King Henry VIII Grammar School

There was a popular cowboy television series in the late 50s early 60s (the time when your father was at KHVIII) called 'Bronco' so I imagine his nickname came from the similarity of his name with the 'steers' associated with cowboys. He was very much an authoritarian as I recall but generally speaking fair. After providing a rather stupid answer to one of his questions he once told me I would never get into the sixth form so there and then I determined to prove him wrong, which I subsequently did. One of his other test questions I remember was to 'list three uses for hydrogen' and if you put down 'bombs' he would deduct several marks from your score (this was of course the age of the hydrogen bomb). During one particular chemistry practical session I managed to get some acid splashed into my face and eyes (no safety glasses in those days). He wasn't in the room at the time so I stuck my head under a tap and washed it off as best I could. When he returned he was rightly most concerned about the accident and further washed me down with some alkali solution which he said 'would sting a bit'. He wasn't wrong. After that I never had any more aggro from him and although it's probably a bit over the top to say I liked him, I did respect him.

Hello PhillipInCoventry, Are you setting down a challenge for the Henry Forum to fly past Railways and Pubs in 2016?! Now, if I was a very silly human being, I would willingly accept. Thankfully, I know better, having swallowed more erasers than are good for my health! When I read your post, I couldn't help but feel somewhat envious that you have gratitude towards the school. I don't know what that feels like, but it seems good, the way you describe it. You are seeing yourself - now - as a product of your past. I can't do that, sadly. I just make it up, day-by-day, because I had the 'Failure' label attached to my school blazer. I entered the gates with hope and left with little. Alone. Walking down Warwick Road after my 'O' Level resits just thinking how grateful I was never to have to go back there again. Not the kind of 'grateful' you were alluding to, but there it is!! Thanks for your moderating and the reminder to never give up trying.

I've come across this forum by chance, but I have to say that as an ex-member of KHVIII's classical 6th I'm in disagreement with the more positive comments on Droob. Throughout my entire time at the school, it was a regular occurrence for a lesson in another room to be brought to temporary silence as we admired the vocal range of our irascible opera lover, often from a different floor. My earliest experience of Droob in a classroom occurred when he was deputed to look after a class whose scheduled teacher was ill. His reputation preceded him as he stalked across the playground, and those next to the windows shouted a warning of 'Droob'. As he entered the classroom the door slammed shut. 'I KNOW WHAT YOU CALL ME. IT'S NOT A NICE NAME'. I'm sorry, I don't see what's so unpleasant about that nickname. The fact that I remember this so vividly over 45 years later is testament to how out of proportion the outburst was. Reference has been made above to his love of whisky - was this the reason for his outbursts, that he had a particularly bad hangover on those days? Who can say? I was once told a story of his behaviour while drunk on a weekend away in a hotel that is so very greatly infra dignitatem that I forbear to repeat it. I can certainly say, though, that they were not provoked by a disappointment in pupils' achievement of high standards. My class in the classical 6th was by no means a collection of ne'er do wells, in fact the majority of us went either to Oxford or Cambridge. But a Latin lesson from Droob was not an enlightening experience - a chapter of Bradley's Arnold was on obstacle course to be negotiated without incurring the wrath of Sergeant Major Norrish. I remember his once complaining that to me that I didn't take an interest in historic Roman inscriptions (not that he'd ever taken the trouble to find out what my interests actually were), but the fact is that the ethos of the classical teachers of that era was to fill us full of facts without troubling to explain why we might possibly wish to be interested in them. Krum, the head of the classical department, was at least as guilty in this regard. 'Now, what I want is, Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else. You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts: nothing else will ever be of any service to them. This is the principle on which I bring up my own children, and this is the principle on which I bring up these children. Stick to Facts, sir!' Little did Dickens know how true to life Gradgrind's character would be in twentieth century Coventry. Droob the taxi driver - now that's amusing. 'YOU TALKING TO ME, BOY?'

