Derlwyn Howard Edwards, 1916-1997

If he was alive he would be in his 90s My other grandfather died a year ago aged 86 and my great-uncle is still alive aged 92, so I wouldn't be surprised if he was still alive.

Originally Posted by timo

I wonder [I type this with trembling fingers] if you have access to any photographs of this legendary Headmaster? You're in for a treat: http://pics.mdfs.net/1940 and http://pics.mdfs.net/1964

A bit more information I've dug up out of my archives:

Derlwyn Howard: Entered University College London gaining a 2nd class honours degree BSc Maths. He then went to take his teaching diploma. He also served in the RAF in India during World War 2. He went to teach in Belfast & Edinburgh. He married Harriet (June) Harker in Whitby (*note*). Finally took up a post as Headteacher of a large comprehensive in Sheffield. Whilst studying at London University he lived with Hazel & Jack in Enfield.

Grandma & Grandad (June & Howard to you lot!) actually married in Henley, not Whitby, which is explained by Howard living with his sister & brother-in-law in Enfield at the time while at University.

03-07-2008, 02:58, geoffusa

23-12-2008 at 15:45, dfs346

As Albert Camus wrote in the introduction to his novel "The Plague" (by which no analogy is intended to the life of Derlwyn Edwards), a narrator has three kinds of data: first, his own observations and experience; second, the accounts of other observers; and third, any documents which may come into his hands. In the first category, I knew Derlwyn Edwards slightly over a period of about a decade and a half. (Was there anyone who knew him more than slightly?) In the second, members of this forum have attested eloquently to their experiences of Mr Edwards as headmaster of Hinde House School. In the third category, we have the wonders of the Internet.

For most of the factual information on Derlwyn's life, I have to rely on the excellent research of Jonathan Harston, his grandson, who has assembled a family tree and identified the important dates and events.

As Jonathan has noted, Derlwyn Howard Edwards was born on December 17th, 1916, in the third year of the First World War, in Aberdare, a coal-mining town in Glamorgan county, south Wales. He was the youngest child of Gomer Edwards and Lucie Limb. Of the parents, I know only that Gomer was born in 1872 and Lucie in 1877. Whereas Gomer was a pure Welshman, I think that Lucie was English. During the war, Gomer would have been in his forties, too old to serve in the armed forces, and the boys were too young. So none of the Edwards family would have been subject to conscription. One imagines that the war largely passed them by.

Derlwyn had two brothers and two sisters. When Derlwyn was born, Bertha was 14, Alan 12, Hazel 11 and Ewert six years old. Ewert died the following year, whether through illness or accident I do not know. Derlwyn must have grown up without siblings close to his age.

He attended the Aberdare Boys' County School, a state secondary school which later became the Aberdare Boys' Grammar School, which still exists, and which seems to be a school of some quality, housed in fine old stone buildings. His time there was from, I suppose, age 11, in other words about 1928, to 1935. I guess that it was during this time that he earned his cap in the Welsh schoolboy rugby team.

In 1934, during Derlwyn's second last year at the County School, his father died. Gomer Edwards was 62 years old.

The "Aberdare Leader", reporting on the County School's certificate ceremony for the class of 1935, mentioned that Derlwyn Howard Edwards had been awarded a County Free Scholarship and was now (this was May 1936) attending college in London. We may suppose that Derlwyn had started his undergraduate studies around September 1935.

At University College London, he earned a B.Sc. in mathematics with second class honours. If the undergraduate degree took three years then as it does now, he would have graduated in the summer of 1938.

During his university studies he apparently lived with his sister Hazel and his brother-in-law Jack in Enfield, near London. Two of Jonathan's photos show him standing on a path in Hazel and Jack's garden, framed by a trellis gate, looking rather shy in one photo and serious in the other. He wears a dark suit and an academic gown, in a preview of his terrifying Hinde House days. In one of the pictures he wears a mortar-board, making him look vaguely Chinese.

At university he met his future wife Harriet Marsay Harker, from Whitby in north Yorkshire. In contrast to Derlwyn, she was an only child, having lost her father in the First World War. In June 1918 Sergeant Robert Isaac Harker, posted to France, received news of Harriet's birth. The following month he was killed at Mont-Bernanchon. He had never seen his daughter. In November 1918, the combatants signed a cease-fire and the war was over. Harriet grew up in the care of her mother (also named Harriet Marsay Harker), and her aunts Lily and Annie. She was an intelligent and capable girl. As Jonathan notes, she was the first girl from Whitby to win a university scholarship. She was one and a half years younger than Derlwyn, good-humoured, talented in languages and with an artist's eye.

