishable from my science notebooks, it had lain neglected and forgotten for half a century. It may even be a unique survival. John Sadden, the School Archivist, says that he knows of no other example. (It will now be committed to his safekeeping.) But it was presumably the norm for all Houses to keep such a record at that time. Surely they haven’t all disappeared? Maybe another OP has such a memento hiding in an old trunk or tea chest, and preserving dark secrets of the past? It might be worth checking! Michael Craddock (1945-54)

Her Majesty is seen in the other archive photograph with the PGS Swing Band at Gunwharf Quays during the 2002 Portsmouth Festivities, which she visited as part of her Golden Jubilee celebrations.