J W Booth AUTOBIOGRAPHY C3

CHAPTER 3. HOLBROOK
The Royal Hospital School was, I believe, an offshoot of a naval hospital which had been established in the reign of William II. The buildings had become out of date and overcrowded and there was little scope for expansion on the Greenwich site. A wealthy New Zealander bequeathed a site in Suffolk and a large sum of money to provide new buildings and thus the Greenwich personnel and boys were transferred to Holbrook near Ipswich in May 1933. I joined this new school in July towards the end of its first term, as one of a draft of about 50. We were medically examined in Greenwich. This was my only glimpse of the old school and was enough to show that the new one was a vast improvement.
It consisted of a main school building with 23 classrooms, some laboratories and offices. At one end was the dinning hall and kitchen and at the other a swimming bath and gymnasium.
The accommodation consisted of 10 houses for 80 boys each under the charge of a housemaster and house-sister. Each house was named after an Admiral and they were linked in pairs, senior and junior, making five pairs having distinctive colours competing with each other in all forms of sport etc. Separately there was a single new entry block, called Nelson, for about 60 boys. I do not know why the most distinguished name was reserved for the least distinguished section of the school.
There was a well equipped infirmary, a wood and metal workshop and a magnificent church seating about a thousand. There were large playing fields on both sides of the site and a parade ground in front of the main building with a full-rigged mast sprouting from the tarmac.
The one qualification for entry was to be the son of a sailor and most boys had both parents living although some priority was given to orphans particularly if their fathers had been killed in action. I believe the whole set-up was under the control of an admiralty official, the Director of Greenwich Hospital and was financed by the crown. There were two distinct chains of command, naval and academic, the result acted as a kind of pre-training school for the Royal Navy. All the boys normally went into the navy unless medically unfit.
In overall charge was a retired naval captain-superintendent. On the naval side a Commander and Lt. Commander assisted the superintendent with a staff of company officers who were Petty Officers pensioners who acted as company officers for PT, swimming and seamanship instructors.
On the scholastic side there was a headmaster, three divisional masters and about 30 teachers. Ten of the unmarried teachers lived in the houses as housemasters and there was a whole village of houses for the others. More directly in charge of the boys outside school hours were PO boys. Each house was divided into two halves of 40 boys each which number included one CPO and one PO Boy.
The classroom side was divided into three divisions. A junior division of eight classes numbered one to eight for younger boys who started in the lower numbers and worked their way up until they were old enough to the senior division classes, also numbered 1 to 8, where the process was repeated. I suppose these divisions taught to ordinary elementary school standards or rather better and the great majority of the boys concerned went to Naval Training establishments as second class boys at about 15 years old.
Separately there was an upper division to which boys were allocated on the basis of a written examination held when they joined the school. This division was called the upper Nautical but I never knew why. The only subject not taught there was seamanship so it was if anything less Nautical than the rest of the school. There were seven classes, class 5UN being a kind of ‘odd man out’ made up of boys weeded out from the main UN stream or creamed off from the Senior Division and destined for the Navy as Second Class Boys. Classes 1 to 4 and 6 and 7 were groomed fort the ERA Apprentice exam to enter the engineering branch of the service. To this end they were taught to roughly grammar school standard, with no languages and little emphasis on the arts subjects but with heavy concentration on mathematics.
Discipline was very strict. Apart from the natural respect which boys wishing to join the Navy could have been expected to feel for a staff which included distinguished Naval officers, Petty officers who had served all over the world in peace and war, and many teachers who had served in the First World war there was a three tier system of encouragement. High, Middle and Low justice so to speak.
At the top, serious offences were dealt with by the captain and the commander on naval lines. The equivalent of capital punishment was expulsion, which was rarely inflicted. For the commoner crimes such as breaking bounds and raiding orchards as much as 12 cuts with the cane was usual. Punishment was carried out by the chief company officer with the victim held down over a vaulting horse in the gym in the presence of the commander.
