All this is incredibly sad

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Great Plum
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Re: All this is incredibly sad

Post by Great Plum »

A couple of points - whilst I obviously didn’t sleep in the houses (until I was a Grecian), I was up and with the house for shoe inspection at 7.15 in Maine B and only home when it was time for bed. This continued in Maine A (no shoe inspection though by then!)

I do not recall eating a meal in term time at home.

Things have changed since the 70s, 80s and even 90s in terms of the house staff, hence ‘house parents’. It is very difficult to compare the school of today with even how I remember it 20 years ago when I was there.
Maine B - 1992-95 Maine A 1995-99
DazedandConfused
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Re: All this is incredibly sad

Post by DazedandConfused »

Different parenting and different house parenting I guess. No two pupils experiences would be exactly the same whether foundationers or non-foundationers.
harryh
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Re: All this is incredibly sad

Post by harryh »

DazedandConfused wrote: Sun Sep 16, 2018 9:56 am Different parenting and different house parenting I guess. No two pupils experiences would be exactly the same whether foundationers or non-foundationers.
How true.
Kind of makes my point clearly about TMF and his Gradgrind view of fact.
Perception? Now there's a thing!
Scazza
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Re: All this is incredibly sad

Post by Scazza »

Great Plum wrote: Sun Sep 16, 2018 9:25 am A couple of points - whilst I obviously didn’t sleep in the houses (until I was a Grecian), I was up and with the house for shoe inspection at 7.15 in Maine B and only home when it was time for bed. This continued in Maine A (no shoe inspection though by then!)

I do not recall eating a meal in term time at home.

Things have changed since the 70s, 80s and even 90s in terms of the house staff, hence ‘house parents’. It is very difficult to compare the school of today with even how I remember it 20 years ago when I was there.
As well as having your folks there at the end of the day (clearly what most kids missed / needed most) and the lower risks from not sleeping in the dorms, dont underestimate just having some privacy and a secure space. That is what drove me potty - having somewhere where you don't have a dozen other lads permanently in your face (and pinching your towel). It made me quite reclusive. I used to go off on long walks just to get some peace.

A low blow, but I'm also picturing you raiding the fridge every night! We survived off weetabix scrounged off the girls tables and smuggled back to house. I'm sorry to @dazedandconfused if this somehow left her starving!

Much of it is different now. The privacy of individual rooms. Links to parents is easy with modern comms, as we have both said before. (That would have really improved my experience. I wasn't homesick but missed talking with my folks.)

Its the soft stuff around pupil safeguarding and wellbeing that is more difficult to judge. Has that changed? A glossy report doesn't convince me. I'm not sure what would.

Its those issues where I felt most let down by CH, long before the widespread criminal abuse came to light. The academic education was great but the emotional education not so much. Imo you need to provide both to deliver the foundations goals.
scrub
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Re: All this is incredibly sad

Post by scrub »

Scazza wrote: Sun Sep 16, 2018 11:38 am ... don't underestimate just having some privacy and a secure space.
That was something that got to me too. Was made a bit worse by having my own space during LE then going back to communal dorms for UF and GE. We got separate studies during GE which helped a lot and only shared a room with one or two others during Deps. Wasn't till Grecians that I finally had my own space to sleep and (sometimes) study in.

Also, I was in Aus for the last 2 terms of my LE and 1st of my UF, so I went from having my own space as an LE, to being back at home, then back to an open dorm and dayroom to study in. On the upside, I missed out on the first term of being a fresh UF in a senior house, which was a definite bonus.
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TMF
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Re: All this is incredibly sad

Post by TMF »

An ongoing discomfort with the concept of 'facts' is evident...

All this is incredibly sad, indeed.
Golfer
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Re: All this is incredibly sad

Post by Golfer »

Scazza wrote: Sun Sep 16, 2018 11:38 am the lower risks from not sleeping in the dorms, dont underestimate just having some privacy and a secure space.
Look, I totally accept your point about privacy and a secure space. I wouldn't have survived in a boarding school.
But there was actually a battle between the school and CH teacher parents who WANTED to have their children sleeping in house. Obviously the school resisted in many cases for financial reasons.
BTW has anyone read the article in the Sunday Times today about senior boys at Millfield recently inflicting beatings with belts and cricket bats (on bare bottoms) on all boys entering a particular house? We are talking 2017-18.
DazedandConfused
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Re: All this is incredibly sad

