I don't know that I can fully capture the importance of this place in my life. Seven years of my life were spent here, five in the same classroom in a modular building annex on the Mill Pitch. But more importantly, this is where I saw something great, something freely offered to us to take advantage of, which was then, before my eyes, slowly and systematically destroyed, time and again each opportunity being yanked away just before we had the chance to grasp it. With hindsight this is where my philosophical and political identity was formed.

Before getting into all that I'd like to give an idea of the place through the eyes of the eleven year old on first entering its grounds.

Love at first sight

My mum tells me that when I was little and we'd ride on the bus to Croydon to go shopping that every time we passed the school with the great big windmill in its grounds that I would say "I'm going to go to that school."

I don't remember that but what I do remember is the Open Day for prospective students and their parents. You could choose from among the local schools in your area a preference for which ones you wanted. To aid in this process you could attend open days. Which one you actually got into depended on your scores in the Eleven Plus and the bureaucrats had the final choice as to how they matched students to schools to make everything balance out.

I don't remember wallking into the school or, even though I don't remember them I'm sure this must have been the pattern, the presentations in the assembly hall to parents on curriculum and uniforms and such like. But what I do remember is touring round the school watching various displays and exhibitions by the teachers and students.

Imagine yourself wandering into the Elysian Fields and watching the fabulous mythical creatures, Gods and Goddesses, etc., wandering around enjoying themselves with wonderful pursuits. Thats what I remember seeing.

First, the setting of the school, a huge imposing three storey building with a huge blacktop playground on one side, beautiful cloister-like gardens on the other, the quadrangle, in the middle of which is a windmill, an 18th Century fully working post mill. Behind the quadrangle and the mill a huge playing field. All of this set amongst huge trees in a hillside setting of Shirley Hills, a huge, to a child, wild forest parkland.

In the playground the Air Training Corp in full uniform carrying real rifles (.22 caliber Lee Enfields) were parading and doing drills in front of the Officer with the metal hook arm. This was Cptn. Maggs, by day the Latin master, who had lost his arm in The War. The guys learned to fly gliders and by the time you left Six Form as an 18 year old you would have a glider pilots license.

Walk around in the building and you had the usual classrooms, lots of desks, blackboards, etc. Every room was a panoramic view of Shirley Hills, woodland, golf courses, the quadrangle and of course, the Mill. But one arm of the building was the laboratories. Real chemistry labs with benches, gas taps, bunsens burning away, things bubbling, condenser tubes dripping with colored chemicals, and the smell! The biology labs with the stuffed animals and specimen jars of dissected animals. The physics labs with all the optical experiments, the pendulums. This was paradise.

Out on the Mill Pitch the sixth formers were practicing archery. Real bows and arrows with those huge straw targets with the bulls-eye in the middle. Sixth formers, those golden haired men who shave and have facial hair, strolling up and down unsupervised by teachers, competing in archery. Gods indeed.

Into the gymnasium. Ropes, wall bars, pommel horses, asymmetric bars, gymnasts doing flips and sommersaults. Men with hairy armpits and chests doing crucifix positions on the rings with muscles I didn't even know people had. These sixth formers were very intimidating. Then the gymnasts cleared and the fencers came out. Real swordfighting! All of these activites were performed like clockwork with no apparent control from teachers, no shouting of instructions, just a quiet "Boys" from Mr. Hasler.

The assembly hall. A huge three keyboard cathedral organ being played by a student at one end. A huge stage, with lighting, curtains, drama performances at the other. The grand piano, the orchestra with Mr. Butterworth.

The Work shops. A fully equipped metal working shop, lathes, furnace, welding equipment. A fully equipped wood shop, saw bench, lathes, bandsaw. I think my Dad thought he'd died and gone to heaven when we saw that one.

All of this was mine. Me, the son of a working class man, this was mine.

First Form

And so it was. I passed the Eleven Plus and me and a bunch of my mates, all working class lads from Castle Hill who just had the potential to benefit from this, Clive Robinson, Dennis Jordan, Dave Corby, Stuart Danks, Bob Thompson, we walked through those gates in September in our newly bought school uniforms which our parents probably had to scramble to pay for at the shop in Croydon which supplied them. Also walking through those gates were the sons of the rich and famous in the area, bankers, lawyers, county councillors, politicians, business owners. And we mixed - not always as friends, we were cruel to each other, we bullied, insulted, but we played and we learnt, and we united against teachers and systems we shared dislikes for, and we came to know each other and our backgrounds and we formed life long friendships.

