Unofficial Christ's Hospital Forum

Since the election of Harold Macmillan as Chancellor of the University of Oxford has been mentioned again, there is an important additional comment that has also been made previously. Macmillan was chosen purposely not because of who he was (although there was some degree of ‘payback’), but as a pro...

I think that you omitted Thursday from your list of lesson times. You wrote

MICHAELMAS AND LENT TERMS.
Monday, Tuesday, Friday.

Presumably Thursday should have been included here.

And Thursdays in the Lent and Michaelmas terms?

Another minor and rare disruption to the morning time table occurred when morning PT was officially cancelled. (There was no outside PT on Sundays, Saturdays or Wednesdays.) This could happen if there was continuous rain or snow at about 9 30 am. In that case the Big School bell would be wrung conti...

There was another hazard to having the trade of Tea Boy. (Was it called Kiff boy in other houses?). Some unpleasant seniors (very rarely monitors) would inspect my thumb after I delivered their tea, looking for “Thumb Juice”. If a wet thumb was detected, the tea was sent back and replacement bowl de...

There were other types of unsatisfactory teachers apart from those who couldn’t maintain discipline. (I leave out predators of young boys, for hardly surprisingly the moderators don’t like such references.) They included alcoholics and there was one present for many years around my Housey time after...

For those interested in this subject, there is some more relevant information in another thread, “CH and the Armed Services”. One item there bears repetition. While this was not on active service, one of Buckie’s WW2 exploits deserves to be retold. Archibald Hector Buck was an OB and housemaster at ...

I have noticed references to a few interesting things done in WW2 by some masters in other threads. It may be a good idea to collect them, to add as much as possible of additional masters’ war careers and also OBs’ exploits, all in one place – this thread. The following have already been mentioned ....

Housey slang is well known, but I suspect that it is steadily vanishing, because of the uniformity of modern popular culture and the ever increasingly efficient ways it is being disseminated with modern electronic communications. Or has this slang already totally disappeared in 2015? Slang words wer...

I don’t recollect the name ‘Brass arse’ for Rider in my days (end of the 50’s). Perhaps this only was used in the early post war days, because of the rumour. In my time he was called ‘Arthur’ or ’Chaps’. Yet he still had the same posture and walk as that already described

The newspaper article contradicts the Wikepdia entry on Dr Martens shoes. Wikepedia states that, “The first Dr. Martens boots in the United Kingdom came out on 1 April 1960”, [my emphasis] which is hardly surprising since they were invented immediately after World War 2, by a German in Germany. This...

One of my contemporaries (1950s) liked singing (and presumably composing) funny versions of pop songs of the day. (After getting a scholarship to Cambridge in a humanities subject he finally became an IT guy - what wasted talent!) They were very popular and here are two examples. Daddy wouldn’t buy ...

And there was RWH Stevens of Lamb A in the early 50s.

Some OBs who went into the Services about my time, roughly in order of leaving although I may have got some out of step: ............ My apologies to anyone left out, mis-spelled or libelled. Leaves out of account National Service. Thanks for this list. Does postwarblue (or anyone else) have inform...

The Barnes motto related to time too. It’s the only one I can recall and it’s remembered for a strange reason. The motto’s understandable, but I can’t translate it. The words are, “Tempus fugit, manet res” and it means something like, “Time moves forward continuously, but many things remain unchange...