From 'skoo' (Primary School) to Cambridge

Calveley County Primary School

My primary school in rural Cheshire (Calveley County Primary School) was pretty extraordinary in retrospect. There were only three classes – 5 to 7 year olds, 8 to 11 year olds, and 12 to 14 year olds, with about 100 children in all. As it stood in the middle of open fields, it was a little island to itself. The kids were, almost without exception, stressed by relative poverty.

Most were the sons and daughters of farm labourers, some were refugees from Liverpool and Manchester, living in Nissen huts on Wardle aerodrome (a nearby former wartime base) and others were temporarily ‘off the Cut’ (i.e. sons and daughters from the families that crewed the narrow-boats on the canals).

Generally, the children of farmers went to private schools. During my time at the school, there was only one other kid from a farming family and he had very frizzy feminine hair and went by the name of Nigel – his life was even more precarious than mine was! The Head Teacher was an enormously tall ex-Army fellow named Mr. Bentley who would lift children out of their desks by their ears (my excuse for the size of my ears).

The good side to the school was the chain of young trainee and recently graduated female teachers that taught the Second Form. It was one of these – Miss Alsopp – who kicked off, when I was about eight, my interest in research by offering a prize for the best scrapbook on zoo animals. I was one of the three children who won the prize of a trip to Chester Zoo. The only downside was the discovery that she already had a boyfriend in the form of a Major from the Chester Army Camp who gave us all a ride in his jeep. My first disappointment with girls. Next year, I put even more effort into my scrap book but was not rewarded with a prize as I had benefited the previous year – an outcome that neatly illustrates the problem posed by trading-off achievement against egalitarianism!

Anyhow, academic work became a solace for my problems as being somewhat sidelined on the farm and I became the first child in the school to gain the Common Entrance to ‘Grammar School’ at age 11. Actually, I was also successful in gaining a scholarship that paid my fees at the ‘Direct Grant’ King’s School, Chester. This meant making a pretty rapid shift from being a rural roughie to a sophisticated townee and involved 5 miles of cycling everyday interspersed with 130 minutes on the C84 bus plying between Nantwich and Chester. This explains my lifelong antipathy to commuting.

Being thrown into Cheshire rural life in a big way – including coping with my scruffy and sometimes brutal little schoolmates – gave me a lifetime interest in the history and dialect of the area . I collected heraldic designs, took brass rubbings and explored many old churches and castles.

Any family visitor to the area should make a special pilgrimage to Beeston Castle – Meg’s ashes were interred here when she died in 1988 – and my sister Sue has dedicated a seat for visitors to her there. Other ‘musts’ are Nantwich - Nantwich Church, Churche’s Mansion, The Crown Inn - and Bunbury Village (Meg lived there for many years following Horace’s death, first at a house called ‘Lindren’ and then at ‘Castleview’). Chester itself can take days to explore fully.

I won’t start on the history, as it would be hard to stop! With respect to the dialect issue, I have carried snippets of it with me over the years and some will no doubt come down from my own ravings. The cutest example is Horace’s saying that ‘it inna very often as the kitling brings the owd cat a mouse’ [plain English ‘it is not very often that the kitten brings the old cat a mouse’ – in other words don’t expect charity from your children]. Another saying of his – also about Cheshire cats – is the tale of the little boy who put the kitling through the clothes mangle, saying ‘Never mind Pussy, we’ll soon be through’ – i.e. advice to hang on in difficult times until things get better!

The specific dialect can be located in the encyclopedia of English dialects produced by the Linguistics Department of Leeds University in the 1930s (at the midpoint in the sample locations that distinguish ‘bowk’ and ‘bittlin’ as words for standard English ‘bucket’).

If anyone has any wider interest, it may come as a surprise that there is actually a literature, with a well-known local novel called A Shiny Night by Beatrice Tunstall. This tells a charming story of a young Cheshire farmer called Seth Shone who was transported to New South Wales for seven years in the 1820s for poaching and returned to find bonfires for the accession of Queen Victoria – and the loss of the family farm to unscrupulous Derbyshire relatives. He then curses the conspirators with images (visit the Image House, Bunbury) and eventually rebuilds his fortune and reoccupies the family farm.

