ORIGINAL MESSAGE
NAME: Vic CoughtreyDATE: 30 December 2016
CONNECTION WITH QE: Pupil 1955-1960
Derek White has drawn my attention to this photo of the whole school in 1919 on Facebook. I've reproduced it rather than put a link to the FB account, as it takes a bit of finding there. Also, photos can disappear from FB after a while. OK, so none of you were at the school in 1919, but some of your fathers or grandfathers were. Headmaster Lattimer and Miss Sims are both included.
1st REPLY
NAME: Nigel Wood.jpg "Nigel Wood")
DATE: 01 January 2017
CONNECTION WITH QE: Pupil 1957-64
Thank you, Vic. Fascinating. Worboys, Sabin and Tinson are distinctive names that featured again when I was there. No doubt there are others.
.JPG "Nick Dean gallery")
DATE: 01 January 2017
CONNECTION WITH QE: Pupil 1964-71
Fascinating to see this picture [original message]. Lattimer would have made a very good Mr Chips; and I was interested to see Miss Sims, whose name cropped up a few times when I was at school. I can certainly recall Eric Shearly referring to her, but I just wish I could remember what he had to say! With her short hair, she has a slightly bohemian look about her - possibly borne out by her obituary. In his autobiography, Jenkins says, of his first year (1930), that "among the 'masters' were two middle-aged ladies". He doesn't mention either by name, except in an appendix, but he does go on at some length about "one of these" - plainly Miss Buxton, the other lady (94) in the photo. Like Miss Sims, she was taken on during the First World War. She had no qualifications; an inspector had apparently advised Lattimer that on no account was she to teach modern languages (which is what she was employed to do); and it was quite beyond Jenkins why she had been kept on after the war. After a protracted process, he duly dispensed with her services, describing his action as "professional murder". Miss Buxton has an "A" ("apppointment terminated") against her name in a list of "masters" in the appendix. Miss Sims left in 1946, when she would have been 60 (she was 29 on appointment in 1916).
DATE: 02 January 2017
CONNECTION WITH QE: Pupil 1964-71
A quick bit of browsing drew me to this item, presumably written by someone who was at the school a century ago. (I think the author's surname may be Bedell, but it's a slightly odd site and I can't find a boy of that name in the 1919 photo.) The recollection concerns Miss Sims, with the active participation of the Headmaster's wife, leading a night time ice skating expedition on Brewery Pond (on Hadley Green?) Quite impossible to imagine anything like that happening these days. I notice that, in the photo, sitting next to the Headmaster (105) is G W N Harrison, one of the two gentlemen after whom the House was named.
4th REPLY
NAME: James (Jas) Cowen
.jpg "James Cowen gallery")
Then & NowDATE: 08 January 2017
CONNECTION WITH QE: Pupil 56-63
I too enjoyed looking at the 1919 photo of the whole school. I continue to be astonished that there are gaps in the identity of some of the people in the photo (43 people). Did not the school, in getting the photo taken, list all the pupils and make sure that all who could did appear? Our house Harrisons was very efficient in taking our names in the early forms (1B in my case). in respect of watching the 1st XV play rugby against other schools on Saturday afternoons, not that I took much in whilst chatting and larking about with my friend Tim Fawdry. I was interested to see one boy (no.84 in the photo) called Wreford. I worked at my first accountancy/audit appointment for Simpson Wreford & Co in Temple chambers near Fleet St London EC4. Mr Wreford, one of the two senior partners, used to tell me it was an old established Devon name and used to joke about those foreigners across the River Tamar in Cornwall. Names that were also familiar to me at school. in addition to those in the 1st reply, were Johnson, Turner (one in my form 1B), Cullen, Edwards, Sheward, Timpson, Harrison, Wright, Honeybourne Spencer, and Blackmore (one in my form 1B). There are several with the same surname - perhaps related.
DATE: 08 January 2017
CONNECTION WITH QE: Pupil 1964-71
I still can't recall exactly what Eric Shearly said about Miss Sims [reply 2], but I am pretty certain that he referred to her in connection with a retired headmistress, Mrs Vera Wimpress, whom Steve Lucas has mentioned [125], who also taught a range of subjects to junior boys: in our case, geometry in 1C; English (making frequent use of Prelude to Poetry by E H Jenkins and A S Vaughan Thomas); and RE. On one occasion in 1C, Eric took us to task, in a measured way, for not giving her our full attention; and, although I'm not entirely sure, I think he may have deployed his own past, as he sometimes did, as a means of empathy (ie there was a lady who, in my day, also had a role with junior forms). I have discovered belatedly that there are two first-hand recollections of Miss Sims on this site [at 78/1 & 78/12]. She is described by Philip Ward (1935-44) as "short, mousy, elderly and TOUGH". Her 1960 obituary [linked to reply 1 above] says that she "proved so useful with little boys", although Mr Ward says that if, as was thought, her function was to ease her charges in gently, "she did nothing of the sort".
