Rev W Cochrane. (Corks!)

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michael scuffil
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Re: Rev W Cochrane. (Corks!)

Post by michael scuffil »

John is being modest. He was the very model of a Major General Stanley.
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Re: Rev W Cochrane. (Corks!)

Post by sejintenej »

eucsgmrc wrote: CMES was right, but until I read this I had never realised that he was aware of music. There were in Corks' time two peaks of high musical excellence - band and chapel choir - separated by a slough of dismal inadequacy in almost every other kind of music. So widely separated that, if you were standing on one peak, you might easily miss seeing the other.
IMHO that has to be the understatement of the year. I rate the band as incredible but the chapel choir as competent; it pales behind many others. It was only decades after I left that I was able to even hear (and enjoy**) opera and other classical music. As for jazz, it was in the 100 club in the mid 60's that I heard any jazz at all. CH was a wasteland musically.

Having savaged CH music let me savage art; OK so Benedict Rubbra seems to have made a painting name and another old blue is an Irish potter but art tuition in my time did not exist. We were simply given paper and powder but never shown how to paint nor paintings by the masters to try to emulate. I suppose the Oil wasn't that way inclined. I just hope the present teachers are better.


** on my other screen there is an orchestra playing light opera with one musician with a rose in his mouth balancing his trombone on his chin!!!!!
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Re: Rev W Cochrane. (Corks!)

Post by DavidRawlins »

Corks thought the only reputable composer was J S Bach.
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Re: Rev W Cochrane. (Corks!)

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"Having savaged CH music let me savage art; OK so Benedict Rubbra seems to have made a painting name and another old blue is an Irish potter but art tuition in my time did not exist. We were simply given paper and powder but never shown how to paint nor paintings by the masters to try to emulate. I suppose the Oil wasn't that way inclined. I just hope the present teachers are better."

Having no artistic abilities, I never really thought about this, but you are right. As far as I remember there was no actual instruction in the arts. Were there any advanced classes for those who showed aptitude, or was this just not seen as an appropriate area for us to study?
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Re: Rev W Cochrane. (Corks!)

Post by eucsgmrc »

sejintenej wrote:We were simply given paper and powder but never shown how to paint nor paintings by the masters to try to emulate. I suppose the Oil wasn't that way inclined. I just hope the present teachers are better.
I hadn't really thought about it that way. I thought Nell Todd was quite nice, and Art periods were an opportunity to indulge my natural laziness without reproach. Still, now you say it, I see that you are right.

What I remember is frustration at not being able to produce a picture that satisfied me. I hadn't the imagination to visualise what I wanted to create, but it didn't occur to me that I needed to imagine something before I could create it. I thought that my problem was lack of draughtsmanship. I might want to paint a face, or a dramatic event, but when my hand moved brush over paper, the result was nothing like what I wanted. I got a hideous daub, grossly distorted at best and more likely unrecognisable.

I was really annoyed when I discovered that adults admired such daubs. They claimed to perceive creativity, talent and imagination in them. For me to produce these messy jumbles was bad enough. To have an adult imagine that I had intended to produce tham was an extra humiliation.
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Re: Rev W Cochrane. (Corks!)

Post by LongGone »

John

That is exactly my feeling. While I doubt that I really had any intrinsic artistic ability, it would have been nice to at least confirm it!
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Re: Rev W Cochrane. (Corks!)

Post by sejintenej »

Having savaged CH music let me savage art;................................

I also agree totally with John - how anyone could possibly agree that dead sheep or multiple copies of the same object are "art" and not food beggars belief
It's crazy but having escaped CH I got into and ended up reasonably competent drawing flowers and landscapes on glassware with a diamond pen.
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Re: Rev W Cochrane. (Corks!)

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Some thoughts on art and music...

CH was probably no different from most schools at the time. Flecker once said to Colin Davies that he'd give him a cap for the pennies.

I remember a spontaneous jazz group called the Housey Hot Five: they were quite good, but of course severely discouraged.

While the band was excellent and the chapel choir quite good, the school orchestra was painful to listen to (but then so are most school orchestras).

There was a music teacher called Alan Wilkinson (still alive, I believe) who was a good violinist himself and got Andrew Porter into the National Youth Orchestra as a violinist.

As for art: I cannot remember any art 'teaching'. In terms of mathematics teaching, it was as if the teacher had said: 'Here's an idea for a few sums. Get on with it.' There were one or two 'art grecians' like Ben Rubbra and Conrad Clark -- I don't know how much they were actually taught.

I don't know when this attitude came in: clearly the Art School was not a mere afterthought in the mind either of the architect or the people who approved the designs.
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Re: Rev W Cochrane. (Corks!)

