Michael Cherniavsky

Share your memories and stories from your days at school, and find out the truth behind the rumours....Remember the teachers and pupils, tell us who you remember and why...

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alterblau
LE (Little Erasmus)
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Real Name: A Smith

Re: Michael Cherniavsky

Post by alterblau »

From Rockfreak’s comment it appears that in a sense Michael Cherniavsky and/or ‘Daddy’ David Roberts may have been the inspiration for the character Hector in Alan Bennett’s "The History Boys", a superb play and film. It’s excellent to know that CH may have exerted such literary influence, for I had wrongly assumed that Hector was derived from a schoolmaster who had taught history to Bennett in Leeds.
JohnAL
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Real Name: John Fairfield

Re: Michael Cherniavsky

Post by JohnAL »

Thanks Rockfreak. I’ll look out for Bennett’s book. Your quotation from it,

“... others on the Russian Course [the National Service’s Joint Services School for Linguists] were disconcertingly clever, particularly, I remember, a group of boys from Christ's Hospital ...” rang a bell.

One OB, definitely on that course, was John Arnold of Barnes A. He was probably one of Bennett’s contemporaries studying Russian, for they were born less than 6 months apart. There were plenty more OBs on the course, I’m sure. It would be interesting to hear from Forum members the names of more OB participants, especially those who impressed Bennett.

Incidentally Arnold, a priest who retired as Dean of Durham Cathedral some years ago, is still active in Church matters and formerly was a sort of official ecumenical advisor for many years to the Archbishop of Canterbury, so he often used his Russian skills. Arnold’s father in-law was a German Lutheran pastor too and I understand that at CH Arnold had been a modern language Grecian, studying French and German.

Also if any reader knows Alan Bennett, perhaps he could be asked if the CH history master was the direct inspiration for Hector.
William
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Real Name: William Devons

Re: Michael Cherniavsky

Post by William »

Another participant in the National Service Russian Course was Derek Humphreys (Ba A), who unsurprisingly was a modern languages specialist while at CH. He’s 7 years younger than Alan Bennett, so I suppose he had no influence on Bennett’s play, The History Boys.

I have lost touch with Humphreys so if any reader knows his contact details, could he please send me a Private Message with his Email, phone, etc? Thanks.
rockfreak
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Real Name: David Redshaw
Location: Saltdean, East Sussex

Re: Michael Cherniavsky

Post by rockfreak »

Back to Geoffrey Cannon who posted originally on this site. He crops up in a new book: "Days in the Life: Voices from the English Underground, 1961 to 1971". It's a new edition of a 1988 book by Jonathon Green which does what it says; collected unexpurgated opinions on the counter culture from those within it. Cannon turns up as a putative film maker trying to do a documentary on the Doors when they first visited Britain in 1967. Cannon is noted as already writing serious rock music pieces in the Guardian and he'd apparently got hold of the Doors' first album and was telling everyone about "the presence of silence" in their music. An associate remembered that "the problems of making the film are summed up in a picture of the band and Geoffrey Cannon that was taken at some point during the making of it. There's the Oxbridge super-brain and these four Californian characters and there is not much communication. There's Cannon wanting to get all hot and heavy and intellectual and the Doors are just 'hey man, you know, please...' ".

A colleague on the music papers had got a spare ticket for the Roundhouse gigs but I turned it down as I'd got some prior appointment. Foolishly because the Doors/Jefferson Airplane gigs have gone down in rock history. Green's book is an exhaustive, not to say exhausting, take on the counter-culture and I'd rather forgotten how shambolic it mostly was and how much old cobblers was talked. But it was still a wonderful time and at least it was benign cobblers as opposed to the four-decade Thatcherite period which is full of malign cobblers. It saw off the 1950s and you can get a feel for what that era was like by checking out Losey's film "Victim", where Dirk Bogarde plays a gay barrister who is being blackmailed. Bogarde himself was gay of course and it says something about his paranoia, probably developed early, that he tried to keep it under wraps all his life.
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