Class and house masters could inflict three strokes which had to be recorded in punishment books. Some did this almost daily and others hardy ever and the severity of the strokes varied enormously.
The lowest but most effective justice was administered by the PO Boys. Nominally they could only inflict what the army calls ‘Fatigues’. Some PO Boys gave out enormous quantities of lines but after boys were caught scribbling away in class and even church this practice was promptly stamped out. Unofficially PO Boys in general were very free with their hands and although anyone found to have struck a boy was disrated (demoted to the ranks) it went on all the time. This was because no one ever complained to a master about it and, if questioned, victims would cover up by saying that black eyes and bloody noses were the result of fights. PO Boys had the best of both worlds in that though they had a certain authority they were still boys and there was a strong prejudice against one boy complaining about another to a master. Moreover the potential complainant had to think of his future. Edgar Wallace once pointed out that those murderers who kill policemen get little sympathy from those members of the police force that remain alive. Boys because of whom PO’s were disrated had a rough time with PO Boys who were not.
This system might be expected to produce a nightmare life for the small or the weak but in practice it didn’t. On the contrary we soon found out the most heavy–handed PO Boys was preferable to a weakling who allowed a state of anarchy, where boys could be bossed about by anyone big enough to do it. PO Boys normally stamped out bullying not so much because they saw it as evil in itself but because they regarded it as an infringement of their prerogative. Moreover quite a few of them were surprisingly enlightened for boys of 14 – 15 in a position of authority.

My first four weeks in this impressive and terrifying establishment were spent in Nelson and the six week holiday followed. I was not homesick but was miserable for other reasons. We marched everywhere and I soon found I had no natural aptitude for it. There were complex rules which were never properly explained – I was knocked down by a blow to the head from the Nelson housemaster for using a door reserved for staff when I had been at Holbrook about two hours and I had never heard of the rule.
I had been circumcised at Swanley two weeks before and was too shy to tell anyone that I was still sore.
The highlight of this period was the official opening of the school by the Prince of Wales, later, briefly, Edward VIII. The sheer hell of preparation which this entailed is fresh in my memory still. The wartime press didn’t know what ‘Bull’ was.
We returned at the beginning of September, not facing 46 weeks of incarceration as at Swanley because Holbrook allowed us home for 3 weeks at Christmas and another 3 at Easter. I had been allocated to ‘Hawkee’ a junior house linked to ‘St Vincent’ and placed in Class 1 Upper Nautical.
I kept no diary then or since so I cannot attempt any chronological narrative of the next 4 and half years. I can only deal with school activities under their various headings and explain how I faired, or failed to fit into them.
The accommodation was generally superior to Swanley, I was in the first half of Hawke, one of forty boys numbered one to forty. There was a day room with 40 numbered lockers and other usual offices. We showered en masse morning and evening and slept in one long dormitory with beds arranged top to tail in 2 rows of 20. We made our beds each morning and the top sheet had to be turned over so that it covered exactly half of the pink counterpane. Thus a pink and white chequered effect was produced as the house sister looked along the line, it also meant that an average top sheet stopped 2 feet short of the foot of the bed inside but that didn’t matter. The covers were tucked in tighter than a sleeping bag and one had great difficulty in getting in without getting one’s long flannel nightshirt around the neck. This was really just as well as windows on both sides of the room were kept open and loose covers would probably have been blown off the bed in windy weather. Once you were in they were beautifully warm and comfortable.
Food was varied and was not only better than Swanley’s but in most respects was better than I could have expected at home. We had butter at breakfast and tea for example, at a time when margarine was normal in all working class homes. We were marched to the dining hall for each meal and each house sat at 4 long tables, 20 boys to each. A PO boy presided at the head of each table and doled out the food brought from the galley in mess tins. The boys sat in order of seniority and seniority was based on time at the school. Years spent elsewhere did not count. The more senior you were, the higher up the table and the better the portions e.g. one slab of butter was cut into 4 portions and the 6 junior boys at the foot of the table got a smaller piece than the 4 at the top. Each member of the group took it in turn to cut the group’s portion into individual parts and the cutter always had last pick.