I presume that Derlwyn joined the Royal Air Force in 1939 or 1940. He would have been in his early 20s. One of Jonathan Harston's photographs of him, dated only "1940s", shows him in an air force shirt, open-necked, with three chevrons on the right sleeve, signifying the rank of Sergeant. He was an almost handsome young man, with a strong chin, a lopsided half-smile, thick hair slicked back, no sign of the tyrant that, it is claimed, he was to become. On the reverse he wrote (to whom, I don't know), "I had this taken when I applied for a commission. Want to send it to you before but forgot all about it. PS I don't look any different as an officer & the only difference in the uniform is that there's a blue stud on both sholder-straps instead of three white stripes on one sleeve. Howard in RAF."

He had by this time dropped the "Derlwyn", although one wonders what was wrong with this good Welsh name, which means "oak grove", a name well suited to this strapping strong-jawed fellow. At least he had a claim on "Howard", which was his middle name. Harriet had a similar discomfort with her given name, preferring to be known as June, a name whose origins I cannot discern.

Derlwyn's application for a commission in the RAF was successful and he reached the rank of Flight Lieutenant. I am not sure whether Flight Lieutenants necessarily do any flying, but I think that he received flying instruction. If so, it probably was in the De Havilland Tiger Moth, the standard air force trainer, beloved of all pilots of that era. I don't know whether he eventually gained a pilot's license. To my knowledge he never flew airplanes after leaving the RAF. He once mentioned that he had done parachute training (his wife, who was listening, was quick to riposte, "They had to push him out of the plane".)

He was clearly a sportsman. I heard that he had achieved distinction in the RAF (by some accounts, he was the air force champion) in tennis and boxing.

I know nothing more about his career in the RAF, except for Jonathan's reports that he served in India and maybe also in the Far East. During the war the RAF had bomber, fighter and reconnaissance activities throughout south and southeast Asia – No.5 Squadron defending Calcutta, No.9 in Ceylon and the south, No.20 doing reconnaissance and ground attack against the Japanese, and so on - but where Derlwyn served, and what he did, I have no idea. He never spoke of his wartime experiences. A more sociable ex-serviceman might have come back from India with colloquialisms like "khaki", "karzi" and "tiffin" but Derlwyn's conversations, such as they were, had no peppering of Hindi slang. In fact there was nothing in his subsequent life to suggest that had he had ever set foot in this vast outpost of the Empire.

I heard somewhere that Derlwyn had been at school (or maybe in the armed forces) with Jimmy Young, who was a well-known singer in the 1950s and later a popular disk jockey and radio presenter. Jimmy went to East Dean Grammar School, which I believe is in Gloucestershire, but he was in the Royal Air Force from 1942 to 1949. Jimmy eventually reached the rank of Sergeant, and during the war might have been no more than Aircraftman, while Derlwyn was by then a Flight Lieutenant and therefore outranked him considerably. Did Aircraftman Young report to Flight Lieutenant Edwards and was the Aircraftman suitably terrified? I believe that Sir Jimmy (as he became) is still alive, aged 85 or 87 - some doubt exists because he is said to have inflated his age to join the RAF. Does anyone have his telephone number or e-mail address? We can put those questions to him.

Derlwyn probably left the air force in 1945 when the war ended. He returned to England where he completed the teacher's training course which was available for ex-servicemen. Harriet must have been waiting for him all this time, more than six years (although she was to let on, much later, that she had "lots of boyfriends", and why not, she was an attractive girl, although one of the children then posed the obvious question, "why him?"). Anyway, they married on February 12th, 1946 in Henley. The mathematics of human gestation indicate that she was expecting, since their first child, Susan Elizabeth, was born on September 1st of that year. Derlwyn was then 29 years old.

His first two children were born in Whitby, in September 1946 and May 1948. I don't think Derlwyn ever lived in Whitby, so maybe his wife wanted to be at her mother's house for the births.

Sometime in the late 1940s he must have taken the teaching post in Belfast to which other posts refer.

