Reid.Alexander.11.1.1941
From Livesretold.co.uk
Autobiographical life story started in January 2008.
Related life stories:
Father: Reid.Philip.12.1.1901
Son: Reid.Philip.30.1.1989
Daughter: Reid.Elisabeth.11.8.1992
Grandson: Creswell.Jocelyn.26.5.1999
Contents |
Introduction
I am starting my life story in January 2008 at the age of 66, living here at 27 Millington Road, Cambridge, England. I sit in my study on the second floor, at my grandfather's kneehole desk, with windows to the south looking out over St. Catharine's College playing fields and Grantchester Meadows beyond. We have had seven in the house over Christmas and the New Year: Sian and me, Sian's mother Anna, Hugh, Miranda, Philip, and Lizzie. Also Cesca our golden retriever. We saw my oldest daughter Anna before Christmas at her home in Ravenscourt Road, London, with her two small sons Edward and Bertie. Sadly we have not seen my second daughter Kate and her family (husband Alex, and sons Jocelyn, Sinbad, and Walter) since October, when we visited them at Alex's Foreign Office posting in Amman, Jordan. Their home, let out to a German family, is near us in Newnham, Cambridge. Before coming to me, a word about my parents.
My father Philip was one of three children of Sir Arthur Reid and Imogen (née Beadon). My father had two sisters, Hilda and Lesley, neither of whom married. Sir Arthur, who had been educated at Harrow School and Trinity Hall, Cambridge, joined the Indian legal service, and rose to be Chief Justice of Lahore. His family, of Scottish professional descent, had served in the Indian Civil Service for several generations.
My mother Louisa was one of four children of Henry and Dorothy Luttrell. She had two brothers, William and John, and two sisters, Elizabeth and Catherine. Her father Henry, who became Liberal Member of Parliament for Tavistock in Devon, was a younger son of the prominent Luttrell family whose ancestral home is Dunster Castle in Somerset. The Luttrell family bought Dunster Castle and its estate in 1378. They were in continuous occupation until Geoffrey Luttrell gifted Dunster Castle to the National Trust in 1976. Louisa's mother Dorothy (née Wedderburn) was a member of a family which, like my father's, had strong Indian connections. Dorothy's father, Sir William Wedderburn (4th Baronet) served in the Indian Civil Service from 1859, becoming Judge of the High Court in Bombay. He retired as acting Chief Secretary to the Government of Bombay. He was one of the founders of the Indian National Congress, serving as its president in 1889 and 1910. He served as Liberal Member of Parliament for Banffshire from 1893 to 1900. A two volume history of Dunster and the Mohun and Luttrell families, by Sir H.C.Maxwell Lyte, was published in 1909 by The St.Catherine's Press.
Sir William Wedderburn's baronetcy has a colourful history. John Wedderburn was an advocate who in 1704 was created 1st Baronet of Balindean in the County of Perth. The fifth Baronet, Sir John, was a Jacobite who fought against the English at the Battle of Culloden in 1746, where he was taken prisoner. The Battle of Culloden, which brought the Jacobite uprising to an end, was the last battle to be fought in mainland Britain. Sir John was executed for treason, with his title and estates forfeited. His descendants continued to claim the title and in 1803 a new Wedderburn baronetcy was created to replace the one which had been forfeited.
Reaching back further in time, my relative J.W.Reid compiled in 1909 a Reid family tree (hung in a large frame on our top landing) which goes back 35 generations. The name at the top is Achaicus, alias Eocahan Fegusiana, sister to Hungus, alias Unust, King of the Picts. Six generations on we come to King Kenneth III, murdered in 994. Two more generations take us to Banquo, Thane of Lochaber, murdered by Macbeth in 1043.
Wartime
I was born on January 11th 1941 in Johore Bahru, Malaysia, during the Second World War. Johore Bahru is just across the straits from Singapore, where my father was serving as a gunnery officer in the Royal Navy. In January 1942, just weeks before Singapore fell to the Japanese, my mother was abruptly evacuated by sea to South Africa, with me and my two year old sister Griselda. My father was captured by the Japanese, and spent the next three years as a prisoner of war. One of my most treasured possessions is a nautical chess set, carved by hand as a present to my father by Capt. R.S.Herring MC, his friend and fellow prisoner in the Palembang Camp.
My mother describes the two month sea journey from Singapore to South Africa as scary, with everyone ready to take to the open boats if torpedoed in the tropical seas. We had our shipwreck bags always ready and were advised to include hats in them for fear of sunstroke. We all wore identity discs in case of separation.
We spent two and a half years in South Africa, frequently moving to any temporary accommodation that was available. In August 1944 we set off on another sea voyage to wartime England. The ship did not travel in convoy, and the risk of being torpedoed by a German submarine was very real. At one port we passed, we picked up a shocked boatload of survivors from the ship ahead of us. The ship's tannoy issued alarming announcements: 'You are now in submarine infested waters. In case of anyone overboard the ship will be unable to stop'. We arrived safely in Liverpool, and made our way by train to Somerset.
Earleywood School
My recollections between the ages of three and eight are hazy. I remember only my favourite books: the Babar books, and Sylvanus Goes To Sea. My father returned from the Far East in late 1945, after the Japanese surrender. It was a time of great rejoicing for us all. We lived first in a cottage in the Somerset village of Bagborough, then moved to Gosport in Hampshire, and then to Bath. My father was based at Admiralty offices which had been relocated during the war from London to Ensleigh, near Bath. I was a kilted pageboy at my aunt Elizabeth's wedding in 1945, and a year later started at Hermitage House school, where I evidently became a neat stitcher.
My vivid memories begin with my arrival as a boarding pupil, aged eight, at Earleywood School, Ascot. Due to a mix-up at the department store where we had bought my uniform, I turned up with a large silver lion embroidered on my blue school cap. Earleywood had no silver lion, and my cap was swiftly swapped by Mrs Aldrich Blake, the headmaster's wife. This was the first of several occasions in my life where I have turned up at important occasion wearing the wrong clothes. Others include a May Ball at Trinity College, Cambridge, where I was the only man among the hundreds there who thought it a good idea to wear a white dinner jacket (together with a rented dress shirt whose sleeves were unaccountably a foot too long). Years later there was a formal industry dinner at the Savoy Hotel in London where I found that I had failed to pack cufflinks, cummerbund, or the right shoes; I kept moving, hoping nobody would be able to focus on the details of my outfit. I still have recurring dreams in which I walk up to a podium to give an important speech, and realise that I am wearing no trousers. I have two other recurring dreams. One is that I am able to float about like a balloon, and demonstrate this at dinner parties. The other is that I save numerous lives by taking charge when an enormous chandelier threatens to collapse onto the audience in a crowded theatre.
Earleywood was a small, family-run boarding preparatory school, which my father had attended forty years earlier. Sergeant Buckle, the physical training instructor, was the one member of staff who taught us both. Ted Aldrich Blake, the owner and headmaster, was a kindly man who treated the fifty boys in the school as an extended family. My most memorable teacher was the inspirational Mr Johnson, who managed to get a lot of information into us, sometimes by throwing blackboard chalk across the room if you were not paying attention.
The main school building was an Edwardian house, set in parkland and with a small adjacent farm also owned by Ted Aldrich Blake. Across the boundary there were woods, in which we could make tree houses by hammering planks into trees with four inch nails. A respectable old people's home stood in its own grounds next door; we saw or heard little of them except during their summer garden party when a visiting brass band played patriotic tunes including Land of Hope and Glory. A patriotic note was also struck by the zigzag marks of a filled-in trench in the parkland to the front of the main building. It was explained to us that this had been dug during the Second World War, in case of German invasion. It always seemed to me that the Germans could have come round the side.
There was an open air swimming pool, a gym, and a carpentry shop in which I made an oak toast rack. There was also a small panelled chapel in which we held frequent services.
The school Prospectus included the following:
The School, especially designed and built for a modern Preparatory School, and since enlarged, is situated near Ascot on the well-known Bagshot Sands, in a high bracing locality amid the pines and heather. The grounds (70 acres), include football and cricket fields, and a large kitchen garden which supplies the school with fruit and vegetables. The farm, belonging to the school, provides pure milk and cream. The ventilation and sanitation have been carefully planned by experts in accordance with the demands of modern hygiene. All the class rooms and living rooms face South. The ground falls away from the house in every direction. The school buildings are lit throughout by electric light; they are heated by radiators. The water is supplied by the Egham Water Co.
