Roy Edwin Terry

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John Saunders
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Roy Edwin Terry

Post by John Saunders »

Does anyone remember Roy Terry? He tried to teach me piano and organ. As I remember he limped ,had more hair than would be acceptable in a schoolmaster on Flecker's staff but wore the finest pair of black rimmed spectacles I had seen until the advent of Hank Marvin. However he played a fine swing piano when noone was listening. During the Christmas holidays he was a rehearsal pianist on the West end shows and I had the benefit of his skills when returning for the Easter term.A great version of Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered amogst other numbers. He also wrote rude remarks on my music
and I remember in particular-"If you don't play with two hands together you might just as well plant potatoes." He also sang with the choir and was a breath of fresh air to me. Did he move to another school after a couple of years?
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Re: Roy Edwin Terry

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Certainly doesn't ring any bells with me. (January 1958 onwards.)
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Re: Roy Edwin Terry

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Ah yes, glasses with blue lenses. Laid on Zoltan Kodaly's Missa Brevis one year.

When I was in the Col B fire brigade we used to have a weekly outing at 12.15 with a high-charged barrow carrying hoses and brass whatnots. Somehow as we hared up the cloisters to the Quarter Mile we tended to upset the whole clanging, banging thing outside the Oil's office. Then up between Big School and the language block and lay out hoses etc, and WATER ON! .. with luck Mr Terry's room in the music school would have its window open ..

Oddly there was never any adult supervision on these outings, it was just a Col B thing. I forget what year one was in to do this one.

You amaze me about the Swing. An OB I knew in the Navy about 4 yrs behind me at school told me he had been told off for playing jazz in the Music School. He was actually quite talented but CH only wanted square talent. CH could be quite Procrustean in some ways.
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Re: Roy Edwin Terry

Post by John Saunders »

You're quite correct about the jazz embargo. My Sid Phillips arrangements disappeared from my music locker along with some Jelly Roll Morton records. I practised
Winifred Attwell boogie left hand for hours whilst keeping an eye out for the Classical thought police. As I remember John Austin Th.B played trumpet in a dance band at home and went on to organise the Housey Hotspots for the home fixture against St Catherine' s, Bramley. I think Graham Fife in Peel had a more than passing interest in the genre. We are speaking prior to 1955. Regrds JHGS.
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Re: Roy Edwin Terry

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"You amaze me about the Swing. An OB I knew in the Navy about 4 yrs behind me at school told me he had been told off for playing jazz in the Music School. He was actually quite talented but CH only wanted square talent. CH could be quite Procrustean in some ways."

Was that Mick Sant? He was banned from the band (for a while) for using wire brushes on dinner parade. He also wrote an article in The Outlook extolling pop music during the time it was banned at CH. All this made him a bit of a hero among us 13-year-olds.
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Re: Roy Edwin Terry

Post by J.R. »

I vaguely remember Mr 'Bill' Bailey having a near apoplectic fit when it was suggested the band should practice/play the 'St Louis Blues' march, though I think he did relent after a while.

Perhaps John H might remember !!
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Re: Roy Edwin Terry

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J.R. wrote:I vaguely remember Mr 'Bill' Bailey having a near apoplectic fit when it was suggested the band should practice/play the 'St Louis Blues' march, though I think he did relent after a while.

Perhaps John H might remember !!
I am sure I remember them playing at least one Souza march, possibly at Beating Retreat. I would even recognise it if I could be bothered to get into youtube
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Re: Roy Edwin Terry

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J.R. wrote:I vaguely remember Mr 'Bill' Bailey having a near apoplectic fit when it was suggested the band should practice/play the 'St Louis Blues' march, though I think he did relent after a while.

Perhaps John H might remember !!
We definitely played it and some others were included in the Xmas Concert.
Michael Froggatt along with Noel Abel formed the Jabberwock Jazz Band, who I think, played traditional jazz rather than Blues.
In our dayroom, (Barnes B), we had on such jazz artists as Cannonball Adderley, Thelonious Monk, MJQ etc, and I evn got some old jazz records from CJ Miller, when he through them out.
At other times we had Spencer Davies, Manfred Mann and the Small Faces etc.
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Re: Roy Edwin Terry

Post by sejintenej »

jhopgood wrote:
J.R. wrote:I vaguely remember Mr 'Bill' Bailey having a near apoplectic fit when it was suggested the band should practice/play the 'St Louis Blues' march, though I think he did relent after a while.
In our dayroom, (Barnes B), we had on such jazz artists as Cannonball Adderley, Thelonious Monk, MJQ etc, and I evn got some old jazz records from CJ Miller, when he through them out.
At other times we had Spencer Davies, Manfred Mann and the Small Faces etc.
Given the outright ban and searches carried out for banned and illegal music recordings (which would have included those named artists) I have to assume you had a blind and / or deaf housemaster.

For the benefit of Hertford victims and those not at CH in 1960 the front page headline and story in the Daily Sketch that CH had banned all unapproved music recordings (ie vinyl and radio) was true and the ban was (at least in Col A) definitely enforced. No recordings were approved - the impression given was that the National Anthem would have taken so long to be approved we would have been 6 feet under
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Re: Roy Edwin Terry

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sejintenej wrote:
jhopgood wrote:
J.R. wrote:I vaguely remember Mr 'Bill' Bailey having a near apoplectic fit when it was suggested the band should practice/play the 'St Louis Blues' march, though I think he did relent after a while.
In our dayroom, (Barnes B), we had on such jazz artists as Cannonball Adderley, Thelonious Monk, MJQ etc, and I evn got some old jazz records from CJ Miller, when he through them out.
At other times we had Spencer Davies, Manfred Mann and the Small Faces etc.
Given the outright ban and searches carried out for banned and illegal music recordings (which would have included those named artists) I have to assume you had a blind and / or deaf housemaster.

