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Frank first wrote to us on July 17th, 2007:
"I am Frank Irons 1956-1958 - I think I have been traduced in your Web Site ( I am not going to sue !). On  the 1959 Henry Cavendish picture the dark haired teacher was Miss Meehan, she taught physics and I loved her to bits - she is two places to left as you look at the picture." 
Happily, he was then persuaded to write the following delightful article.

Miss Meehan

The journey to school

It's just before Christmas 1957 and it's freezing both outside and inside the house -- and  so am I. I get myself some breakfast and leave the house about 7.50 am to catch the bus at Sinfin Barracks. I join a sizable queue of people. About five minutes later a number 33 bus arrives – it’s a trolley bus; those spark-spitting , pole-dropping pre-cursors to a non-pollution age. I get on and find a seat

upstairs, hoping I get a seat with not too much gob on the floor, and revel in the smell of cheap hairspray. If I am lucky some of my friends will get on en-route and I will have some company.  

The bus drops me in Victoria St – there is tobacconist just by the bus stop. I work out that if I walk from Victoria St. to school and do the same journey back I can buy fve cigarettes, only the cheap ones mind - usually Dominos. I take the plunge, hoping that it won’t piss with rain on one or both of the journeys. The shop keeper doesn’t give a stuff, takes my money and gives me the fags despite my age and appearance in full school uniform.  I might then pick up a few friends hanging around with the same idea in mind.

I,  or as the case may be, we, walk round the corner into St James St., through the Market Place and along Iron Gate past the Power Station and up toSt. Alkmunds Church, then  along the outside of the  churchyard to St Mary’s Steps where we cross over into a Council Estate. I remind myself that it was in that very area a few months ago that I heard for the first time the strains of Buddy Holly’s “Peggy Sue” coming from one of the upstairs windows.

A few hundred yards on is a disused railway goods yard, probably an extension of Friargate Station built during the war. They haven’t yet prised up the rails and the roofs and raised platforms are still on the sheds. It's still freezing but we stop for a cigarette, which unfortunately doesn’t last long – it's only  a Domino today. We then cut across the goods yard, under a bridge and then follow a single track overgrown linear siding for a good half mile.

We take a right  hand fork which leads straight into the corner of the park by the side of the river. The river is pretty full at this time of the year and despite the freezing cold weather it's pretty boggy, so we cut up hill following the line of the river. We can now see the school so we head for it , striking a diagonal across the park. The shortest line takes us to a point halfway down the metalled track from the lodge to the school, by a seat and a “keep off the grass" sign. We now join a stream of boys walking down the hill. It's still freezing, and so am I.

School begins
We arrive in time – I don’t remember an Assembly - and face the prospect of the first lesson. My luck is in – it's English with Mr Simpson, a rather elderly gentleman with a limp who has a faint sense of melancholy humour. He is our form master. We take out our books. Mr Simpson, with infinite wisdom,  has chosen “Chang” this year -  a Kiplingesque book of the East but since it has little relevance to social conditions of working-class Derby I take  absolutely no interest in it. I mercifully escape having to read anything. But my luck does not last. We move onto “comprehension” and are given some purple printed (or was it green?) duplicated sheets of words. Mr Simpson goes through the class word by word, and its then my turn. I look at the chosen word “Hyperbole”.  I am asked to pronounce the word and give the meaning. Never daunted I have a guess  - Hyper Bowl.  Dead silence. I am then accused of being either stupid or insolent or probably both and he moves on to another victim. We are never told what the word was or its meaning.

The next lesson is Geography and again I am in luck - it's Mr Simpson.  I go into a total trance and scratch things on my ruler with a compass point. It must have been about coal and millstone grit because that’s all I remember I was ever taught. 

It's now the mid-morning break and after milk, despite the fact it's freezing the bollocks off a monkey, we are slung out into the park and we roar around for about 20 minutes. Bill Bailey is standing at the entrance to the park and is unusually abusive. Lippy backs him up - it would seem that he was anxious about the state of the grass around the entrance but since we don’t have wings there is nothing we can do about it.