I recall forming an alternative lending library at the school. In contrast to the rather serious school library, it concentrated on popular boys' paperbacks, such as The Colditz Story and Sherlock Holmes. Our favourite periodicals were the Eagle, and Radio Fun.
My other major enterprise was to launch and edit the Earleywoodian magazine. It was produced by typing or writing onto a kind of carbon paper of various colours. The sheet was then attached to the cylinder of a hand-cranked duplicating machine which, with the application of copious amounts of methylated spirit, printed out blurred but coloured pages. Each issue of the Earleywoodian started with an adventure story. One of my own efforts was called 'The Clue of the Faulty Statement'. Dipping into the story, we find that:
In the opposite corner was the trussed figure of Roger Smith, Mr Frobisher's newly-engaged secretary, gagged and bound on the floor, official papers, documents and wills spread out beside, beyond, and under him.
Later, under cross-examination, Smith confessed to being the accomplice of Isaac Burton in murdering Mr Frobisher by hitting him on the head with a typewriter. Other contents of The Earleywoodian included poems, jokes, crosswords, sports reports, and useful information on sign language, semaphore and conjuring tricks. Inspired by the Eagle comic, the centre spread would sometimes contain a cut-away drawing, for example of a submarine. I ended up producing most of the content, including a desperate call for contributions which began:
If this paper does succeed,
(That it will, is what I hope),
You must supply our greatest need,
(Thus enabling us to cope).
Some flavour of life at Earleywood is given in the two following letters written to my sister Griselda in 1954, when I was thirteen:
Dear Gris,
Thanks awfully for the two lovely long letters. I'm awfully sorry this is my first, but I'm awfully busy. We have been doing a lot with the new 'Earleywoodian Library Club'. Already we have made white paper jackets with the Club crest on for about thirty books. Several grown-ups have also taken out books - Matron, Nurse, Mr Townley, and Mr Johnson.
I have been making a survey of the school, which I am putting in the model exhibition. I have finished it now in rough. The school is such a funny shape that just to do the ground floor plan needed about !150! measurements with tape, indoors and out.
When Martineau left at the end of last term he gave as I think I told you a wireless to the captain's room. We have been having it on quite a lot. In the evenings we have been listening to some sponsored programmes on Radio Luxemburg, which are rather fun as its just like what it is in America.
A week from today is the first match. I hope that I will play right-half. It is a very nice day today and we will have a game of soccer. After break today, instead of doing lessons I marked out the soccer pitch which was rather fun.
Mr Townley, the maths master who left the term before last when Mr Headley came, has come back, as Mr Headley is very ill. Mr Townley has his degree, and now goes around in a long sweeping black gown, looking very like the assistant masters in my chess set! I gave the chess set [which I had made by turning wood on a lathe in the carpentry shop] to the captain's room the Monday before last, and everybody liked it very much. I am sorry that you never saw them. The captains, of which there are five, which is very unusual, are myself, Williams-Freeman, Dutton, Mason, and Phelps.
Dear Gris,
I am so sorry that I have not written for such a long time, but I have been awfully busy for the last 10 days making things for the exhibition at half term. We brought out an issue of the Earleywoodian, and we made one pound, three shillings, and threepence halfpenny on it. That is about twice as much as we usually get. I enclose a copy. The only thing wrong with it is the poem, which doesn't scan. I did the story, and most of the rest. Try boiling water in the box described on page eleven!
I have four things in the exhibition - an electrical quiz, two pieces of marquetry and a bombing range like we had on the ping-pong table at Bath. Due to excessive use, the bomber has given up the ghost, but was working alright most of yesterday. The electrical quiz was of words which are written up somewhere in the school. There are two rows of plugs, one with the words against them and the other with the rooms in which they might be. There are two wires with plugs on the ends, you put one on the words, and the other on the room in which you have seen them. If you are right, a green light will light up, and also the spot where the words are on a map lights up. All the electricity is taken off the mains with a transformer, so it doesn't matter how many people use it.
The marquetry consists of wood inlays. I am enclosing a piece of marquetry of the inn-sign the 'Cross Keys'. I hope you like it. This afternoon we played in the scout ground and let off lots of fireworks which were left over from yesterday evening. Then we had a fircone fight. It was all great fun.
Other cameo memories of my happy five years at Earleywood, from 1949 to 1954, include:
Cheesy Kraft's home movies
Mr Kraft (known as Cheesy) was an elderly member of the staff, who would occasionally offer to entertain us with showings of his silent black-and-white home movies. There being little alternative entertainment, such offers were eagerly accepted. This despite the fact that we had seen all Cheesy Kraft's home movies several times before, and they consisted entirely of lingering shots of his relatives, dressed in what looked like Edwardian clothes, milling wordlessly around on a lawn.
Jenkins sandpapering his nose
Jenkins was worried that his nose was too big, and tried to reduce it with sandpaper. He was restrained, and recovered quickly.
The rocket that did not rise
My most ambitious model-making project was a balsa wood rocket, shaped like something out of a science fiction movie, painted in purple and gold, and driven by a Jetex engine. Jetex engines were small aluminium cylinders into which you inserted a solid fuel pellet and a fuse. When assembled and lit they would go off with a great whoosh for about thirty seconds. They worked well on cars and boats, and I expected my rocket to rise until it was a speck in the sky. The launch took place on the cricket field. Dozens of boys gathered round at a safe distance, waiting for the rocket to take to the skies. I lit the fuse. Disappointingly, the rocket just sat there in a vertical position for the full thirty seconds of the Jetex burn, with a lot of whooshing but no vertical movement. It then fell over.
Bishop alert
The visit of the local Bishop to officiate at one of our Sunday chapel services was a big day for Ted Aldrich Blake, and provided an electrical opportunity. I was much interested in low voltage electricity, and had a set of bulb holders, switches, batteries, and buzzers. They came in useful because Ted Aldrich Blake wanted the organ to strike up just before the Bishop entered the chapel. The problem was how to signal to the organist that the Bishop was approaching. I volunteered to install a bulb holder beside the organ, connected by wires running the length of the chapel to a switch in the outer vestibule. Aldrich Blake fell in with this unlikely scheme, and I was excused from chapel in order to man the switch in the vestibule. When the great moment came I threw the switch, the light lit, and the organ blared.
When I bit my knee
We had to make our own amusements, and one of these was to hang from the first floor landing by our hands, then let go and land - bending one's knees - onto the floor below. This worked well until one time I bent my knees rather too much. My mouth was open, and I bit my knee deeply. I reported to Matron, who had not previously had to deal with a boy biting his own knee.
My brief religious conversion
My proudest possession at Earleywood was a black portable typewriter, given to me as a present by my aunts Hilda and Lesley. But one terrible day, while I was typing away, the printing end of the H key (about the size of a pea) flew off the typewriter and disappeared, who knows where, into the cluttered classroom. A fingertip search yielded nothing. Without the H key the typewriter was useless; it just produced a smudge instead of every H.
Having tried all else, I decided to try the power of prayer. I went upstairs to my dormitory, knelt down beside my bed, pressed my hands together very tightly, and prayed like anything to find the H key. I went back downstairs, and started looking. Instantly I found the H key, behind someone's tuck box. Instantly, I was converted. But my religious phase was brief. A few days later there was something else I very much wanted, such as a place in the cricket team. I went upstairs and prayed with great confidence. No luck. Disillusion. Other prayers over the next few weeks, aimed at other objectives, were equally fruitless. Perhaps I was asking for too much.
Our secret weapon Lundberg
Lundberg was from Sweden. He did not shine in lessons, but he was very large. One reason he was so large was that he was about two years older than the rest of us, and seemed to stay on at the school indefinitely. This may have been because he was a crucial asset when it came to sports matches against other schools. Being a very small school, we would have faced hopeless odds if it had not been for Lundberg. We would arrive at away matches in a minibus, and us tiny boys with squeaky voices would pile out to the derision of the home team. Then to gasps of astonishment Lundberg would unfold himself from the bus and draw himself up to his full enormous height. It was like Hannibal producing his elephants.