Post by Kit Bartlett »

"Trial by Jury" was performed as a Coleridge Block play on two nights in 1949. There is a review of the production in "The Blue" for July 1949 page 138.
E.G. Malins was the producer who also played the piano accompanied by Corks on a separate piano, Colin Alves played the Judge, John Walker the Usher, Gordon Bridger the Defendant and Johyn Marvin who stepped in as the Counsel at the last minute owing to the illness of Truscott.
Corks incidentally was born in 1914 and educated at Cheltenham College where he obtained a choral scholarship to King's College, Cambridge .
He took Holy Orders and came to C,H. as Assistant Director of Music in 1937 succeeding Dr. C,.S. Lang as Director in 1945.
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Re: Rev W Cochrane. (Corks!)

Post by sejintenej »

michael scuffil wrote:
As for art: I cannot remember any art 'teaching'. In terms of mathematics teaching, it was as if the teacher had said: 'Here's an idea for a few sums. Get on with it.' .
So that is why I failed "O" level Elementary Mathematics! Oh, and also failed it at "A" level giving me three "O" level maths/arithmetic passes.

Fortunately I cannot remember the teacher who was supposed to teach me French. One person who was influential in my later upbringing came to the UK from France at the age of 13 not speaking English. He later was one of the tutors at SOE training agents; this man, whilst taking me out one w/e, met my French teacher and considered that he knew no French and was not competent to teach it.
OK, I have a phobia about languages but was forced to learn them. 3 years French CH tuition was a total waste, one year, 2 periods a week, working in the back of a CH German class on Spanish and I could get by over there. 40 to 50 hours one-on-one (and no computer screens) Brazilian Portuguese and I was perfectly confident in business meetings over there. It is all about how a language is taught

I have to wonder whether Nell Todd was any good with a brush, clay or sculpture.
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Re: Rev W Cochrane. (Corks!)

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Fortunately I cannot remember the teacher who was supposed to teach me French. One person who was influential in my later upbringing came to the UK from France at the age of 13 not speaking English. He later was one of the tutors at SOE training agents; this man, whilst taking me out one w/e, met my French teacher and considered that he knew no French and was not competent to teach it.

The French teachers at the time were Arthur Rider, Reggie Dean, AL Johnstone, Morton Peto and Littlefield. Pat Cullen and Jack Massen taught some French, but were German specialists. Arthur and Reggie, I think, were fluent French speakers and certainly very knowledgeable. I don't know how well Peto actually spoke French, but he taught me extremely well in my first year.
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Re: Rev W Cochrane. (Corks!)

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I ended up with Arthur Ryder every year in French and I have to say, 50 years later I can still carry on a reasonable conversation. One of my Parisian colleagues always mentions that I have a 'vairy naice accent'.
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Re: Rev W Cochrane. (Corks!)

Post by Kit Bartlett »

Does any one know when Corks first received his nickname ? I presume that it was related to a contraction of his surname and his alcoholic consumption.
I remember a boy in Coleridge A , one John Fiddy, later House Captain in 1951-52, scratching the name Korky on a melon which grew in size and showing it to Corks much to his amusement.
I believe that Korky the Cat was a character in a comic possibly " The Beano".
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Re: Rev W Cochrane. (Corks!)

Post by John Saunders »

With ref to the Musical Wasteland. I agree. My sheet music-Sid Phillips parts ,and Boogie piano disappeared when I placed them in those music lockers in the Music School. However don't forget the Housey Hotshots who played at least once in the annual fixture against St Catherine's, Bramley. I think the group was led by Johnnie Austin who later became a peripatetic brass tutor in Cornwall. The early BBC jazz guru Steve Race gave a lecture in c,1952 on Jazz.
The last time I spoke to JH Page was Poppy Day 1960 when I jumped off a jazz float in Cambridge having spotted him and Mrs Page watching the procession.I remember also playing some jazz piano with Ernie Raisbeck when the film projector in Big School, broke down one Saturday night in c 1953. I also was told off by the Bandmaster Mr Bailey for giving a Dixie entry to that well known march the" Thin Red Line". Humph had recently performed it with Wally Fawkes which I tried to imitate. JHGS
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Re: Rev W Cochrane. (Corks!)

Post by postwarblue »

Anything modern like jazz was verboten.

I remember Ernie Raisbeck - got a music school to university I think - at RAF CCF Corps Camp at Cottesmore in 1953 he sat down at the NAAFI piano and played anything anyone hummed to him, straight off, no music.

There was a 'hit' ca.1952 or so called 'The Thing' - the melody was a riff on the Lincolnshire Poacher - there was a point where one did a big
stamp-te-stamp in unison in the chorus. 1600 feet doing this together in Big School got it banned from cinema night.
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