The book uses a lot of dialect and contains many sentences like ‘t’kine an gone jed’ (the cows have died) – as you can imagine it may not be that easy to read – especially for a New Zealander! Interestingly, the wider Cheshire dialect is also evident to some extent in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (e.g. the use of ‘oo’ = her for she). This is often regarded as the finest early modern English narrative poem (it was written about 1350, probably in western Cheshire and makes reference to the Wirral and the bold deeds of Ranulph, Earl of Chester).

The village had its own life, despite the fact that it held only 200 people and was very spread out. There were two pubs -– the Boot and Slipper and The Little Man (almost certainly there for long into the future), a church (Anglican), a Methodist Chapel and a village hall. Even though Horace came from a neighbouring village, Church Minshull, we were long regarded as ‘strugs’ (strangers). Events like the Village Pantomime were eagerly awaited and well attended. I have a vivid memory of a production of Cinderella when I was about 9-year old, with my sister Susan as Dandini and my future brother-in-law John Hollinshead as Buttons. I also had something of a shock when I first encountered Halloween, mixing among the American community in Manila in the 1980s. When Matt and Pete went out Trick and Treating, I realized that they were repeating a custom that had its origins in the fields and hedgerows of old rural England. I too went trick and treating (though we called it ‘souling’) with the village children was I was a nipper, singing:

‘Soul, soul a penny or two, if you haven’t got a penny a halfpenny will do. If you haven’t got a halfpenny, an apple will do. If you haven’t got an apple, God bless you ’.

Television and easier access to larger centres of population soon killed these aspects of village life. We got a TV in 1953 for the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II and the entire family stayed watching the endless processions and ceremonies in the Brown Room .

Everyone was very impressed by Queen Salote from Tonga who appeared to be a highly exotic, huge and very imposing Polynesian lady. We eagerly followed the ornately decorated programme that detailed the contributions of the various parts of the Empire – oops, Commonwealth. However, I have to say that I have no recollection of New Zealand’s effort.

The village children were naturally in awe of the TV and took every chance to watch it. This gave me great power – and power corrupts. However, when I told Minnie Cornes that Mrs. Darlington said she could no longer watch, she sagely and spiritedly replied ‘You can tell Mrs. Darlington to stick her TV up her arse’. I suppose the time that I sent with the kids from the ‘Council houses’ ultimately did me a lot of good. I got a pretty good understanding of working class life and it made me a lifelong opponent of the class system and a lifelong proponent of equality of opportunity. That’s not to say that I was entirely acceptable to them and I spent a lot of my time alone with my dog Nellie (who was not concerned about social justice and allocating TV or pony rights).

There was of course another ‘class of people’ – but one that we had little to do with on a day-to-day basis. This was the upper class, consisting of the families of nobility like Lord Rocksavage, Lord Tollemache and Lord Leverhulme. These large landowners maintained traditions that had established Cheshire in the Middle Ages as the Vale Royal and a ‘Seedbed of Gentility’. The goings on of these aristocrats and the more minor squires were often a subject of gossip and speculation in the way that film and TV stars are today.

Recently, I became aware of Issy Blow, the famous hat-designer and fashion personality of 1970s London. Issy was a direct contemporary of mine. She was born Isabel Delves-Broughton and was a descendant of a very old aristocratic Cheshire family. In reading of her life up to her suicide, I was shocked to recall the story of the death by drowning in the ornamental pond of her baby brother - a cause celebre among the tenant / peasant class to which I belonged. More outrageously and disastrously for the family's fortunes, Issy's father Jock Delves-Broughton blew most of his fortune in Kenya's 'Whiteman's Mischief "Happy Valley".

Partly from pique and partly from egalitarianism, I developed a strong antipathy towards this upper crust. However, my scepticism was also fuelled more romantically by my love of history and the view that the ‘nobs’ represented a line that stretched back to the usurpation of rights after the finalisation of the Conquest, following the ‘harrying of the North’ and the fall of Chester in 1086 .

My one close relationship with the nobility developed when Meg bought a pair of Lord Rocksavage’s ‘Plus Four’ shooting trews at the Conservative Party Jumble Sale in Alpraham in 1968. I was wearing these one Saturday morning when the entire Cheshire Hunt cantered down the drive. I had to go out to open the back gate and lift up the washing line, hoping that Lord Rocksavage would not recognise his pants! And, oh I almost forgot – I also had to cycle twice a day past Lord Leverhulme’s country retreat at the end of the Long Lane – and despite numerous adjustments of the tilt of my school cap amidst the hair-styling brylcream – never managed to score a date with daughter ‘Plum’ Leverhulme.

