Unofficial Christ's Hospital Forum

I remember at least two sorts of official lists of boys at CH.

There was the “Alphabetical List,” commonly called the Blue Book, because it had a blue cover. It listed all the teachers’ surnames in alphabetical order and their degrees with universities, on the first page. This was followed on page 3 by the surnames of all pupils alphabetically. There was, I recollect, one line per boy, giving surname, initials, house, form, maths set and year of entry. Each boy received one Blue Book per year.

The other document was called a “House List.” It was a piece of paper (about 30 x 10 cm), headed by the name of the house (and year of publication?), with a list of the surnames of boys in roll order. On the same line were their initials and each line was preceded by the boy's house number. There was one such list for each house. Many copies were printed and used by house masters, matrons, etc. for administrative purposes. (Perhaps the monitors’ names were in italics.)

Firstly are some of the above details incorrect and has something been omitted? Next, and more importantly, are copies of these documents still stored somewhere, such as the museum?

I still have my Blue Book from 1983. It's covered in graffiti from my brother and I from the time (an interesting insight into who we did and didn't like...) but don't have any of them after then.

I also remember the House Lists, usually used for marking people off for Trades, fire drills, and other various bits of Admin, mostly in Junior Houses.

William wrote: ↑Fri May 12, 2017 4:07 pm I remember at least two sorts of official lists of boys at CH.

The other document was called a “House List.” It was a piece of paper (about 30 x 10 cm), headed by the name of the house (and year of publication?), with a list of the surnames of boys in roll order. On the same line were their initials and each line was preceded by the boy's house number. There was one such list for each house. Many copies were printed and used by house masters, matrons, etc. for administrative purposes. (Perhaps the monitors’ names were in italics.)

Firstly are some of the above details incorrect and has something been omitted? Next, and more importantly, are copies of these documents still stored somewhere, such as the museum?

I saw three house rolls for Col A for when I was at the museum on OB Day. Regretably the September 1960 list had at least one boy omitted and I had to wonder about the order in certain cases.

The house lists also included cryptic letters that baffled me at first, but they indicated what sort of grecian or dep you were, like 'pcg' (probationary classics grecian), 'dmlg' (deputy modern language grecian). Writing out house lists was a common punishment.

The museum has copies of the Blue Book Lists from c 1931 onwards. I believe that they started way back before then. They were published originally in September but switched to February in 1943 or 1944. The House Rolls as they were called came out at the beginning of the school year in September.
Again the Museum has copies in one vast broadsheet for each year,going back to the nineteen thirties. It was the practice for each individual house to have its own individual copies cut up from the original sheet.