Cold baths
For moral or medical reasons, or simply to wake us up, we were required to take a cold bath every morning. This involved standing naked in a shivering queue outside the bathroom, then stepping forward one at a time and briefly plunging full length into the cold bath. Rather like parachuting.
Liquid currency
Life was not all hard. In contrast to the rigours of the cold baths each boy was given one boiled sweet, wrapped in a twist of cellophane, after lunch every day. In the same way that cigarettes become a currency in prison, these boiled sweets became our informal currency. If someone wanted to borrow someone else's football boots, or get help with his work, payment would be made in sweets. I did well in this primitive economy because my grasp of maths was a marketable commodity, but I got my comeuppance.
Having like Shylock accumulated a substantial hoard of boiled sweets, I decided that they were at risk of theft and should be placed in a safe place. I sealed them inside a large biscuit tin, wrapping it around with many layers of sellotape. I then crept out unobserved, over the boundary fence, into the woods. There, in a carefully calculated spot, I dug a hole and buried the tin. I spread leaves over the disturbed earth. I felt financially secure for life. But it was not to be. A few days layer I crept off into the woods to make a withdrawal. I dug the tin up, and opened it only to find that due to the cold or the damp all the boiled sweets had dissolved into a thin syrup of no commercial value.
Radio Luxembourg
I had bought by mail order a kit for a crystal radio set, which came with dark brown bakelite headphones, of the kind used by spies in the Second World War. It was a huge success. It required no batteries, and you wiggled a knob to pick up a signal. I very much enjoyed listening to popular music on Radio Luxembourg, under the bedclothes after lights out.
Never ending stories
An alternative to listening to Radio Luxembourg after lights out was to listen to a never ending story, told by one of the other boys in the dormitory. Some were extraordinarily good at this, making up interminable adventure stories, full of people riding motorbikes, capturing burglars, and clinging to the undersides of railway trains. After this had been going on for about half an hour, the narrator would ask 'Is anyone still awake?'. If even one person was still awake, he would continue. Then when all were asleep he would go to sleep himself, and take up the story the next evening.
Home
Throughout my time at Earleywood we lived in our rented top floor flat at 30, Royal Crescent, Bath. A magnificent crescent-shaped terrace of thirty grand houses, the Royal Crescent was designed by John Wood the Younger, and was built between 1767 and 1774.
Recollections of Bath include the arrival of a large crew to make a film based on the Scarlet Pimpernel story. Called The Elusive Pimpernel, it was released in 1951 and starred David Niven, Margaret Leighton, and Cyril Cusack. One striking feature of their visit was that the large cast iron lamp posts around the Royal Crescent were uprooted and removed, with a crane, for the duration of the filming. They were apparently not of the correct period. Also red carpet was laid up the front steps of our house, which was decked out to receive visitors (in horse drawn carriages) to a fashionable ball.
We had an allotment in the parkland below the Royal Crescent. Part of this had been turned over to allotments during the Second World War, but has now been returned to grass. We had a rather grand white painted garden bench in it, brought from a previous house. My mother grew (and we ate) very large sweet corn plants, along with other vegetables.
I had an O Gauge Hornby clockwork train set, which monopolised the dining room. I fitted a battery and bulb into the engine, and much enjoyed switching all the lights out and seeing it crank round the track in the dark, with forward pointing beam. It was like an American freight train roaring across the prairie.
Another electrical project was the illuminated jelly at my tenth birthday party. My long-suffering mother agreed to cast a green jelly with a small inverted glass tumbler embedded into the base. I wired up a bulb holder and we secreted a pair of wires away to a concealed switch by the skirting board. Because the jelly was not entirely transparent, the electrical works could not be seen. Imagine the surprise of my small guests when the lights were switched out, and the jelly suddenly glowed brilliantly and greenly from within!
I wanted to learn to touch type when I was about eleven, and my mother (who was keen to see us have a go at anything) enrolled me in a three week course in a secretarial college in the town. The other pupils seemed like grown-up ladies, but were probably about seventeen. We tapped away to music, to help our rhythm. My mother also arranged for me to spend some weeks as a juvenile apprentice in a metal working shop in the basement of a terrace in the town. They taught me to do exciting things, including operating a metal lathe, where the cutting bit had to be cooled with a constant stream of a white liquid that looked like milk. It sizzled fiercely, and curls of metal came off in twirly shapes. I made, as a present for my father, a turned brass pencil holder in the shape of a naval shell. I was also keen on conjuring, and was taught conjuring tricks (and 'patter') by Mr Donovan, a member of the Magic Circle who lived in the Royal Crescent. Later, when I had children of my own, the conjuring came in useful at birthday parties.
At weekends we would go out to the countryside in the car, and all get out to do what my mother called 'deep breaths'. This involved standing in a row, usually on an exposed hillside, drawing in and blowing out enormous breaths. We would also picnic in all weather conditions, on a check blanket, with soup served from a green wide-mouthed Thermos.
Several times a year I would visit London to stay with my paternal grandmother, Lady Reid. She and her two unmarried daughters Hilda and Lesley lived in a tall Victorian terrace house at 46 Tedworth Square, Chelsea, leased from the Cadogan Estate. Hilda and Lesley indulgently took me all over London on the top of double decker buses. We also played Happy Families; I liked Mr Chip the Carpenter, but found Mrs Bone the Butcher's Wife rather alarming. On one of my visits they mentioned their difficulty in removing the tight foil caps from milk bottles. This was during my lathe phase, and on the next visit I brought them as a present a device I had turned out of wood. It was a biscuit-sized disk which was flat on one side, and had on the other side an upstanding centre designed to fit the inside radius of the top of a milk bottle. You pressed this onto the top of the bottle, and the foil cap then lifted off easily.
Most summers we would go by ferry to Brittany for a seaside holiday in France. One of these trips provided material for the following travel article in the Earleywoodian, written when I was twelve. Its tone accords with the Englishman's traditional polite surprise at the strange ways of foreigners.
What one might notice on holiday in France.
Firstly, the advertising seems to be carried to a greater extreme than in England, no less that 14 firms giving away ash-trays to hotels and restaurants free, while 3 other firms throw notepads into house gardens, one firm gives away sheets of paper with the equivalent of a Tommy Walls strip on the back, another giving away cardboard and celluloid sun-glasses, and yet another gives away picture post cards.
As far as cycling is concerned, one will often see four, and sometimes even five, people on a bicycle, which is not against the law as it is here. Also children of down to about 8 years of age can be seen riding bicycles with motors attached, which are much more common than in England; bicycles can also be put on buses which have racks on their rooves, for also carrying luggage there.
To pass on to trains, a great majority of which are electric with overhead wires, the tracks are always on a level with the platform so there is a big step down, and in our case at Dieppe the tracks actually go through the ordinary streets. In Paris the Metro Underground is not nearly as deep as it is in London therefore one sees many places where the tracks are uncovered. Also one might be surprised to hear that a journey of one stage costs exactly the same as a long one.
Two highlights of our time in Bath were the Festival of Britain exhibition in 1951, and the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II in 1953. At the Festival of Britain I particularly enjoyed the Skylon and the Dome of Discovery. A simple but gripping exhibit within the Dome of Discovery was a large white panel, about twenty feet square, with a million black dots neatly arranged on it in rows. I stared at this for a long time, never having seen a million of anything before. The coronation involved much preparation, including the compilation of loyal scrapbooks which were specially printed and sold for the purpose. Mine contains carefully pasted cuttings of the Royal couple, the Crown Jewels, and the street decorations. We watched the parade from my father's club, the United Service Club in Pall Mall. I remember cheering myself hoarse in a patriotic frenzy.
Winchester College
I arrived as new boy at Winchester College in January 1955, having won a scholarship. In a severely meritocratic way, the College pinned up on the notice board in the entrance gateway a list of the scholars in the order of the entry examination marks. Top of the list was James Sabben Clare, who went on to become Headmaster at the College. I scraped in at number 11 in a list of 12.
