The War

At school, I was doing well at French. We all read a lot about the French Revolution and the exploits of the Scarlet Pimpernel. So it was satisfying to be able to understand the French expressions which peppered the stories. But the war was an even bigger encouragement to learn the language. Like General de Gaulle's famous message to his people after the Fall of France, calling "A tous les Francais" to join him in the fight against Hitler. You'd have thought Miss Wood, our French teacher, would have got us to translate it as part of our lessons. After all, it was real - to do with the war going on around us. But no, we had to plough on with the usual dreary passages out of our exercise books. So I struggled through it myself with the aid of a dictionary and felt quite pleased when I'd rendered it into English. Had I got it right? I asked Miss Wood, hoping for a word of praise. All I got was a dismissive sniff and the suggestion I would be better concentrating on the lessons I had been set.

She was not alone in her attitude. Here we were involved in a world war, the greatest war in history, but for all the notice that was taken of it it might not have existed. The only time we ever talked about it with the staff was if we raised it ourselves. For instance, we asked Mr. Weston (Squeak) what he thought when Hitler invaded Russia. All he said was: Remember Napoleon and the Russian Winter.  He proved to be right as it happened but he clearly thought (with some truth) that we were trying to distract him from the serious business of learning. We were at school to pass the School Certificate and everything else was irrelevant. We boys talked a great deal about the war among ourselves but would have welcomed what would now be considered Current Affairs sessions with teachers who obviously were better informed than we were. But it wasn’t a School Cert subject so it didn’t count. Disappointing and surprising.

I can remember only one occasion when the school reacted to the war news. One summer morning we arrived at the old school building in Abbey Street, where we went once a week for chemistry lessons, only to be sent home again. It was Tuesday June 6, D-Day. We'd heard about the Normandy landings on the news at breakfast time. But first reports just seemed to suggest it was nothing more than a big raid, like those on St Nazaire and Dieppe. But it soon emerged that this was the moment we  -- and all occupied Europe  -- had been waiting for. We were back in France, almost four years exactly since the Germans had seen us off in such humiliating fashion.

In the town, people in the queues were all talking about the news. A special edition of the Derby Evening Telegraph was rushed on to the streets,  a rare event in those days. The headlines were huge (they only used big type then if it was something really important):

It was a thrilling moment. For so long life had been dull with nothing much to look forward to. Now you could feel how excited everyone was. At last we'd show Hitler what was what. Maybe the war really would be over by Christmas. What a wonderful thought!

“Dropping”

In the autumn of 1942 I entered the Third Form and marked the occasion by  'dropping’ - going from short to long trousers. It was always a special occasion. When you 'dropped’ didn't depend entirely on age. It also mattered how big you were and whether you felt the moment was right. The war added another factor: clothes rationing.Not only were they rationed in quantity. So was the choice of material, no matter how much money you'd got. The Government brought in Utility clothing. There were only a few types of cloth and the price was controlled. So we all had to make do.

 People carried on wearing clothes they would once have sent to a jumble sale. It didn't matter so much if you went around looking a bit shabby. Darns and patches became respectable. One of our masters, Mr. Poole, was a tall, elegant man who always wore what were clearly expensive suits. But even he came to school with leather elbow patches.

Obviously, a new pair of trousers for me would use up many precious clothing points. So I did the same as most of my schoolfellows - raided my brothers' wardrobe. They were away in the Army so weren't going to be needing the contents for some while. I commandeered the trousers from a smart, grey-striped suit. They fitted passably well, were expensive and looked it. But they weren't quite right separated from the jacket that should have gone with them. That wouldn't fit me at all. The trousers had turn-ups which you didn't get with Utility in order to save material. So my mother let them down and in ironing out the creases slightly singed the cloth. My debut in long trousers was not therefore the sartorial triumph I had hoped for. But it was a landmark.

Forbidden Fruit

By now, like the rest of Form Four, I was beginning to be preoccupied with sex. We discussed its precise nature endlessly but facts were hard to come by.