Efforts to produce a more equitable system were occasionally made by house-masters with very limited success. The thing balanced itself in time by promotion up the table, but if the PO boy took a dislike to a boy he might remain at the bottom for years. In my case, even the bottom seemed like a land of milk and honey.
Most great men’s biographies highlight their backwardness at school. I always excelled in the classroom so I naturally grew up into a non-entity. I was almost totally incompetent at games and not physically impressive although I was rarely ill. In a boys’ boarding school it is a toss up whether it is more unpopular to be good in class or bad at sport: being both I had to work hard to live it down. Naturally my recollection of things which were problems to me is more vivid than of the easy things; we marched everywhere in column of fours and I never became better than competent at it but I soon learnt to get by.
The first real hurdle was swimming; non swimmers were social lepers and they spent their very limited free time, which normal routine allowed, in the baths. By such pressure and physical coercion which included being pushed in at the deep end (literally) I duly ‘passed out’ by swimming one length of the baths. Thereafter I ranked as a swimmer and in normal swimming periods was expected to swim round the baths starting and finishing at the deep end. As far as I know nobody ever drowned which just shows what fear can accomplish.
I always loathe the gymnasium. Class sessions on vaulting horses, climbing ropes etc wasn’t bad; I just wasn’t good at them but house sessions were apt to include competitive team games on an inter-house basis along the lines of ‘It’s a Knockout’ but deadly serious! If a boy lost control of a football for example, he could wreck the team’s chances and I frequently did!
Cricket and football were not nearly so bad. I didn’t dislike either of them although I was never anything like good enough to play for the house, let alone the school.
Every year there was a cross country race, one for seniors and one for juniors, nearly 400 boys taking part in each. One year I actually finished in the first 20 of the juniors, the only sporting achievement of my life, and was cheered home by a crowd of seniors and POs who knew my reputation and expected anyone who excelled in class to run like a cripple.
There was considerable emphasis on organized religion with morning prayers in the assembly hall on week-days and compulsory church attendance on Sunday, morning and evening. Confirmation was arranged for boys about 13 and thereafter Holy Communion was optional each Sunday at 8.00 a.m.
There were two resident naval chaplains. The Reverend Gilbertson was the senior chaplain when I joined and was the kind of clergyman to over-awe grown men, never mind boys. Chaplains in the navy are officers of course, but do not hold any specific rank. This means that no-one, not even an Admiral outranks them in the sight of the Admiralty, let alone in the sight of God! We were not a very wicked lot and probably did not fear God as much as we ought to have done. But we made up for this with a wholesome dread of his representative here on earth.
The Reverend Gilbertson had been at sea for many years and he frequently enlivened his sermons with naval anecdotes. He deplored ‘hell fire’ preaching and recalled a young officer he had known who never attended voluntary church services having been put off for life by a Scot’s minister he had encountered as a boy. This cleric was wont to describe the torments of hell in detail and tell his congregation
‘….and you will cry unto the Lord “Lord Lord we didna ken” The Lord in his bountiful mercy will say “Well, ye ken now”
He also disliked the practice of chaplains under war conditions who preached a gospel of ‘repent today-you may be killed tomorrow’ and he once quoted a war-time poem in which a wretched Tommy pictured the judgment as put to him by his chaplain:-
And if he tried to chance his arm
And hide a single sin,
They got a bleedin’ angel there
With books to do him in.
Gems like these were well received when delivered from the pulpit and certainly fix the point of the sermon in our minds. I remember one occasion however when a local vicar preached the evening sermon. He was presumably accustomed to address either adult audiences on the one hand or small children in Sunday school on the other. He treated us like the latter with one or two exciting stories from the Bible – with actions – and there was an outbreak of giggling. Captain Bruce-Jardyne rose in his seat in the first pew, fortunately out of sight of the preacher, glared round the church and sat down. A reverent hush fell instantly as house masters and PO boys peered along the pews mentally taking the name of any boy who as much as smiled. In an establishment where all adult males were addressed as ‘Sir’ they did not tolerate any disrespect to the cloth.