I have not really said much about my sister Sue up to this point. Being 8 years older than me and leaving home at 16, we did not really overlap that much. However, the fact that she married John Hollinshead (from Woodside Farm, Wettenhall) after getting her nursing SRN from Manchester Royal Infirmary and soon set up an independent home at Lower Farm, Kelsall became immensely important to me. Both Sue and John were always extraordinarily generous to me in terms of both time and support as I was growing up as a rather confused teenager.

I remember riding Jonty over to Lower Farm when I was about 14 years old – quite a long trek. I was an usher at their wedding at Wettenhall Church and there used to be a movie film that included me doing my ushing in a top hat and tails. John and Sue moved on to Bankhouse Farm, Cholmondeley – a farm with a beautiful 3-storey Georgian house and ha-ha that is close to Cholmondeley Castle but they ultimately retired back to the Lower Farm site where they have developed three fine old-style houses within the building envelope of the farm’s old shippon.

John and Sue’s first daughter Diane Hollinshead was born on 10th August 1959 when I was 15 years old. Her sister Claire was born on 31st July 1961. One of my happy memories of Diane’s childhood was the ‘Tooth Episode’. We were at Corner Farm when she was about 6 years old and she had developed a very wonky front tooth, prior to the appearance of her adult teeth. After considerable cajoling, I managed to persuade her to let me gently tug it out. ‘OK’, she said ‘Now put it back’.

I was always very fond of both girls and sent them regular reports of my adventures in Australia (perhaps this was a factor in Diane marrying a Banana-bender from Brisbane). As the girls grew up, they interacted with the New Zealand family that I had acquired in marrying Dianne Cunningham. Dianne’s brother Ross came to the UK on his ‘OE’ (Overseas Experience) and spent quite a lot of time with Diane and Claire and their friends, participating in the Young Farmers’ scene.

Although my early life was very focussed on the farm, we did travel afield (I used to walk mile upon mile literally across the fields tracing stream sources and courses) and by pony, bike and later car, I came to know most of the back lanes that linked the extended network of villages (the neighbouring villages are Alpraham, Calveley, Cholmondeston – pronounced Chumston, Church Minshull, Darnhall, Oulton and Eaton).

One big excitement was following the Point-to-Point and Steeplechase horseracing circuit in the Spring. We would pack thermos flasks of Heinz tinned tomato soup and boxes of Cream Crackers and Cheshire cheese and head off to such wonderfully named places as Flag Moor (near Buxton), Eyton on Severn and Bangor on Dee. The local Cheshire Hunt moved the site of their race a number of times in my era but eventually settled on Alpraham near Wettenhall.

Our neighbours the Watsons (my best young farmer friend was John Watson) would generally run a horse there. We would also travel fairly frequently on alternate summer weekends to Hinstock, near Market Drayton, Shropshire, where my Uncle Ron Clarke bought a farm, following his return from Australia. There I would play – and fight – with my bigger and older cousins David and Chris. A major source of these spats was David’s immense prowess at Monopoly, where life followed art when he eventually became the owner of a fabulous white porticoed house in Notting Hill Gate, London.

The King's School, Chester

Returning to my schooling, Kings’ was again a quite extraordinary place. The core classrooms derived from the 1860s in the form of an intricate mock-Gothic building that was physically attached to Chester Cathedral (last time I was there, it had become a Barclay’s Bank branch). It had an internal spiral staircase that created mayhem when a class going down, passed a class going up. There were also stone fire surrounds that were big enough to stuff unfortunates into (particularly during old Johnny Walsh’s maths lessons).

One of the classrooms and the Tuck Shop were housed in the 14th Century Cathedral Gatehouse – probably one of the oldest classrooms in England. Most of the teachers were equally decrepit and fitted the ambience perfectly – and delighted in or were given strange names: Atty Owen, Gomer Davies, Bentox, and ‘Doggie’ Lysons. There was a small sunken sealed playground that served the entire school but this had the saving grace that it was separated by area of coke from the Choir School playground above. The coke was dumped there to feed the Cathedral heaters during the winter. This was a marvelous boon for both schools as we could spend many happy breaks pelting each other with lumps of coke.

I was an average student who always struggled with maths-based subjects. I think that I had only got into Kings because I wrote a long essay about Alexander the Great at the entrance examination – drawing my knowledge from the old encyclopedias that I used to pore over in the ‘Brown Room’ at the farm (the smaller of the two ‘sitting rooms’ that was generally heated in winter by a paraffin stove).