There were no sex lessons and no text books. So we seized on any scrap of knowledge we could find. Every reference to sex in the books we read, every anatomical diagram in medical text books added to our hazy understanding, or confused us all the more. We were so ignorant we had no idea that the daring pictures of nude girls in magazines like Lilliput and Men Only, which we studied with close interest, had been doctored to hide the indelicacy of pubic hair. Most of us had no idea there was such a thing. Sometimes we tried to buy copies of the nudist magazine Health and Efficiency but usually the shopkeeper refused to sell them to us.

Most of what we knew about sex came to us in only one way. We all now began reciting lewd verses and telling each other dirty jokes. That was what sex seemed to be about: something secret, 'rude,' to be sniggered at.

We went on hunts for French letters, as condoms were called. In summer, the slopes of Darley Park were covered with the prostrate figures of servicemen (Americans usually) and their girls. The litter of 'Frenchies' in the grass was proof of what they'd been doing. We deduced all these activities must have something to do with the mysterious advertisements that began to appear in the newspapers about VD.

We weren't in the least bit clear what venereal disease was or how you got it, but it was clearly something to be avoided. The fact that the notices were also to be seen in public lavatories gave us the impression that you might catch it from sitting on the seat after someone else had used it. So we wasted reams of precious paper cleaning lavatory seats and needlessly sitting on layers of protective 'bum fodder.'

On the buses it became an art to pace yourself when you followed a girl  to the top deck to be just the right distance behind at the steepest part of the stairs. Then you could look up and see right up her skirt. You rarely got a glimpse of stocking tops. Silk stockings had practically vanished and nylons, just introduced from America, were a great rarity. To give the appearance of stockings girls used leg make-up, a brown dye they painted on with varying results. Sometimes it was so bright it looked revolting but applied with just the right touch it could be as enticing as the real thing, even more so if a non-existent seam was painted on as well. A lot of knicker spotting went on at school. The women teachers often perched themselves on a desk and as soon as they did, pens or pencils clattered to the floor. We'd bend down to pick them up and from the low-angle vantage point shoot a swift glance up the teacher's skirt. Stocking tops were a rare treat, the sight of knickers a greater one.

For just one term we had a young and pretty  French girl to teach us the language  -- I think she was a refugee who somehow  had got out of occupied France. Her name was Miss Doudal, or that’s what it sounded like.  When she had set us an exercise she used to perch herself on one of the big window seats so she could watch us but it wasn’t easy for us to see her. It became a point of honour as to who could get a glimpse up her skirt. I tried the pencil dropping routine but young though she was she knew at once what I was up to. You are a very rude boy she snapped and ordered me out of the class for the rest of the lesson. 

Trying to look up women’s skirts  was as near to sex as most of us got. But it didn't stop us dreaming about it. One evening I was at an ARP dance at the local school hall. With me was Robbo, one of my school pals, helping me to put on the gramophone records. A girl of about 18, the sister of another school friend, had had too much to drink. She confided to us that one of the records, Glen Miller's "In The Mood" made her feel "all queer." Only moments before Robbo told me that he found it so sexy that it could give him an erection. "It gives me a funny feeling, too," he said at once to the girl and asked her for a dance. She was so taken aback that even though there were plenty of servicemen there she agreed. Robbo couldn't really dance but he managed to get round the floor a few times. I could see he was pressing himself against her.

When he came back I knew from his expression that the music had had the same affect again. "You're a little devil," the girl said. She was a tarty looking female with too much makeup. I asked her quickly if I could have a dance, too. She looked at me for a moment. "You're too young," she said and moved off in search of more promising material.

Her words wounded me. I was actually older than Robbo and a couple of inches taller. But then, I consoled myself, she wasn't the sort of girl my mother would have approved of. I decided I'd better wait until a nice girl came along. The trouble was nice girls didn't let you press yourself against them. Robbo knew what I was thinking. He laughed. "You haven't got the knack," he said.

We put "In the Mood" on again and watched the girl jitterbugging with an airman. Her skirt flew up as she twisted round the floor and we saw she was wearing mauve knickers. I sighed. "Never mind," Robbo said. "Wait till you're in uniform. Then you'll get the girls." It was a comfort of sorts.

