School Days By Peter Cherry

Introduction

If you attended a secondary school in Britain in the nineteen seventies, you will hopefully find this autobiographic piece - which takes about twenty five minutes to read - a humorous trip back in time. This writing is a completely true and un-embellished description of my days at the Philip Morant School in Colchester, Essex between September 1970 and June 1977. Some of the following people’s names have been changed. The text is displayed in this one long scrolling page and can be printed out if you click ‘print’ on your browser.

The Shock Of The New

When, at the age of eleven, I moved from a quiet village Church Of England primary school to the Philip Morant Comprehensive School in Colchester with twelve hundred pupils, it came as quite a shock to me in the autumn of 1970. The first thing I noticed was the loss of status: starting as a first year in an oversized green blazer you were at the bottom rung of the prestige ladder. The routine use of the F word and the C word in virtually every sentence was curiously new but could not be regarded as shocking because I had never heard them before. These words were simply not used at all in my primary school days and only caused embarrassment when accidentally said in front of my parents. Well thumbed pornographic magazines were handed round, which could perhaps be more aptly described as ‘The Gynaecologists Monthly’! There was not much ‘glamour’ to be found in the pages of those glossy magazines, although I did show a detached ‘biological’ interest in the graphic pictures.

Although a lot of the school language was harsh, there were phrases - now extinct - that seem warm and quaint from the cold perspective of the twenty tens. One of my favourite expressions was ‘I felt like a right proper narner!’ Presumably ‘narner’ was derived from the word banana, that most comical of fruits.

Colchester in north east Essex, is a medium sized town with a High Street dominated by a large Victorian water tower - called Jumbo - and has an intact Norman castle built on the foundations of a Roman temple. Colchester’s main claim to fame is that it is Britain’s Oldest Recorded Town. It is also a garrison town and has a military prison nick-named The Glass House. The town is large enough to have a football stadium, a theatre, a zoo, a leisure centre and - in the seventies - three cinemas: one of which was small and specialised in X - films. Being only fifty five miles from the centre of the capital, it is right on the edge of the London commuter belt. The Essex coast is only a thirty minute drive away and features the kiss-me-quick resort of Clacton On Sea and the genteel resort of Frinton On Sea: so up-market that it did not - in the seventies - have a single pub.

Philip Morant’s drab sixties two storey school building was alarmingly utilitarian, with a flat roof and large expanses of glass. The acoustics of the stone stairways with chattering pupils and clattering feet was memorable and still echoes in my mind as I write this. Harsh electric bells sounded five times at the start of every half hour. Of course, all schools also have that certain institutional smell. When the ‘new block’ was built in 1971 this was little better in appearance, but at least had the fresh smell of new paint inside and featured some red and green coloured steel balustrades either side of the many stairways.

The urbane and likeable headmaster, Bill Burton, seemed to run his comprehensive school as if it were a minor public school. It was just not done for boys to sit next to girls in class, only boy-boy and girl-girl on the twin desks, which in those days were in regimented rows facing forward. The short tubby balding bespectacled deputy headmaster, who had a deep welsh accent, was universally known as Dubber by all pupils: in fact I at first thought that all secondary school deputy heads were nick-named this. It was ‘compulsory’ for every single pupil to do a vocal impression of Dubber - even me - usually with the catchphrase ‘You boy! I’ve got my eye on you!’ due to one of his eyes having a squint. Dubber was also the school’s chief executioner, with the cane, in the good old days of corporal punishment but this could not detract from the fact that he was a figure of fun. I was never at the receiving end of Dubber’s cane as I was too much of a well behaved pupil. I have recently learnt that the word dubber means a person who dubs someone on the shoulder with a sword when bestowing a knighthood. Perhaps Dubber was thought to dub using the cane instead, although this derivation seems a little too sophisticated for schoolboys. In truth, the origin of the name Dubber was lost in the mists of time.

In 1992 while driving to work and listening to one of those listeners’ confessions slots on Radio One, I heard that a ‘someone’ had once directed a very powerful spotlight down onto the bald head of ‘a teacher called Dubber’ during a school theatre production. This had caused Dubber to become hot-and-bothered and forced him to move away. It was wonderful to hear the name Dubber mentioned on national radio for millions to hear: talk about rolling back the years! These confessions were anonymous and the school’s name was not mentioned, but I was certain it was 'our Dubber.'

Flick knives were sometimes furtively displayed by some of the rougher pupils in the large tarmac playground, but in those days that was not regarded as any more threatening than showing someone your wristwatch. The thought that anyone was in danger of being stabbed was simply and utterly unthinkable. Drugs of any sort did not exist in the school, not even cannabis and were never even talked about. The only way we ‘got high’ was through alcohol out of school and fifteen to seventeen year olds regularly and successfully passed themselves of as eighteen plus in the local pubs.

When it rained hard during break or lunchtime, the pupils were herded into the sports hall. There was almost a visible fog over the chatting throng, complete with the smell of damp hair and moist wool blazers. You would think that this event would occur every few days in England, but I can only recall it happening three or four times a year.