In 1950 Derlwyn moved to Scotland to join Loretto, an upper-crust boys' boarding school. This was a small fishing town in Midlothian, a few miles east of Edinburgh on the Firth of Forth. For this account of his career at Loretto I am indebted to one of his former pupils:

"I was a pupil at Loretto Senior School from 1950 to 1955 and remember [Mr Edwards] very clearly, though he never taught me in the classroom. I remember him as a large upright figure with a smart gait and strong (to us anyway) Welsh accent who was an effective coach of the rugger forwards of the 1st XV in the two seasons I played in that team. I suspect he was a pretty tough player himself and he taught us to be aggressive but fair players. I also remember a particular incident when he took the backs (who were typically rather dismissive of forwards as ignorant lumps I think) and he revealed that he himself had played centre-threequarter for one of the famous Welsh clubs - it might have been Llanethlie or some such - which made them sit up (metaphorically anyway)! I am sure that at Loretto he was known to his colleagues as Howard, presumably the Welsh name being deemed too difficult for us up here."

The position that a man plays in a team game must throw light on his personality. Rugby players would know the significance of the position of centre threequarters. My knowledge of the game of rugby union is limited, but I understand that a centre threequarters is a player who, if attacking, receives the ball from the scrum, and either runs with it or passes it to the other backs, in the process fending off opponents. If defending, he has to be a strong tackler. So this position is played by a tough, physical, aggressive man.

As in those days rugby clubs were amateur, a schoolmaster might well have played for a major club in his spare time.

His former pupil goes on to quote the Loretto magazine for 1957 as follows:

"In April, Mr D. H. Edwards left to take up an appointment as Head of the Maths Department at Stoke on Trent School. He was most successful at coaching - firstly boys for the Additional Maths papers in the G.C.E. (many Masters envious of the high percentages he always managed to attain, and sometimes wondered if those who were, so to speak, in the percentage trade, got special treatment for their exponents), and secondly, at coaching forwards in the XV; again and again he turned an undistinguished pack into a really good one - to the delight of our supporters and the surprise and confusion of our foes."

During his Loretto period, from 1950 to 1957, Derlwyn and his family lived in a small terraced house at 11 Eskside East in Musselburgh. As the name implies, the street fronted on the River Esk. The river joins the Firth maybe half a mile to the north. I recall that there was a iron girder bridge, painted green, that crossed the Esk near his house, leading to a wasteland of gorse bushes and abandoned hangars. Derlwyn was not yet earning enough to buy a television set; on Saturday afternoons his children went to Luca's ice cream shop on the High Street, where they could buy a threepenny ice and watch "The Lone Ranger" in black-and-white on the BBC. (Luca's still exists.)

He evidently had retained his interest in aviation, since in Musselburgh he was active in the local Air Training Corps, 297 Squadron. He may even have been commander of the squadron; in fact, I have a vague recollection of references to him as "squadron leader", although that is one rank above Flight Lieutenant. The ATC was then a branch of the RAF that provided classes for schoolboys who might later want to enlist. The ATC hut was on Goose Green Crescent, on the eastern bank of the Esk, a few minutes' walk from Derlwyn's house. It was festooned with aircraft recognition drawings; I recollect three-view silhouettes of early post-war jet airplanes like the Gloster Meteor and the Hawker Hunter. The Musselburgh squadron is still in operation; its motto is "Honesty".

Derlwyn was apparently still interested in mathematics, outside the narrow perspective of teaching the subject to possibly truculent and unruly schoolkids. His name is mentioned in a JSTOR citation of an article in the Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, published in 1957 and titled "The replacement cost of fixed assets in British manufacturing industry in 1955". Maybe he was a co-author of this article.

In 1953 when Derlwyn was 34, his mother Lucie died at the age of 76.

In the spring of 1957 he moved to Biddulph, a small town in northern Staffordshire near the Cheshire border. He and his family lived at the end of Charles Street, in an imposing detached house, in a style that I think is called Tudor, with black beams on white walls, at that time surrounded by open fields, and named "Tall Oaks" after the eponymous grand trees which lined the drive. During that period he was teaching in Stoke-on-Trent. The notorious Sheffield chapter was to come.

23-12-2008, 16:05, dfs346

By my calculations his move to Sheffield was around September 1961, when he was 44. His new job was as headmaster of Owler Lane Intermediate School. Two years later Owler Lane was absorbed into Hinde House Secondary School, the merged school becoming the first comprehensive school in Sheffield. He was appointed headmaster of Hinde House, an important career advance for him. The term "comprehensive" implied a merger of the former two-track state system of "grammar" (for academically minded kids) and "secondary" (for the rest).

Hinde House was in Shire Green in northeast Sheffield. The school, though set in a rustic area surrounded by fields and woods, was an unlovely collection of boxy industrial buildings. Its students were mainly from poor and deprived communities. It was adjacent to the Shire Green Working Men's Club where, many years later, the producers of the "The Full Monty" filmed their climactic male strip show.

