Unofficial Christ's Hospital Forum

I`m beginning to think that some of you should come and do a housemaster`s job for a week or 2 - you might just change your ideas!! With respect, I was a monitor for seven terms (about 15% of my life to that date), during which time I also took A Level, Scholarship level, and Oxbridge scholarships....

Oh dear. I get up early to do some work and find onewestguncopse telling me (among others) that I am out of touch with present-day CH reality (as if I didn't know!) So I'll use my coffee break to reply. There has of course always been a conservative tendency among OBs and sometimes it has been destr...

Katharine The last three houses at each end of the avenue had (still have, I suppose) an attached house for a married housemaster. (That meant the housemaster accommodation in the centre of the respective blocks could be assigned to a bachelor non-housemaster. E.g. the director of music Jack Rust li...

There is no doubt that you are right, but it's clear what the problem is. When the Horsham school was designed, and until mid-century, the "houseparenting" for each house was done by: 6 monitors, who did the bulk of it, and whose accommodation was provided for anyway half a matron, who had...

Bachelors/spinsters are out of fashion. It's a problem, and I don't claim to have an answer (my initial contribution to this thread shouldn't be taken TOO seriously). Maybe in 50/60 years' time things will have come full circle, who knows. Then the married accommodation will have to be sub-divided i...

Clearly one of the biggest social changes at CH in the last half century has been the huge increase in the proportion of married staff, and this is not without its problems. Houseparents are clearly a separate issue, but even then, I'm not sure they need to live on top of their houses, but I suppose...

Morning gemmy! We had two safety pins. The small one held the bands to the shirt at the back. It had to be properly centred, but it only had to be done once with clean bands. The other safety pin lived in the right shirt flap. You aligned the bands, held the visible ends in your teeth, held the coll...

The funny thing was, while most of us weren't allowed to walk on the grass in front of houses, we were allowed to play croquet on it. (And summer morning-break PT took place there too.)

I don't think that boys minded much about the grass, but it was irksome that they weren't allowed to smoke, and a great thing was made about it, while masters openly smoked in front of boys. I suppose teachers aren't allowed to do that now. (Even as a non-smoker myself, then as now, I found this pre...

Judge Judy herself is great, though she did once have to ask the uniformed man next to her whether the hard drive was an important part of a computer.

I never liked the rule that staff could walk on the grass in the quad and on front avenue and pupils couldn't. I remember one member of staff who refused to walk on the grass because he said that that is unfair to the pupils because after all, it is their school. I think his attitude is commendable...

michael scuffil says: When I think back to my time at CH, I agree that many things were a disgrace, in particular the washing/sanitary facilities. And I suspect the wiring was a death-trap (I nearly burnt a house down). When it was built in 1898-1902 the CH site was real state-of-the-art in all its...

CH is not a museum and will evolve slowly but surely - after all if the work on the boarding house had not been done then the school would have failed its Social Services inspections and been forced to close! Now all Old Blues who left pre 2000 would not recognise the place. On the whole the refurb...

nastymum wrote:What is this nonsense about gardens and privacy? If you want privacy then don't work in a boarding school because you won't get any

Precisely.

To continue this rant, if Lamb Asphalt's been built on, where do they do SCHOOL DRILLS??!!