We were referred to as 'new men' rather than 'new boys', because Winchester College has its strange private language, known as Notions. My book of Winchester College Notions, published in 1910, contains several hundred definitions. These include:
Abroad. Sufficiently recovered to leave the sick room.
Adam and Eve. A stream flowing from Birley's corner through Dalmatia, rejoining New Barge immediately below First Pot.
Apple Pie Day. The Thursday after the first Tuesday in Sealing Week, when College men got apple pies. On this day, which is always a Hatch Thoke, College Six play Commoner Six.
Bake. To lounge.
Batmugger. A wooden instrument used for oiling bats.
We were expected to learn this language in our first term, and were given an examination by the prefects. It is described in a letter to my sister Griselda:
Last night we had notions examina, which is an examination for the new men. It is held in the upstairs chambers, and there are lots of cucumber sandwiches, jelly, blackberries, hot sausages, soup and cider. The festivities stop around half past eleven, but the extra hour in bed this morning makes up for lost sleep.
Griselda was on an exchange in Paris with a family called Lehideux, with whom I had already stayed, and later in the letter I ask her to buy something for me:
I wonder if you could possibly get me a record?? I will pay you back when I see you next. It is the 45 rpm 7 inch, 'Cha Cha Cha No.2' with Enriquo Jorren's band. On the shiny cover (which is red and yellow) there is a cat grinning from ear to ear playing a tom-tom.
Several of the boys had classical records, which were played in the chambers. I remember going into a record shop in town to buy my first record and asking the advice of the young lady assistant. She was most helpful and recommended Mozart's Concerto for Flute and Harp in C Major, which I bought and much enjoyed. I was curious to discover that the orchestra included a glass harmonica - an instrument which, I later discovered, was invented by Benjamin Franklin.
I had a less happy retail experience twenty years later when I went into a classical record shop in Cambridge to buy tapes for my first car audio system. I said I wanted about five, perhaps by Beethoven, Bach, Mozart, Brahms, or Tchaikovsky. I asked the assistant (who clearly preferred discussing with aficionados the finer differences between various recordings) which works he would recommend. He icily directed me to the appropriate racks, saying 'I think you will find them all perfectly satisfactory'.
The advantages of being a scholar, or 'College man' were that the fees were much reduced, and you lived in the beautiful medieval part of the school, known as College, in a tolerant community. The other boys, known as 'Commoners' lived in 'Houses' where prowess at sports and normality ruled the day. In College, by contrast, diversity was tolerated. Many College men had consuming, even obsessive hobbies. One collected leaves. Another memorised most of the UK railway timetable.
We were regarded by the Commoners as rather odd, not least because we were required to wear every day a most peculiar outfit. This consisted of a white shirt with detachable starched collar, black tie, black long-sleeved waistcoat, grey trousers, and a flowing black gown with puff sleeves. This feeling of being regarded as a curiosity took some getting used to. The sensation came flooding back fifty years later when I attended an Old Wykehamist dinner held at the Jockey Club in Newmarket - near my home in Cambridge. Most of the attendees appeared to be large landowners, much into country sports. I introduced myself to one of them. When he looked at my name badge, and saw I had been in College, he called out to his friends, saying 'Look! look! here's a College man. Come and see. I always wondered what happened to them!'
I count myself enormously lucky to have spent five years at Winchester. The College stands in wonderful grounds to the south of the city, with huge ancient trees, a river running along the boundary, water meadows beyond, and views of St.Catherine' Hill. The teachers were excellent, and every kind of extra-curricular activity was available.
The days were a busy mix of chapel services, classroom, meals, active afternoons, and evenings spent in the Chambers, around the College court. Each Chamber was a large room shared by about ten boys of all ages. Around the edge of the room were 'Toyes' which were open-sided wooden cubicles with a desk, a wall light, shelves, and cupboards. On one side of the room was a large stone fireplace with a coal fire burning in it. In the centre of the room was a big table, with newspapers on it, and chairs around. It was all extremely cosy and congenial. You could quietly sit in your cubicle, doing some work, or writing home, while keeping an ear open to the general conversation. Toasting forks were available, and cans of baked beans could be heated up in a saucepan of water on the open fire. Once one exploded because someone had forgotten to puncture it.
The dormitories operated on a similar principle of mixing all ages. The bathrooms were most unusual. There were three or four of these, alongside the dormitories on the first floor of the College court. The bathrooms were about twenty feet square, had a threshold about six inches high over which you had to step to get in, and were floored in waterproof terazzo, with a central drain. Pairs of hot and cold taps were arranged around the wall. There were no fixed baths as such. Instead there were portable metal baths, known as Bidets. In shape, these were like a frying pan without a handle, about three feet in diameter and about a foot deep. You would get undressed in an adjacent changing room, then drag a Bidet over to some taps, and fill it up. You took your bath in it, then when you were finished you simply tipped the Bidet up and the water went all over the floor. Occasionally, and illicitly, we would block the outlet and flood the whole bathroom with a few inches of water; you could then float around in the empty Bidets, using them as boats.
College men ate in the medieval dining hall. It was on the first floor adjacent to the Chapel in the College court, and was approached by a wide flight of stone steps. Two curious features of the dining hall were the square wooden boards we used instead of plates, and the coal fired stove in the centre of the room. It radiated a lot of heat, but it also served as a means of producing toast for breakfast. In a feudal process, the boys in the most junior year had to gather before breakfast every morning at the foot of the stone steps (while the more senior years were still getting up), each armed with a toasting fork. As the chapel clock struck the hour, all would rush up the steps, grab a piece of bread, and start toasting. The reason for the rush was that the first to the fire got the choice toasting spot at the centre of the fire. The last had to make do with the edge of the fire, where it was practically impossible to toast anything. The iron rule was that your first piece of toast went to the most senior boy in your chamber. The second to the second most senior, and so on. The toaster was last in this pecking order, and seldom got any toast.
The chapel services were numerous and pleasant, with much stained glass, oak pews, and hearty singing. Every morning, seven days a week, there was a service for the whole school in the main Chapel. Then every evening the College men had evening prayers in a tiny and delightful small chapel, called Chantry, placed in the centre of a medieval cloister adjacent to the main chapel. It had a first floor library above it, reached via a stone spiral staircase in the corner.
In the classroom we had to specialise quite early into one of three streams: Classics, Science & Maths, and Humanities. I found it difficult to choose between Science & Maths and the Humanities. I ended up doing Science & Maths, taking Physics, Mathematics, and Higher Mathematics as my A-level subjects.
The housemaster in charge of College, known as the 'Second Master' was the fiercely intelligent linguist and historian Tom Howarth, who had been a junior staff officer under Montgomery in the Second World War. He later went on to be the High Master at St.Paul's School, and later a fellow of Magdalene College, Cambridge. While at Magdalene he wrote a book on Cambridge Between Two Wars, published by Collins in 1978. The assistant master in College was David Lutyens. We thought him extremely good looking, and were much impressed when he left teaching in 1959 to become a newsreader on ITV, the first commercial television channel.
Extra curricular activities included pottery and carpentry, where I made a miniature oak table; it now serves as something to stand my computer on beside my desk. I also made a gramophone with record changer, buying the parts and making up a wooden case covered in simulated leather. I reported on progress (and on the Suez crisis) in a letter to my sister Griselda:
I have bought yesterday a sheet of that punched metal to put in front of the loudspeaker on my gramaphone. I am now waiting for the rexide to cover it in. Mummy is trying to get some in London. The Suez crisis is causing a lot of interest and discussion here. Last night most of the school went to a debate on it in School. Four dons made speeches, two for two against the government, and then questions were asked from the audience. It was very interesting, and clarified my picture of the situation quite a lot. Work is going well. In History we are doing the Industrial Revolution - you know, Crompton's Mule, Arkwright, Cartwright etc.
My two main extra-curricular ventures both took place in my penultimate year at Winchester, 1958. Both were joint ventures with my good friend Philip Steadman, who also went on to read Architecture at Cambridge. The first was the setting up of a Printing Society, whose largest project was a book of prayers for use at evening prayers. The second was the production of a satirical summer magazine called Three Short Legs.