None of Derlwyn's children attended this school. His eldest son went to King Edward VII School and the other children, I suppose, to local primary, grammar or secondary schools. His house was on Fulwood Road, in a quiet and prosperous residential district of Sheffield.

Here we enter the period that seems to mark a change in his professional personality, of which I had known nothing until I read this forum. By all accounts (and the authors are evidently former pupils of Hinde House who suffered or survived his teaching), he was, or became, a bully, a sadist, prone to insult and humiliate his students or physically to attack them, at the same time a bumbling buffoon, ill at ease with other adults and teachers.

What is there in his previous life to account for this? Was there a wartime experience that scarred him? If so, I am not aware of it. Some dark family secret? His father died when he was 18, and his mother when he was 35, but his relations with his surviving brothers and sisters seemed to be cordial. Was he simply out of his depth as headmaster of a large school, could not deal with the responsibility and could not admit to his limitations? Was he unable to handle rough and unruly mobs of kids from poor homes, except with an iron fist?

Let's look at other aspects of his life.

After his RAF service, he rarely ventured overseas (although eventually he bought a flat in Spain). Apart from Welsh, he was not known to speak any foreign language (although his wife spoke French). In the summer holidays, he usually drove with his family either to his mother-in-law's house in Whitby, or, with a modest caravan in tow, to a beachfront campsite to the north of Skegness on the east coast of Lincolnshire. The children played "I Spy" on these trips; one of their favourite acronyms was "FSPTW" which stood for "First Sign Post To Whitby", a road sign on the Yorkshire moors that they awaited breathlessly on the way to their grandmother's.

As a young man, he rode a motorcycle with a sidecar, and later drove three-wheeler "bubble cars" (as they were then known), first a Messerschmidt and then a Heinkel. As his career advanced he bought a series of progressively larger cars, none of which he kept very long. They included two old Rolls-Royces (I think 1929 and 1937 models). These stately black machines were his only ostentation. I see that his Hinde House pupils remember one of them.

Now that I think of his cars, I believe that he never bought a new one. Even the Rolls was well over 20 years old in its Hinde House days. He was in general a frugal man. He did not buy expensive clothes or gadgets. I think that he disliked luxury, waste, branding and all the paraphernalia of the consumerist society.

As to his physical appearance (for example, his reputed resemblance to the popular image of Dracula): his former pupils seem to remember him as supernaturally tall, but aren't all adults tall in the recollections of childhood? I am fairly sure that his height was about 5'11". For sure, he had a strong angular face, but I would not have described him as a lookalike to Bela Lugosi or Christopher Lee. He had thick dark hair and used Brylcreme (is that the right spelling?). There was a period when he had one false tooth, which he could protrude to scare or entertain his children (maybe this is the origin of the Dracula reference). In middle age he had to have all his teeth extracted, a process which he bore stoically. His wife told me how he lay in bed at night, quietly enduring the pain. Thereafter he wore dentures; as I recall, they were of human rather than vampire morphology.

Other than that, he was physically fit. He never had any major physical illness. He was somewhat stocky in his mid-40s. I recall seeing his blazer, striped beige and dark blue, dating I suppose from his University College days, and being surprised that he could ever have been that thin. But he was evidently slim when he was in his 20s (as one sees from Jonathan Harston's photos).

He did not smoke. His wife did, but he apparently did not object. He drank bottled beer, rarely wines or spirits. His preferences in food tended toward traditional English dishes like roast beef, potatoes and Yorkshire pudding, and desserts like semolina, baked rice pudding and apple crumble and custard.

He was certainly a Welshman, but if he had a Welsh accent it was quite subdued. I don't recall his using Welsh in conversation apart from the occasional phrase like "croeso y cymru" ("welcome to Wales") or "cymru am byth" ("Wales forever").

I wonder whether a person's taste in music can be an accurate guide to his or her personality. Derlwyn liked Welsh songs. He had a good singing voice, I would guess baritone. I once entered his living room to find him intoning a Welsh song into a tape recorder. The song was "Sospan Vach" ("The Little Saucepan"), a nonsensical rugby ditty. Perhaps this recording still exists. Apart from that, I am hard pressed to recall hearing any music in Derlwyn's house. There was of course the radio (I think that the BBC had a monopoly in those days, but there was a pirate music station called Radio Luxembourg to which the Edwards family tuned in). There was, I think, an upright acoustic piano, which Harriet could play, though she rarely did. The family had also a wind-up gramophone with a small collection of 12-inch vinyl records.