Revered Gilbertson also took scripture lessons occasionally and I remember him quoting a couple of howlers from exam papers. One boy condensed the story of Judas’s suicide and the selection of his replacement to ‘Judas hanged himself and all his bowel gushed out and the lot fell upon Matthew’ More subtly another lad asked to say when, and by whom, the words ‘Thine art not far from the Kingdom of God’ were spoken, wrote ‘This was said by Jesus to his disciples when they were nearly drowned on the Sea Of Galilee’ As Gilbertson remarked ‘That’s when men think of religion, when its touch and go’
I cannot now think why we were so terrified of him as he must have been a kindly man with a great sense of humour. I believe many of the staff were half afraid of him and this must have got through to us. During my time at Holbrook he became Archdeacon Gilbertson, Chaplain of the Fleet, so he must have been very senior indeed. His successor was a much less towering figure who never made much impression on me one way or the other.
In the house my career followed the usual pattern. I spent about 2 years in Hawke until I was old enough to move to St Vincent, which was a lesson in itself. From being one of the most senior members of a junior house I became one of the most junior members in a senior house. It also meant that for a year or so I didn’t eat quite so well for reasons already explained. I have since discovered that all life is like that.
In both houses I was reasonably happy for most of the time. The disciplined environment soon became second nature and although my eminence in class was despised almost as much as my incompetence at games I was rarely bullied. Considering it in retrospect I was very lucky with PO boys. For much of my time in Hawke our CPO was a lad named England. He was rated PO while I was in Nelson and I first met him when I turned faint on church parade and he helped me off. I expected utter contempt but he was sympathetic and concerned. He was the first and for years the only PO boy who ever treated me with kindness and consideration. He boxed and played football for the school and was adequate in class (I think) but his great strength was that he was a really good NCO.
The CPO of my half of St Vincent was a boy named Houson, son of a retired navel PTI. He was champion of his weight at boxing throughout his school career and also excelled at swimming and football. He would certainly have been Head Boy if we had had one. Despite a certain lack of intellectual attainment, he actually won ‘Best All Rounder’ cup one year. Unlike most boys he seemed to have a sneaking respect for brains and always treated me with a kind of friendly tolerance. This was not only pleasant in itself but certainly coloured the attitude of the community at large in my favour.
I made a weekend visit to Holbrook in 1947 when the school boxing championships were on and both Houson and England were there as full lieutenants RN. This suggests that the naval selection system, whatever its weaknesses with wartime RNVR candidates, was fundamentally sound when it came to regular officers.
It is significant that although I was then 25 years old, I did not venture to speak to any of these great men.
In class I had few problems. Whereas in the house PO boys were all important and the effect of housemasters on the quality of life was marginal, in class the masters were paramount and the PO boys did not come into it.
There were two exams for Engine Room Artificers each year, one about Easter and the other in October. The Easter one was set by the Civil Service examiners on a full range of subjects and was for dockyard apprentices as well as ERAs. The October one was in maths and science and was set by the Royal Navy College for ERAs only. Each boy worked his way up to 6UN where he remained until the year he qualified for the exams when he moved into 7 UN. I made rapid progress and thus spent about 2 years in 6UN and one year in 7UN.
The master of 6UN was a man named Amiss who took both classes for maths and 7Un was under Mr Hirst who taught both classes English, history and geography. Science was taught separately in a laboratory and mechanics which counted as part of science by Mr Perrin who was divisional master of the UN.
