MILESTONES
Born: 1905
Became Headmaster of Central School in 1944, aged 39
Moved from Central School to Henry Cavendish in 1958, aged 53
Retired in 1969, aged 64
Taught part-time until 1978, aged 73
Died: October 1980, aged 75
George Bertram
Swaine
AN APPRECIATION OF HIS LIFE
By Michael Buss: April 29th, 2005
HE HAD the kind of face that seemed not to smile;
gaunt, thin-lipped, bespectacled. His head was balding even back in 1944
when he was appointed Headmaster of Derby Central School for Boys. Add to
this image the academic gown that he often wore and we have conjured up the
stern looking Boss Swaine who presided over the school until its transition
to Henry Cavendish in 1958. But behind that gruff exterior was a man of
immense kindness, fairness and warmth. His love for the school never dimmed;
his care of the boys never waned, impelling him to spend evening and
weekends with them as scout master of a school based troop.
Sing song in the Nag's Head - 1946. [Full
Picture] |
G.B. Swaine also had considerable musical
talent. He loved to lead the boys in singing scout songs, sea-shanties
and ballads. When there were no other masters to accompany the hymn at
the daily assembly the Boss would thump out the tunes on the piano with
gusto. He also wrote the words for a
new School Song and composed the music.
That School Song, with its elegant and sophisticated words, its music
calculated to inspire young men, embedded itself into our souls with
unusual intervals and harmonies both haunting and beautiful. It is small
wonder that |
when Old Centaurs meet they still
sing the old School Songs composed by Cedric Astle and George Swaine.
Apart from the School Song Mr. Swaine must have
initiated many other changes and in time other Old Centaurs will fill in the
blanks. He was probably responsible for changing the house names, dropping
the Trojans and Greeks and replacing these with Spartans and Athenians. The
Olympians and Corinthians remained. He would have had a hand in hiring a new
band of teachers as the old masters retired and in so doing built a team of
his own loyal supporters.
Mr. Swaine was not a religious man. Yet saddled with
the requirements of the 1944 Education Act every school was obliged to hold
a daily act of worship. As a pupil during 1953-58 I noticed how seldom the
Boss put any effort into actually singing the hymns he introduced. And the
ones he chose were from those writers whose hymns were more conducive to
national pride, personal commitment to family and duty rather than
devotional hymns of faith. I recall tackling him about the hymns and the
reason we had assemblies and he gave me a cool, qualified explanation that
clearly implied he had no great place for personal religion. If I'm wrong, I
stand to be corrected. But these were days after the War when religious
cynicism ran rife and men were looking for other explanations.
When I was in the second form the Boss took it upon
himself to teach us the facts of life. I held him in high regard for
the way he did this. My mother had already passed on to me a small, blue
covered booklet that explained the mechanics of sexual intercourse and the
names of all the relevant body parts. It was a revelation! Then the sex
education began at school and I remember wanting to put my hand up to supply
the name of the sac in which the testicles hung! I was actually anxious that
Mr. Swaine might get some boy out to the front to demonstrate, live, what
all the bits below the belt looked like! No such worry. In his calm,
inscrutable manner he covered the whole ground with crystal clarity, using
the correct biological and medical vocabulary to demystified sex and
reproduction.
Of course, boys still resorted to their own devices to
further their titillation - but in those days not much was available.
Well-thumbed copies of Health and
Efficiency were passed round under the desks at school where we
marvelled at the sight of the naked female form. We were innocents, back
then, compared to the porn ridden age in which we now live. There were a few
boys, I later discovered, who were enjoying every sexual experience that
came their way (which was often), but most of us were probably restrained by
an amalgam of ignorance, moral warnings from a residual Victorianism.
One day a boy was expelled from the school. Of course
rumours flew. Then we read about it in the News of the World and were
amazed to see the name of the boy in the press and the words - in print -
sexual intercourse, rape. Curiosity was mixed with shock. This all happened
on Mr. Swaine's watch. And he could only watch, because the times were
changing.
| I think it was with the third form that the
Boss took a series of lessons on the Origins of Life and Evolution. It
was at this time that I discovered his own views on the mysteries of God
and the Universe. God, he taught us, was an invention of man. He had us
imagine ancient Arab peoples sitting under the immense canopy of
brilliant stars amid the vastness of the deserts. At such a time and in
such a place, were men not bound to wonder what lay beyond all they
experienced from day to day? Might they not conceive of some great
‘being’ who had made all this and who in some way might live 'up there'?
