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Cyril Smith writes Feb 21st, 2005 |
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It's nice to know there are still a few of us Old Centaurs around. I was there up until the end of 1946, so most of my sojourn there was during the war years. I am going to try and [send] you some stories that were printed in the Derby Telegraph Bygones insert. I'm afraid the quality is not all that great as I have had them for year or two now, also as the pages are rather large I can only scan part of the page at a time and at the wrong angle too, so I hope you can make out what they are all about. It will also result in me having to send you two or three e-mails as I haven't yet fathomed out how to scan in more than one copy to the mail at a time If you do manage to make out the print you will see a reference to one of the teachers as "Squeak" Weston. He was at one time my form master and the bane of my life, but I was fated to meet him again long after I left school. It turned out that he and his wife were great friends of an old lady that my wife and I rented rooms from when we married in 1953. "Squeak" and his wife had originally retired to Bexhill-on-Sea, but apparently they weren’t happy there so they returned to Darley Abbey. Until they could get their accommodation sorted out they stayed in the same house as us, and he was as big a paragon with his wife as he was with us reprobates he had to teach. Anyway Mike I will now attempt to scan the rest of the pages, if you have problems I could post the cuttings via snail mail. Success: CLICK here to read Cyril's submission about Patrick Morley from the DET. More about Squeak Weston One of the teachers that comes to mind was a Miss (Maggie) Reynolds, a fiery Scot. She taught Geography and French. I don't think she was with us for long. If she thought you weren’t paying attention she would hurl anything that came to hand at the offender, be it a stick of chalk to a soccer boot and tough luck on the guy behind if the offender spotted it and ducked!! There was another woman teacher who took us for Physics at Abbey Street but whose name escapes me now. In one of her lessons a chap, whose name I think was Jackie Herbert, had left his place at the bench to query something from someone further along the bench. In the meantime, this teacher was leaning over in the place that he had vacated checking the experiment with his neighbour, when he came back to his place all he saw was a rear end sticking out to which he gave a smart whack and said "Hey that's my place". I don't know who got the biggest shock the teacher or Jackie, who I think wished that the earth would open up and swallow him!
Thoughts on the 1948 Staff photo, etc. Another master I don't see in the 1948 photo is (Jasper) Jarvis, our P.T. master. One of his P.T. ideas in the winter was to send us all off for a run out of the rear entrance to the park and round Darley village whilst he would be found on our return sitting in the nice warm staff room! At the end of 1946 we held the school concert in the Co-op hall which was situated somewhere behind Northcliffe House, and one of the turns was a song that parodied all the masters at that time, unfortunately the only part of it I can recall is the chorus. The song was sung to the tune of "My Darling Clementine", the words of the chorus as follows:-
I know one verse was about the school secretary at the time but I can only recall the start of the verse and that was:-
Maybe some of my old contemporaries may recall the rest? (We now have the full song. Click here.) One of my first introductions to the Central School was being conned by Ernie Tapman on my first day walking down that long drive to the school, and Ernie stopped to talk to me and got me to carry his portable typewriter for him, which in those days wasn’t the light-weight jobs we had in later years. Probably that is why I can recall his name so readily. Some of the members of 5T were, Trevor Stone whose father ran his own transport business and lived in Cobden Street; Archie Wagstaff, who also came to work at Burrows & Sturgess where I served my apprenticeship; Dickie Holderness, a chap whose surname was Rogers and his father had a pharmacy that I think was somewhere in the Normanton area. Rogers’ pal was a lad called Willets.
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