Post by DazedandConfused »

A low blow, but I'm also picturing you raiding the fridge every night! We survived off weetabix scrounged off the girls tables and smuggled back to house. I'm sorry to @dazedandconfused if this somehow left her starving!
That Weetabix shortage has left me mentally scarred beyond all else that happened at CH :D

It’s funny, I’d never really made the connection before but after leaving CH on my GE I’ve always struggled in big groups and with any form of communal livings, swerving halls at uni and always needing plenty of time on my own. I mostly work from home now and love my own company, something I craved at CH. One of the things that pushed me into leaving when I did was having to share a single study bedroom- two cabin beds shoved into that tiny space. Fairly sure that was against some sort of rule or policy even in the 90s.
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Re: All this is incredibly sad

Post by rockfreak »

I'm aghast reading some of this stuff. I was at CH from 1952 to 1960 and I fondly imagined that the worst of bullying and abuse was being consigned to history after I left, especially when the school went co-ed. But I find that no, some things seem to have got worse for some people. I never had my own personal property nicked (or "borrowed"). Bullying seemed to be on the way out. I experienced Pink and Buck (I was in their houses) but never the prolonged reign of gropery and rapery that Husband and Dobbie, Webb and Burr, seem to have inflicted on their victims. I'm still astonished at the way that some people are trying to find mitigating excuses: "It was a good education," "Balance it against the good things," "You can't expect perfection," "This stuff goes on at day schools." NO IT BLEDDY WELL DOESN'T!".

Check out Alex Renton's videos on You Tube. He's still researching boarding schools and yes, it is still going on. Wake up, privileged public school apologists (if indeed it is a privilege). These places are out of date and the whole system is holding up our stupid, class-ridden country from joining the rest of developed Europe.
ZeroDeConduite
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Re: All this is incredibly sad

Post by ZeroDeConduite »

rockfreak wrote: Sun Sep 16, 2018 8:11 pm I'm aghast reading some of this stuff. I was at CH from 1952 to 1960 and I fondly imagined that the worst of bullying and abuse was being consigned to history after I left, especially when the school went co-ed. But I find that no, some things seem to have got worse for some people. I never had my own personal property nicked (or "borrowed"). Bullying seemed to be on the way out.
+1

Dr T Hoskins report (linked to elsewhere in this forum) from the late 1970s has a very (very) hollow ring:
"It is a decade since student unrest reached its height, and those of us working in schools saw its effect on schoolchildren, with an unprecedented questioning of authority and the entire basis of the educational system... Now that affluence (sic) has given way to recession, the practical advantages of education are more apparent to its recipients... this makes the adolescent more prepared to accept the constraints of school life – constraints which themselves are less irksome than they were ten years ago. Today's young people seem in general to be more conforming and more conservative than were their older brothers and sisters...
It could be argued that the adult world has regained its confidence and increased its understanding in helping them. Our particular schema of the interaction of teachers, medical officer and consultant psychiatrist is an individual one .... But its advantages have been considerable, not least in the personal continuity and availability of the individuals concerned, and the close personal relationships that have developed.
"

When @robert totterdell goes to face the Governing Council's committee, they will have had decades of being fed such bullish!t about the health and well-being of the school's pupils. :shock:

These were the links to Hoskins' report (I've quoted from page 4):
https://i.imgur.com/jFmQazc.jpg
https://i.imgur.com/jqMWubW.jpg
https://i.imgur.com/URVC3mI.jpg
https://i.imgur.com/kxlzSHy.jpg
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michael scuffil
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Re: All this is incredibly sad

Post by michael scuffil »

Two points from this thread.

Like rockfreak, I too am amazed by the fact that bullying, which was declining in his time, and declining still faster in mine (we overlapped but he was four years my senior) seems to have got worse in the 1970s and 1980s.