This brings to my mind a song that I will always associate with Derlwyn Edwards. I think that he had a copy on a scratchy old LP. The song is "The Holy City". It was written in 1892 by composer Stephen Adams (alias Michael Maybrick) and lyricist Frederick E Weatherly. I found a version on YouTube, posted only eight days ago as I write these words, as if by a strange coincidence someone had anticipated my need to track down this song. The performance so exactly matches my memory that I am sure it is the same one that Derlwyn owned. The singer is the American tenor Richard Crooks.

The opening verse, which had more or less remained in my memory and which I was able to confirm from the Internet, is:

Last night I lay a-sleeping
There came a dream so fair,
I stood in old Jerusalem
Beside the temple there.
I heard the children singing,
And ever as they sang
Methought the voice of angels
From heaven in answer rang.

The last lines and the refrain are as follows:

It was the new Jerusalem
That would not pass away.
Jerusalem! Jerusalem!
Sing for the night is o'er!
Hosanna in the highest!
Hosanna forevermore!

In some way this song seems to me to encapsulate the moody, frugal but sometimes passionate character of Derlwyn Edwards.

Did Derlwyn have a warmer side or a sense of humour? I can't recall his telling a joke, though I see from other posts that he was capable of ponderous aphorisms. He was known to play practical jokes. One such was to creep up behind his wife in the kitchen and "knee" her in the back of her legs, which made her laugh. On motoring trips, he was prone to sing humorous and repetitive ditties like "The Bear Went Over The Mountain", which goes like this:

The bear went over the mountain
The bear went over the mountain
The bear went over the mountain
To see what he could see
But the other side of the mountain
The other side of the mountain
The other side of the mountain
Was all that he could see ...
So he went back over the mountain ...

Another of his favourite motoring songs was "Riding Down From Bangor", an American college song about an opportunistic student who has an amorous adventure in a train (the Bangor in question is in Maine, not Wales). This song could be found in British school songbooks in the 1950s.

Apart from singing, Derlwyn seemed to have no hobbies or recreational activities. He had no treasured personal possessions - books or collectibles, for example - though I recall seeing, under the stairs in Biddulph, an old and rusty model train set. He rarely went to pubs, bars, restaurants or cinemas. He seemed very focussed on his teaching and was prone to take work home. He read the Manchester Guardian, a left-of-centre newspaper (which later became The Guardian), but rarely or never expressed opinions on politics, sex, religion or current affairs, or indeed on his own life or any personal matter.

I am not aware that he had any close friends. No air force buddies ever showed up at his door. There were no reunions with old squaddies with names like Smudger. No school pals descended from Aberdare or London. His relations with teaching colleagues started and ended, I think, at the school gate.

For relaxation, he watched television. Among the actors of his generation, I think he admired Kenneth More, who typically played stiff-lipped English heroes such as Douglas Bader. Do I imagine that he bore a passing resemblance to Kenneth More? He liked most of the British comedy shows of the era - Benny Hill, Charlie Drake, Tony Hancock. I recall his comment on the 1960 series "The Strange World of Gurney Slade": he described it contemptuously as "punk" (an innovative or prescient use of this word). His habitual TV fare included "The Army Game" and "Whack-O" (starring Professor Jimmy Edwards - no relation). Could it be that he modelled himself on the Headmaster of Chiselbury School?

Certainly his relationship with his children could be described as authoritarian. They did not attend the schools where he taught, so they did not experience his terrifying "work" personality, of which his former pupils have spoken with awe and horror. He was not prone to express affection for his children, either verbally or physically. He occasionally or maybe regularly administered corporal punishment to them, both the boys and the girls. That is to say, he beat them on their bottoms. Is this an echo of his reported violence to students?

He also had a system of disciplining the children, which he called "penance": if a child did something wrong, he or she had to do a task such as cleaning the house. He seemed quite pleased with this system; it did not take much of a fault on the child's part for Derlwyn to sing out "Penance!" in a cheerful tone of victory. Penance is a concept that originates from the Catholic and Orthodox churches. I don't think though that Derlwyn was a Catholic or indeed a regular churchgoer of any denomination.

He must have hoped for his sons to become sportsmen like himself. I recall that he gave one of them a set of boxing gloves as a birthday present. The boy, a perfectly gentle little soul, was (privately) horrified. I don't think he ever wore the gloves, but possibly he never dared to throw them away.