The language used differed from my primary school days’ language in that a refined form of sarcasm was routinely used to give emphasis by saying the exact opposite of what you meant, for example ‘ She never went crazy!’ referring to a teacher who over-reacted or the much used reply ‘Do believe!’ to discredit someone’s statement. In the above, particular emphasis was given to the words ‘never’ and ‘do’. This form of language was so automatically used for seven years that when I started at Lancaster University immediately after school, I was often regarded as an unusually sarcastic person and felt like a fish out of water. The thing was that our school sarcasm was hardly ever used nastily, it was just the way we talked.

On decimalisation day the 15 th February 1971 I clearly remember standing in the dinner queue clutching a new and gleaming nickel coloured ten pence and copper coloured two pence piece to pay for my meal. Twelve pence now seems very little to pay for a full dinner ( more accurately lunch ) but this amount is vividly fixed in my memory. One of my favourite school dinner dishes was chicken curry, but it had an oddly green hew: Thai Green Curry might be fashionable now, but curry was not supposed to look green in those days. For the amusement of any American readers, I can tell you that my favourite pudding was Spotted Dick with custard: I do not tell a lie.

The arrival of large gleaming device of astonishing electrical sophistication occurred when the new Drinks Vending Machine was installed. I liked the tea best, even though it did not taste remotely like real tea. Not very impressive to today’s Play Station / X-Box generation, but to us it was cutting edge technology. On the subject of electrical technology, we had a single large grey metal cased computer in the school linked via the phone line modem to the distant and, no doubt, house-sized main frame. The computer did not have a screen or a mouse but instead output results onto endless Z- fold paper via a dot matrix printer. A Qwerty key board and punched paper tape was used to input data. It frightened me a bit, because I thought of it as a ‘dreaded’ Maths Machine and never believed I would ever find it a useful tool. It was definitely for maths nerds only.

While at Philip Morant School, my humour consisted mainly of witty one-liners which I said out loud in the exact instant they formed in my head. My parents and I were walking around the small boating lake in Colchester’s Castle Park, on a cold February day, and there were four or five teenage boys at the water’s edge. Astonishingly, one of the boys got into the brown watered lake in his underpants, amid the cheers of the others. He swam for about a minute then came out and shivered violently. As my mother and I walked away, my mother said ‘They forced that poor boy to go into that freezing lake - I wished I had put my coat around him to warm him up.’ I replied without any pause at all ‘Who do you think you are, The Queen of Narnia?’

When I was sixteen or seventeen, my parents, my sister and I went for a dinner at Seckford Hall, a fine original Tudor building near Ipswich. We were served vegetables by a young waiter, aged about sixteen who was a charming lad but when he spoke his voice was camper than Mr Humphries’. While serving the vegetables he asked us a short question which instantly had all four of us in hysterics. His question was: ‘would you like stuffing?’ what made the phrase funny, was the very camp intonation culminating in the word ‘stuffing.’ The poor lad just stood there with a hurt and bewildered face. I felt a bit guilty at our outburst because I really liked this mild mannered lad of about my age. This is one of our most memorable family stories which we tell each other to this day, complete with vocal impersonation. In actual fact our family was, and is, very liberal minded so we did not mean to be unkind, but it the incident was so very funny and unexpected.

One evening in the mid seventies, during a very serious historical re-enactment of The Siege Of Colchester at the local Mercury Theatre, there was a scene where an unfortunate man was shot by first one arrow, then another. When a third arrow struck him, my sister shouted out ‘One-Hundred-And-Eighty’, which caused much - unwanted - laughter in the audience. The actors were, however, not amused.

School Friends And Enemies

Just after I started at Philip Morant School, I became good friends with Donald, who I used to sit next to in my class. He was a slim, good looking boy with straight brown hair, hazel eyes and flawless skin. A few months previously while at primary school, I had a close friend called David, with whom I spent virtually every spare day during weekends and school holidays in Blenheim Palace Park in Woodstock - both in wellington boots - as a kind of latter-day Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. My role model in those days was William Brown from the 'Just William' series of books. Donald proudly proclaimed himself working class, but was quite 'middle class' in his refined, considerate manner and his articulate speech. I once foolishly said to him ‘I think you’re really a middle class person’ and he reacted surprisingly angrily. I did not, therefore, ever mention the subject of class to him again. Donald, who was a bit of a 'leftie', did not join the Colchester Boy Scouts with me, as he regarded them as altogether too right-wing and militaristic.