Mr Amiss had the vital gift of making the complex seem simple and the standard of maths was far beyond the normal. I recently came across a notebook I kept when I was 13/14 and I cannot make head nor tail of it. He was always an effortless controller of the class although he rarely caned anyone. The Swanley practice of caning for simple errors was never used at Holbrook. I only remember two occasions when Amiss caned anyone and both arose from circumstances outside his control so to speak. Mr Perrin the divisional master was highly qualified and learned but he couldn’t teach. Even in such a sternly run school his classes were often in disorder and mechanics was not only just my weakest subject but most of the other boys as well. At the end of one session he caned a persistent offender named Evans. As it happened Amiss was a couple of minutes late for the next session and arrived as Evans was giving a spirited re-run of the recent ‘execution’. Amiss sent him for the book and caned him much more sufficiently than Perrin had and when he came to record the fact he saw Evan’s name as the previous entry. “You’re becoming a general nuisance” he said, “Bend over again.” That time he really put his heart into it. I suppose nowadays some fool would have referred the case to the European Court of Humans Rights but at the time Evans rubbed it in and resumed his seat rather gingerly.
The other time was when Gilbertson’s successor was conducting a scripture class and some hot-head presumed in his mild manner and the fact that men of God do not normally inflict corporal punishment to give him some cheek. The chaplain sent him out to stand in the corridor which proved to be the equivalent of the Inquisition’s habit of abandoning heretics to the secular arm. When Mr Amiss arrived for the next session the following conversation took place “What are you doing out here Smith?”
“The chaplain sent me out, Sir”
“Go and get the book” and that was that.
I only saw Mr Amiss really angry once. He had been an amateur footballer in his youth and was said to have played for Charlton Athletic when they were an amateur side. He had been watching a house match between Blake and Drake and when it was over a hefty Blake CPO boy named Conner had accused a much smaller Drake PO of fouling him and had floored him. Amis hauled Conner up in front of the Captain and had him reduced to the ranks. In such cases disrated POs were always moved to another house and Connor finished his time in St Vincent getting very little sympathy from Houson or anyone else.
Mr Hirst was another born teacher who taught the subjects which have proved to be the most important to me in afterlife. He took an interest in me and treated me with real kindness. He knew that I was not very affluent even by Holbrook standards and pushed various small chores my way which brought a shilling or two a term. He also used me to run errands to other teachers and collect things especially in gym periods which I therefore escaped.
He was another man who was sparing with the cane though not quite as much so as Mr Amiss. In common with other masters he did evening duties in a house on a roster and apparently had trouble one night with talking in the dormitory, when the CPO boy in charge was actually present. Mr Hirst called in the CPO boy next morning and caned him. I was not there and when another boy told me about it I said “Was it just a token affair?” and he said, “Oh no He wasn’t half rubbing his arse when he came out”
On another occasion Hirst came into the class in a cold fury one Monday morning and sent me to fetch a senior boy from 5UN. It transpired that this lad was a Methodist and on Sunday evenings a Methodist Chaplain from Shotley Barracks held a service in the assembly hall at which this boy played the organ. However the boy had presumed to fall out with the Chaplain, which was the height of impudence in itself, and had refused to play the instrument. He then piled it on by attending the service and disrupting it. Either he was insane or he did not know that Mr Hirst was a Methodist and was actually substituting for him at the organ.
Mr Hirst gave him an awful tongue lashing and said that he was considering asking the Captain to expel him. After leaving him to sweat for a couple of days he caned him with great severity. I think he would have put the lad up for a more formal thrashing in the gym but he didn’t really wish to see him expelled and had the Captain heard of the matter he might have done just that.
The smooth-running and rather featureless pattern of school life was broken up by a number of distinguished visitors whose impact on us varied enormously. A common feature was the dreadful day of preparation which preceded each one. Normally we did few domestic chores through the week and there was a general clean-up on Saturday morning. This embraced houses, dining hall, gymnasium, swimming bath etc. Each house provided a party to clean the ‘common user areas’. The company officer of Hawke was one Dusty Miller who was also a swimming instructor so we cleaned up the swimming bath. In passing, I later read that Dusty Miller had been a Greenwich School boy who had done 25 years in the Navy and returned as a company officer. The divisional master of the Senior Division, Mr Sheldrake, had been a master at Greenwich when Dusty was a boy. The day before a visit was always like Saturday morning but more so and this went double for Royal visitors. There were two such in my time, the Prince of Wales who opened the school in 1933 and the Duke of Kent who presented the prizes in 1937. The former landed on the cricket field in his private plane and a day or two before his pilot landed there to spy out the land without prior notice while there were several hundred boys on the field. It was said that the commander was very annoyed about this and I remember thinking that the Prince might be in trouble. My ideas of the relative status of a naval commander and the heir to the throne were not as clear then as they are now. My recollections of these two visits are more of the furore they created than of the visitors themselves.