He had us realize that the great religions of the world (Judaism,
Christianity and Islam) essentially emerged from men who spent time in
deserts. So wonder became projected into divinity - a divinity made in
our own image. Having cleared the ground of the traditional creator
God Mr. Swaine moved on to the teaching on Evolution. |
 |
This was a natural process occurring over vast eons of
time driven by the forces natural selection by the survival of the fittest.
It was classical Darwinism. The world had yet to learn about genetics and
DNA.
Armed with this new understanding - the human origin of
god and the theory of evolution – I felt emboldened to make the decision to
say farewell to my Church of England background and become an atheist. If it
was good enough for the Boss, it was good enough for me! (That, however, was
far from the end of the story!)
The Boss was known for his gentle and sometimes wry
sense of humour. Graham Headworth recalls that he would come into the
classroom, using the local vernacular, and say "Get out us books", to which
the class had to respond in dutiful chorus, "Get out our books!" One
day I crossed the Boss on the main staircase while the snow was falling
heavily outside. He waved his hand towards the window as we passed and
commented, " 's no good!"
It seems that as the twentieth century moved into the
second half there was less and less dependence upon corporal punishment as a
primary means of discipline in school. The anecdotal evidence of these pages
is that the cane was wielded with less frequency under Boss Swaine than
under Boss Hainsworth. Of course the boys still felt the sting of physical
discipline in the last years at Central School, and old boys seem to relish
telling the stories. I totalled ten swishes of the cane from Mr. Swaine -
every one of them deserved. He never hit me with malice or anger. Sometimes
he carried his cane with him and the crime would be followed by instant
punishment. When his study was vandalized one night by some disgruntled boy,
the canes were left broken and the famous bow and arrows that hung in the
hallway had been snatched from the wall, the arrows being shot into the
Boss' study door.
A French master once swore at the boys in class and we
reported him to the Boss. The tide was changing. Some teacher conduct was
becoming less acceptable.
The Scoutmaster
Not long after passing my scholarship into the school
in 1953 I joined the Scout Troop - the 126th Derby (Centaurs) Group - which met at least once a week in the
multipurpose gym/dining hall. I was in the Peewit patrol. The boys who came
under the Boss' leadership in the Scouts came to see a side of him that many
others missed. Here he was more closely involved with the boys teaching them
the old culture and skills of Baden Powell. He wore Khaki shorts; his shirt
was replete with badges.
 |
Like him we also wore the wide brimmed hats of the South
African campaigns. Mr. Swaine showed us how to whittle sticks, to make
flour and water twists, to light a fire from only two matches in any
conditions, to sew and repair our uniforms, to march, to read maps (at
which I only got better). He loved maps, and opened up to us the
mysteries of the old 1 inch Ordnance Survey maps. He taught us to use a
compass and to navigate with these tools in unknown territory. |
Down in the cow patch was the long jump pit. The Boss
took us there to teach us tracking in the sand. Here are the prints of a
man walking backwards, or carrying a weight, or limping. We had to get
it right to pass the test. Perhaps best of all were the wide games. What
greater excitement for fit young boys than to roam at night across the
entire park, and the Copse, attacking each others' home base to steal the
opponents flag and bring it back for victory. We used all our skills of
camouflage, disguise, secret owl calls, whistles and tactical planning to
tag out the other side and win the night. The Boss devised all this and
revelled in it as much as did we.
| To go camping with Mr. Swaine was even better. I still
see him pulling out all the heavy old canvas of the pitched tents and
his own larger bell tent. Somehow this was all loaded, with our help,
into a lorry which would run the gear up the campsite in places like
Lathkill Dale, Chatsworth Park, or Bakewell. Derbyshire is a magical
county for hiking and camping. Here are the things a boy can never
forget. Hillside campsites, strewn with boulders, the grass cropped
close by grazing sheep; tents pitched overlooking |
The Boss slept in a bell tent like this.
|
a Peak District valley, where the river runs deep and
clear, abundant with trout and clean enough to drink with no more than a
water-purifying tablet; cooking stew in large blackened pots over fires
outside our own tents; using our knot tying skills to build ornate 'gates'
to our patrol tents or to the whole campsite; sitting round the
campfire at night, each boy wrapped in his own camp blanket with a
silhouette of his patrol emblem sewed on the back and there learning songs
from the Boss as he taught us verse by verse.
