School days - Peter Symonds 1

Having passed my 11+ exam I graduated to Peter Symonds now a sixth form college but then a boys grammar school. The school has an impressive history.

Several other boys made the same journey as I did by rail to Winchester and then the 10 minute walk from the station to the school. I was put in form 1B and Kirby House.  There were four houses for games: Kirby (red), Mackensie (yellow), Northbrook (green) were non-boarders, and Symonds (deep blue) were boarders.  Thus my games kit consisted of a bright red shirt, thin white shorts that became translucent when wet, plimsoles and football boots.  And a duffel bag to put it all in.

Here is the old school building.  Behind this facade was Northbrook Hall which was used for the lower school assembly led my the deputy headmaster Mr Cooksie.  There was something wholesome and strong about the old school building, and it had a distinct smell .  Every summer vacation the wooden floors in the classrooms and the Hall were re-varnished to a high gloss.  The new building housed science labs, classrooms and the Varley Hall used for upper school assembly, school plays and concerts.

I think I was very different from the normal student particularly in having zero interest and very little ability in sport.  As a result I was a loner especially in my first years. I remember spending what was left of the lunch hour running around the playing fields pretending to be a train. There were wooden benches at intervals that served as stations.  I also kept a ridiculous diary, so childish that (sadly) when older it so embarrassed me that I trashed it.  By the third year I had made some friends and this become a little more normal.

This aerial photograph was taken in 1969 when I would have been in the 5th or lower 6th form. The railway station is behind the camera (shown as a blue arrow in the map) from which the walk ended in Owens Road.

"Breezy" Gale (also known as Windy) was our 3B form master, class room "Kirby" in the Old building. Breezy was OK, one of the last bastions of coshing.  Although by the 3rd year I was an incessant chatterer and joke maker I received the cosh at his hand only as a sort of mock exercise - "Bailey had better have the cosh so he knows what it feels like". Most boys were in right fear of the headmaster's (John Ashurst) cane.

It was expected that boys would know the rules of football, cricket, etc. Since I had never played football before or watched it being played (I remain incredulous as to why anyone should want to watch football on the box) I had no idea of the rules. My asking what the rules were was met with ridicule. In any case, organised sport bored me, so I would loose concentration (I did try) with the result that I would forget which goal was which with disastrous results.

As for cricket, I neither could then nor can now understand the game. My friend and I thought up a way of bringing zest to tennis - the idea is to see how many balls you can keep flying at the same time. This version of the game is better played as doubles.

One sport that did appeal to me was cross country running.  Our standard course was about 5 miles and is shown on the map above and took us to Teg Down. I think we looped around somehow before reaching Teg Down farm.  Once a year there was a cross country race where the whole year would run: typically I would end up about half way between first and last, so even with running my performance was mediocre.

More excitement when I describe some of our masters and class situations must follow in a subsequent post.