Getting There

There were no such things then as school buses: you used the same buses as everyone else. And with so few cars because of petrol rationing, the buses were packed out. Sometimes six or seven would sail past full. In the winter, when not so many people cycled to work, you could stand waiting in the freezing cold for half an hour or more. It was no joke especially if you’d been up half the night in the air raid shelter  because the sirens had gone.

CLICK to see full map of old Derby before the "Planners" wrecked it. Follow your old routes to school.

I lived at Alvaston so I had to change buses in the Market Place. From there the trolley went up Irongate, past the Queen Street baths where we had our swimming sessions, and on past Derby School (evacuated during the war to Amber Valley). At the Five Lamps the bus took the right fork to the trolley terminus at the junction of Duffield Road and Broadway. Then a long walk to the school, first an unmade lane to the park gates with the school allotments on the right then down the path through the park that brought us at last to the school.

Going home - if it was a nice summer’s day - we walked all the way through the park and out of the back entrance past some rows of tall early Victorian houses coming out at last in Bridge Gate. On one side was  the elegant Roman Catholic church of  St. Mary’s with  the tall spire of  St Alkmund’s on the other.

Caning  [I dealt with caning at some length in my BYGONE DERBY article which is already on the website. Here are a few additional thoughts] 

Apart from Squeak Weston the other really fierce caner was “Treth”  (Mr Trethewey.)  He was normally a pleasant well liked teacher but when he wielded the cane (which was infrequent) look out!  I remember examining the weals he had inflicted on a fellow pupil’s hands  -- deep purple wounds (there is really no other word). The boy’s hands were shaking uncontrollably and there was no way he could possibly use a pen. I couldn’t understand why we were caned on the hand. Apart from making it difficult to write if you got a really hard caning there was always the danger of breaking or damaging a boy’s finger. Much better surely to have you bend over. It would hurt but wasn’t likely to cause any serious damage and it didn’t stop you writing your essays which caning on the hand often did. Women  (apart from the sadistic young mistress I have already mentioned) rarely used the cane. Miss Wood never, Miss Hepworth hardly ever. As far as “Polly” Wood was concerned her viciously sharp tongue was feared far more than a caning, which is perhaps why she never needed to use it.  

Change at the Top

In 1944 we found ourselves with a new headmaster. I suppose there must have been some announcement and perhaps a farewell presentation to Mr Hainsworth who had been the head since well before the war.  I certainly don’t remember anything of the sort.  We were sorry to see Mr Hainsworth go. You certainly wouldn’t have called him a colourful figure but he was a man we all respected. He was not someone to take liberties with. He maintained discipline but he was essentially fair. I don’t think I ever saw him smile but he never raised his voice either that I recall.

What would the new head be like, we wondered. Mr Swaine came from a very different mould to his predecessor. Looking back, I should think he was a warm hearted, understanding man who would enjoy a joke. Certainly I can’t imagine Mr Hainsworth reacting as he did to my escapade with the paint brush (see article below entitled March 25). Nor can I imagine him caning a whole line of boys himself for skating on the ice. But all that is with the benefit of hindsight. I think at first we older boys thought he seemed more approachable than we had been accustomed to. Mr Hainsworth had been stern looking and kept properly aloof.  But his successor’s style of management, as we would say today, was quite different and it would take some getting used to. Schoolboys tend to be conservative and prefer what is familiar. So we treated GB, as we came to call him, with some caution. Let him prove himself and we would come to have the same regard for him as for his predecessor. Time would tell.

Pongo Molyneaux

Mr Cook was our English master. He was clearly devoted to the subject but oddly enough we didn’t get as much reaction out of him as we did from “Pongo” Molyneaux who took English from time to time. He was a large, balding man with a booming voice and he was given to expressing himself forcibly. One day we were reading aloud from Hereward the Wake. After enduring  Kingsley’s turgid, convoluted prose for ten minutes or so  Pongo suddenly flung his copy down in exasperation. “This wretched book needs abridging in large chunks” he announced.  How we agreed with him.