Winchester College Printing Society
Phil Steadman and I set up the Printing Society to take advantage of the bequest of equipment by an Old Wykehamist who was a keen amateur printer. Two enormous cast iron, treadle operated, rotary printing presses, and a lethal guillotine, arrived in the art building. They were accompanied by numerous trays of moveable type. Phil and I volunteered to take charge of this and were assigned a large room for the purpose. We fitted this out with workbenches and shelving, and set about learning (by trial and error) how to compose type and operate printing presses. We started out printing headed stationery, and small invitations for personal or school events. The number of boys joining the Printing Society grew, probably because it offered, to the less sporty boys, a legitimate alternative to afternoon games. We organised the members into a strict hierarchy. Only Phil Steadman and I operated the printing presses. This was probably just as well, because their rotary momentum was huge. Their jaws opened and closed quickly and relentlessly. At each opening you had to remove one sheet of paper and drop another into exactly the right position. You could easily have crushed a hand if you had got your timing wrong. The next layer of boys were assigned to composing the type; picking up the type from the right little compartment, and stacking it into something called a Composing Stick. The third and most lowly layer of boys were assigned to sorting the type back into the trays after it had been used.
The great project of the Printing Society was the production of a 30-page book of prayers for use in the scholars' evening services. The previous edition had run out of print, and the College agreed to commission us to produce a replacement. The project was a joint effort of the 21 members of the Printing Society. It was a major undertaking, with all the hand typesetting, and with each page having to be printed four times (in red and black on each side). The first word of each prayer was in red. We chose for the text 14 point Perpetua type, designed by Eric Gill, with van Krimpen's Romulus type for the 36 point initial letter of each prayer. The books were professionally bound in red cloth or leather, with the title stamped in gold.
Three Short Legs
The Three Short Legs magazine was produced as a one-off summer publication, to be sold at the annual Eton against Winchester cricket match. The editors were myself, Phil Steadman, and John King, with a master (Count Nicholas Sollohub) pressed into service as minder. It contained no less than 60 paid display advertisements, mostly full or half page. We wrote off to local and national companies, and somehow persuaded them to cough up. As well as local firms, they included household names such as Austin Reed, the Royal Navy, Thomas Cook, Barclays Bank, and the Oxford University Press. The venture turned a profit, and I was able to buy an Olivetti portable typewriter (for £25) out of my share.
The contents included anonymous attempts at parody and humour, a contribution from the Punch author H.F.Ellis (which began 'The advantages of being very bad at cricket are not always clearly understood.'), a crossword, and two articles on the traditionalist design of the new school hall. One article, by Andor Gomme, criticised the scheme, describing the building as 'a severe disappointment'. The other article, in defence of the design, was by its architect Peter Shepheard.
The best piece was a rumination on proverbs by Phil Steadman, entitled 'It will be seen in the frying of the eggs'. The opening section follows:
The scientists have missed it; it has lain hidden in a cobwebbed tome; it has escaped their notice - the proverb. It alone has evaded the searching ray of the scientific method, has survived into this our marvellous mechanical age, a revered and musty oracle, soon to be struck down by ruthless men in white coats. But perhaps in some vast, clinical, impersonal building (should it be an 'establishment'?) the proverbs are even now fighting a losing battle; out-numbered, unarmed, they are falling prey to bespectacled monsters whose weapons are test-tubes and balances. Can we imagine the scene as each proverb in turn comes for trial into the spotless laboratory that is science's courtroom?
"Call the first proverb."
Down from his dusty home among once-handsome volumes bound n red morocco creeps the shirivelled emaciated thing.
"State your case."
"A horse stumbles that has four legs."
A low murmur goes round the laboratory. The experiment begins - horse after horse, black, white, piebald, thin, small, large - cart-horses and elegant ponies parade past the committee. The little proverb weeps silently in a corner as horse after horse fails to stumble, and prances along in perfect step.
The judge puts on the black cap and judgement is passed.
"Call the next proverb."
Down from his rice-paper home jumps a yellow-faced, slit-eyed proverb and bows low.
"Honorable sirs: beg to recite honourable proverb; a fog cannot be dispelled with a fan." (A lamentable lack of the Canute spirit here, one can't help thinking.)
The jury deliberates;
... a small fog ... an enormous fan ... absurd generalization ...
And so it goes on.
My own contributions to Three Short Legs have not stood the test of time so well. One was a three page commentary on school events parodying Time Magazine. It included a review of a recent school play which started:
Oedipus Tyrannus (Sophocles) is another stringy, unshaven utterance of the tragedy muse. Action plunges into long backlog of all the old works - curses, prophecies, plagues and riddles. Biggest riddle is to sort out where we come in.
and ended:
Audience, chorus, shuffle off in tears. Nicholas J.Richardson gives Oedipus punch, feeling, is handicapped by loose dialogue, heavy scripting. A.Patrick Minford [later to become a famous professor of economics], playing opposite Richardson, wheels out a spirited performance. Rest of cast carry along a script that lacks impact. Chorus of moaning oldsters palled, but took everything that author Sophocles gave them.
Other cameo memories of my five years at Winchester College include:
Acting as Lady Macbeth
Tom Howarth, who was producing the College play, decided in my first year that I would make a good Lady Macbeth. There were a lot of lines to learn, and I felt rather silly dressed up in wig and dress. In the dress rehearsal of the sleepwalking scene I set fire to my wig with the candle. I managed to put it out.
Sailing on the Hamble
Being a disaster at cricket, I opted for sailing as an alternative. We would set out in a minibus for the Hamble River, under the care of Mr Darling. Darling was a physics teacher who was keen on sailing. Indeed he taught largely through the medium of sailing, explaining most physical principles (such as velocity, levers, pulleys, and relative motion) by drawing pictures of sailing boats on the blackboard. The College kept Firefly dinghies at the boatyard of Fairey Marine. We would sail around in the Hamble, and sometimes venture across to Cowes in the Isle of Wight, taking care to avoid the enormous ships heading to or from Southampton. We greatly enjoyed it, and came back windswept and smelling of salt.
Writing to The Times
I somehow came across the Purchase Tax regulations, and was interested to see that carpentry sets were exempt, whereas chemistry sets were not. I wrote a letter to The Times (which was published) suggesting that both should be exempt. I argued that while in the days of wooden ships the nation's security might have depended on carpentry it was more likely today to depend on science.
Battle Drill
My strangest memory of Winchester is something called Battle Drill. We did it in the College Cadet Force as part of our military training. We also did parade ground drill. For that we wore shiny boots and neat battledress uniforms which we pressed using solid irons heated on a gas ring. Battle Drill was quite different.
Everything about it was absurd. We dressed in sloppy denim uniforms, which were three sizes too big. Battle Drill took place not on a tarmac parade ground, but on the sports fields. Instead of marching around like proper soldiers, in Battle Drill you had to hold your rifle up horizontally in front of you in a position called the High Port. It was as if you were wading chest-deep through an imaginary swamp. You also had to lift your knees up very high, as if stepping over the high grass of the veldt. The whole effect was ridiculous. Every so often you had to stop, and the boy in front had to should out 'Observe!'. Then on you went. On another command, you had to prance off, knees lifted high, to gather round the boy playing the role of leader. When all were arrived, he would should out to the first boy: 'Rations!', and the first boy had to shout back 'No!'. Then the leader had to shout out 'Ammunition!' to the second boy, who had to shout back 'No!'. Then the leader had to shout out 'Rendezvous!' to the third boy, who had to should back 'No!'. So it went on. We assumed this ritual had mutated from a procedure on which your life would have depended in the Boer War.
While I was at Winchester College, my sister Griselda was also in Winchester, boarding at St.Swithuns school. My father's job had moved from Bath to London in 1953; we rented a flat at Morpeth Mansions, off Victoria Street. We then moved to Kent, and up to Kirkintilloch, near Glasgow, for my father's last job in charge of a gunnery proofing range. My memories of the Morpeth Mansions flat are that it had an open outside lift serving the kitchen window, which I once travelled up in, and that my mother decided to change the look of the flat. This involved wallpapering my bedroom in a very Festival of Britain red wallpaper, and painting everything in the kitchen (table, chairs, cupboards, bread bin, walls) in a warm tomato soup colour. She also bought her first electric cake mixer; a man came to the flat to demonstrate it by making a Victoria Sponge.
