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| Sir Rowland Whitehead pictured in the gardens at Earshill in 2003 |
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“Twanky-dillo, twanky-dillo, twanky-dillo-dillo-dillo; A roaring pair of bagpipes made from the green willow” sang a couple of middle-aged men and sixty little school boys sat cross-legged on the floor in front of them in grey shorts and grey and white ties and clapped and shouted with appreciation. This was entertainment we had never seen anything like this before. The Great War has ceased to be great or a war about twenty years ago, ancient history enough to take its place with Agincourt and Crecy, but here were songs from that period in the past which we found enchanting. Who was the girl in the garden where the Praties grew, what for that matter were the Praties ? And the Banner with a Strange Device, what on earth was that ? A little bird sang Willow-Tit-Willow-Tit-Willow and a Japanese Gentleman seemed to be in charge of absolutely everything.
Cox and Ellis, fine baritone voices, joint headmasters of Durlston Court Preparatory School, formerly situate in the town of Swanage in the county of Dorset, knew instinctively how to reach the minds of active, intelligent school boys. The combination of serious philosophy, mystery and the unexpected, good humour and fun, these made the magic of Durlston. Neither Cox nor Ellis were professional school teachers. Both had served in the Great War and Cox had emerged as a Captain in the Grenadier Guards. We did not know where he had served save that he had been wounded at some stage. “You see I was wounded in the Bundy”, he would say. We rather took it that a bullet has entered his posterior but we didn’t like to ask. Badges on Hippy uniforms of the 1960’s used to say “wounded in the Arras” so perhaps we were not far out. While Cox was the extrovert, Ellis was silent and so we never knew anything of his past.
The school has been founded in 1903 ‘when Edward was King o’er land and sea’ and we had to presume that it was bought as a going concern by these two ex-soldiers in the early twenties. How much of their unique philosophy was brought in at the start and how much developed one does not know. Suffice it to say that by 1940 we, who were there, saw a polished and highly sophisticated system running smoothly along lines which seemed to have been set up in the dawn of time.
My bother and I, we were twins, went to Duriston for the Easter term in 1940 when the school was in Swanage. My father, serving in the Oxon and Bucks, drove us down to the school and, to make the occasion more palatable, booked us in to the local hotel for a couple of nights to ‘get used to the place’ before the term started. It was freezing cold. With my teeth chattering in a draughty bare hotel bedroom, on my knees, hands clasped and the smell of a wool blanket in my nose, I prayed. I prayed hard. Could the Lord, perhaps, spare time, in a busy life to set fire to the school ? I wouldn’t ever ask such a difficult thing again of him.
Next morning we woke to hear that fire had broken out at the school and the opening would be delayed by three days. First rate And I have never since, I promise, asked the Lord to do such a monumental piece of work.
With us, also enjoying a run up to the term, were two other new boys, the Goodisons, with their father, an Air Force man in a very snappy grey blue uniform. We all felt proud of our fathers who would win the War. One of the Goodison boys went on to become Chairman of the London Stock Exchange and a world expert on clocks. They were both very homesick and received letters of support from their parents and urgings to cheer up. I know because we once committed the ultimate schoolboy crime of reading one of these letters. This was, perhaps, the greatest unwritten law of boys of our age, one never, ever, read other boy’s letters to or from their parents. If I am to appear before St Peter and am asked to come clean about my sins, then this will be the first to get off my chest. “Remember to fly the Family Flag” urged Wing Commander Goodison of his sons. There I have made a full confession...
The Easter term, always the shortest, went coldly by. Icicles hung from the eves, as indeed they had done from the firemen’s hoses and uniforms, snow piled up in the corners of the playground, we crouched in the cellar at nights when German bombers came over Portsmouth, we made friends and sat at wooden desks with ink pots at the top right corner and scratchy pens with nibs upon which was enscribed ‘Waverley’, ‘Pickwick’ or ‘Owl’. The boys from rather well off families had Conway Stewarts and Swan pens that filled up and wrote for pages and pages. One such had a pen with a spiral glass nib which was always put back into its cardboard box after use with great care.
Two new boys fascinated us. Karl-Heintz and Hans Hoffmann were German refugees, Jewish I suppose though we had not the faintest notion what that meant at the time, and the sons of a textile manufacturer now settled in the north of England. KarI-Heintz, the older boy spoke good English and had a tuck box filled with what, nowadays, we might think of as ‘trade gifts’. Probably badges, pins and the like from his father’s business. These went down enormously well with everybody and he was a centre of popularity for a long time. Hans, his brother, must have been scarcely more that a child, had virtually no English, had warts on his pudgy little hands and sucked his thumb continuously. Not a very good start at an English prep-school with the Germans on the doorstep. Both boys, however, made it through with the schoolboy sense of decency and fair play from their fellows. In fact there was no bullying in the school at all.
Twins at the school were a norm after Cox had made clear in one of the school magazines that he would welcome some. The Cannings and the Franks were joined by the Whiteheads to confuse the staff and our friends alike. We were, of course, all identical twins. Names stand out in cameo. Perkins who made model aeroplanes from balsa wood and tissue paper that flew like beautiful birds on a twisted elastic. Bowker and Bowdler, like Tweedle Dum and Tweedle Dee, were neither friends not exact contemporaries but one cannot separate them in the memory. Croft, a superb carpenter and craftsman. Hancock whom we called ‘Ping, the elastic man’ after a cartoon character for reasons which were perfectly clear to us but probably not to the staff. Savill who remained cool and calm when three of us got lost in dense mist on the cliffs above Duriston Head. And then there was Rose, the son of the managing director of Thorn, a company that made radios. Rose was sophisticated, worldly wise, having grown up in the business world of North London but, more important, Rose possessed a bright red radio. We listened entranced to Beethoven and Schubert in the dormitory after ‘lights out’ on the understanding that, though strictly speaking, radios were banned, the staff found that the ensuing peace and quiet was preferable to the usual pillow fights and ruckus of young boys.