At about the same time Kevin came into my life, who was a rough working class boy my age and seemed to be intent on being my enemy. Perhaps he took a dislike to me because I had ginger hair, or just because I was a 'clever' pupil. Fortunately he was in a lower stream to me. We came to blows just once, at the age of fifteen, after he taunted and threatened me. You could call it more of a thirty second wrestle than a fist fight. I lunged forward and grabbed him by the lapels of his green school blazer and very soon a six inch plastic ruler fell out of his top blazer pocket and my trousers ripped along the crutch seam. The best thing to happen was his truly horrified facial expression when I took hold of him. At least his side-kick Karl was not there to join in and there was no time for other pupils to form the customary playground circle chanting fight, fight, fight. I recognised that Kevin was not stupid, in fact he was quite intelligent. He just had a chip on his shoulder regarding school ‘creeps’: one the favourite names he called me. For this reason I played mind games with him because I thought it was best to ‘confuse my enemy.’ To really rattle his cage I would say things like ‘Oh why can’t we be friends? you’re really not such a bad person.‘ To him this was not at all ‘playing the game’ and he clearly wanted us to remain ‘the best of enemies.’ Some people seem to have the need to make and keep enemies, like most people make and keep friends. Fortunately, Kevin was not good looking, so it made it easier for me to return his hate. Most of the time he issued verbal threats along the line that ‘Him and his mates were going to beat me up after school.’ I used to say to him that ‘I don’t mind fighting you on your own, in a fair fight.’ He of course sneered at this statement, preferring to have the backing of his friends, mainly his side-kick Karl. Karl was also a rough boy and became my secondary enemy ‘by association.’ He was the first boy in the whole school to wear a gold ring in his ear: I cannot tell you how shocking this was in those days, although it is now commonplace for schoolboys.

One morning while I was off school ill, Donald was forced into a large classroom stationery cupboard and locked in by two of the rougher boys. He did not make a fuss but when the teacher called his name during registration, he called out a muffled ‘here’ from his temporary prison.

All pupils in the school belonged to one of four Houses ( but not separate buildings as in Public Schools ) called Nuffield, Aylward, Churchill and Ryder. Each pupil’s tie stripes were colour coded accordingly. There were four well defined house areas in the new block: essentially common rooms which were also used for house assemblies. I was in Nuffield House and Donald was in Aylward House. His house area was next to mine on the same floor, so I spent a lot of time visiting Donald in Aylward House. In any case, the music they played was more varied and sophisticated than Nuffield’s. Unfortunately Kevin was also in Nuffield House, which was the location where we once came to blows. From the fourth year onwards we were able to use the house areas at break time, dinner time and after school when we eagerly played snooker on a six foot table for many hours. Seven inch vinyl records were played continually in Nuffield House and seemed to alternate only between the two discs of Devil Gate Drive and Snoopy Versus The Red Baron. I now have both songs on my i-pod. In my mind’s eye I can see the exact relative position of the stylus on the records when, about once a year, I hear those two memorable songs play.

We had Tuck Shops in each of the four house areas, selling fizzy drinks and snacks such as KP Wigwams and Wagon Wheels. These were very small rooms with a counter and a shutter which rolled down. I used to help run the tuck shop. I clearly remember that a packet of Golden Wonder crisps cost two and a half new pence, immediately after decimalisation day in February 1971. These prices must seem very Dickensian to today’s youngsters. In fact you could get a whole loaf of bread for five new pence and a litre ( equivalent ) of petrol for eight new pence. I can now hear playing, in my head, a famous Monty Python sketch complete with Yorkshire accents. To put things into price perspective, a typical colour television would cost about £300 and the very first Video Cassette Recorder launched by Philips in 1972 cost a staggering £800, equivalent to sixteen thousand loaves of bread! Only rich people bought a Philips VCR in those days. Our school used two large Sony ACE reel to reel video recorders which played forty minute half inch tape reels in black and white.

One of my friends was David, who was the coolest boy in my year group and appeared to be wise beyond his years. He was in the Bryan Ferry league of coolness. When we last met on New Year’s Eve in 1981, David told me the thing he most vividly remembered about me was an incident in our metalwork class. David was fitting a piece of metal into a lathe when I walked up and said ‘you’re not going to switch that thing on are you? David was irritated, telling me to ‘go away’ and turned on the power. The steel chuck key, which I had seen sticking out of the three jaw chuck, immediately hit the ceiling and dented one of the fibrous white ceiling panels. If this chuck key had hit David in the face he could have lost an eye. I reprimanded myself for taking dry schoolboy humour too far and endangering him for the sake of a bit of fun. To this day I still feel guilty, and thankful that my good friend was not hurt.

Donald and I had something in common, in that we did not allow ourselves to be drawn into the sexual maelstrom that existed within our co-educational comprehensive school. Our other school friends must have thought us to be too ‘goody-goody’ ever to invite Donald or I to one of their ‘parties.’ These fabled parties reputedly involved getting half drunk to pop music, then soon sneaking off, in couples, up to one of the bedrooms While The Parents Were Out!

David’s close friend was Charlie, a blond boy and bit of a joker but very intelligent with it. His caricature pencil drawings of pupils - Dubber being prominent - and staff were very slick and clever. Unlike a boy’s Public School ( for you American readers, we say Public School meaning Private School ) boys in co-educational comprehensives had the choice of girls or boys as friends, but invariably chose other boys to be close companions. Another good pair of friends was Christopher and Andrew, who both attended the Colchester Boy Scouts with me once a week. Jeremy and Harry were also close friends, but were much more ‘touchy-feely’ in their humour based relationship. You could say they did a sort of never ending comedy double act. Once, a young female biology teacher said to them - and the whole class - in loud exasperation ‘For goodness sake, stop touching each other, otherwise you’ll turn into a right couple of queers one day!’ Those were not the days of Political Correctness.