During this time my father inherited a substantial house in the Scottish borders from his childless cousin Herbert Eckford. Herbert had emigrated to Canada as teenager before the First World War, and had made his fortune in the wild frontier town of Calgary, in Alberta. Key to this was a stake in Calgary's principal brewery. Herbert returned to Scotland, and set himself up in style. The house, called Templeknowe, was near St.Boswells, in Roxburghshire. It was in the Scottish baronial style, with a turret, battlements, and stabling for 12 horses. We used it for holidays for a few years, but my parents sold it in 1958, when they bought Greenhill, a Georgian house in the village of Thorncombe, near Chard in Dorset. My parents were 57 and 51, but Greenhill was, apart from Templeknowe, the first house they had owned.
A curious footnote
I was passing through Winchester some twenty years later, and James Sabben-Clare (now Headmaster at Winchester College) and his wife Mary kindly invited me to lunch. On my way to their house I popped into a small supermarket to buy something. The lady at the check-out handed me my change, then reached under her desk, said 'This is your free basketwork parrot', and handed me said parrot. She explained it was part of a loyalty scheme. On arrival at the Sabben-Clares I discovered that it was James' birthday, and gave him the parrot. It was green, and the top half came off, so you could keep things in it.
Cambridge University
After a severe illness in my last summer term at Winchester, which followed an emergency appendix operation, I went up to Trinity College Cambridge to read architecture in October 1959. I was in the first cohort to miss National Service. About half my contemporaries had done National Service, so were two or three years older (and about ten years more experienced).
A letter home, two weeks after I started at Cambridge, exudes breathless enthusiasm:
I am really enjoying myself enormously (don't think I'm trying to put a good face on things), and what I enjoy most of all is the architecture! All the dons are very good, and the lectures so far (2) have been extremely interesting. We each have a table in the studio and have had to buy some (I am very sorry to say) expensive equipment, e.g. adjustable protractors and a vast T square. Luckily I managed to get some things second hand. The drawing board with ebony edge I got for £5 instead of £8. Everything else, however, including sketch books, notebooks, exercise books, paper, pencils, ink etc etc etc is all on the house.
I have bought a very good bicycle for £2 from the cycle attendant. I had to get new brake blocks and a bell at woolworths, but well worth it. I have booked the morning coat outfit. Should I wear a hat? Please let me know immed. as I have to give them notice for the hat. I have joined several societies: the Architecture society, the Arts society, the Film society, and the Conservative Association. Let me know about the hat. If I don't hear I shall assume no hat.
My interest in design had been triggered by the study of typography into which I was led by my printing activities at Winchester College, and by a Buckminster Fuller lecture in London to which my mother took me as a teenager. The lecture, which took place at the Royal Institute of British Architects, lasted more than three hours. During the question period I asked the great man why, when all his designs were so revolutionary, did he wear a conventional suit. He replied that people took unconventional ideas more seriously if presented by someone in a suit.
I took to architecture like a duck to water, and much of my life during my three years at Cambridge revolved around the studios in the Department of Architecture in Scroope Terrace. Fitzbillies was conveniently placed about half way between Trinity College and Scroope Terrace, and I would call in for a sausage roll or a Chelsea bun depending on the time of day. We were hugely committed to the subject, and most of us worked very long hours, sometimes late into the night or all night. There were two explanations for this enthusiasm.
Firstly, it was immensely invigorating to be released from the passive learning of school into the active process of coming forward with one's own ideas. Secondly the teachers, particularly our year tutor Sandy Wilson and the head of school Leslie Martin, were truly inspirational. We hung on their every word, and we shared with them a worship of the leading masters of the modern movement: Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Alvar Aalto. Leslie Martin kindly extended to students an open invitation for tea every Sunday at his splendid home/office, a converted mill in Little Shelford. It was stuffed with modern movement paintings and sculpture, given to him by his friends over the years. These included Henry Moore, Barbara Hepworth, and Ben Nicholson. I also worked in his office as a junior draughtsman during two vacations, alongside his senior associates Patrick Hodgkinson and John Miller. One task was a meticulous ink drawing of the elevation of his residential building for Caius College in West Road, Cambridge.
Each term was a succession of design projects, carried out at drawing boards in the studio, and presented for open criticism at 'crits' undertaken by visiting teachers. In our first weeks we were asked to design a record sleeve, then a house within a redundant squash court, and a sculpture garden. The sculpture garden was to occupy the area of a tennis court; it was to hold six sculptures; it was to contain two levels, and a roofed area. My scheme, for which I made an intricate balsa wood model now lost, was severely geometrical. It received embarrassingly lavish praise in the 'crit' from the architectural theorist Colin Rowe.
Sadly, I don't think I ever did anything as good again. Looking back on it, there was a central paradox in the way we were taught. We were encouraged to reject old ways, and to think for ourselves. One of the reasons we all admired the heroes of the modern movement was that they had rejected the earlier orthodoxies and had come up with radically new design ideas. But, perversely, we were expected to adhere slavishly to the new orthodoxy, represented by Corbusier, Mies, Wright, and Aalto. If our buildings did not look somewhat like theirs, there would be trouble. One girl from Malaysia produced a design that included windows in curved Islamic style. She was quietly taken aside by the year tutor, who explained that this was not done. Her subsequent projects were rectangular.
My first signs of insubordination came when we were asked to do a measured drawing. Being enthusiastic about industrial design rather than classical architecture, I did a meticulous measured drawing of the plan and elevation of an Olivetti portable typewriter.
My real clash with the orthodoxy came when we were asked to design a motel for a roadside site between Cambridge and Trumpington. Reflecting the transient nature of road travel, and influenced by the work of Buckminster Fuller, I produced a design consisting of a string of spherical pre-fabricated plastic pods, which clipped together like popper beads. There were three types: an eating pod, a bath pod, and a bed pod. These could be combined in various combinations. Pods could be added or removed in response to seasonal or long term changes in demand. In the bath unit the bath and basin were all moulded into the pod, as in Buckminster Fuller's Dymaxion bathroom. There were a couple of pods at the end for a caretaker, who could send guests breakfast through a pneumatic tube. It was described thus:
A motel is a service station for the body. Eat. Wash. Sleep. Sleep. Wash. Eat.
The motel consists of three different types of unit. The first is primarily for eating in, the second is primarily for washing in, and the third is given over entirely to the bed. Each unit is approximately 7'6" by 7'6" by 7'6". Large enough to stretch and reach and jump in; small enough to be easily prefabricated and transported. The motel does not try to disengage itself from the road; it clings to it. A car pulls into the motel as a car pulls into a lay by. It points always in the same direction. It is not forced into ungainly and unnatural manoevres.
I adopted an equally unorthodox approach to a project for new student rooms at Jesus College. In deference to conservationist constraints, and on the principle that most students only used their rooms to sleep in, I designed a single storey windowless building hidden behind an ancient wall. The drawings of the fitted furniture, in the style of an engineering blueprint, were remarkably detailed.
Unfortunately these schemes did not find favour with the visiting examiners, and I was severely marked down, resulting in a 3rd class grade for my second year (after a 1st in my first year). I produced more conventional work in my third year, and ended up with a 2(ii) grade overall. But whatever the ups and downs of my marks, I loved every minute of architecture at Cambridge.
Close friends in the same year included Richard MacCormac, Robin Webster (an accomplished cartoonist), Robin Spence, Sumet Jumsai and Dominic Michaelis.
Richard MacCormac went on to have a distinguished career. He established the firm of MacCormac, Jamieson and Prichard, won numerous RIBA Awards for his buildings, became a Fellow of the Royal Academy and President of the RIBA, and was knighted in 2001. Robin Webster and Robin Spence hit the headlines by winning, in their twenties, a huge and prestigious competition to design a new parliamentary building on Bridge Street, opposite Big Ben. Unfortunately, after much publicity and several years of work, the project was abandoned. Years later a parliamentary building did get built on the site, but it was designed by Sir Michael Hopkins. Both continued to practise, and Robin Webster later became head of the school of architecture at The Robert Gordon University, Aberdeen. Sumet Jumsai was from Bangkok, and returned there to lecture and build up his practice. One of his most notable buildings is the Robot Building, Bangkok, for the Bank of Asia. It is 20 storey building in the shape of a robot, complete with two large round eyes. It was selected by the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, as one of the 50 seminal buildings of the 20th century. Dominic Michaelis went on to qualify as an engineer as well as an architect. He and his architect son are currently in the news with proposals to build floating eco islands in warm climates around the world.