Ah, the First Formers. The lowest form of life on the totem pole, fair game to everyone. But, you knew your turn would come, one day you would be one of the Gods, the sixth formers with their own lounge room which even the teachers weren't allowed in!

In junior school I was bullied in a bad way, singled out by a bully with issues. This lead to health problems and was raised to parent and school levels. It only really resolved when he went to his school Overbury, and I went to Ruskin. So I know what bullying is. The stuff that went on at Ruskin was completely different and I only have positive memories of it. It was institutional, age based. No one particular person picked on you, and no-one picked on anyone in particular. It was just, if you are a third grader, you'd better show respect and distance to fourth and above and the second and first had better stay the hell out of your way! And whoever you were you'd better look out for Smut, Rhino, and JoLo (teachers and headmaster if you didn't guess).

I was happy.

My first form teacher was Mr. Harrison. Taught geography and history. I still remember the roman road project we did with him. So we were 1H and we were in a two room modular building erected on the Mill Pitch. It was the music room separated by a cloakroom from our classroom. This unique location, surrounded by trees with a view of the mill, was my form room for the next five years. Of course every 40 mins was a new lesson somewhere in the school so we weren't in the same room seven hours a day!

The Sound of Distant Drums...

In the final assembly that year, 1971, the headmaster, Mr. Lowe, made some announcements in morning assembly after the hymns and lesson. The government had abolished the Eleven Plus and the schools were to be reorganised! To this day I don't understand the purpose of this plan but here was the concrete result. We were to take no more pupils in at first grade for three years years. So when I entered the Second Form, guess what. No First Formers, we were still the lowest form of life on the totem pole.

In the fourth year we would take in pupils from the local comprehensive schools to form a much enlarged Forth Form. So when I was to became a Fourth Former there was to suddenly be a whole bunch of strange guys and girls. Oh yes, that was to be the other change!

So for two years things went on as before as far as we could tell, apart from being at the bottom of the pole the whole time nothing much else would change, well they took away the playground and built a big two storey building to be the new art rooms, domestic science, and sixth form center. We were basically being reorganised to be the senior school with the other schools being the middle schools. What could be wrong with that?

My second form teacher was Mr. Suffling, the sports teacher, so we were 2S. He taught mathematics as well. He was a bully and a sadist. The usual corporal punishment at school was a belt on the backside with a plimsol. Suffers used to take a run at it... He picked on a guy called Barber incessantly. None of us liked Barber but none of us liked what Suffling did to him.

In the third form is was Mr. Dalziel, 3D, he was mathematics. We were 4D and 5D as well.

The Bombshell...

In the final assembly of the Third Form the headmaster made another announcement in assembly. Every year there would be teachers leaving and joining and this was the time to announce them. Occaisionally we would celebrate retirements. That morning he announced twenty five to thirty teachers retiring or leaving, over half the faculty. The bottom fell out of our world.

When we walked through the gates into Fourth Form in September what was left of the rest of it blew up.

The Wasteland...

It seems what the teachers knew, but that no one would talk about, was that the intake into our schools wasn't just a cross-section of the whole ability range no longer separated and streamed coming in as first years. It appears that the worst of the pupils from the existing non-selective schools were extracted and dumped in our school. Its seems the Labour Party view was that in order to form two average schools from a school which was above average and one which was below average you had to take the worst of one and mix them with the best of the other.

Now understand, I'm a working class lad in a good school. This wasn't some snobbish bankers son complaining about the hoi poloi. We were getting kids with criminal records, kids who had attacked teachers, who stole.

All of the grammar school kids were regularly mugged for the next two years. We just handed over our lunch money to avoid any trouble. I never saw violence but the threat was there.

So the archery and fencing equipment went into storage in the Mill under lock and key. The gym equipment was never taken out, we simply played murder ball, or jungle gym on the wall bars for thirty minutes to "let off steam." The gym teachers and coaches were replaced by kids fresh out of teacher training college who'd majored in sports. The ATC was disbanded. The rifle range in the basement under the labs became storage. The wood and metal shops were reduced to arts and crafts (we used to learn joints and build furniture, now its shape a piece of 2x4 into a boat and paint it. Stick a dowel in it and call it a funnel and you've got bonus points for a steam ship.) The Rugby, the Lacrosse, the Cricket and all the other sports and teams and leagues where County and National Honors were sometimes won dissappeared as we all played soccer. The huge yearly drama production where tickets were sold and local newspaper theatre critics would come and comment were no longer put on. The magnificent choir, the sixth formers singing descant to the hymns, the huge organ playing masterpieces of classical music in a shool wide assmbley were no more. Now assembly rotated around the forms so they could fit in once a week for announcements and notices. Hell sometimes we even had a new teacher join to replace the endless array of substitutes.