As for non-foundationers, of course they had an easier life. The only one I knew well was Peter Scott, the doctor's son. He was uncomfortable about his status, I think. He left after Prep and arrived in time for chapel; until he became a monitor, when he lived in. Thornton B was a house largely free of bullying (presumably the doctor knew this and chose the house accordingly; his brother had been in Peele B, which by then had become possibly the roughest house).
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Foureyes
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Re: All this is incredibly sad

Post by Foureyes »

Like Rockfreak and sculfill I find the reports of bullying and pilfering at C.H. in the 70s and 80s hard to understand. I was in Prep B for two terms in 1948, then Lamb B until 1955, so predate them slightly. I really cannot remember any excessive bullying and as for private property, that was absolutely sacrosanct. As far as I remember everything we possessed was marked - I was Lamb B 13, it is engraved on my heart to this day! Even our shoes were marked with nails on the instep. I still have the setsquare from my precious Oxford Mathematical Instrument Set; in those days they were made of metal and there it is, inscribed rather shakily (possibly with the pointed spike from the compass) - "Lamb B 13."

I got beaten twice, which was about par for the course, once in Prep B once in Lamb - deserved one, did not deserve the other, but, hey, that's life!

There was a short period in Lamb B when some of the seniors decided that some of the juniors were becoming too stroppy, so they resurrected an (allegedly) ancient C.H. punishment of 'fotching. This involved the senior (bigger) giving the junior (smaller) a very hefty blow to the ear - painful and allegedly damaging to the eardrum. I think that it happened two or three times and was then stopped, never to reappear.
David :shock:
Avon
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Re: All this is incredibly sad

Post by Avon »

michael scuffil wrote: Wed Sep 19, 2018 6:39 pm Like rockfreak, I too am amazed by the fact that bullying, which was declining in his time, and declining still faster in mine (we overlapped but he was four years my senior) seems to have got worse in the 1970s and 1980s.
For heaven's sake.

Bullying isn't like smallpox. It doesn't decline as medical science and progressivity increases. Bullying is a function of leadership; poor leadership lets bullying in. Bullying isn't being outmoded as practices change, it just changes itself.
  • Sillett: intellectually a factotum but with a violent and aggressive (borderline sadistic with his 'tangents') style of leadership.
    Poulton: bookish but weak as a Nun's pi**. In awe of the Foundation such that he made some dire and inhumane decisions not to report abuse to the authorities.
    Crud. A peasant of the highest (or lowest) order. Morally weak, an appalling choice of housemaster and unable to treat all his charges as equal.
    Cairncross. Largely token as deputy head as far as I observed - but in a position of authority that she failed to meet.
I could go on...

CH in the 80s (that I experienced) was a petri dish - if you create a deliberately spartan environment (by the standards of the time) and fill it with children of such mixed backgrounds overseen by such a broad spectrum of adults, from those happy to rape their charges to those who acutely cared for them, if you add a veneer of leadership that's so myopic and uncaring that the evil can flourish, and above that you place a governance structure of doughties from the Corporation of London massively ignorant of their responsibilities, what do you expect?
bakunin
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Re: All this is incredibly sad

Post by bakunin »

Points very well made, Avon.
Avon wrote: Wed Sep 19, 2018 7:18 pm and above that you place a governance structure of doughties from the Corporation of London massively ignorant of their responsibilities, what do you expect?
Yeah, throwing in a bizarre cobweb-encrusted senile feudal relic of an organisation on top of everything really doesn't help, does it?
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Re: All this is incredibly sad

Post by sejintenej »

rockfreak wrote: Sun Sep 16, 2018 8:11 pm I'm aghast reading some of this stuff. I was at CH from 1952 to 1960 and I fondly imagined that the worst of bullying and abuse was being consigned to history after I left, especially when the school went co-ed. But I find that no, some things seem to have got worse for some people. I never had my own personal property nicked (or "borrowed"). Bullying seemed to be on the way out. I experienced Pink and Buck (I was in their houses) but never the prolonged reign of gropery and rapery that Husband and Dobbie, Webb and Burr, seem to have inflicted on their victims. I'm still astonished at the way that some people are trying to find mitigating excuses: "It was a good education," "Balance it against the good things," "You can't expect perfection," "This stuff goes on at day schools." NO IT BLEDDY WELL DOESN'T!".
Having had three children in state schools (no way would I allow them near CH), having helped run a council sponsored youth group and having run another youth orientated group YES IT BLEDDY WELL DOES in state schools (though I came down heavily on it when I could - I even "employed" a local ruffian to help me stop it)
What happens if a politician drowns in a river? That is pollution.
What happens if all of them drown? That is solution!!!
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