In the year ahead of me was Peter Carolin, who later worked with Sandy Wilson on the design of the new British Library at Kings Cross. He edited Architectural Design journal, and became head of the school of architecture at Cambridge. He is now, in retirement, a neighbour and friend here in Cambridge. Phil Steadman was in the year behind me. He turned to research rather than architecture, at Cambridge, the Open University, and University College London, where he is now a professor. I should also mention Jon Harris. A scholar at Winchester College in Phil Steadman's year, he read history of art at Cambridge, and went on to be a professional artist and art teacher. He has lived in Green Street, in the middle of Cambridge, for more than thirty years; he knows and loves the architecture of the city more than anyone I know. His beautifully annotated pen and ink drawings of places of interest are truly remarkable.
University friends not studying architecture included Simon Lister and Colin Perry (both of whom went on to do an MBA at INSEAD in Fontainebleau), Malcolm Cockburn and Roger Garside. Simon, who read engineering, spent most of his career working as a transport expert for the consultants Arthur D Little in Boston and London. Colin spent his career in industry, including as Managing Director of the Birmingham Mint. Malcolm worked as a civil engineer, then took over the running of his family farm in Dorset. Roger joined the Foreign Office, and wrote an authoritative book on 'China After Mao'.
Other cameo memories of my time at Cambridge include:
The world of cinema
The Arts Cinema in Market Passage, now converted to a bistro bar, ran a subscription cinema club every Sunday in term, with screenings at 2.30pm, 5.30pm, and 8.30pm. You would book for an entire term at one of these times, and enjoy an excellent series of classic films. They were generally in black and white, sometimes in French with sub-titles. They merge in memory into a flickering collage of Alec Guinness, Jaques Tati, Orson Welles, Gregory Peck, Brigitte Bardot, Audrey Hepburn, Alfred Hitchcock, Humphrey Bogart, Fred Astaire, and the Marx Brothers. Two scenes that are seared into my memory are one from 'The Wages of Fear' in which a lorry driver sinks into a quagmire so that eventually only his outstretched hand is seen; and a murder mystery in a spooky house in which a drowned corpse rises up terrifyingly from a bath.
I tried to get into film-making by joining the university film society. I reported on a Sunday afternoon to the senior undergraduate who ran the society in his rooms. I was most impressed to find him ensconced in bed with a beautiful young lady. This chimed with my fantasies about show business. Only slightly annoyed by the interruption, he handed me an editing machine and a cardboard box full of curly film clippings. He asked me to make something of the material.
Back in my own rooms I spooled through the clippings. They consisted of shots of a respectable looking middle-aged man repeatedly walking in and out of a suburban bungalow, and getting in and out of a car. There were no other characters. I decided to build my masterpiece around the theme of 'Setting off for a day at the office'. I carefully glued the strips of film together in logical order, so that the man first came out of the door, then walked down the path, then opened the gate, then closed the gate behind him, then got into his car, and then drove off. I took the finished work back to the film society supremo. He ran it trough a projector, gave it the thumbs down, and offered me no further work. I think he had been hoping for something more bizarre.
Braun salesman
Like the rest of the school of architecture, I was a fan of the Bauhaus, and an admirer of the clean geometrical products designed for Braun by Dieter Rams of the Ulm design school (the spiritual successor of the Bahaus). I bought a beautiful rectangular Braun cylinder fan heater, which I treated as a useful work of art. I was so taken with it that, in an entrepreneurial and evangelical spirit, I made an arrangement with a Cambridge electrical retailer to sell these heaters on commission to fellow undergraduates, like an Avon lady.
The open road
I bought a 50cc BSA motorbike in 1960, when I was nineteen. My first outing was on the A10, which runs long and straight through flat country towards Ely. It was unbelievably exhilirating; I was probably only doing about 35 mph, but it felt supersonic. My next purchase was an Isetta bubble car. It was the first car produced by BMW, was spherical, and had a single door on the front which had the steering wheel attached. Three people could squeeze onto a bench seat. I had seen it parked in a nearby street, and put a note under the windscreen wiper asking if it was for sale. It was, the vendor being Tim Eiloart. Tim had just founded the Cambridge Consultants consultancy, as an agency selling the time of University academics to industry. It grew into a substantial company with hundreds of staff and several spin-outs. Tim's other distinction is that he had, in 1958, taken part in an attempt to fly across the Atlantic in a hot air balloon. The following account of this adventure is from the Balloons Over Britain website:
The Atlantic Ocean was the greatest challenge in ballooning history for many years. A group of 4 British balloonists, Colin Mudie, his wife Rosemary, Bushy Eiloart and his son Tim, planned to take on the Atlantic crossing, using their experience as sailors. They decided to take an east to west route, leaving from Tenerife heading towards a central location on the east cost of the United States.
They had a basket specifically built for the journey. It was made from reinforced polystyrene and measured 15ft x 8ft. It had to be a strong, sturdy structure to make sure it would be able to withstand the impact if they fell to the sea at any point throughout the flight.
They named their vessel Small World. It took off on December 12, 1958 and travelled a mighty 1200 nautical miles, breaking all existing balloon duration records. Unfortunately, the 4 were caught in a ferocious storm and their attempt was brought to an early close. However, they completed their journey (another 1,450 miles) in the custom made gondola.
In 1961 I swapped my Isetta bubble car for a 1939 J2 MG sports car. The vendor pointed out that there was no speedometer, but said that you could tell when you reached 60 mph because the car would begin to shake to pieces. He also threw in a plastic macintosh, saying I would need this if it rained. I asked if the hood leaked. He said it did, but that the bigger problem was the large holes in the floor through which water would come up into the car. The plastic macintosh was to wrap your legs in. I sold the car in due course to my fellow undergraduate Henry Scrope. In 1962 I bought another J2 MG for £17 from a scrap yard in Royston, did some rudimentary work on it, and sold it on to a wealthy undergraduate for £110. I applied the profit to the purchase of my Rolex chronometer watch.
Romantic May Ball
The 1962 Trinity College May Ball was an enormous and enjoyable party, which went on all night. For me the special thing about it was that my guest was Sara Coleridge, whom I was two years later privileged to marry.
Outside term, my main university memories are of four foreign travels:
New York
My first visit to New York, in 1961, was an eye opener. I shall never forget the sheer throbbing, hissing, thunderous energy of Manhattan. I stayed in a cheap hotel near the Empire State Building, and saw the sights. I have been a lifelong fan of New York City ever since, my three favourite books about it being Meyer Berger's 'New York: A Great Reporter's Love Affair with a City', Jan Morris' 'Manhattan '45', and James Thurber's 'The Years with Ross'. I also devour the New Yorker magazine every week.
Touring with Shakespeare
In the summer vacation of 1960 I secured a very small part in a touring university production of 'As You Like It'. The undergraduate director was the energetic and versatile Michael Deakin, who went on into a career in film and television. His versatility was needed, because at each of the performances across France and Switzerland at least one of the actors would be missing - on account of a missed train, a broken down car, or an emotional crisis. Deakin would step in to replace the missing actor, male or female. In some cases he had to replace two or more actors who appearing in the same scene.
Another hazard of the tour was the risk to the lute. This priceless instrument had been lent by the Fitzwilliam Museum. Unfortunately the lutist was given to roaming the bars of the neighbourhood, with lute, after each performance. He would spend most of the next day trying to locate it.
Three of the other bit part players were, like myself, studying architecture. We did the journey in a Mini, and made architectural detours between performances. One of these was to Le Corbusier's famous chapel at Ronchamp.
