January 2011 offcuts_Jan Offcuts 2010.qxd.qxd - The OKS Association

More documents

Recommendations

Info

Choir rehearsal, Brass rehearsal, barbershop and flute; Stanford, Bruckner, Gounod and Ridout : it was an exhausting but exhilarating day which left a warm afterglow of affection for what Edred Wright (Common Room 1955-78, Director of Music 1958-78) did so much to create, and others now maintain. The whole organisation seemed to function extremely smoothly throughout the day and is a great credit to Susan Tingle and her team. Roger Lawrence (GR 1948-54) Finally Stanford’s Te Deum in B flat with full orchestra burst on the scene. As Stuart Whatton’s (MO 1976-81) programme notes pointed out, OKS going back a long way sung this at Cathedral Matins, with Edred Wright’s congregational part. The remembered gusto was duly replicated! Through this and the other orchestral pieces Stephen Barlow was the master musician (or should I say magician), and it remains to congratulate Howard Ionascu on the high standard achieved by the Crypt Choir (founded by Christopher Tinker (Common Room 1972-80), present in the double bass section with Christopher Barlow). Singing is the backbone of the school’s music. Robert Scott (Common Room 1956-91) OKS Concert : Impressions As it was King’s that gave me the lust for singing and playing, I arrived at the Mint Yard Gate with high hopes and feelings of nostalgia. First to the new Music School to rehearse Gounod’s Petite Symphonie with eight other wind players, ably led by Andrew Lyle (MR 1965-70) and Roger Lawrence including my elder son Stephen (GR 1973-78). Nostalgia hit immediately as I looked towards the corner of the room where my desk had been as Captain of Hall about 60 years ago. We then moved over to rehearse in the Shirley Hall – a building which was begun just before I left . I have a photograph which I took from Grange Senior Dorm, of what I like to think is the first man digging the first hole. I had to leave the Shirley Hall early to join the rehearsal of some barbershop numbers led by my other son James (GR 1983-88). This was in a room on the 3rd floor which had been constructed above the cavernous Junior Dorm of old, and it was stuffed with computers. The barbershop group was extremely jovial, rather loud and pretty chaotic; this did not bode well for the concert. After a quick lunch – a notable improvement on the ration-book offerings of the ‘50s – I listened for a few minutes as Peter White (SH 1970-75) efficiently introduced the choir to Bruckner’s Te Deum before going to help rehearse the brass section in the same work. Photo by Eleanor Bentall New Headmaster Appointed The appointment of Mr Peter Roberts as Headmaster of the King’s School, Canterbury from 2011 has been announced. Peter was educated at Tiffin Boys’ School, Kingston-upon-Thames, and at Merton College, Oxford, where he gained a First Class Honours degree in Modern History. He took a PGCE at London University. He was on the staff of Winchester College from 1986-2003, first as assistant teacher, then from 1991 as Head of History and also from 1991 as Master-in-College (Housemaster of the Scholars’ House) and ex-officio deputy to the Headmaster. He became Headmaster of Bradfield College in August 2003 and is a Governor of two prep schools. Peter is married to Marie and they have three teenage daughters. From a strong field, the Governors were delighted to appoint Peter, who they are confident will be a good fit for King’s, and the right person to lead the school in the years ahead. OKS Offcuts • Jan 2011 • Issue 31 2 The OKS Association • www.oks.org.uk
Dr Liz Pidoux, Luxmoore Reunion Speech. Sunday, 10th October 2010 Those of us old enough to remember dear old Tony Hancock in his persona as the crusty loner who lived in 23, Railway Cuttings, East Cheam, just might remember an episode on the early radio versions of ‘Hancock’s Half Hour’ entitled ‘The Old School Reunion’. Tony’s tenants were the prim and scornful Miss Grizelda Pugh (Hattie Jacques), a wide boy of dodgy deals, aka Sid James, and a terminally dim, infantile Australian otherwise known to us as Bill Kerr. Assorted characters as they were, they all joined together in mocking Hancock when he began to talk about his alma mater, remembering the old school song Gaudeamus igitur. Waxing sentimental about the old school tie and its wearers, Hancock was heard to ask wistfully of Kenneth Williams, ‘But the chaps Tell me, how… how are the chaps’ We didn’t believe him of course: half of Hancock’s world was a ludicrous fantasy he created to protect himself against the desperation of his own ordinariness. He probably never belonged to the school he remembered with such apparent authority and sentiment; we suspected that this was a