But there were times when he was  prepared to listen to what you had to say. On another occasion we were set to write a piece about a recent film we had enjoyed. Two or three of us chose an Abbott and Costello mystery comedy “Who Done It.”  Pongo wasn’t having of that. “Totally ungrammatical. Not acceptable,” he thundered. And he insisted we entitle the essay “Who Did It.”  But,  we pointed out, that was not the title of the film, ungrammatical though that undoubtedly was. Finally we agreed on a compromise. “Who Done It [sic] More Properly Who Did It.” I can’t imagine any other teacher who would have been prepared even to discuss the matter.

Abbey Street

On Tuesday each week we went to Abbey Street for chemistry lessons. It had a remarkably roomy and  well equipped laboratory  and the lecture theatre with its rows of climbing benches was impressive. But compared with Darley Park mansion it was a dreary place and every time I went there I gave thanks that the one good thing about the war was that it had put us in such a lovely setting. Apart from which as far as I was concerned chemistry was a dead loss. My solutions never crystallised, my experiments rarely came out right. I couldn't remember the formula for anything except water and concentrated sulphuric acid  -- and that only because it was what had deformed the villain in "Phantom of the Opera" (Claude Rains and Susanna Foster).

This was the Cleft Chin murder case involving what the newspapers called "a gunman and his moll." The gunman, whose named was Hulten, was an American soldier, a deserter posing as an officer. The moll was an 18 year old English girl called Jones, a dancer in a night club. They staged a series of violent robberies and finally killed a taxi driver, a man with a cleft chin. The Americans handed Hulten over to British justice and the two were found guilty and sentenced to death.

An original press cutting of the Hulten case. Left, the strip-tease dancer Elizabeth Jones. Their victim was a certain Edward Heath!!

On the eve of the execution, the girl was reprieved by the Home Secretary, Mr Morrison. But he decided the soldier must hang. At school, we were outraged at this injustice. Clearly, either both should hang or neither. From the evidence, the girl Jones had seemed as vicious as her partner, Hulten, and had egged him on to commit more crimes "for the excitement of it."

We decided our views should be made known and I was chosen to make a grand gesture on behalf of all of us. I found a tin of white paint and daubed a suitably restrained slogan on the school wall:

                        HANG JONES  HANG MORRISON  SET HULTEN FREE

We agreed that should do the trick. It did. In assembly, the Head announced grimly that when he found the boy responsible he'd give him the hiding of his life. It was a disconcerting moment. Discovery seemed probable and as a prefect I carried a certain responsibility. Perhaps I should have thought of that earlier.

I decided to confess. The Head (G.B. Swaine, known simply as G.B.)  was always lecturing us on courage and honesty. Given his anger, it took a certain amount of both to own up. I hoped I might get the credit for that. It was a calculated risk but one I felt worth taking. In the event, it paid off. Instead of the expected outburst once I had owned up to my misdeed, the Head stood looking out of the window. Then what he said was not what I expected to hear. "Do you know any girls the same age as this girl Jones," he asked. "Can you imagine any of them getting involved with a gunman as she did?" And he went on to talk at length about how easy it is to be tempted, especially in wartime, for a young girl from a poor home whose head had been turned by dreams of glamour and money. The French girls who had succumbed to the lure of German soldiers came to my mind.

At the end of it all, he didn't strike me off the list of prefects or even cane me. I had to clean the paint off the wall of course. But I'd expected that. The whole episode gave me much food for thought. It set my fellow prefects thinking as well. Perhaps there was more to G.B. than met the eye....