When not listening to the radio we told ghost stories. These, often blood curdling fantasies, were little masterpieces of invention though many of us had read the Conan Doyle stories and could draw on an experience far beyond our own. The supreme story-teller was Dunne. ‘Dopey Dunne’ as he was known to staff and boys alike and not without reason. His manner was detached and vague and he treated all of us with a kind of distant amusement. His ghost stories involved lonely walks at dusk along vast beaches with the waves incessantly lapping at the feet and an unknown, unnameable, unidentifiable, creature clambering over the breakwaters and eventually catching up with the terrified man who screams for the Vicar to save him. ‘But I am the Vicar!‘ announces the beast
Dunne’s interest in the occult must have been in his genes. His father had written the famous ‘An Experiment with Time’ which wanders between past and future by way of dreams and anticipates much modem thought. He lived in a castle and Professor Dunne had designed the Dunne Biplane in the thirties. It is not difficult to imagine how we found him so fascinating.
The summer term arrived and we resumed school life at a brisk pace. Sixty pale and skinny little boys with tiny bright red trunks, looking a little like cherries on cocktail sticks, rushed across the sands at Studland Bay and plunged with a whoop into the sea. We always did it like that, all together, we were Durlstonians. Ellis looked on approvingly.
Outings to Corfe Castle and walks above Swanage Bay were regular features. We built ‘huts’ in the field beside the school; rather crude affairs of branches and what was known as ‘foliage’. This was a completely new word to me and I used it as much as possible thereafter. Beyond the field lay a sandy path to the cliffs over the bay and at the end lay a schoolboy’s Eldorado. The Belle Vue café. Here was a ‘tuck shop’ which despite the hostilities would stock all imaginable sweets and chocolates. Mars Bars, Crunchie Bars, Bulls Eyes and Barley Sugar Sticks, and, most exciting of all, ‘White Chocolate’. Our family did not go in for sweets so the Crunchies and Mars bars were unknown to me. As for White Chocolate, I still experience a little shiver at the thought of it and of the memory of the ‘By’ as we called it. Needless to say the place was totally out of bounds to us. ‘I went to the By in the middle of the night, and there I got a terrible fright, for Old BV Man had died in the night, and there was his ghost so white, white, white’, chortled Dunne to the tune of D’ye ken John Peel. His version of PopEye the Sailor Man is unprintable, even after sixty years.
The summer was warm, the sun shone endlessly, we had ample time to amuse ourselves and the memory of what we actually learned in lessons is correspondingly vague. There was Maths, French, history, Latin and some geography — a bedrock for the future. The senior boys performed Shakespeare’s Tempest and the magic of the set, the island, Prospero, Miranda and Trinculo and, especially Caliban and Ariel, have been etched in the memory. One never forgets the ‘first time’.
The Cadet Corps took on new significance with a war being fought and the lines of Boer War rifles, stacked across the wall of a classroom, were often taken down, cleaned and shouldered as we marched up and down the playground. One day in an idle moment I slipped a ‘blank’ 303 bullet into the breach of a rifle and pulled the trigger. Being still in it’s rack in the classroom the noise from the rifle was deafening, the smoke alarming, and teachers ran from all corners of the building. 20 lines of ‘copper plate’ writing were imposed.
Belligerent attitudes extended all over the school. The boys, about six senior ones, whose dormitory was in the small turret of the school building, were known as the ‘Turret Toughs’. They were what we all would like to be. Strong, fearless and unconventional. They could do things — they could get away with it. The highest point, and the test of the true Turret Tough, was to pick up a full ‘slop pail’ and swing it in circles around one’s head. Then one qualified. Modern sanitation probably precludes a bucket of foaming yellow liquid standing at the end of a line of beds throughout the night; in those days it was quite normal.
Prayers were said daily and we had chapel on Sundays when quite senior churchmen would visit and preach. Somebody came and spoke about Tubby Clayton and TOC-H, somebody told us that Archbishop Temple’s cassock had come back from the wash labelled ‘One Bell Tent’ since he was a giant of a man, others urged us to pray for peace, well actually they didn’t, they asked us to pray for Victory. We sang Onward Christian Soldiers endlessly.
Cox’s pep talks got into high gear and Germans were called variously, Boche, Huns and Jerries. ‘Its not — if we win the war, its when we win the war’ he snapped at us having heard one of Churchill’s speeches the night before. To little boys without television, mass reading of newsprint, wireless, political plurality and parents who had said little to us about Europe or the World, the subtlety of ‘if’ and ‘when’ was lost on us. The humour of Temple’s Bell Tent, though, made sense.
Catchy songs filled the corridors during the intervals between lessons. ‘It’s a grand holiday everywhere, for the Jones Family in the Grand New Year, Mr Franklin D Roosevelt Jones’. Who these people were we didn’t know but the tune was great. ‘Run Adolf, run Adolf, run, run, run’ was another favourite
By the end of the summer term it has become obvious to all that the school would have to move away from the coast and to a country venue. It was announced that a large house had been taken in Somerset and that the Winter Term would start there. An idyllic seaside summer had passed and a new, unknown chapter would begin in the aut By the end of the summer term it has become obvious to all that the school would have to move away from the coast and to a country venue. It was announced that a large house had been taken in Somerset and that the Winter Term would start there. An idyllic seaside summer had passed and a new, unknown chapter would begin in the autumn.
Sir Rowland Whitehead
24th June 2003