school he saw every day as he walked home from his own scruffy secondary modern. We imagine him standing for untold minutes, staring wistfully over the hedge at the mock Victorian Gothic buildings, at the strange uniforms consisting of oblique references to clerical history, and we fancy we hear him straining to pick up and assimilate the even stranger language employed by ‘the chaps’, a language so strange that it constituted complete gobbledygook to any but the initiated. We laughed, but we appreciated his dream, and what it consisted of in general terms; it was a deep-seated yearning to belong, to belong to a family not constricted by blood ties or even by common characteristics, but by extended family values, by group ethos, and in Hancock’s fantasy but our reality, by the magical, indefinable and essentially ineffable qualities which go to making up the school to which we belong, and to which, through friendship and through the important ritual of reunions, we still belong. In a sense, the King’s School, Canterbury conforms to many of Hancock’s fantasies. We reside proudly in a cathedral precincts largely composed of buildings stunning in both their age and beauty, even if the Luftwaffe ensured that some of them are now kitsch reproductions – Lardergate, most famously. Our male uniform has been modified subtly by fashion as it was dragged through the ages: my husband assures me, for instance, that the rage in the ‘50s when he was at Grange was for shoe-lace ties, crepe-soled shoes and slicked-back duck’s-arse hair-does. We have sadly lost the straw hat - remember those – another trick, which I am sure none of you Luxmoore chaps indulged in, was to sell it off or the silver-topped cane, to some passing American tourist – ‘Gee, Marvin, get a load of this cute headwear and the shiny stick – just like Fred Astaire!’ Little has changed for the young blades of King’s, including the language, and when the girls joined the school, they too were eventually accoutred in the female skirt version of the pin-striped trousering so handy for those school plays involving waiters. However, here we come to the rub: how many boarding houses at the King’s School can boast a reunion involving both sexes Well, Walpole and Broughton for a start, but we don’t talk about them. Some of you will remember the emotive business of quitting the lofty towers of Luxmoore in New Dover Road for the comparative wendy house of Luxmoore in the Precincts. Incidentally, we are delighted to welcome three Luxmoore housemasters: Messrs Richard Roberts, Roger Medill and Bob Bee. You gentlemen it was, who defined Luxmoore in that splendid building, which I am told is now, rather sadly, a block of flats. Then Mr Bee and his wife, Martha, oversaw what must have been a somewhat traumatic yet exciting move into the Precincts. Incidentally, I’m told by OKS gentlemen (with a tribal axe to grind) that you New Dover Road fellows were considered a strange and exotic lot, lurking as you were at a distance on the edge of town, therefore on the edge of civilisation as we know it, and to them - when you finally moved, as the hooded hordes, across the ring road in 1980, and into the jolly folly we call Luxmoore now - there was a feeling amongst those in the Precincts that this move was something of an Anschluss, an outrageous invasion of territory, made all the worse by your audacity in moving into a building which had been the back garden of Linacre! I met gentlemen at an OKS lunch a couple of years ago in King’s Week, OKS gentlemen of Linacre, who have still not forgiven you this outrage. I cannot imagine how you chaps must have felt, on hearing that, in 1991, Luxmoore was to be converted to a girls’ house, in the inimitable hands of Fiona Tennick and her wonderful husband, Martin, who to me will always define what it is truly to be a scholar-gentleman. Fiona it was who established the feisty, sociable ethos of this new female boarding house, eventually lieutenanted by the now legendary Mrs Pears, who, like Sir Humphrey to passing prime ministers, has held administrative Continues on page 4 OKS Offcuts • Jan 2011 • Issue 31 3 The OKS Association • www.oks.org.uk
Page 1: OKS January 2011 No.31 Months of pr
Page 5 and 6: Never mind, Luxmoore rejoiced in it
Page 7 and 8: LORD PILKINGTON We are grateful to
Page 9 and 10: undergraduate magazine I had publis
Page 11 and 12: To Trust and To Love: Sermons and A
Page 13 and 14: Gavrilo Princip: The Assassin who S
Page 15 and 16: Musical Canterbury A Recital What h
Page 17 and 18: The OKS Association Hugh Robertson
Page 19 and 20: Rowing from Westbere Lake to West L

January 2011 offcuts_Jan Offcuts 2010.qxd.qxd - The OKS Association

Create successful ePaper yourself

Delete template?

Save as template?