The Survivors

The grammar school kids and the teachers who remained had an unwritten pact. We weren't the usual kids and they did what they could to help give us what we should have had.

For example, to study biochemistry at univerity you need a Biology O Level. The O levels are done in fourth and fifth form. We didn't find out about college requirements until the fifth form. The new school schedule, with all these strange new CSE subjects, hadn't had room for it. There was no demand so it wasn't available. I and a couple of other guys went to Mr. Green, who was the biology teacher as well as the teacher with the job of drawing up the school schedules, teachers to classes to kids, and said "Well, we DEMAND it!" Do you know what that man did for us? He said, if you eight guys promise to work hard with me I'll teach you during the lunch hour of whats left of the fifth form. So we did our two year biology O level in two terms of lunch hour lessons with Mr. Green. And we all passed with A's and B's.

As the grammar school kids left and moved through the system these teachers of lower grades would move on. After O levels and CSE s most of the really bad mob disappeared, they didn't stay on in the sixth form (some were arrested and sent off into the juevenile justice system!) so some of the teachers stayed, they had found diamonds in the rough in the now more balanced and normal intake to whom they again felt obligated to give of their best. God Bless them.

I was recently reminded that another change was enacted at the same time. The school leaving age was raised. I don't remember being aware of that at the time because our family view was that we were expected to take advantage of a full education, go to university, etc., all of the things which our parents couldn't get in their day. So I suppose I shouldn't be so judgmental of that first fourth form intake who left just as soon as they were allowed. They were probably bitter and angry too. There they were happy in their "secondary modern" school, set to leave at 14 and get jobs with their mates when bang! They were dumped into completely new surrounding for another two years, with all these snobby, grammar school kids.

In the lower and upper sixth our form teacher was Mr. Natan, a University Dean from Celyon displaced because of the civil war on the island which lead to its change of name. He was a refugee making a new life from scratch in Britain with his family. We found all this out afterwards. If we'd known before we might have been more forgiving of some of his quirks. He taught Physics.

Obviously, the system recovered. The quality had irredemable gone down from what it was but the transition was badly managed and unneccessarily brutal to all involved. As always, the best will manage despite not because of the education they recieved, the worst will be disproportionately catered for and get better than they deserve and the vast majority in the middle get a watered down version of what the best used to get.

There will always be a bell curve of abilities in a population attempting any endeavour. Its seems self evident to me that the minorities on the two wings, the worst and the best, have vastly different requirements. Equally clearly, the majority in the middle would be best helped by a system designed for them, not a beefed up version of the lowest or a watered down version of the highest. One size does not fit all.

Memories of school

I spent more time learning Chemistry from Mr. Marsden and his lab technichians in detention, for not handing in homework, than I did anywhere else! I spent hours in that lab, polishing the benches while asking questions. When detention was over (20 mins/max) I would be there another hour helping (hindering?) the lab technicians. Why do you do that? Whats that for? How does that work? For example, they would be making up solutions for titration experiments in class the next day. In class we would learn how to find the amount of x by titrating against known solutions of y. All the standard stuff. But what they don't teach you at O and A level is that before you can do this you have to have an estimate of how much x you are expecting in order to get a titration solution y which will give you an accurate color change over a sufficient volume of titrant to be measurable with reasonable error. So in detention before I'd learnt how to do the whole calculation from scratch, mole volumes from the reaction equations, rather than just the last step given in the cooking recipe in class. I had Mr. Marsden for Chemistry for seven years. People like him have an impact - firm, fair and fun, and he obviously knew and loved his subject.

"Doc" James. The music room was next door to our form room and was the lair of Doc James. He was long haired with a wild beard, a red headed Welshman? Passionate about music. He wrote some film scores and eventually left to do that professionally. He would be hunched up in his chair in a fur coat when we all marched in and sat down for music. He would spray the room with deodarant spray because "boys stink." He had a couple of canes and a "cat'o'nine tails" made our of one of those plaited leather dog leads, unravelled. He used them occasionally but mainly they were for show. His bark was worse than his bite! (James Robertson Justice in the Dr. Sparrow films is the picture you need to have in mind.) It was against school rules to climb the trees. One lunch time a ball got stuck in a tree near the teachers car park on the Mill Pitch. I climed up to get it. As I was hanging from the lowest branch, about to drop to the ground, I got caught with a couple of great stinging swipes. Doc James had caught me. He thrashed me right there in front of everyone. It hurt like hell but you know whats funny. Then and to this day I had no problem with that, it was part of the cat and mouse game we played. I lost that time and I got what the rules said was coming, but I'd climbed trees a thousand time withot being caught. Fair cop, no problem.