6th REPLY
NAME: James (Jas) Cowen Then & NowDATE: 10 January 2017
CONNECTION WITH QE: Pupil 56-63
I enjoyed reading the 1916 "Grandfather's Journal", Nick [3rd reply 3]. I am delighted and full of praise for your finding so often interesting links. This was a time presumably when boys boarded at the school, unless I have presumed too much. It is interesting to me that homework in those days was called prep like in present public schools, a foretaste of EHJ wanting QEs to be rated at the same status as them. Its status today is clearly as good in so many ways. It is also great that it brings to life a little the HM, Mr Lattimer, and his family as well as Mrs Sims. In connection with writing about my old boss Mr Wreford [4th reply] and his views about those foreigners across the Tamar, I was interested to hear a similar reference but this time by the Cornish to those across the river in Devon, who were themselves regarded as the foreigners. This was on The News Quiz on Radio 4 (on Friday at 6.30 p.m. repeated on Saturday at 12.30). I liked the additional fact given that one person in Cornwall was always referred to as "the traveller" as he had actually been up to London once on a train. I myself was always referred to as a great traveller by our local petrol station on account of driving to Andorra in my Datsun to go skiing with 2 children and without my wife. Every time I saw the proprietor in the garage he referred to this so called great exploit. In connection with Devonian views and in particular A Plymouth man's one I recall the comedian Josh Widdicombe referring to those from Exeter coming to play Plymouth Argyle as the northerners. Meanwhile I have yet to meet another Mr Wreford from Devon but maybe will some day.
7th REPLY
NAME: Nigel WoodDATE: 12 January 2017
CONNECTION WITH QE: Pupil 1957-64
Just a couple of quick points prompted by reply 6... We live near Exeter, and we pass Wrefords Lane whenever we travel into the city. And this very morning I was chatting to a Devonian born and bred near Tiverton, who astonished me by saying that no-one living in the area when he was a boy (in the 1950s) would have considered crossing the nearby county boundary with Somerset, for example to shop in Wellington or Taunton.
8th REPLY
NAME: Nigel WoodDATE: 23 February 2017
CONNECTION WITH QE: Pupil 1957-64
I find any school photograph from a hundred years ago [see original message] oddly moving. It's partly because, to state the blindingly obvious, at the moment the shutter was opened, most of the pupils had their lives ahead of them, yet now, every single one of them is dead. The dress and hairstyles are, to my eye, not so very different from those of forty years on (1959), and this added to the poignancy. I don't suppose a school photo from 1879 would have had quite the same impact on me, as Victorian schoolboys would instantly be seen as long dead. One way, of course, in which the actual 1919 photo differs from the group photos that we're all used to, is the absence of smiles. When did fatuous grins become de rigeur in photos?
DATE: 24 February 2017
CONNECTION WITH QE: Pupil 1964-71
Well put, Nigel - it is a very poignant photo, and maybe in part because the war supposedly to end wars had ended the previous year. It's a little disappointing that nobody appears twice in the picture - the famous mad dash from one end to the other while the camera is moving round. As regards apparel, some of the collars are similar to those that were very fashionable around the time that I came to the school; and, having commented previously that Miss Sims looked a bit bohemian, I have to say that her outfit (not sure if it's a dress or a two-piece) looks a bit like something that Julie Driscoll wore in the late '60s!
Then & NowDATE: 24 February 2017
CONNECTION WITH QE: Pupil 1954-59
And of course, some of those boys will have lost fathers, brothers and uncles in the war. Also, some of the older boys will have been stunned to hear of the deaths of OEs who had been at the school at the same time as them. Apropos of which, did anyone else see the recent BBC4 dramatisation of Vera Brittain's Testament of Youth? I thought it captured very well (in just two hours) the emotions of the sheltered and chaperoned Vera as she first loses a beloved brother and her fiancé in the Great Carnage, and then finds herself plunged into the unspeakable horrors of a makeship field hospital as a VAD nurse. The film shook me and Angela as much as that very long book had done 30 years earlier.
DATE: 13 April 2017
CONNECTION WITH QE: Pupil 1964-71
A further thought about the 1919 photo was prompted by an obituary in the latest issue of the Elizabethan of J Chapman who was at the school from 1944-52. It says that "in 1944 John took up a place at QE with Miss Sims": in other words, there will still be old boys around with a direct link to a teacher in that picture. According to the appendix in Jenkins' book, Ken Carter was School Lieutenant in 1944 and so is one of them; H G Thomas (Lieutenant in 1952 and thus a contemporary of Chapman) is probably another; and see also reply 5 above regarding a first-hand recollection by Philip Ward (1935-44). Probably the only master in the photo to have lasted long enough after Lattimer's departure for there to be any "overlap" with living OEs is Knowles, who, as Second Master, retired in 1938 on health grounds and evidently committed suicide a few years later. Jenkins described him as "too set in his ways to sympathise with the fresh impulse given by the move to the new buildings", but adds, rather underwhelmingly, that he was discreet and reliable and "helped me greatly in my first year or so". Philip Ward recalled Knowles (at 78/1) as kindly and gentle.