French Romanesque architecture
My long suffering parents accompanied me on an architectural study trip to Romanesque cathedrals in 1962. My mother was a voracious sightseer, but I my father must have got very bored as we traipsed round one ancient building after another, in Angers, Poitiers, Perigueux, Beynac, Cahors, Moissac, Auch, Toulouse, Carcassonne, Arles, Avignon, Valence, Cluny and Beaune. We stayed in pensions, and had to fill up the car radiator frequently. The following extract is from a high-faluting essay on Romanesque architecture, written on my return:
French Romanesque architecture is indubitably centrifugal and diverse; indeed one may be forgiven for thinking that had its complexity not been shot through with the unifying influences of Burgundian monasticism and Spanish pilgrimage, we would do better to consider it as a group of separate styles.
To Jerusalem and back
In May 1961, over a spaghetti bolognaise, Colin Perry told me that he had bought a motorbike with the idea of driving it to Istanbul during the summer vacation. He suggested I join him, which I was pleased to do. I bought my 50cc BSA motorbike, and booked a test. Unfortunately I failed it. You could not drive abroad with a provisional licence, and no re-test was available until months later. Luckily for me a member of another expedition (to refugee camps in Jordan by Land Rover) had failed his exams and could not go. So we merged the two ventures. I travelled in the Land Rover with Tony and two others, and Colin rode ahead on his motorbike. We had everything you could want in the Land Rover, including sunhats, refrigerator, mosquito nets, snake-proof tent, lettuce shaker, toilet paper, tinned food, a collapsable Calor gas stove, and an economy drum of orange processed cheese. Colin's motorbike gave up the ghost in Ankara, and from there to Jerusalem we squeezed five into the Land Rover.
Vivid memories of the trip include Venice, the bustle of Istanbul, the dome of the Hagia Sophia Mosque, the Crac des Chevalier crusader castle, Jerusalem, Petra, and the heat, the dust and the rutted roads. Colin went in front because he quite often came off his motorbike, and we would then rescue him. One of our party, Richard Warren, was a medical student, who brought his medical kit. His studies had not yet got to the stage of operating on humans, and he hoped to have the chance at least to inject Colin, and ideally to carry out a minor amputation. When Colin came off his motorbike, however badly he was hurt he would always find the strength to shout out 'Keep Richard away from me!'.
In a letter home I described a sighting of President Tito in Yugoslavia:
There were tremendous preparations, all the schoolchildren out with little paper flags, innumerable policemen marshalling the crowds. Big slogans across the road, and large flags from public buildings. It turned out that a political delegation from the Sudan was coming along with Tito. This was great excitement, as Tito is everywhere in Yugoslavia. His photograph in every restaurant and shop window, Tito whitewashed on cottage walls and cut into the stone on the hillsides. The procession eventually arrived, preceded by wailing police cars, army lorries, and ambulances. Sinister men on motor bikes dressed in black leather with white holsters shot by. Finally large black American cars began to appear, followed by an arrowhead of motor cyclists. Tito and the Sudanese Prime Minister sailed by in a shiny black Rolls Royce.
and our arrival in Jerusalem:
I must confess I was considerably disappointed with the first sight of Jerusalem, which for some reason I had expected to be perched on top of a sheer rocky eminence. In fact it seemed to hug the top of a gentle hill. However once inside the city itself one could hardly be disappointed. The little narrow winding streets, with steps every few yards, and bright busy little shops on either side. Awnings to keep out the sun over the narrow streets, and where the streets are wider, wires strung across the street at first floor level like clothes lines, with cloth screens hung on them which can be adjusted as the sun moves across the sky. At about midday the squatting peasants selling plums, grapes, prickly pears and all sorts of other produce get up and shift across to the other side of the street to get the shade.
Tony Fearnehough came from a Sheffield steel-making family. Local firms had contributed supplies for the expedition, including a large quantity of scissors. The idea was that we could give these out as gifts from the city of Sheffield, but the weight did rather slow us down.
On our return journey we spent two nights Budapest, still under Communist rule. In order to get a visa you had to buy coupons entitling you to sleep and eat in a grand but dilapidated hotel. We felt we must use up all our coupons. This involved eating a lot of large meals in the hotel restaurant. For each dish the menu had two prices - with or without a gypsy violinist. The only way we could get through the coupons was to order music with everything.
Space does not allow descriptions of the time we camped in a convent in Beirut, how we towed some Germans through a Turkish river, or how we had to roll the spare wheel into our hotel lobby in Istanbul on account of the thieves.
A curious footnote
A curious footnote to my time as an undergraduate at Cambridge occurred when, fifteen years later, I attended a ceremony to collect my MA. This simply required a prescribed passage of time after getting one's BA, and the payment of a small sum. On the way back from the Senate House to Trinity College I walked alongside the other mature graduand, both of us proudly clutching our scrolls. He explained he had come from Esher, and went on to say that it was a pleasant area except that the recent arrival of Hitler and his entourage had driven up house prices and had resulted in long queues in the shops. Arriving at Trinity, I took aside our host, the Senior Tutor, and mentioned this. "Oh!', said the senior tutor, "I wondered if you would notice. Fact is, he's on day release from a mental hospital. When we got his application we weren't quite sure what to do and consulted the Statutes. They say the graduand must of good character, but there is no requirement to be of sound mind."
Royal Navy
After Cambridge I decided that instead of continuing my architectural studies I would take a break and apply for a five year Short Service Commission as a helicopter pilot in the Royal Navy. Having been a weedy swot at school, I wanted to prove that I was capable of doing something manly and dangerous.
Dartmouth
Our first six months of officer training was at the Britannia Royal Naval College in the Devon fishing village of Dartmouth. Part of the induction in the first few days was to queue up in the gym to spend a few minutes with one of the chaplains who were stationed in side rooms. We were marshalled into separate queues for the Church of England, Roman Catholic, and Free Church chaplains. As I joined the Church of England queue, I noticed one of the cadets going up, in an embarrassed way, to the Chief Petty Officer in charge and explaining that he was agnostic. Quick as a flash the Chief Petty Officer replied 'Fall in with the Church of England'.
There was a great deal of fresh air and physical exercise. Sailing and rowing in the River Dart went on around the year. My Boatwork Log Book for 8th December 1962 records: 'More pulling practice for the regatta. I am now finding it easier to take a long steady pull. It rained heavily throughout which added to the usual pleasure in stopping. Wind Force 1. Tide ebbing.' Another entry reads 'We had several times to leap out waist deep in water, knee deep in mud, to push'.
We had to run between classes, where we were taught naval history, seamanship, and knots. We polished our boots to a high shine, made our beds meticulously, and folded and stacked our clothes with equal care. We did parade ground drill, sometimes in weather so cold that one's hand almost froze onto the rifle.
Those of us who were on our way to being pilots were given initial pilot training at the nearby Roborough airfield. We flew in Tiger Moth bi-planes with open cockpits, wearing leather helmets and goggles. After about ten hours of instruction we were sent out on our first solo flight. It was a nerve wracking but fun experience.
Yorkshire
After six months of the rigours of Dartmouth I moved in spring 1963 to my fixed wing flying training at Linton-on-0use, an RAF airfield near York. It was six months of sheer pleasure. There were interesting morning lessons covering aerodynamics, the mechanics of aircraft, and meteorology. Then in the long summer afternoons we would have an hour of flying and several hours of sitting in deep armchairs in the crewroom (or on the grass in the sunshine) reading and dozing.
We trained on Chipmunk monoplanes, which looked a bit like Spitfires. The training included not just taking off and landing, but also aerobatics and formation flying. The aerobatics included barrel rolls and looping the loop. It was strange, in formation flying, how you could lock onto another aircraft just a few feet away. We also did instrument flying, where the cockpit windows would be covered in yellow perspex, and the pupil wore blue goggles. This meant that the pupil couldn't see out at, and had to rely entirely on his instruments.
An alarming feature of the fixed wing training was something called Unusual Attitudes. You would fly up to a reasonable height of say 5,000 feet. The instructor (who sat in front of you, with dual controls) would take control and tell you to shut your eyes. He would then put the aircraft into an Unusual Attitude, that is to say into a forbidden and dangerous combination of speed, angle, and control settings. For example he might put the aircraft into a downward vertical spin, so that it was upside down, dropping like a stone, with the rudder and joystick controls in the wrong position. He would then calmly say: 'Open your eyes