I last met Christopher, David, Charlie and Clive during New Year’s Eve in December 1981. Clive modelled his image on Rod Stewart, whom he facially resembled, and had a matching hair style and hair colour. It was at the Sun Inn, which was the pub nearest my house and I met them quite by chance early in the early evening but stayed till midnight. We drank every form of alcoholic drink, including beer, Tequila, Rum and Cokes, Whisky and Baileys. The after-school warm camaraderie was touching and wonderful: In fact it was the best evening of my life and sadly never repeated even though I went to the same pub exactly a year later, to no avail. When I walked home I had double vision for the first time ever. The following morning I awoke with my first serious hangover. My sister tells the story thus: ‘Peter came down to breakfast looking literally green faced and sat in front of his empty cereal bowl. Thirty seconds later he heaved out a continuous stream of vomit which was neatly captured in the cereal bowl on the table. The flow of sick stopped at the exact instant the bowl had been filled right to the rim!’ This is just about my sister’s all time favourite family story, and she recounts it gleefully to me and my parents at least once a year.

The Teachers And The Lessons

Dubber was the most talked about teacher in the school, although as deputy head he would only take occasional lessons when a teacher was ill, as he spent most of his time managing the general running of the school and administering the cane.

Miss Turner was a formidable middle aged woman in a senior position, universally known a ‘Jungle Legs’, due to her being a stranger to the Ladyshave. We pupils always thought it was ‘suspicious’ that she was not married and rumours about her private life were rife.

During music lessons we were required to sing in a group, songs such as ‘Dirty Old Town’: of course we all chorused ‘Dirty Old Man’ much to annoyance of the teacher Mr Carlton. One day in music class, before Mr Carlton was there, Charlie put on a colourful, inflatable PVC swimming ring complete with a front protruding smiling duck’s head. The problem was that the ring had stuck tight around Charlie's waist by the time Mr Carlton arrived and he was immediately sent to see the headmaster with the ring still firmly in place. His nick-name forever afterwards was of course ‘duck.’

A boy called Nigel was unusually small for his age and seemed to have what would now be called Tourette’s syndrome, expressed with a squeaky voice. Often while my whole class was sitting quietly, we would hear him utter a two word phrase, very quietly at first them progressively increasing to a hysterical level after its tenth utterance. The phrase was ‘Ginge Minge’: at least he could be poetic. Sometimes teachers would drag him out of the class literally kicking and screaming. It those days teachers were allowed to ‘get physical’ with pupils.

Mr Dudley, our games teacher, was always keen to check that we did not illegally wear underpants when doing PE, athletics or football, and did this by standing behind us as we stood in line and pulling our elasticated shorts waist-bands out horizontally about four inches, to give him a view of our bare buttocks. We were thankful that he did not require a frontal view and all accepted this inspection routine as perfectly normal: he was simply enforcing the rules, we thought.

The cheerful, bald, middle aged Mr Carroll was my all time favourite teacher, even though he taught maths, my least favourite subject. He was only one of only three teachers in the school I knew the first name of: Albert. We pupils regarded knowing the first name of a teacher almost as distastefully as seeing them in their underwear. Mr Carroll’s catchphrase was ‘For crying out loud’ as he was born a true Cockney - within the sound of Bow bells, he said - but did not have a strong Cockney accent. His fellow Cockneys would have called him ‘a diamond’. One of his habits was to punch boys and girls on the arm in an affectionate manner, but sometimes these punches would actually hurt a bit. Mr McArdle was also a maths teacher, but with a totally different style. He was tall and slim and reminded me of a Scottish version of Basil Fawlty, complete with moustache, and seemed to have a manic edge about him.

My second favourite teacher was the white haired and amiable Mr Westwood who took metalwork classes. I absolutely adored metalwork. The act of creating something - that would actually function - with my own hands was thrilling and wonderful to me and every two-hour session just flew by, seemingly in ten minutes. I could have happily worked non-stop from morning till night, in the school workshop, like a mad inventor. In fact all I wanted to be when I grew up was an inventor. Throughout my life I have had my technical side, which eventually earned me my living, and my artistic side demonstrated first in my photography and now in writing. Leonard Westwood was very much an uncle figure to me and we went together to Aston University in 1977 to enter my invention of a device for taking photos through binoculars, for the first Young Engineer For Britain Competition. I was distressed to learn that the poor man became blind some years ago. If he is still alive I would be absolutely delighted to hear from him. While staying at Aston University he took me to visit a friend of his, whose wife was actually the bikini clad young woman standing in the basket of the Nimble Bread Balloon in the well known series of TV commercials. The fact that I had met this very famous ‘fit bird’ gave me lots of kudos amongst my school friends. While on the subject of TV commercials I remember the slogan ‘Get busy with the fizzy Soda Stream.’ Our family, of course, had a Soda Stream but it would probably have been cheaper, in the long run, to buy fizzy drinks from the supermarket. That wasn’t the point, though. I notice this brand has recently been revived and Soda Stream commercials play once more. What goes around comes around! To this day I still use only Imperial Leather soap because of the influence of a seventies TV commercial featuring an attractive and wealthy family having a bath inside their own private jet airliner.