The guest of honour at the annual prize giving was usually an Admiral, the actual presentation being carried out by his wife. My favourite was one named Dunbar-Naismith who enlivened the proceedings with several salty interjections which rather pained the platform but convulsed the boys. His speech was laced with anecdotes including one about Captain Bruce-Jardyne who had served under Dunbar-Naismith in the War as a junior officer. We found it hard to picture the captain as a junior officer. We had a vague idea that he had always been old and in command rather like God, whom he closely resembled as far as we were concerned.
The admiral’s best story concerned an expedition in India in which they were continually delayed by a native guide who would lie on the ground pretending to be ill when they were ready to move off. Apparently they carried a branding iron of the leader’s initials to brand horses and mules and finally someone was so exasperated that he touched up the guide with it. This not only cured his ills for the rest of the trip but enables one to see who he was working for (just like the mules). We did not see anything racist in this tale at the time.
About 1934 the Archbishop of Canterbury came to consecrate the school church. He was accompanied by the Chaplain of the Fleet Archdeacon Peachall a splendid figure in full regalia with war medals including the VC. He was Chaplain of the cruiser Vindictive in the famous raid on the U-boat base at Zeebrugge in 1918. She was secured to the Mole which was swept by a crossfire which reduced life-expectancy on it to a matter of seconds. Throughout the raid Peachall walked up and down it carrying back the wounded and he never got a scratch. Rev. Gilbertson once pointed out how absurd it is to imagine the Lord God Almighty taking a personal hand in the squabbles of mortal men but I sometimes wonder.
We were also visited once by Admiral Tobias of the Broke whose legendary exploits were world famous. He gave a lantern lecture in the assembly hall about Scott’s last expedition to the Antarctic where Evans himself was second in command. He and two naval ratings named Lashly and Creen were the last party to be sent back on the fatal march to the Pole. Evans went down with scurvy and only survived by a combination of good luck and the incredible endurance and devotion of Lashly and Creen. I was completely entranced and have been fascinated by polar exploration ever since.
Sadly it has recently become fashionable and profitable to write books denigrating men like Scott and Evans but I am still sure their reputation is quite safe from such people who are not fit to clean their boots. Reading about Shackleton some years ago I noticed that he died on the day I was born – January 5th 1922.
In many ways our most remarkable VIP visitor was Rear Admiral Lyne. He has the rare and possibly unique distinction of having risen to that rank from second class boy. We were told that he had been commissioned as a lieutenant, a tremendous feat in itself, by the outbreak of war in 1914 and was in command of a sloop which broke her shaft off South America and was thus totally immobilized. Scorning neutral assistance, which would have meant internment, he set all hands to work stitching up canvas hammocks etc and brought the ship 2,000 miles to the Falklands under sail. This led to rapid promotion as well it might. There was the usual parade in which he addressed us in a broad cockney accent which I now suspect he might have dropped on the way up and only resumed when, in his own words, he “shipped this ‘ere fat stripe as a Rear Admiral” It so happened that there was a bit of a reign of terror going on at the school at the time; PO boys normally had what was called ‘local leave’ on Saturday and Sunday afternoons. This meant that they could leave the premises for walks and could lawfully buy sweets and unlawfully buy cigarettes. Sometimes with permission they went to the pictures in Ipswich or without permission chatted up local girls. I don’t think they ever got much further than chatting except in their own accounts of course. At the time of Admiral Lyne’s visit a spate of orchard raids had caused this leave to be stopped and thus Saturday and Sunday afternoons had become ‘hell on earth’ for the troops who were hounded by bad tempered POs with ‘wet shirts’ and practice drill. How the Admiral got wind of this I can’t imagine, but he rounded up his remarks by “………..hoping as how we all grow up to be officers” – an unlikely event - and called for “an extra turn of leave for the POs” instead of the usual half holiday. This was no doubt welcome to the POs but much more so to the rest of us. We cheered him to the echo and I feel grateful to him still.