For the benefit of Hertford victims and those not at CH in 1960 the front page headline and story in the Daily Sketch that CH had banned all unapproved music recordings (ie vinyl and radio) was true and the ban was (at least in Col A) definitely enforced. No recordings were approved - the impression given was that the National Anthem would have taken so long to be approved we would have been 6 feet under
First Cherniavsky (With Paddy Cullen), then Miller, (with Pete Brotherton), and finally Goodall (with Johnson).

Clive Purdue was responsible for the jazz records, Chris White for the Faces, whose hairstyle he tried to emulate.
We had a record player at the top of the dayroom, between the studies, or occasionally, in the study. Never heard of any objections, and because of what I heard, I would get records out of Eltham Public Library during the holidays,
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Re: Roy Edwin Terry

Post by John Saunders »

Ref the jazz embargo. I was once accused by Mr Bailey of trying to emulate Humph in the back row of the band. We were playing a straight version of Alford's Thin Red Line but Humph had just recorded a trad version. So I tried! It would be 1954 I think. JHGS
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Re: Roy Edwin Terry

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This general ban at House level seems to have come in after my time. In 1954 I had a friend whose thing was Earl Bostik and Bebop and he used to play that in the dayroom. A while before that there was a pop song called 'The Thing' roughly to the tune of the Lincolnshire Poacher. In the chorus was a Boom-de-boom bit that people used to stamp to. It was banned from Big School after several hundred stamping B-d-b were thought dangerous to the building. All musical subtlety passed over my head as I am totally tone deaf. In the Prep we had our music lesson in the dayroom, lined up on a bench with 'nightingales' and one end and 'crows' at the other. I was easily the crowiest crow; indeed I was asked not to sing in Morning Prayers in the Prep Hall because I spoilt it for everyone else, because like Stalin I believed that quantity had a quality all its own. When Corks laid on Handel's Messiah the whole school had to sing the Hallelujah chorus. We rehearsed in the Chapel. By not paying attention I sang an extra one on the end, solo and fortissimo. People turned round and looked.
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Re: Roy Edwin Terry

Post by michael scuffil »

The ban was on 'rock and roll' [sic] and 'other popular music'.

As far as records were concerned, the decree (which came in in 1957/58) specifically allowed 'classical music, jazz, and modern stage musicals'.

It is hard nowadays to appreciate the horror aroused by rock music among the middle-aged middle classes. There is a recording (though I can't find it on the web anywhere) of a BBC 'Any Questions' in which the matter is discussed by Jeremy Thorpe, Lord Boothby, Isabel Barnett and Emanuel Shinwell. The splutterings of the first three are quite hilarious (and Jeremy T. was only in his 30s at the time). Shinwell was quite understanding, and told the others to calm down, but he must have been about 90. (Given what we now know about Boothby, and JT's subsequent history, the hypocrisy stinks.)
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Re: Roy Edwin Terry

Post by Fjgrogan »

I still have a recording of 'The Thing' mentioned by postwarblue - can't call it vinyl; it is on a 78, inherited from my grandmother, along with a whole teachest full of other 78s.
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Re: Roy Edwin Terry

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Roy Edwin Terry was a pleasant fellow, who would conduct the Chapel Practice on Saturday mornings if Korks was ill or otherwise unavailable. One thing that marked him out was that he was the only member of staff who had no degree or other qualification listed after his name in the ‘Blue Book’ (officially called the ‘Alphabetical List’). In the early 50s he was the junior housemaster of Lamb B.
He was one of the free-spirits that Flecker would tolerate, in great contrast to Seaman¸ whose regime was marked by such narrow mindedness, that it rapidly and most regrettably caused several superb and most imaginative, talented teachers to to quit CH (Korks, Malins, Cherniavsky, etc, etc). This was a paradox, for Flecker superficially seemed as ‘establishment-minded’ as could be imagined. Seaman, Flecker’s successor, was younger and did have a few more ‘modern’ ideas than Flecker. For example he introduced a primitive form of sex education. (Doesn’t that deserve its own post, Mr Moderator?)
The sex educator chap Seaman brought to CH (Horsham!) was a very Christian psychiatrist who toed the party line, ending with the conclusion that during our lifetimes we were developing something that he called ‘Personality’ which would outlive the physical life and in effect was the soul. Imaginative, but not very convincing! Apparently he also gave the same lectures at other public schools (certainly at Ardingly). He did not totally ignore conventional ‘sex education’, at least for the older boys, passing on such information as ‘prostitutes perform their function without any feeling at all for the customer’. This was said early on in the series of lectures, presumably to shock the audience and indicate that he was serious about his subject. The first time he came, there was a vast amount of buzz, in all parts of the school, before he lectured, no one having any idea what was going to happen. The back two rows of the New Science building lecture room were filled with masters, probably told by Seaman to attend. Overall the talks seemed an anti-climax, but he was an excellent speaker (in mode of delivery at least) who told a few good jokes. Excuse the length of this post, but once one starts to think of some specific matter, so many other memories come flooding in ....
Was there any sex education at Hertford?
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