If you want to hear about real madness, I have to tell you about ’The History Teacher’ as he is still to this day legendarily referred to on the pages of the website Friends Reunited. I have tried, but cannot remember his surname: probably just as well. To us he appeared neither particularly young nor particularly old, and was in truth probably only in his early thirties and a nice enough chap. He regularly used to do a one man re-enactment of famous battles in front of his class, running up and down, crouching behind desks and firing imaginary rifles over them. Once when angry, he smashed a wooden ruler onto his desk and it shattered into three or four pieces. One piece hit David on the chest and he theatrically recoiled in mock pain at the ‘shrapnel’ blow, with a suitably painfully sounding aaarrrgh. Not surprisingly, ‘The History Teacher’ subsequently had a nervous breakdown and had to leave the school.

Mr Rumsey was a young German Language teacher, and once so despaired at our class’s ineptitude that he knelt against the wall looking heavenwards with hands together as if praying. In that exact sublime moment, Dubber opened the door, immediately looked down at Mr Rumsey and said with a straight face ‘very interesting’. The whole class of course erupted into laughter.

In a boring RE lesson, Christopher drew a large picture of an upward pointing penis complete with balls and pubic hair on a fresh page of his exercise book. The RE teacher saw this and said ‘ What’s that, boy?’ he quickly replied ‘Its a rocket sir!’ Christopher went on to draw the word NASA on the shaft and explain that the profusion of curly scribbles at its base were ‘The rocket’s smoke.’

Our A-level Chemistry lessons were an absolute riot - the young, mild mannered female teacher could not keep us in control and only one person from our group eventually passed the exam. One day, David tried to make the volatile liquid explosive ‘Nitro Glycerine’ by mixing two readily available liquid chemicals . We all hid behind a bench in fear but also trembling excitement as he poured the liquids together but thankfully, and disappointingly, no explosion occurred.

As far as I can thank anyone for teaching me to write, I can thank the no-nonsense Miss McAlpine. Her catch phrase, often directed to her whole English class was ‘You’re too immature!’ ( to comprehend this or that piece of literature ). I was certainly not near the top of the English class in those days: many of the brightest girls were far ahead of me in ability. Now in my early fifties, you could call me a late developer in the skills needed to construct a decent piece of writing. My current writing heroes, whose styles I try to combine and emulate are Stephen Fry ( you must read ‘Moab Is My Washpot ) and Alan Hollinghurst ( you must read ‘The Folding Star’ ). I truly believe that the piece you are now reading would never have been written without the combined influence of all of these three people. In those days I dreaded the prospect of writing - by hand then - even a five hundred word essay, and would usually not start it until late on a Sunday evening, ready to be handed in on Monday morning.

Even though I could have been regarded as school and teacher friendly - some of my peers would have called me a ‘teacher’s pet’ or ‘swot’ - I thought of school as a virtual Day Prison and was so glad when the magical going home time of ten-to-four arrived. I always walked the one mile home from school and as soon as I got back, my mother would make me a cup of tea, served with with Mr Kipling’s ‘exceedingly good’ Bakewell Slices

Seventies Music In Britain

When I started at the Philip Morant School in September 1970 the Beatles had disbanded only a few months before. The Beatles were the continual soundtrack to my childhood throughout the sixties. The newly released song Can’t Buy Me Love was playing on the radio after I came home after my first day at primary school in 1964, at the age of four and three quarters.

Seventies music reached a zenith with Queen’s astonishing Bohemian Rhapsody at the end of 1975 and encompassed the whole Glam Rock phenomenon during my seven years at Philip Morant School between 1970 and 1977. The seventies were the gender-bending decade of men wearing heavy make-up and dancing in long pink dresses on Top Of The Pops. Even though Elvis Presley did not feature greatly in seventies music, from a British point of view, his death just two months after I left school seemed to mark the end of an era in music. Of course, Punk Rock became prominent from 1977 onwards and was shockingly different to glam rock.

Even when he started to appear on television in about 1972, Gary Glitter appeared, to us, to be positively middle aged and not exactly slender or good looking with it. We all loved his camp over the top Glam Rock style, complete with outrageously high silver platform boots, however. I noticed that some of his music ( Rock And Roll Parts 1 and 2 ) was used in one of the Hollywood ‘Fockers’ series of films, not so long ago.

The British group Slade gave a harder edge to the whole Glam Rock thing. Their gravel voiced lead singer Noddy Holder ( who famously wore a top hat covered with mirror discs ) never seems to age and now, in the twenty tens, looks almost exactly the same as he did in the mid seventies. The music of Gary Glitter and Slade were the continual soundtracks to our lives in those days. Not to be forgotten are the group Mud with their catchy song ‘Tiger Feet’ dancing in-sync on Top Of The Pops. Badfinger were an evocative Welsh rock group of the seventies and the tragic early death of their lead singer made their music legacy all the more poignant. Of course, all of the coolest school pupils were big fans of David Bowie, Rod Stewart, ELO, Roxy Music, Queen and Marc Bolan. Acts like Elton John, ABBA, David Essex,The Moody Blues and 10CC were considered sort of half way between the cool and the uncool.