We then have German with Mr Topliss ( I was never taught by Miss Smallwood) . Mr Topliss is a regular guy, prim and tidy and unusually without any sadistic traits. I like him but can’t get on with the Gothic print. The primer is “Deutsches Leben”.  He is trying,  without much success, to explain the Subjunctive . He recounts the time when he was a Translator with the British Forces at the end of the war. He tells what some Germans said when he told them the war was over – they replied “Gott Sei Dank," which was,  it seems,  an example of the subjective tense. And so it was.

We have History next with Mr Grimley. He is a short, burly man with loads of kids - I had seen them all one weekend marching to the allotments near Normanton Rec. in descending order and each with a garden implement, with Bill striding in the lead. Again I like him and history. I work out that he might be a Socialist and that makes me like him more. I come down to earth with a bang, however, when one of his large hands connects with the side of my head. My ears ring for days. I still don’t know what I did. Sadly, just another sadist then, although in his case he made up for it later.

After dinner there is a choir practice in the Metalwork Room for the Carol Service with Mr Simpson . It’s a double period but I don’t take part having been summarily and mercilessly dropped from the Choir the year before (my first year) for being a “Grunter,” my voice having apparently broken, or trying to. This meant I was excluded from the Carol Service at Darley Church – the only one to be so excluded and so my parents didn’t get to attend on that or any other year. Since I am not in the Choir I have to amuse myself. I sit in the Cloakroom and read. 

The last lesson of the day is Art in the Conservatory. It’s taken by Mr Robinson. I had been watching wrestling sometime last week and it strikes me that he looks like a Wrestler- arms like tree trunks gone to fat. I always keep out of his way which isn’t difficult because he’d  given up years before. My drawing skills are nil - I can draw Teddy Boys passably well and, bizarrely, a very good galleon in full sail - so I do both. Neither excites any emotion from Mr Robinson who simply looks and passes on. Basically left to our own resources hence the skill with the Teddy Boys.

The free ride home
It's over for the day and it's sleeting.  I decide to risk a free ride on the bus back into town and get the chance to ogle the convent girls at the bus stop. It’s chaos and it is now snowing. The conductor, too, has given up and I get away with it. It is nearly Christmas and the lights are on in Victoria St . I hear Helen Shapirio singing “walking back to happiness” from somewhere, which didn’t at all catch my mood. I catch the bus and so to home. I am still freezing………..

I left Henry Cavendish with five O-levels, some retaken, but by a miracle got a job as a Scientific Assistant at Aldermaston in the face of, I was told, stiff competition.

Since then things changed
I then had to make up my wasted years. I spent the next seven years in part-time and full time education eventually gaining an Upper Honours in the Institute of Physics Graduateship exams ( 1- 2.1 equivalent)  then worked for British Nuclear Fuels as a Health Physicist. I then had a mid life crisis, sold a very successful business which my wife and I had ran whilst I was at BNFL, and entered the legal profession. I am now a self-employed Employment Lawyer and work mainly for a litigation firm in Manchester. I am living in Canterbury, Kent, have a lovely loyal wife, two daughters, two step-sons and six grandchildren. And life is good and comfortable.

I am never cold.

I have had a life-time interest in History – it's all I read and I read a lot. I have kept an interest in the German language and speak it passably well and in my estimation made a good Physicist - at least it gave me a good standard of living while it lasted. I was a Magistrate in Wrexham as a Nominee of the Citizens Advice Bureau and the Wrexham Labour Party and was a Scientific Adviser for Cheshire County Council. If I am honest any success I have had was nothing to do with my education but the faults were evenly spread between us. I have Bill Grimley,  Bert Topliss and Miss Meehan (Physics Henry Cavendish) to thank for my private and professional interests but it’s a small selection of teachers that deserve mention.