Memories of St John's College School in the 50s and 60s

I attended St John's College Choir School from 1957 to 1963. The school was all boys then, just over a hundred of us aged 7 to 13, including about a dozen boarders (looked after by Matron, a kindly woman forever in blue uniform and white hat). We studied for the Common Entrance exam, but regulations meant we also had to trek to a local state school to take the 11-Plus, although it didn't count for anything. Most of us were English, although I remember Iranian-born Farzan Zohhadi in the 1st Form and our Jamaican-born teacher, Mrs Franklin. From time to time there were Americans in the school, no doubt sons of visiting academics. I remember three of them.

Our headmaster was the Reverend Walters, a short, well-respected C of E High Church clergyman, with glasses and a rather severe face, and whose cane was to be avoided at all costs. His clergyman brother often visited him from Wales. The staff counted around a dozen.

I remember the school as a happy place (for most). We were divided into four 'Houses' (mine was Fisher, although I can't recall that fact serving any purpose). Classes were five days a week and Saturday mornings, with afternoon sports (rugby, hockey, or cricket) on two or three days. Compulsory subjects were Art, English, French, general knowledge, geography, and history (although I can't recall a single history class), Latin, and mathematics (including calculus).

At each beginning of term, we received folded cards, printed in red, announcing the upcoming programme. Items included sports days, film shows, talks, and religious events, but I don't recall there ever being school outings. Senior boys who were not C of E (about half a dozen) could skip the religious ceremonies. These included me, Greenberg, and Adam Cornford (who is Charles Darwin's great-great-grandson, and lived off Chesterton Road). We spent those occasions in a classroom supervised by Mrs Gordon, who was Catholic. Mr Walters also allowed a few of us to undertake school grounds maintenance work instead of sports. My younger brother Chris, a prankster all his life, had once used a blood capsule to get out of rugby. I recall one game where he and I took the opposition by surprise, dashing up the entire field to my spectacular touchdown, only to be told that the game hadn't yet started. It had been an icy November afternoon, and we had to thaw out our skinny frozen fingers in the warm changing rooms afterwards.

Our unattractive school uniform (King's was much better) comprised a bright red cap and tie, dull grey blazer and short pants, grey socks with two horizontal red stripes, and we even wore it on special occasions at home. During a performance of the pantomime Mother Goose in town, comedian Cyril Fletcher summoned two of us to the stage and asked why our tongues were hanging out.

Miss Franklin's 1st Form was at the front of the property, in front of the wood-panelled refectory, which doubled up as the 2nd Form classroom. We were a rowdy lot, for which she made a science of rapping us on the knuckles. The classroom had a piano, used by Mr Gibbons to see if any of us showed promise for the choir. In my case, the matter was never mentioned again.

For lunch, the refectory next door served what we knew as 'Mathew's Muck', stodgy food delivered in, and served from, large double skinned aluminium vessels from Matthew's in Trinity Street, with some items delivered on trays. Fish was for Fridays. When, at a geography class on Canada, we were told that cod was associated with St John's (Newfoundland, of course), we all laughed.

We spent break times playing bulldog at the back (western end) of the property before it became a swimming pool, commissioned in 1963. Other pastimes included conkers (the autumn horse chestnuts in Storey's Way providing an excellent source), and an odd game swiping at each other with knotted handkerchiefs. Both became banned by Mr Walters and I'm not sure what we got up to after that.

Our teachers mostly wore gowns. Mr Bevan was a tall, avuncular man. His brother, a 1928 Olympic gold-medallist in rowing, was a local GP living in Storey's Way who had taken in the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein after diagnosing his cancer (Wittgenstein's grave is a short walk away). Mr Chapman, equally respected, owned a garage and drove a green hardtop MG. In the late 1950s, he won £100 on the horses, a fortune in those days. A good teacher with a cool comportment, he nevertheless found himself outsmarted by Christopher Cullen, a brilliant Scholarship Form pupil to whom he taught Russian. Mr Lamb taught geography and Latin, if I remember, and Mr Gaillard (a quiet Frenchman with a military appearance), French.

Eric Gibbons was certainly the most inspiring teacher of all (he gave me private tuition during school holidays, which rescued my maths enough to make it my best subject). He, too, had a sports car, an open one in which he had a terrible crash which left him permanently hobbling. I recall our long, agonising wait for him to return to action. A film buff and cineast, he made at least one 16mm film of the school (I wonder if it still exists). I remember being summoned to the roof above the changing rooms to cling onto his heels to prevent him falling while filming pupils emerging from classrooms 5 and 6 in the prefabs along the northern part of the site, towards the headmaster's garage at the front. After he built a small projection cabin in the large wooden gym that served for collective activities other than meals, we attended weekly sessions of documentaries such as Night Mail and The Living Desert, as well as oeuvres by Canadian filmmaker Norman McLaren. I remember one American documentary talking about how day was light, and night was dark, being met with howls of laughter. Mr Gibbons (who was quite eccentric) got on famously with my mother (who had been a film actress in her younger years), and I recall a show of his works at our home in Huntingdon Road (nearly opposite the old Byron House) for various friends.