Definitely uncool were the Scottish Boy Band, The Bay City Rollers but teenage girls including my sister were mad about them. Acts which so uncool and middle-of-the-road that only one’s mother would like them, included Peters And Lee, Nana Mouskouri, Demis Roussos and Johnny Mathis.

So many of our morning assemblies featured Cat Stevens’ early seventies hit Morning Has Broken, which I still like. Apparently, Cat Stevens did not write the song, but certainly arranged and sang a haunting version of it, which still sounds fresh to this day.

Christopher got me interested in the sophisticated Dutch rock group Focus by lending me a couple of his twelve inch vinyl records. I really liked Focus, so I went to one of their concerts at the Ipswich Gaumont with David, Charlie and Christopher. This was the first time that music volume had caused my ears actual pain. The support group was the raw and abrasive ‘Budgie.’

The same four of us also went to a standing ‘Burlesque’ concert in the Colchester Technical College. This less-than-serious group featured the comical bald lead singer from ‘The Scaffold’ ( a Liverpool group famous for their hit ‘Lily The Pink’ in the late sixties ) and we actually danced around holding and throwing six-foot yellow inflatable bananas which the group threw into the crowd. A memorable, fun evening filled with camaraderie.

My father and I used to frequent the smart ‘audio temple’ that was the best HIFI shop in Colchester, called Cheesmans. We would drool over the latest stylish and expensive offerings from Bang and Olufsen: even their remote controls were a gleaming thing of beauty. In the end, however, my father only bought a pair of Bang and Olufsen loudspeakers, which he still uses to play classical music this day and relied on a cheaper Bush turntable, Bush cassette deck and Bush amplifier for the rest of his HIFI system, which I was allowed to operate. I used to record an eclectic mix of tunes onto cassette from the radio - usually from the uncool station Radio Two - such as the themes to Van Der Valk and The Onedin Line, two of the most popular TV drama series’ from the seventies.

Seventies Astronauts, Eccentrics, Comedians And Actors

The last four Apollo Moon missions occurred between January 1971 and December 1972, while I was a pupil at Philip Morant School. These were Apollo 14 to 17 which completed nine to twelve day journeys, successfully landing two astronauts on the surface of the Moon each time. I was an avid watcher of the many hours of television coverage, usually introduced by presenter James Burke and would often record the sound of the missions, particularly the launch countdown, onto audio cassette. The whole Apollo space program seemed to be a very exciting new era in technology and may have influenced my decision to do a degree in mechanical engineering at university and then become a design engineer. We all thought that a manned mission to Mars would soon inevitably follow but of course it never did, mainly due to financial rather than technological restrictions.

Jimmy Savile - who was ten years older than my parents - is fondly remembered as an icon of the seventies and regularly introduced the TV programmes Top Of The Pops and Jim’ll Fix It, both hugely popular with my age group. Jimmy gave new meaning to the phrase ‘English Eccentric’ ( have you seen the Louis Theroux documentary? ) and is now sadly missed. He said his main claim to fame was that he invented ‘the disco’ in the late fifties: previously, people had only danced to live bands in dance halls, but he played gramophone records instead, using two turntables.

Uri Geller was a psychic ( some people would say ‘magician’ ) of middle-eastern birth, whose speciality was bending spoons and forks , ‘using mind power’ which he rubbed lightly between his thumb and index finger, on a great many British national television programmes. He became a great friend of the singer Michael Jackson, who was not actually that eccentric during the seventies, only becoming perceived as so in later decades. Michael Jackson also befriended Mark Lester, who used to be a young seventies film actor ( he played the role of Oliver in the film version of Lionel Bart’s musical, Oliver! ). Incidentally, both Michael Jackson and Mark Lester were born in 1958, the year before I was born.

Evil Knievel was an American motorcycle stunt rider only three years younger than my father. He seemed to be intent on repeatedly breaking every bone in his body when driving up ramps at high speed on his Harley Davidson motorcycle to jump across various obstacles: mainly rows of cars or buses. Evil Knievel once famously jumped across the fountain of Ceasar’s Palace Casino in Las Vegas, live on American national television, but crash landed and spent the next twenty nine days in a coma. He later strapped himself inside a tiny purpose-built rocket and tried to cross the wide Snake River Canyon, but failed to reach the other side and had to deploy a parachute. Amazingly, Evil Knievel did not die during a stunt, but reached the age of sixty nine when he sadly died from a lung disease.

Regularly featured on British TV news was the heroic American ‘John Wayne’ figure of Red Adair. He was the world’s leading expert in extinguishing oil-well and gas-well fires and always wore his trademark red helmet when working. Most notably, he put out the disastrous fire on the Ekofisk Bravo Oil Platform in the ( British ) North Sea in 1977, which was at the time, the world’s largest ever oil-well blowout.