Prefects’ Fun and Games

Being a prefect had certain privileges.  In the depths of winter you didn’t have to stand outside in the freezing cold waiting to be let in. You sauntered grandly through the door and warmed yourself at the fire blazing in the main hall. You also more or less had the run of the building. In the winter you could go down into the basement and keep warm by the main boiler. In summertime you could always find an excuse to admire the sweeping views across the park from the roof, normally strictly out of bounds. One day a group of us including Dave Milner decided to explore the roof space. Dave lost his footing on one of the beams and stepped on the ceiling. The next moment his foot went straight through. We grabbed him, hauled him back on to the beam and beat a hasty retreat. But as ill luck would have it the room below was where Squeak Weston was presiding over the boys who had taken packed lunches. Suddenly there was crash and part of the ceiling actually fell on him. A few moments later we met him on the landing coming down from the roof. “Ah prefects,” he shouted. “Some wretched boy has been in the roof. Quick! Get up there and see if you can catch him.” I’m sure we did our best but somehow the “wretched boy” eluded us…..

Elections, Mock and Real

In the summer of 1945 I went on the first seaside holiday we’d been able to have since the war began and all the beaches were closed to the public “for the duration.”  I was on the Isle of Wight when we heard who had won the General Election that had been held soon after we had beaten the Germans. We'd had a mock election at school. I was the Conservative candidate and my election programme came straight out of the Daily Express which announced confidently that Labour's chances were remote. I won at school by a handsome majority. Reality was different. In the Labour landslide victory, Derby returned two Labour M.P.s Some while later I received a school prize from one of them, Group Capt Wilcock who seemed a pleasant cheerful sort of man. The prize he handed over amused my mother no end: The Life and Times of Winston Churchill

Spring 1946

Cricket we played in Darley Park but football wasn't allowed there for fear of churning up the turf. So we used Darley Playing Fields, on the other side of the river. This involved a trek through Darley Abbey, crossing the Derwent by the mill and on down to the playing fields. On a wet cold afternoon it wasn’t much fun especially as I didn’t excel at sport. All the same I did go to all of  Derby County’s home games and was also keen on horse racing. At school, this  was looked on not as a sport but a vice. One day I'd marked the card for a particularly tricky Newmarket meeting when a teacher spotted me with the SPORTING CHRONICLE. From the way he reacted you'd think I had a copy of one of Dr. Goebbels' Nazi propaganda newspapers. I got a long lecture on the wickedness of trying to get something for nothing and then had to watch in helpless dismay as my list of selections was screwed up and flung into the wastepaper basket along with the rest of the paper.

What he would have said had he ever known about my escapade over the school wireless set and the 1,000 Guineas I shudder to think. I had put the princely sum of half a crown each way on the King's horse Hypericum and I was desperate to listen to the race. The only wireless in the school was in the dining hall and normally there was no safe way of getting at it during the day. But as luck would have it, on the afternoon of the race we were taking part in a sports day at the far end of Darley Park, so the entire school was gathered there. I concocted some excuse to return to the school building and slipping into the deserted dining room, turned on the wireless. I had timed it perfectly. The race was about to begin: a couple of minutes and I could return safely to the sports with no one the wiser. Then to my horror, Hypericum bolted.

She was eventually caught and the race began a quarter of an hour late. All the time I was in dread of someone suddenly appearing and finding me in the act. But my fears soon vanished in the excitement of the race. In spite of having run the length of the course once, Hypericum won easily   -- and I was the richer by getting on for three pounds. That would have been worth being caned for.   But when I returned to the sports no-one seemed to have noticed how long I'd been away.

Bullying

It seems to be commonplace at schools today but I was certainly never bullied and I can’t recall a single instance of real  or systematic bullying (as distinct from calling people names or giving them a shove now and then) in the six years I was at the Central School.

AFTERTHOUGHT

A quarter of a century after leaving school I met a young woman who had also been to school in Derby though some years later than me. It turned out she had gone to Parkfield Cedars, whose girls we had lusted after vainly long ago. Which school did you go to, she asked. Derby School or Bemrose?   When I told her Central School she turned her nose up. Oh that wasn’t a proper grammar school she said. I was hurt and annoyed. What a nerve!  Not a proper grammar school indeed. Just what you’d expect from one of those toffee nosed girls at Parkfield Cedars…..