Incidentally he was the only visiting Admiral who turned up in full dress uniform with cocked hat so our officers had to do the same, and very impressive they all looked. I am sure the shades of Drake, Raleigh, St Vincent, Blake, Hood, Howe, Collingwood, Anson, Cornwallis, Hawke and Nelson hovering over their respective houses felt quite at home with them.
I must have been about 14 when it first occurred to me to question the assumption that I would inevitably go into the navy. My experience at Holbrook and seeing, even at a distance, men who served in the service had confirmed my early impression that it was a great life and I never doubted that I could be happy, contented and comfortable in it. I was not so sure about the engineer branch having no aptitude for metalwork; but I suppose I could have opted out of the ERA stream and taken my chance as a second class boy. The snag was the prospect of being pensioned off at 40. Even at 14 I could understand what that had done to my father and no doubt many thousands of others. The chance of reaching commissioned rank from the lower deck was extremely remote and, cocky as I was then, I never thought I was that outstanding. On the other hand outside the navy I had no chance of any job requiring further education and that didn’t leave much. At this time my sister was coming to the end of her schooling at what was then called a secondary school, and hoped to sit the Civil Service exam for clerical officer between 16 & 17 years of age, and I thought I might have a crack at that myself. Clerical officer sounds grander than it was. It was actually the lowest grade in the Civil Service apart from CA (Clerical Assistant) which was only open to girls at that time anyway.
The Civil Service had the same attractions then as it has now, pay at least comparable to similar work outside it, relatively long holidays, short hours, paid sick-leave, security of tenure and a pension you could live on at 65, not a few pounds pocket money at 40. These attractions have since been eroded not so much by changes in conditions in the Civil Service as by improvements elsewhere, but in the 1930’s they were very real.
Once I had worked up the courage to broach the subject the school authorities made no effort to press me into the navy and gave me every assistance to make good deficiencies in my education for the Civil Service exam in July 1938. As useful practice I sat the ERA exams both in Easter and October 1937 being place 2nd in the first and joint first (with another RHS boy)in the second. I was allowed to stay at Holbrook until Christmas 1937 and Mr Hirst in particular helped me to plug some of the gaps in my education. The two compulsory subjects for the Civil Service exam were arithmetic, which was easy, and English including English literature which wasn’t. Optional subjects included languages which I couldn’t touch but I could muster enough by including such things as higher maths and science.
For may last term I was PO boy and a pretty poor one at that. Much as I admired giants like Houson and England I had neither the strength of character nor charisma to follow their example and I must have been a ‘right little Hitler’. In my final report the Captain says “A satisfactory PO boy but shows little sympathy with younger boys” That was putting it kindly! I never made chief, my first disappointment of that kind, but certainly not my last. So just short of 16 I left Holbrook where I had become a senior member of the community and became and became an insignificant particle in the London labour market.

Chapter three: Holbrook School – My comments

It is interesting throughout this autobiography how Dad seems unimpressed by his own successes – which viewed dispassionately are very impressive and his overview seems to be that he failed, if narrowly, in most of life’s tests. It is a deep regret of mine that I knew so little of this view of himself that I never got the chance to challenge his perception. It is often true that we are more critical and unforgiving of our own faults and failings than we would be of the faults and failings of others.

Dad makes little of his academic successes but I know he was in the highest stream in the school long before others of the same age.

Surely the very fact that he simply made his mind up not to follow the school’s blueprint for all its students and this was accepted by the authorities indicated that they realised that they had something exception on their hands.