Katherine Gordon, poetess daughter of the renowned JL Garvin, editor of the Observer, ran Form 6B. (Thanks to her and Mr Bevan, Latin became my other best subject. Ever since, I have believed that maths and Latin complemented each other, the structure of the latter being conducive to navigating the former.) Mrs Gordon, a portly lady who had great humour and a wheeze when she laughed, was sometimes less discrete than she might have been; she told us how she could predict the future from Virgil (but refused to do so when challenged) and how much she preferred Oxford, her alma mater (something one never does in Cambridge). She lived in an old, terraced house (since demolished) called The Hind, in King's Street, and from time to time her son James had also helped at the school. With a friend, in 1966, I printed a book of her poems, for which she arranged a brief article in the Observer entitled, “Pupil Prints Teacher”. Quite a few of copies went to the USA.

I remember over fifty names of fellow pupils, too many to mention individually. Among them were David Fraser, whose father was a civil servant who worked in the government offices in Brooklands Avenue, and mother who occasionally stood in for teachers at the school; Christopher Lloyd and brother Andrew, a classmate of my brother Chris, whose father was a well-known gynaecologist; Michael Smith, whose father and uncle were Newmarket jockeys, Doug Smith and E. Smith respectively; Charles Butler, who also lived in Newmarket; Stephen Horne, son of a farmer; Adam Dupré, son of a local vicar; Christopher Garvin, who was to end up living in the same part of Brittany as my brother Chris; and Anthony Wilkes, son of the Cambridge mathematician who lived in Huntingdon Road near Mr Gaillard. Another was Bennett, although not in my class. His father, Ralph, I much later discovered, had served at Bletchley (as had many from the university). He taught at Magdalene and lived on Chesterton Road. His secrets, of course, were to come out many years later, and he wrote about them. At school, one or two pupils mentioned what their fathers had done during the War, but on the whole the subject was broached infrequently. One feature film Mr Gibbons projected for us was the 1956 Reach for the Sky (with Kenneth More as Douglas Bader), and I recall our shudder when we heard the word “bastards”. What innocent days!

Apart from his teaching duties, Mr Lewis (a likeable, energetic man who didn't wear a gown and who arrived at the school in later years) organised the summer plays that took place on the open stage at the front. I had the privilege of playing the front legs of Alfred the Horse in The Wind in the Willows, marking the beginning and end of my career in acting (other than playing a dead soldier in Macbeth before that). After my brother Chris backed out because of hay fever, classmate Adam Dupré played my rear legs. We roamed the stage and gravelled audience area where Mr Lewis asked us to unseat him while he was playing the piano, which we dutifully did on the day, but I don't think anyone appreciated it had been deliberate. One morning beforehand, on the same day that the swimming pool was to receive its grand opening, Mr Lewis walked into our classroom to announce a dress rehearsal, and I called out, “and the undress rehearsal!” It had been decided that we would swim in our birthday suits during school hours, so I thus got an apprehensive laugh from my classmates who were to partake. Winter events took place in the gym, two of them being Androcles and the Lion, and Amahl and the Night Visitors.

David Bailey, who also worked at Robert Sayle's, taught art part-time. Other teachers at various times included Mr Barlow, Mr Boggis, Mr Della (whom we routinely tortured with a noisy rendering of What did Delaware, Boys, a 1959 American hit, each time he entered the classroom), Mr Hawthorne, and Mr Little (who also gave me private tuition, in English, and later left for Tasmania). Mr Flaxman, the college carpenter, gave voluntary evening classes in the prefab at the western end of the property, behind the 4th Form. There was a young female teacher (who appears briefly in one of Eric Gibbons' films) whose name I don't recall. I think she had succeeded Mrs Franklin.

Frequent college visitors included choral master George Guest and archaeologist and TV personality Glyn Daniel. Daniel brought along artefacts to nurture our enthusiasm, but I recall him being far more expressive, with a stronger Welsh accent, than comes across on old BBC recordings. On one occasion, an RAF pilot came to give us a lecture on the lawn, and to our collective envy, Adrian Nichols had the privilege of climbing into a G-suit (I can't remember if he got inflated).

In October 1959, Winston Churchill visited Cambridge to plant an oak at the nearby college bearing his name, and the school went along to watch. My brother Chris, with his school cap, can be spotted in the background in press photos and colour newsreel of the event. In May 1962, the Queen came to Cambridge to open the new Addenbrooke's Hospital on Hills Road. The entire school crossed the playing fields to cheer as she passed along the Backs in her tall Rolls Royce. The end of that year saw the dreadful 1962/3 winter. As late as April, we were still getting stitches during post-lunch runs to and from a snowbound Coton. How we yearned to get back to the playing fields.

Mr Walters purchased bicycle racks in the late 1950s. These comprised rows of V-shaped wedges, toothed to capture our front wheel rims. They didn't work particularly well, and in the evening, he had to be summoned with his “jaws of life” so that we could return home.

A memorable event during those years (that will resonate with present times) was the 1960 contest between Kennedy and Nixon for US President. For weeks, the entire school took sides, and we were relieved once it was over. American nuclear missiles were arriving in East Anglia, said at the time to be the most heavily defended region of the country, and one or two school parents marched for the CND, something that cost their sons a fair baiting at school.

I went to boarding school after St John's and returned to Cambridge three years later to complete my A Levels at the Cambridge Tech. I saw David Fraser again, ran into Farzan Zohhadi and one or two others, and regularly encountered Mrs Gordon and James. I retired from professional life in 2015, having worked in manufacturing mostly in France and the USA. We now live in Tunbridge Wells, but family has remained in Cambridge, and memories of it remain special. It would be a delight to read other alumni accounts of those early years and any additions or corrections to the above.