Hi there Classicist, Yep, Droob sure did have a temper, as far as I could tell from my encounters with him at school. JohnnieWalker states that he has mellowed, which is good to know. There are some folk who get more grumpy as they age, so if he had followed suit, just imagine what he could be like! Blimey. That is a scary prospect! He would be using a walking stick as an offensive weapon by now. I take it that you were not particularly enamoured with the teaching methods and were also surprised, as I was, by the lack of hospitality on offer. I don't think 'getting to know you, getting to know all about you' was on the agenda. I didn't make it to 6th Form, but, hopefully, they had some sort of leaving do when you all departed for the final time. Nothing too elaborate, of course. Perhaps a handshake. I had nothing. With hindsight, that also seems odd. You would have thought they could have stretched to a standard letter of well wishes. Or maybe they did and I just threw it straight in the bin, along with my uniform and that flaming hymn book!

I remember my last day at school. For some reason it seemed that I had been rumbled for something or other - at long last - and was on Piggy's list to attend his office at break. I hadn't been to assembly but a couple of lads told me my name was in the frame for something. So, instead of a carpeting, I just went home at breaktime. It was only a couple of weeks before A-levels so it meant I could do my revision in peace and just turn up for my timetabled exams. I only ever returned for those A-levels after that day. I did wonder whether Piggy would catch up with me on one of those days but he never did. After the last exam I started work at the council as a temporary clerk before term had finished. I never heard another thing from the school except a slip of paper with my exam results on. Certainly no farewell missive from Herbie.

In the junior school, we had a music teacher called Mr Lane. He was called Bronco Layne, after the western series with Ty Hardin.

On my leaving report, Herbie put "Best wishes for the future". He'd obviously copied Pop's Housemaster's Comments, a hastily scrawled Bestwishes (sic). Yes, Pop was in such a hurry, he'd written both words without lifting his fountain pen off the paper. Herbie thought it best to add "for the future" to Pop's words, so it didn't appear like an exact copy. I suspect at least one of the aforementioned masters first picked up my report and thought "Who?".

In 2A there were three of us with the same surname, and we were referred to by the staff just by our two Christian name initials

On the subject of Ted Norrish... I can't speak against those who have reported certain negative things about him. I don't recall being taught by him (except maybe as a stand-in), and my only real direct run-in with him (earlier in this thread) showed that he also had admirable self-control under provocation. I thought I should weigh in with a half-remembered snippet of information. Is it not the case that Ted organised fund-raising for the Pestalozzi village (a charitable organisation for under-privileged children)? This might have taken place after the tenure of some of the other forum members, but if I have remembered correctly, it shows another aspect of his personality which I have thrown in purely for balance. Apologies if this has already been discussed - memory not what it was! On the subject of leaving, I don't remember anything about a final message from the head (which would have been Roy Cooke in my day); I remember having to complete a checklist of things (such as handing back textbooks and so forth), and then the completed list was presented to Taff in his office in order to obtain the necessary paperwork. He must have been dreaming about that moment! I won't claim to have been especially unhappy about it myself! As we have already discussed, a persons quest for happiness was not best pursued in the KHVIII that I knew!

Classicist, Let me get this straight. You obtain a scholarship to Oxford and the Head doesn't remember which college you will attend? I find this bizarre, because I was under the impression that you had achieved his aspiration, which was to see as many pupils as possible from Henrys going to Oxbridge. I was anticipating that you would all have had some sort of celebratory gathering, hosted by the man himself, being paradigms of the virtue of study. Wow, that place must have really been operating on a tight budget. No wonder toilet paper was in short supply. Presumably your accomplishment was duly celebrated in 'The Coventrian' publication. I would have reckoned that mine - no 'O' levels - deserved the lead story, but that they might have found a place to squeeze you in somewhere.

Utopian, Droob may well have mellowed in later life, and if so I am glad to hear it. I assure you that my memories of him are in no way exaggerated - I remember being told one story of him very much worse than anything I have alluded to above, but which I have left out because I do not know for certain that it happened and the name of the pupil involved. You say that your time at the school was under a new headmaster - is it possible that that headmaster threatened Droob with the loss of his job if his unacceptable behaviour continued? The classical sixth of my time did not provide anything that could be described as a liberal education - for both Krum and Droob teaching was a mission to instil as many facts as possible into their charges. If those charges did not regurgitate said facts to an acceptable standard the result was at best a bout of exasperated complaining. The carrot of an insight into why we might conceivably be interested in the great works of literature that we studied was never dangled in front of us. Inkers, Herbie was for most of the school a remote figure. I suspect that he was merely pretending to have forgotten which college I was going to as a conversational ploy. Although he was remote from the day to day life of the school, I do not remember him as an unpleasant person. Corporal punishment was rare, and I distinctly remember the expression of distaste on his face when he administered a few strokes of the cane to the hand of a miscreant during the morning assembly.

