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IV.

POLYTECHNIC SECONDARY SCHOOL 1919-39

P. Abbott

1.

IT is permissible to say that the difference P. Abbott (or P.A. as he was invariably called) made to the School can be explained by the simple fact that he was an educational expert. A recital of his career and of his activities inside and outside the Polytechnic makes this clear. He was appointed a Form Master in the Commercial School in 1895 and his efficiency and skill as a mathematics teacher led to his appointment in 1907 as the first Head of the Polytechnic Mathematics Department, the parent of the present Maths and Physics Department. From 1918 to 1919 he was temporary Assistant Director of Education of the Poly owing to Robert Mitchell's absorption at that time in work for the Government in connection with the technical training of ex-servicemen. There was thus a chance at one time that he might be Robert Mitchell's eventual successor. But this progress merely testified to his success inside the Polytechnic, and at a time when men combining organising ability with high academic qualifications were still comparatively rare in Regent Street. What marked him as so very different was the range of his educational activities outside the Polytechnic. He was Honorary Secretary and then President of the Association of Teachers in Technical Institutes, he was Leader of the Teachers' Panel of the Burnham Technical Committee, and did much pioneer work in the formation of that committee; and he served also on the Secondary Schools' Examinations Council. These things meant that during his career P.A. was actively concerned with organisation and negotiation in connection with the status, salary and pensions of an important section of the teaching profession, and that he was intimately acquainted with the organisation of the university examinations taken by secondary schools all over the country. For many years, right into his old age, he wrote and edited technical books for two great publishing firms.

          Here, then, was a complete professional man come to proclaim that the long reign of the amateurs (as he regarded them) was over. Good will, supported by nothing more substantial than rules of thumb applied by men with meagre academic qualifications, was no longer enough. This rather parochial, complacent school, divided in its organisation and lagging behind the times, had passed into the hands of an Enlightened Despot. At once, he buried the school's past with the abrupt haste of a new dictatorship demolishing the legends and memorials of its predecessors, and set out to focus all his own energies and those of his subordinates on the one purpose of making the school the most successful of its kind in London. He knew, as nobody else in the Poly did, just what was needed to achieve this; and with a like superiority of personal ability he knew how to do it.

          P.A.'s first two Speech Day Reports make abundantly clear the manner in which he had already determined to set about his task. To the general principles he laid down thus early he adhered until the day of his retirement.

          "The past year," he declared in July, 1920, "has marked an epoch in the history of the School. After having separate existences for over a quarter of a century, the two schools, Commercial and Technical, were amalgamated into one School with two sides. The resulting unity of policy, concentration of effort and pooling of resources will, it is hoped, result in the future of one great school worthy of the Institution in which it is housed."

          The future is to be assured by just those methods for the lack of which the past is perfunctorily brushed aside-"unity of policy" (his policy); "concentration of effort" (by him and, willy-nilly, by his staff); and a "pooling of resources" (under himself). And then for the first time - and so early - comes that phrase which repeatedly bursts into speech and print in the next fifteen years, "one great school." Nothing less than a "great school" would do. Not for P.A. the affectionate phrase of former times, "the dear old Poly." Indeed, with supreme egotism he appropriates the epithet "great" to the School he has controlled for so short a time and denies it to the Poly - "one great school worthy of the Institution.. ."

          Deceived, no doubt, by the toneless delivery of the words and the not very impressive appearance of the speaker, many no doubt thought this was just one Head Master's Speech Day Report like any other. If they thought so, they under-estimated him.

          From the body of this Report one sees that P.A. had at once brought into being the institution by which alone a "great school" could achieve its greatness, a Sixth Form: -

          "The year has seen the introduction of various reforms which have for their aim the raising of the standard of attainment in the School. Foremost amongst these has been the institution of Advanced Courses for capable boys who have matriculated . . . The training provided will no longer end with Matriculation, but the School will fulfil one of its proper functions by passing on boys of suitability for a higher specialised training of a University standard."

          This is quite different from Q.H.'s aim of producing capable clerks and qualified artisans, though it is fair to repeat that the School had at no time done merely that. And P.A. was at pains to rub it in, too. The teaching of book-keeping, shorthand and typewriting in the school had been abandoned: -

          "Experience has shown that there is a tendency for those boys who possess qualifications of this character only to remain in the lower ranks of commercial workers; at the same time the majority of employers desire intelligent boys with a good all-round education . . . It is the proper function of a Secondary School to provide this all-round training."

          P.A.'s "great school" was not going to produce mere clerks.

          Within twelve months, the outlines of the future are seen more clearly still. The crisply statistical approach to educational advance, the mathematician's measurement of progress by reference to the precise number and status of examinations passed was already in being; and for the next decade or so, the phrase "these numbers constitute a record" provided an annual calculation of glories scientifically assessed by the unassailable evidence of results.

          "In the matter of numbers the School is larger than it has ever been. The total number on roll this term is nearly 600 . . . There are over 110 boys in the School who are over the age of 16 . . . This year there are 21 boys in the Sixth Form who have matriculated and are working for various intermediate examinations for degrees, and for the Higher School Certificate and for University Scholarships; whereas two years ago none remained after Matriculation.