However, I was again lucky in finding a series of younger teachers who caught my imagination (notably Mr Brian Denton, the Geography master). As I was already a great dreamer about such matters as exploring Africa, pacifying the US West and developing and managing land-use on the farm, Geography - and later Economics - were naturals for me. I therefore gave up the idea of joining the Royal Navy when my Ordinary (‘O’) Level results turned out to be pretty good and was fed into the school’s system for gaining Oxbridge (Oxford and Cambridge) entrances. This led on to me winning a scholarship to St Catharine’s College, Cambridge in 1961.

My other achievements at school were not all that memorable. I was a mediocre sportsman and only rose to the rank of Corporal in the Army Cadet Corp (where, however, I much enjoyed soggy camping trips in North Wales attacking mythical missile sites and doing ‘courses’ with the regular Army).

However, school did give me opportunities for travel and Meg and Horace were very good in forking out for trips to Switzerland (to Lucerne and Lugano), France (staying in a workers’ hostel for 3 weeks in a ‘Foyer’ in Orleans, and our tour de force – the circumnavigation of the North Sea by bicycle. In the latter case, I was one of six 15-year olds who organized a one-month cycling tour that took us down to Dover, across to Ostend, through Belgium, the Netherlands and North Germany into Denmark, across to Gothenburg, up to Oslo and home via Newcastle-upon-Tyne. [The others were Pat Cross, Tony Male, Alan Wilkinson, Bruce Colenso, and Gus Sumner]. We were very fit when we returned. At that time, the roads in Europe were still quiet and we had a great time. One of the things that sticks in my mind was the cold-shoulder reception that we got from local Danish hostellers in Aabenraa. However, they came to us in the morning with gifts when they found out that we were English – they had mistaken us for Germans (a sign that WW2 was still not too distant from people’s minds).

On to St Catharine's College, Cambridge

By 18, I had gained a scholarship entry to Cambridge and was therefore regarded as a rising young man. I had been able to take advantage of the broadening of educational opportunities in the post-war period. Trained at a rather old-fashioned Anglican secondary school, I had been shaped into a Christian Gentleman. Grounded in the Gospels and the inheritance of Greece and Rome, I could become a patrician.

No doubt, I would take up a post of District Officer in far flung Nabootsieland, rising eventually to the rank of Governor, only to retire with an MBE to Cheltenham to be wheeled around in a bath chair by ruddy-cheeked nurses. However, this scenario was torpedoed by the dismemberment of what remained of the British Empire, the blooming of Kitchen Sink drama written by Angry Young Men, and the dawn of the Permissive Society of the 1960s. From my vantage point at Cambridge, these trends were only dimly discernible.

I stubbornly stuck to the formula that I had become familiar with as a young farmer on Cheshire outings with friends like John Watson and Mike Buckley – heavy drinking at the Eagle and neighbouring pubs in Cambridge with David Knighton and my other friends . There were also forays into Rugby, as a player with St Catharine’s fourth team, the Persians, (funny how cats keep creeping into this story!).

I am somewhat sorry now that I was so preoccupied with my studies and did not get more involved with the Arts and politics. I had my chance, rooming at one point with Howard Brenton, one of the new dramatists – he seemed far too far out for me, though he completed a marvelous ‘degree’ for life in later 1960s London, winning the Vice Chancellor’s Medal for Poetry and then being ‘sent down’ from Cambridge for obscenity.

Having reached graduation from Cambridge in 1965, we can now pick up a lot of the story on my Curriculum Vitae. One has to bear in mind that this has been designed to get me work on overseas assignments and that there may be slight tinges or slantings in my favour. However, I think that it is probably remarkably accurate as these things go. At first blush, it does look a bit as though I am telling stories a la Munchausen Syndrome but I can honestly say that I have completed all the assignments listed .

That is not to say that some of my more colourful rantings in conversation in the ‘never let the truth spoil a good story’ tradition are entirely true. Was I ever a trainee ballet dancer with the Bolshoi – sorry Kirov Ballet in the USSR who had to resign following a disastrous rupturing of my tights at a gala performance in Sempalitinsk? Did I ever share a masseuse with Princess Margaret’s ex-boyfriend Group Captain Peter Townsend? Sometimes, it pays to leave a few loose ends.