Comments on other contributions
Email: October 2nd, 2005

What a pleasure it was to read John Garratt's piece on school dinners. A delightful piece of atmospheric writing. John and I were colleagues many years ago on the Evening Telegraph. How strange therefore I didn't realise he and I had both been at the Central School -- or perhaps I did and had forgotten.

I stopped having school dinners after consuming a cheese pie that made me violently sick. As a result I didn't eat cheese for many years afterwards. I did resume school dinners after a while. I think my mother got fed up of giving me "packing up" especially when food became harder and harder to get.

I also read Peter Eyre's piece with interest. He and I must have worked together on the Telegraph which I joined in 1946 but I cannot for the life of me place him. As he rightly says memory plays strange tricks. He is right of course about there being a school special trolley bus from the Market Place to Darley Park. Because it looked like any other Corporation bus it became fixed in my mind as a service bus. In fact I think we often had to catch a service bus especially if we had been waiting in the cold and rain during winter to catch the bus from Alvaston into town after the special had gone. Now I come to think about it there was also a special school bus from the Darley Park terminus down the Broadway to...where? Can't remember!

Two other points from Peter's email: I never meant to suggest the 1940 intake list was complete because I'm sure it wasn't. And re. Don Acford: sorry if I spelled his name wrongly but I was never sure if it was Ackforth or Ackford. One further point: I certainly never meant to suggest that no one bothered about the war. Very much the contrary: it was with us all the time. The point I was making was that as far as I was concerned (and my experience was obviously different from Peter’s) the teaching staff rarely mentioned it and certainly didn’t bring it (as they could easily have done) into any of our lessons, especially French and Geography as well as History.  

Peter’s article also reminds me that the “tarty teacher” I mentioned in one of my articles must have been the Miss Ferguson he refers to. And that reminds me of another woman teacher who was only with us for perhaps a year if that  -- Miss Collis. She was a very pleasant easy going lady, quite young, who had the misfortune to have a rather unsightly wart on her face.  

More later but meanwhile all the best.  Patrick (Morley)

Other of Patrick's memories were published in the DET Bygones section

[Home] Page updated: Saturday, 04 August 2007

There were only a few types of cloth and the price was controlled. So we all had to make do.

A lot of knicker spotting went on at school. The women teachers often perched themselves on a desk and as soon as they did, pens or pencils clattered to the floor. We'd bend down to pick them up and from the low-angle vantage point shoot a swift glance up the teacher's skirt. Stocking tops were a rare treat, the sight of knickers a greater one.

St. Alkmund's Churchyard in the 1950s

I found it later in the school copy of the two volume Oxford English Dictionary. I was about to show it to him triumphantly but decided on reflection it might be wiser to keep quiet.

Errol Flynn as swashbuckling Captain Blood.

"Being but humble sergeants and corporals ..."
in front of AFN mike.

It was a revelation: the jokey, friendly announcers - such a contrast to the stiffness of the BBC. From AFN we got the best of the American comedy shows: Bob Hope, Jack Benny, Burns and Allen, Charlie McCarthy. We learned something of the mysteries of baseball and American football; we listened with interest to shows like the American equivalent of the Brains

The unforgettable Burns and Allen comedy duo

Trust, called Information Please.

But most of all it was the music we wanted to hear. We listened to as much pop as any teenager nowadays though it wasn't called pop. We tuned in to request programmes like Duffle Bag, were devoted to Corporal Johnny Kerr and other turntable maestros. We listened to them with as much informed attention as any modern DJ's radio show.

We knew what was top of The Hit Parade and the morning after they'd been played on AFN we were arguing about whether this number or that should have been higher on the list. We discussed the relative merits of the big bands, Benny Goodman or Tommy Dorsey. We imagined ourselves drumming like Gene Krupa. We swooned over Dinah Shore and we fought over Crosby and Sinatra.

March 1945

At school, I'd been made a prefect but my term of office was very nearly a brief one, all because of a famous wartime murder trial.

An original press cutting of the Hulten case. Left, the strip-tease dancer Elizabeth Jones. Their victim was a certain Edward Heath!!