Unofficial Christ's Hospital Forum

Since no one has commented in the Forum on the appointment of our new Head Teacher, Matthew Judd, I’ll welcome him on behalf of us all, looking forward to his tenure being long, satisfying and successful from every point of view. I know a bit about Leighton Park School, where he is its Head, since I ...

Some things changed after the 40s. Then we were encouraged to walk in the countryside and not to frequent Horsham; bikes or no bikes.

In the late 40s and 50s, not only were Dorm raids totally unknown, but entry into the passage between the two houses of the same block was forbidden and I am not aware of any who disobeyed this rule. There were the many obvious legal exceptions - Entry into the ground floor inter house passage to ...

One of my friends always returned for the term’s start with plenty of American comics, for his uncle was a newsagent I think. So he fell foul of the ban and they were confiscated. However he knew lots about them and had the gumption to appeal to our sen housemaster to point out that some of his c ...

Certainly not, at least not in my time, for I left CH late in the fifties. At no time was R’n’R (nor any other music) banned. A very few had their own radios (clumsy things with glass valves/tubes and big heavy batteries) and no one minded. Each house had a radio (available for non-prep and non-sch ...

I recollect in the early 50s two boys with disabilities . One was a boy in La B with a deformed right hand, which tapered and only had a single finger (an extreme form of syndactyly). The other, Hardy of Mid A, had (before CH?) suffered from rheumatic heart disease, which had permanently damaged his ...

I recollect that Sgts Usher, Fielder and Carter all had similar uniforms, possibly because they were ex-Army. Band Master Staggs’ dress uniform was quite different, with a sort of frock coat and sash. This was probably because he was formerly a Royal Marine. I think that Sgt Carter’s full title was R ...

After the 1950s CH Horsham was clearly democratised (or as we conservative traditionalists would say, the high standards for being a Button Grecian were lowered). The categories mentioned by Spoonbill school monitors: boys who either excelled at sport or who were good all-rounders (... nevertheless ...

Nuts to Cambridge. The Drummond Chair in Political Economy was established in 1825 at (wait for it)

OXFORD

Kirby (Signals) Camp was not entirely free, since the only luxury that Uncle ever permitted himself was decent coffee. According to him the Royal Signals would only pay for tea, not coffee for the Camp. Hence a voluntary payment of a couple of shillings was required for those who wanted coffee ...

My experience in 1942 was untypical, but my answer to Pe.A’s question, How big were the classrooms in your primary school? is, “Close to 50,” for I presume you mean class sizes, not classroom dimensions. (Then state schools were called “Elementary,” “Central” and “Grammar.”) The untypical circumstanc ...

There was another suicide about half century before Sejintenej’s time. I think it was a Lamb A boy and it took place publicly. I know nothing more (eg if the principal cause was beating, bullying or another stress). However I am pretty sure there is something written about this event elsewhere in t ...

Although Gad Malins clearly was an excellent teacher, he was also imaginative and did more than instruct the subject he was paid to teach. I remember in his GE history class we devoted a few periods to learning how to control a meeting and then demonstrating this knowledge. We were divided into ...

The snobbism directed towards Manual School Instructors (they were not called Masters or Teachers in the 50s and earlier) came from Masters too. None of these Instructors were members of the Masters’ Common Room until Mr E Ingledew, in the mid-fifties, became the first Manual School educator to be s ...

Going back a bit further (to the first half of the 1950s) the music situation at CH Horsham was similar to the above description. There were occasional classical music concerts from the school orchestra, conducted by ‘Pip’ Dore (organist) and after his departure by ‘Corks.’ At concerts, in contrast t ...