Telly Savalas was the American actor who starred in the popular TV cop show Kojak, with his catchphrase ‘Who loves ya, baby?’ He was notable for being completely bald - which was very unusual in those days - and sucked a trademark lollipop in his Kojak show. Unfortunately Telly released a couple of singles onto the British music market, in particular the excruciating If A Picture Paints A Thousand Words, which was more talking than singing: who ever bought those ‘songs’ I cannot imagine. As American cop shows went, I much preferred the - serious - series Cannon, headed by the enormously fat - in fact almost spherical - but very likeable detective Frank Cannon, played by actor William Conrad.

The monocle wearing, rapidly speaking, Patrick Moore used to present the popular British astronomy programme, The Sky At Night. His voice and ‘telescope eye’ persona was a gift for impersonators including the famous Mike Yarwood. In fact Mike Yarwood was the only impersonator you saw on British television in the seventies. His favourite impersonations included Frank Spencer ( Oooh Betty! ) Bruce Forsyth ( Nice to see you, to see you nice! ) Harold Wilson ( Oh Mary, come and listen to this! ) and Edward Heath ( Ahoy Shipmates! ).

All comedians are, by nature, a bit eccentric, but the Liverpudlean, Ken Dodd took first prize in the seventies, with his wild hair and buck teeth. Ken Dodd is a big favourite of mine, and to this day still energetically tours with his stand-up Happiness Show, appearing for five hours on stage: an incredible feat for someone now in their eighties. I recently wrote to him - he still lives in Knotty Ash! - telling him that I saw his show in 1975, aged fifteen and it was, and remains, the best theatre evening of my life. He sent me back a charming letter, specially written - not a standard letter - thanking me for my kind words. Judging by his writing skill, he is clearly a most intelligent chap, for all of his perceived eccentricity.

My all time favourite seventies comedian was Eric Morecambe, from the double act Morecambe And Wise. He was a true genius of comedy and, in my opinion, ranks alongside Buster Keaton, Charlie Chaplin and Laurel and Hardy as one of the all time greats. Every Christmas that I spent while at Philip Morant was dominated by the hour long Morecambe And Wise Christmas TV special. In fact very nearly half of the entire population of the Britain would watch the show and if it was good, people felt they had experienced a good Christmas. Their humour gave you a warm feeling inside, and you would always smile along, if not actually laughing out loud. Eric had the gift of making everyone feel as if they knew him personally as a friend: I certainly wished I had met him before he sadly died in 1984 from a heart attack while on stage. I have heard it said that Eric Morecambe did not need to perform opposite Ernie Wise to be funny, but I do not agree: where would Laurel have been without Hardy, for example? While I think of it, The Morecambe And Wise Show was the only time you saw two men sharing a bed on British Television, but nobody thought it to be ‘odd’: it was just a funny situation, and Eric would underline his manliness by smoking a pipe in bed, when lying next to Ernie. Of course, both Eric and Ernie were married with families, but you could sense the deep affection between the two of them every time they appeared on screen.

As seventies comedy actors went, there was none finer than the amazingly talented and enormously likeable Ronnie Barker. He was able to portray - like a chameleon - two totally different characters like Fletcher in the sitcom Porridge and his Bank Manager persona when in The Two Ronnies Show with Ronnie Corbett. Ronnie Corbett was also very talented but came from more of a stand-up comedy background.

I used to adore virtually all of the Carry On Films, because they were so very British and bawdy. My all time favourites were Carry On Cleo, Carry On Cowboy, Carry On Up The Khyber and Carry On Screaming. The scripts were of variable quality but it was the remarkable cast of actors which made the series so great: The wonderful Kenneth Williams: who virtually invented on-screen camp, the effete Charles Hawtrey, the craggy faced Sid James with his trademark Hah Hah laugh, Barbara Windsor with her famous breasts, the large and matronly Hattie Jacques, and the very funny supporting cast of Kenneth Connor, Peter Butterworth, Bernard Bresslaw , Jim Dale and Joan Sims. I would occasionally go to the Colchester Odeon cinema with Donald, to see the latest Carry On Film: we last saw Carry On Emmannuelle, which was a truly dreadful film, not in any way redeemed by the rear view of a naked Kenneth Williams.

The long running TV series Are You Being Served? followed on in the Carry On tradition of bawdy British humour. The latest jokes regarding the adventures of Mrs Slocombe’s ‘pussy’ were much repeated in our school playground. As with the Carry On Films, the cast assembled was simply wonderful and to this day most people are not offended by John Inman’s portrayal of camp shop assistant Mr Humphries. A series made without that character would simply not have been as funny.

The Actress Thora Hird often acted on stage in Morecambe alongside my English grandfather, Jack, in various high quality am-dram productions, when she was in her early twenties. My grandfather, Jack, was born in 1898 and I always thought of him as a Fred Astaire type in looks and charm, partly because he was only a year older than that famous Hollywood actor. Jack was a couple of years older than Thora and as our family legend goes, ‘became intimate’ with her for a while. My parents introduced me to Thora Hird, just inside the stage door of a London theatre, where she was appearing in the comical play No No Nannette. She said she did remember Jack, but gave nothing else away. Thora Hird later became enormously famous after her exceptional dramatic television monologue A Cream Cracker Under The Settee, written by Alan Bennett, and her appearances in many episodes of the comedy series Last Of The Summer Wine. I once did a ‘pilgrimage’ to Holmfirth, Yorkshire to see the famous Nora Batty Steps - now virtually a National Shrine - where most of this long running TV series was filmed.

