King Henry VIII Grammar School

Hi all, Mr Leachman was a dedicated teacher, who along with Mr Brotherwood, tutored me whilst I was in Paybody hospital, for months on end. His son was at the school.

Mr Leachman had an ongoing spat with the council in Kenilworth in the early 60s when they erected a lamppost outside his house, with the light adjacent to a bedroom window

Bugsy did indeed take swimming one year - and he actually got into the pool, which I don't remember anyone else doing. He was involved in an accident when he was swimming across the diving area and someone jumped of the board and landed on him - an accident I believe as the boy involved was fairly innocuous. Nobody hurt fortunately, but the guard nearly swallowed his whistle. Regarding Slim's story of someone fiddling with his hearing aid; there were a couple of lads who would produce a very high pitched whistle from between their teeth, not very loud, but persistent. They would stop when he started shaking the hearing aid and then start again a bit later. We had him for geography one year and people would distract him into talking about his service in the Far East. Far more interesting to a bunch of 12 & 13 year olds.

We did the same with Fossil. He was keen on giving us a dreaded test, to see how much we'd learned. I was lucky if I got more than 5 out of 20 in a history test. One of the lads, whose hobby was archaeology, would come to class with some interesting specimen of stone or fossil, and deliberately present it to Fossil, with some question that put Fossil in his element as the fount of knowledge on his specialist subject. He'd talk for so long, going off on tangents, that I lost count of the times he'd eventually look at his watch and say "I was going to give you a test, but there isn't time now, so we'll do the test next lesson". Of course, by the next lesson the test had been completely forgotten. My performance in geography was equally abysmal. Dickie Dawson was also fond of tests, and one year, he took just about all the classes. We exploited the fact that he didn't keep good records of which class had done what, and would start at the beginning of the putative test lesson by asking if we'd seen "the slide show of North America?" We all looked puzzled, pretending we hadn't seen it, and he'd fall for it: "oh, it must have been 4C I showed the slides to then". We escaped many a test, and I remember seeing one of his slide shows several times.

I recall Dickie Dawson's tests being helpful to the learning process. Clear instructions given as to what knowledge was to be tested and what we would required to be successful. I contrast this with Alfie Crocker's Chemistry tests. When he announced there would be a test next lesson I dared to ask what it might include. The unhelpful answer was "chemistry" but he threatened to add the odd Latin or French question! The saving grace with Alfie's tests, sometimes given at no notice, was he allowed us to mark our own papers. Being a strict master, he believed we would mark our work honestly; little did he know what was really going on. Herbie's tests in second form RE lessons were something else. Successive homeworks were to learn by heart the school song, the Beatitudes, Ecclesiasticus 44 and so on and following lesson began with writing out the learnt piece under test conditions. As a fuzzer I was amazed to see one lad copying his piece direct from an open Bible but even more surprised when another lad raised his hand to tell Herbie that one of his classmates was cheating. I recall both lads had the same surname but the lad caught cheating was the son of a high up at the cathedral. Needless to say Herbie was not pleased and that was the end of any cheating in his tests! Bebop Barnes never cottoned on to how I cheated in Music. I think he encouraged us to cover our exercise books which I did dutifully. As the cover looked boring I decided to cover it with musical things like time signatures, notes on staves, EGBDF, FACE etc. In his tests my covered book sat on the desk providing me with useful information. So much for the rigours of testing at KHVIII!

Mr Irwin had a very interesting way to score our attempts at French dictation. He would dictate a piece of writing at a nice slow pace, and then we swapped papers with a neighbour and you had 20 marks given to you straight off. As he went through all the correct spellings etc, you lost half a mark for each error. There was some negotiation allowed, and a more-or-less democratic concensus could be reached as to whether an error was excusable. At the end, the marker called out the score and Mr Irwin recorded it. At the beginning, it was easy to score zero! But as we improved, higher scores began to be recorded. I cannot recall anyone ever scoring 20, but there were some bright lads in the class, so perhaps they did. I still have a working basic conversational French today, so the teaching worked! During the oral examination for O-level, the external examiner asked me to talk about my holiday. We had been told not to be nervous, and to ask the examiner if there was a word we had forgotten. Perhaps not surprisingly, when I had to stop to ask what the French for 'LandRover' was, he said it was 'LandRover'... and still I passed! I still wish that it had been possible to do German and Greek instead of French and Latin; ah well!

Maybe it's my memory, but I don't remember many teachers giving us tests. We certainly had them in Latin, from Bert Parkinson and Kitty Fisher. I didn't mind those as I was top in Latin and found them easy; it was simply a case of remembering a word from vocabulary, or conjugating the odd verb. So I never declined! Occasionally the odd dreaded test in geography (not my subject). And I recall that just about all the history teachers I ever had were addicted to those wretched tests, as history was another non-subject in my book. Foghorn in the fuzzers, then Fossil for the fourth forms onwards. Every other week was a test, it seemed, certainly with Fossil. In the thirds it was the young blond-haired fellow, whose name still eludes me (Cazulet, it has been suggested) - I don't remember him giving us a test, but then I can't remember much from those history lessons, more's the pity, I now realise. What I do remember (apart from talking to the trees) was one of Foghorn's tests, for which we were given tiny bits of ripped up paper for our answers, each measuring about 2" wide by 6" high. We swapped with our next door neighbours for marking, and I dreaded handing in my mark (out of 20): "Eight, Sir". "Eh? You'll end up in the D form!" he boomed. I had been honest. My mate hadn't scored much better than I, but he upped his score to about 16 when asked. At the end of the lesson, Foghorn stood by the door and made us hand in our marked papers. The following week, he slammed the door shut and yelled " 'oose Dozy-akken-booken-vald-hinny?" My mate sheepishly owned up. Foghorn laid in to him verbally about cheating, gave him a prod in the chest with his big index finger, and put him in detention. I won't reveal my mate's real name, but as I've said before, Foghorn delighted in mispronouncing surnames, especially ones of foreign origin, so that it sounded nothing like the real name. It caused us great amusement, and livened up an otherwise dull session. Other teachers all seemed to make the effort to remember correct name pronunciations.