Derlwyn did not seem to influence his children in their studies or careers, but he probably envisaged university studies for most of them. His eldest daughter obtained a place at London University but dropped out in the first year, returning home with a female companion, thin and dreadfully afflicted with acne, whom Mrs. Edwards described as "neurotic". This would have been around 1963. The first signs of dysfunction in the Edwards family?

His first son was evidently aching for an opportunity to escape. Something happened to the boy in the early 1960s. There are two photographs of him, on the website of the Old Edwardians, that caught my attention. As a new boy, in September 1961, he has a mischievous sunny smile. In a class photo dated 1962/63, he stands at the end of the back row, wearing horn-rimmed glasses and staring disconsolately somewhere off-camera. In January 1965, having finished his high school studies, and with a scholarship to Cambridge University awaiting in September of that year, the boy leaped at the offer of an eight-month apprenticeship with the Bristol Aeroplane Company, that allowed him to live away from home for the first time. He was just 16. His mother was reluctant to let him go; the boy insisted, and Derlwyn expressed no opinion.

I'm not sure that the reported "blazing row" between Derlwyn and his son really happened - both parties were too reserved for that - but there must have been a gradual dissolution of their relations. I believe there was at one point an awkward confrontation that precipitated the son's decision to leave. During the breaks in his studies at Cambridge, the boy came back to Sheffield with increasing reluctance. Towards the end of 1967, in his third year, he found a way to avoid returning. Maybe in Cambridge he had made friends with whom he could stay; in any case he did not come home for Christmas nor for the following Easter. In effect he was severing the ties with his father, who however did not react at all. In May of 1968, the spring of the summer of love, the young man completed his final examinations and, without a word of farewell, left the country. He sent a postcard from Newfoundland, another from New York and maybe one or two from other places. Then the postcards stopped coming.

Derlwyn's wife told me much later that he had been secretly proud of his son's acceptance at Cambridge, though he never said so to anyone else (least of all to the boy, who maybe needed to hear the words). Did the boy's departure engender or unlock Derlwyn's sociopathic personality? Did he take out his anger on his luckless charges? Or was it there before? His former pupils will have to speak for this, at least for the timeline – do their accounts of the Welsh dictator date to the time before 1968?

Then there is his divorce, which I understand occurred around 1976. Derlwyn and Harriet were not an overtly affectionate couple, but they seemed used to each other and they had seven children. I never heard of major fights or even heated arguments between them. When I learned of their divorce, many years after the fact, I was surprised. What was involved? Another woman? Another man? I never learned.

I did hear that Derlwyn remarried, his second wife died, and he married for a third time.

Remarkably, if I have my facts in order, all of his children lost touch with him. Jonathan Harston remembers that when Harriet died in 1993 the children reported, possibly incorrectly, that she was a widow.

At some point Derlwyn acquired a flat in Spain. To me this seems out of character: he would have been at home neither with the beer-swilling English expatriates nor, given his limited languages, with the Spanish. But at the last sighting he was living with his second or possibly third wife in Thorpe Hesley, which is a suburb of the adjacent town of Rotherham but is only a few miles from the school where he terrorised thousands of children.

If he is alive, he has just turned 92.

24-12-2008, 01:55, geoffusa

24-12-2008, 10:49, darra

25-12-2008, 10:04, beady

My wife who also went at the same time but left in '66 recalls him as quite an overbearing yet sad character. She and her mates were quite frightened by him! She remembers as though it was yesterday how he one day came bursting into a lesson, asked a question of the class which no-one could or dared to answer - he went barmy and had a right go at my wife sitting on the front row suggesting she was a spoiled brat - an only child etc - quite a tarade! Her knees were actually knocking! She was actually 1 of 5 kids!

On reflection both of us agree that out of all the teachers we had contact with - he was the most odd and unprofessional. Whoever set him on must have been totally hoodwinked. I think he was the proverbial round peg in the square hole - on reflection totally out of his depth.

The timetable of attendance for both of us tallies with the more difficult period in his private life? I often saw him driving into school in his Rolls, had heard he had a large family and being a youngster could imagine him with the kids in the back a bit like the Darling Buds of May character in his big yellow motor. Anyway I'm certain he had his good points - it was a difficult school to manage and I must admit you always knew where you stood with the rules and discipline etc.

Having said that though not all the kids were 'rough and ready' - there were a majority of good youngsters who didn't need managing with an iron fist. Wouldn't like to think folks would remember me in my professional or private capacity as some of the people above remember him? If he's still around and by chance reads this - I hope he reflects on how he ran the school and how he could and should have?

26-12-2008, 15:42, ALZYMER