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

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
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OKS Offcuts • Jan 2011 • Issue 31
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