I was never taught by Froggy Irwin, but J P Bedford, "Bedpans" (?), used the negative scoring on tests and homeworks in his Physics lessons. When your work was returned there were no ?s or ?s but a series of negative numbers, eg -1 or -1/2 which when subtracted from the total gave your score. I was disappointed not to continue with "Bedpans" in the sixth form where "Pop" Cork (a great name for a Physics teacher) and "Always ask why" Hough took over. You may be surprised to learn that after KHVIII a Physics degree and a teaching career followed. Not sure who might have been my role model, although I'm sure I adopted a few of their techniques. Happy days!

My whole career would probably have panned out completely differently if not for having different physics teachers. For two years, I had a science career in mind. I never had Pop Cork, although he was our house master (Whites). I presume "Pop" came about because he was one of those teachers who appeared to be really old. In the fuzzers we had RC (Chapman) for general science. I was always interested in mechanical things, science, and electricity, and loved the subject. In the thirds, we had Ron Hough, and I fared even better. He once complimented me on how neatly I had drawn a diagram. He was a character. No-one dared incur his wrath by messing about, and he was an excellent teacher. Then in the fourths, we had Fag Barker, and that is where my interest in physics ended. He was a young bloke in a suit, a Bill Gates lookalike. He was fresh out of college, and his mind was still lost in degree-level theory which he would spend a whole double period reproducing in chalk, whilst we were expected to copy it all down. That's not how you learn. I switched off because I couldn't understand it. Especially when there is no practical experiment to break up the monotony, order in the class, eye contact, and the conversation is directed at the blackboard in a Kermit the Frog voice, but with an English, not USA accent. Fag was only at KHVIII for one year then disappeared.

To be fair, I think we did about two experiments during the whole year. The only one I remember is where everyone was messing about, which happened in just about every lesson. We had to construct a scalene triangle, about a foot across (that's 300mm or 0.3m for anyone born after 1975 AD, or should I say 1975 CE). Then we had to calculate and mark the centroid. Fag explained that the centroid was the balance point, and that we should prove it by clamping an upward-pointing compass or divider point on a retort stand, then making sure our triangle balanced. Of course, it wasn't long before the class was engaged in a contest to see who could make their triangle spin around the fastest. Fag was not amused in the slightest. I can still see the look of disappointment and exasperation on his face. He never said a word though.

Wasn't there a chemistry master called "Fag" as well? Fag Wiley? I remember in one lesson we were talking colloidal suspensions. "A good example is smoke in air. Just a moment." *click *spark *puff "Now you can see the layers forming as the air currents..."

When I was there, there were three chemistry teachers, Alfie Crocker (head), Tringham, and Snoz Wiley (Wyley?). Tringham took me for the two years of compulsory chemistry in the thirds and fourths, but never either of the others. Tringham was quite young compared to the other two.

Fag Barker was so called for obvious reasons. He was never early for lessons. We all had to wait outside P3 to be admitted. Eventually, he would emerge from the main building and slowly walk across the playground puffing away on a cigarette. He would say "in you go" and eventually join us in the lab once he had finished smoking. We were in for a long session as it was a double period. Most lessons started the same way. He would walk into P3, stand at the front of the room looking at us, as we awaited instructions. Then, after a pause, he would tell us what to do, probably miffed that we had not shown initiative. He had a slightly odd accent which we never pinpointed, and some funny turns of phrase; e.g. his opening instruction was "get.. out.. your.. boooks" [sic], instead of the more usual "get your books out". I do wonder if smoking would have been less encouraged in the school, nay, frowned on, had the precedent and example not been set by Piggy Shore.

And there's more. Fag's inability to keep order in class (contrast that with Ron Hough's physics lessons!) was obviously known by the whole school, in particular by the staff room, which surprised us kids. Apropos of nothing, in the middle of a Latin lesson, Kitty Fisher suddenly announced that our class was misbehaving in physics lessons, and told us it had to stop and that we must improve our behaviour. Kitty said it as if he was our form master, which he was not (can't remember who was; it may come back to me). Kitty then picked on one of the less well behaved lads in my form (again, can't remember who). He castigated him, as if he were the ringleader, and made comments to the effect that "Mr Barker is obviously not an established, merely a trainee teacher; he's only a young ex-student with no proper teaching experience. Don't you think it unfair, Smytheson, to take advantage of that fact and make Mr Barker's life here difficult?" In truth, many of the lads thought any teacher was fair game.

But at least Fag did finish his fag first, then, having diligently made sure it was extinguished, carry it into the building and put it in the waste bin. Unlike Piggy, who would stub out a partially smoked fag underfoot before entering the school hall for assembly, and leaving it for the caretaker or cleaner to sweep up.