One of my main claims to fame is that I once sat on the knees of actor Warren Mitchell who played Alf Garnett, the bigoted main character in the popular sixties and seventies sitcom Till Death Us Do Part. I had just turned eight years old and was with my mother visiting the Blenheim Palace set of the feature film Diamonds For Breakfast, where my mother was working as an extra . She is clearly visible in the finished film, of which I have a DVD copy. Warren Mitchell took a shine to me and lifted me up to sit on his knees. Of course, I did not realise who he was at the time, as I was forbidden from watching Till Death Us Do Part in the sixties ( because of its strong language ) only catching up with the show in the early seventies.

Battles, Bombs And Blackouts

From time to time, a wrestling battle worthy of Agincourt would break out between virtually all twelve hundred members of my school and the nine hundred or so members of the adjacent Catholic St Benedicts School on our linked playing fields. The two ‘armies’ could be differentiated by Philip Morant wearing green blazers and St Benedicts wearing black blazers. Eventually Dubber would run out red faced, panting and waving his arms, to try and stop the epic fights. He had, however, about as much effect as King Canute had in trying to hold back the tide.

The seventies was the decade that the IRA regularly bombed English towns and cities and the inhabitants of Colchester were especially vigilant as it was a Garrison Town. You never, however, saw any army uniforms in the shopping or tourist areas of the town, which this was partly for the soldier’s own safety. You may find it hard to believe, but Squaddie Bashing was a well known occurrence in Colchester, occasionally reported in the local Evening Gazette newspaper. You would have thought that soldiers could look after themselves in a fight but usually of course it would be a lone soldier attacked by two or more townies. We had no swimming pool in the school so we always went swimming by taking a coach to the army’s utilitarian, shiveringly cold and chlorine-reeking garrison pool.

About once every three months there would be a school Bomb Scare which meant evacuating all twelve hundred pupils onto the playing fields. Almost certainly, the telephoned warning calls were usually made by disgruntled former pupils wishing to cause disruption. The Woolworths Store in Colchester’s High Street was, however, burnt to the ground by an IRA fire bomb in 1973. I was therefore very worried every time my parents went into Colchester town to shop, throughout the rest of the seventies.

Autumn 1973 marked the start of fuel shortages due to the combined effects of the British miners working to rule and the OPEC oil embargo caused by the USA deciding to supply the Israeli Military. Petrol was rationed and the Three Day Week was announced by Prime Minister Edward Heath, effective from 31 st December 1973. This meant that all businesses were only allowed to work for three consecutive days, in order to conserve the dwindling fuel stocks: mainly of coal and oil. At home this meant blackouts caused by scheduled power cuts in the evenings on many days, and so my generation has memories of the whole family wrapped in overcoats, sitting around a single candle in the lounge, with the television and heating off, night after night in the winter of late 1973 and early 1974. I found this deprivation exciting is a strange way: it was the Spirit Of The Blitz in my time! Stiff-upper-lip and all that! Electricity was, however, continuously supplied to most schools during the day, as it was for most hospitals and other vital services. The fuel crisis only came to an end in March 1974 when life returned to normal and we could, most importantly of all, watch television again in the evenings. The biggest status symbol in those winter months was to own a portable petrol generator which enabled the two vital amenities of the central heating and the telly to be kept going

I left school in the summer of 1977 when the James Bond film The Spy Who Loved Me, starring the tongue-in-cheek Roger Moore, was released and I saw the film at the Colchester Odeon with my parents. The slow theme tune Nobody Does It Better had a hint of melancholy about it and is now one of the most played songs on my i-pod. It serves to remind me of the days when I left the security of school behind, to go to university.

And Finally

Four years after I left school, my former school friend Donald was working at the Halifax Building Society in a small branch in Eld Lane, Colchester. The following event occurred on the morning of the 1st April 1981: that date is burned into my memory. On several mornings previously I had been photographing, from a home-made hide, a wild kingfisher bird in our garden, which originally took small goldfish from our pond but which I later ‘trained’ to dive down from a perch and take goldfish I had put into an old baby’s bath. For this purpose I now and then purchased tiny goldfish from the pet shop in Eld lane. On this particular morning I held three goldfish in a clear plastic bag full of water when I walked in to the building society and went to the till where Donald was serving behind glass with the usual stainless steel trough between him and the customer. I placed the bag of goldfish on the counter where it stayed upright for a few seconds, but soon capsized, like in a bad dream, decanting its flapping fish and water into the metal trough. I swear I had not planned this as an April-the-first stunt: events just unfolded. Donald smiled while trying to make a joke of it with his colleagues. How the fish were recaptured and the water was dried out are erased from my memory. I only have a vision in my head of the poetic sight of the three fish swimming in the stainless steel trough: what a YouTube moment that would have been!

Foot Note:

Donald, I would be very pleased to get an email from you! The same applies to Christopher, Andrew, David, Charlie and Clive.