How else would I know Goolie-goolie, goolie-goolie,
what's you ging-gang-goo, ging-gang-goo?, or John Brown's Body,
or Oh You'll Never Get to Heaven, or The Quarter Master's Store,
etc., unless Boss Swaine had not taught us the words round the campfire? And
as the fire died down, he made cocoa and poured it into our enamel mugs -
the best cocoa in the whole world. And from a large aluminium tray (borrowed
from the school kitchens), slices of bread and dripping, slightly dusted
with salt, were handed out to the scouts.
Night, a glowing campfire, the songs, the cocoa, the
bread and dripping, the ghost stories - with the Boss. We were in heaven!
These were some of the best days of my life.
I was not in the top echelon of academic achievers at
school. It seemed others always pipped me to the post for the honors and
prizes. But one of my proudest moments at school was to be awarded a prize
for Good Progress. I chose Norton's Star Atlas (which I still possess) and
turned it into the school office for the bookplate to be pasted inside the
front cover. Speech Day came and I walked the stage at the Derby
Co-operative Society Hall to receive my prize from The Boss, and have my
hand shaken by him. The book, signed by him, is among my special treasures.
Boss Swaine was a patient, understanding man. I said
goodbye to him after only one year in the Sixth Form (by which time were had
moved to Henry Cavendish). Family life was disintegrating and I needed to
get out. It seemed to me at the time that further education was not
necessary for me. How wrong I was, and later I put that right. But having
determined I would leave school and find a job I went to see the Boss in his
new Breadsall Hill Top office, where large windows let in the ample light.
He listened to my story. He tried to reason with me to stay on, but my mind
was made up. We stood up, we shook hands and I walked out. I suppose I
collected my belongings and left the school that day, for I do not even
appear in the 1959 School Photograph. But the Boss is there, unsmiling (on
the outside), the guardian of all those boys - and now girls. There he
remained until his retirement in 1969, ten years on, the devoted master. I
think I once visited him a while later at his home just off Kedleston Road,
but the details have faded from memory. It seemed an old Victorian kind of
terraced house.
From his
obituary we learn that Mr. Swaine continued to teach part-time until he was
73. It may have been a financial necessity. But I think we can also be sure
he found his place in those other schools because most of all he loved to be
with young people, sharing his heart and mind, shaping youthful aspirations
and thereby keeping himself forever young.
A view from
next door
June 22nd,
2005. John Buckland, who once lived next door to Mr. and Mrs Swaine, adds
these thoughts:
I only knew Mrs. Swaine after 'the Boss' had died but
we did share many memories about Central School and the one over-riding
thing that came out was the total dedication of the Swaines to the school.
Mrs.Swaine used to like to sing the school song with me and our
conversations always centred around the school. As she became ill I recall
one occasion when, whilst my wife went to 'phone for an ambulance, I knelt
at her feet to massage them as she was complaining that her feet were cold.
She was quite lucid and able to talk and we joked about the fact that, all
those years ago when Mr. Swaine was whacking my backside for being late back
at lunchtime he couldn't have guessed that I would, one day, be kneeling at
his wife's feet in her bedroom. She really was a lovely lady and a sad
footnote is that her sons gave my ex-wife and I some china as a memory of
our friendship with their mum which was later stolen in a burglary.
Please send in your stories about Boss Swaine.
Derby Evening Telegraph October 17th,
1980.
Death at 75 of ex-Head
Mr. George Bartram Swaine, a former headmaster of the
Henry Cavendish School, Derby, has died at his Darley Abbey home. He was 75.
Mr. Swaine who obtained a history degree at Leeds
University, moved to Derby in 1944 to become headmaster of the Central
School, later to become Henry Cavendish School. He retired in 1969, but
continued to teach part-time at Park School, Belper; Mortimer Wilson
School, Alfreton; and Ockbrook Girls School, until two years ago.
He leaves a widow and two sons.
Source:
Derby Local
Studies Library
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