But, I nearly had a serious run in with the authorities over Doc James for a totally unrelated issue. We were playing poker in the back of our form room one Christmas term at lunch time. Suddenly the whole room went quiet. Looking up there was Doc James standing in the door way, bright red and quivering with rage. "You're all in detention tonight!" Slam. What was that about? It turns out he was going down the steps from the mill pitch which were snowy and icy and slipped, falling on his derriere. On picking himself up he sees a bunch of boys in our class who'd seen it happen, laughing. This infuriated him. Obviously, the boys denied it when he came it, he couldn't be bothered to work out who it was so he bagged the lot of us.

Now this didn't seem fair to me. So I left it twenty minutes or so and then knocked on the music room door and went in. Now this was how it was supposed to go. "Sir, I understand you've put us all in detention?" "Yes." "Why is that sir?" "Because you all laughed at someones misfortune, namely me falling in the snow." "Oh I see sir. Well actually I didn't see that and I didn't laugh so do I have to come to the detention?" At this point he would have said "No" if he'd calmed down and seen reason, or "Yes" and explained that he couldn't work out who to blame. In either case I would of been happy. I would have been out of detention or at least made an honest attempt to escape it.

Here's what actually happened.

"Sir, I understand we are all in detention?" Long drawn out "Yes." "Why...." I vaguely remember him leaping out of his chair faster than I've ever seen anyone move and I then remember waking up under the piano with him quivering and screaming for me to get out of his classroom and that if I ever talked to him that way again I'd rue the day I was born. My ear also hurt and was very red. I was livid. My Dad is deaf in one ear and when he heard that this guy had hit me in the ear he was with me. We were going to report his guy to the school, the education board, the works. Now my sister, who worked as a lab technician at another school kinda quieted the situation down. She explained what his view might have been. He just scolded a room full of disrespectful boys. Then one of them walks in and says "Why do we have to do detention just for laughing at you, get a life man, don't be so sensitive." Wouldn't you clock such an insolent little brat? Well yes I would but thats not what I was going to say. I only got as far as "Why..." OK, so he was a little quick off the mark but... So, thanks to my sister, I let him off. And what was really amazing was from that day on, he always seemed to treat me a little differently, there was always a twinkle in his eye when he had his little dig jokes. I like to think it was because he had more respect for someone who tried to stand up to him, rather than that he was afraid I might report him. In hindsight, he was one of my favourite teachers. He came back to visit the school after he had left to go to Hollywood for film scores, composing, etc. He arrived in the playground in a full length fur coat, in a bright pink limousine taxi. There were kids leaning out the windows waving at him like he was a rock star. Why was he everyone's favourite? Assembly time, music on the big catherdral organ. He'd be playing hymn music, background classical stuff. When in the rear view mirror he'd see the Headmaster and staff walking in and everyone stood up he'd play musical tricks. If you had paid attention in his music classes you'd realise he'd just segued into the "Entrance of the Queen of Sheba" from Aida. A snigger would pass around the hall and a quick look of puzzlement would pass over the headmaster's face. He'd extemporise variations on the Wedding March into some other tune. Everyone is laughing at the headmaster but he can't fight back because it was there for one or two notes and then it was gone again. We loved Doc James. And if he spotted any sort of musical ability in you, obviously I failed that test, you were one of the chosen few and no effort would be spared to grow a love of music and develop those abilities. By the time we left school, a couple of the boys in my form were playing that full school organ, could jam away on a piano playing anything you wanted in any style you asked for: Beethoven Boogie Woogie!

I'm sure many of you reading this think I'm making it all up. Honest, these guys were characters and apart from Suffling I think all of them made us better. Rather them than some bland by the book nondescript. If you want to see other peoples views of these guys, Rhino, Smut, Piggy, Wally, etc., see this website.

Postscript

I had forgotten quite how strongly I felt about all this until I was visiting back home with my kids and said I should go show them my old school and my Mum quite noncholantly says "Oh, didn't you know, they knocked it down a couple of years ago." I hope they didn't notice but I was gutted by this and nearly moved to tears. All that is left is the Windmill, now the centre piece of an upmaket housing development, and this website.