Hello Classicist, It could be that Herbie's look of distaste, whilst applying six of the best, was because he would have much preferred to be flogging him with the cat o'nine tails! Seriously though, I didn't have Herbie down as 'a scowler', unlike some of the teachers. My memory is more of him approaching the stage for morning assembly clad in his Batman cape, with a somewhat neutral, occasionally benign, expression on his face. I don't recall witnessing any public canings during assembly. Damn. Something else I missed out on. Yes, the use of 'remind me' as a conversational gambit. I'm not a great fan of this technique. I once used it after I'd been chatting to a girl at a party for a couple of hours. On my return from the rest room, I recommenced our discourse with 'Remind me, what was your name again?" and she didn't like it one little bit. For some reason, she perceived it as being disrespectful. Oh, well. Win some. Lose some. A good response from you might have been to reply "What is amiss, Headmaster? Are you having difficulty remembering a fact that seems of little relevance to you? May I be so bold as to suggest that perhaps you can now view things from the perspective of a pupil?" I really disliked the 'given' that the facts provided to us at school had value. I couldn't see it then, nor can I now. As far as I am concerned 'value precedes facts'. That is, in order for information to possess merit, it requires contextualisation. This being the case, then the onus is on an instructor to explain, firstly, why something is worthwhile expending the effort to learn, until it reaches the point of automaticity. This is not my idea. It is just something that I once learnt off by heart.

I always thought droobing was some sort of running/orienteering.

Octavian Droobers (Wikipedia) Club History (Ted Norrish)

It was interesting to read Ted Norrish's account of how he came to embrace the word 'Droob' in the title of the orienteering group. It seems that, as far as he was concerned at the time, 'Droob' was "well suited to unflattering or unsympathetic usage" due to it being "monosyllable". Like 'Ted', presumably. He doesn't suggest that he knew what it meant, either, but its inclusion was "taking the fight to the enemy's camp". Ah yes, the enemy within. The subversion that was rampant at the time amongst pupils, plotting to overthrow the teachers. Um. I beg to differ. Here is how I see it. We were required to call all teachers 'Sir', presumably as a respectful form of address and irrespective of whether they might actually have done anything to deserve that respect. Instead, it was accorded as a right. So, if every teacher is to be addressed as 'Sir', then how were pupils meant to differentiate between them? For example, if a pupil took it upon himself to forewarn his classmates of the impending arrival of a teacher, he could hardly say "Sir is coming" because which 'Sir' was he referring to? Could have been anyone. He could have said "Mr Norrish is coming" but if that was an acceptable means of address, then why were teachers not then simply called 'Mr. Such-and-Such'? By virtue of the rule demanding that they be denoted as 'Sir', it contributed to the circumstances in which the use of nicknames for teachers became commonplace amongst pupils. I don't think most of us knew what the hell they were about, nor why a teacher had a particular nickname. We certainly were not doing 'the schoolboy snigger' every time we used it, in order to demonstrate what a bunch of subversives we were. Frankly, in my opinion, that is overestimating the degree to which we - with a few exceptions - gave a hoot. I certainly wasn't sitting at home pondering why Mr. Scotford was call 'Fossil', for instance. I thought I had better things to do with my spare time. For all I knew, he could have collected fossils as a hobby. I can't remember teachers introducing themselves and their interests to pupils, so that we could get to know them as human beings. Who knows? Perhaps we might have begun to respect them. And they certainly didn't get to know us either, so it was a two-way street of utter ignorance. Ted could have tried this, perhaps. "Lads, please don't call me 'Droob'. I don't like it. When you talk about me behind my back - as I'm sure you do - I would much prefer 'Mr. Norrish'." It might have worked. He could then have gone on to say "What is more, after a period of grace, say two weeks, if I do hear someone mention the word 'Droob', I shall knock the c**p out of them." At least then we could have had less to complain about, fifty years later, should this outcome have transpired.