          "Four boys have passed the Inter B.Sc. (Engineering) examination at the University of London, being the first in the history of the School. A number of students have entered for Inter B.Sc., Inter B.A. and Inter B.Com.. . . one year after passing the Matriculation examination.

          "At the General School Examination 20 boys succeeded in passing Matriculation and 8 others passed General Schools. These successes are a long way ahead of any previous result . . . Seven boys were awarded L.C.C. Intermediate Scholarships, one a
Middlesex Intermediate Scholarship. Only two of these scholarships have been awarded to boys of this School in past years.[28]

          It was indeed a far cry from the time when possession of London Matriculation was enough to get you a job on the staff or your photograph in the Polytechnic Magazine. Mention of scholarships moved him to utterance of the supreme article of belief upon which he justified this demand for higher standards: -

          "The highest education obtainable is now open to all suitable boys, merely by passing the appropriate qualifying examinations."

          "The highest education obtainable" - this was the glittering prize that P.A. now declared was to be won "merely by passing the appropriate qualifying examinations." That was why examination statistics and the numbers of boys staying on in the Sixth Form were so important. They were a proof that this was a school where these magical qualifying examinations were being successfully dealt with, and were an incentive to parents to let other boys stay on and do likewise - for the ultimate prize was nothing less than "the highest education obtainable."

          P.A. was not alone in holding to this somewhat simple faith that "the highest education obtainable" was something that happened automatically to whoever successfully surmounted a succession of academic hurdles called examinations. It was the faith of most grammar school heads at this time and it explains the great surge of enthusiasm which gave vigour and a sense of purpose to the work of these schools all over the country between the wars. But few Heads lived and worked so steadfastly and with so much "concentration of effort" to translate this faith into work done and honours achieved as P.A. did; and there were years when the Matriculation successes of the school could be rivalled by few other schools in the country.

          It was a remarkable testimony to what could be achieved by singleness of purpose and an almost grim insistence, year in year out, on the single virtue of loyalty. Nothing mattered but the reputation of the School. It has been noted that in his first report. P.A. did mention the Poly once - but merely as an Institution in which (almost accidentally one might suppose) his potential "great school" was housed. In this second report, the Polytechnic is not even mentioned; and as for the fact that the School had existed since 1886, that is simply ignored: -

          " . . . there is another aspect of school life which we are equally keen in developing and which is slower of growth and more difficult to foster - I refer to that subtle and undefinable spirit and sense of loyalty to the best traditions of a school which is always a characteristic of a great school. It is that spirit which leads boys, present and past, to make any sacrifice rather than bring discredit or dishonour upon the school. It produces a feeling of kinship which ever binds the boys to their school, makes them rejoice in its achievements and supplies a bond which unites them all the world over. These traditions are yet in the making in our school. To achieve complete success we must all unite, parents, boys and masters, in playing our appropriate parts in training our boys to be upright men and good citizens of whom the school may always be proud."

          Once again one notes the proud phrase "a great school"; but more striking is the jettisoning of 33 years of the School's history in the arrogant assertion "These traditions are yet in the making in our school." It was a hard saying, coming from a man who had himself known the School since 1895, and among whose assistants were men who had known it even earlier than that. Were such O.Q.'s as Russell Ross, and Fred Moser and Oswald Groenings and Isidore Salmon in the Large Hall that day in 1921, one wonders? W. C. Lee and W. J. Saunders certainly were. What, they might legitimately ask, as they heard these words, had they been doing these past thirty odd years? But Saunders only taught mechanical drawing and Lee merely looked after the Preps. Because they could contribute little to the coaching for the academic hurdle race, their years on the playing fields at Merton Hall, at the Paddington Rec., at Wembley Park and Chiswick, in encouraging a loyalty that has in fact survived to this day, now that not only they but P.A. as well are dead, all counted for nothing on that day in 1921.

          The fierce beam of the cold mind that will not diverge to play for even one amiable moment on the old days and not direct a solitary ray of illuminating courtesy upon the Polytechnic, will not move through more than a degree or two even when it invokes the idea of "citizenship." P.A.'s "great school" will train "upright men and good citizens" certainly; but upright men and good citizens of whom the school may be proud. Presumably the nation, or even perhaps the world, might be proud of these upright men and good citizens: but that was not P.A.'s concern. If the school had reason not to be proud of them the praise of princes or the acclamation of multitudes were irrelevant details.

          Examination successes being the declared aim, an immediate raising of the standard demanded of entrants to the school was necessary. There were three sources of entry. There were those who secured free tuition and a maintenance grant from the L.C.C. on their showing in the Junior County Scholarship examination. This was the fiercely competitive counterpart of the modern "eleven plus" examination. Any child who could overcome this hurdle was bound to be good academic material, for it was exclusively an attainment test in English and Arithmetic, and was designed to keep most children from getting scholarships to grammar schools rather than to let a good proportion of them in. Success depended on much more than aptitude, or "intelligence," and the standard required in both English and Arithmetic was much higher than that reached by the average grammar school entrant now. The second group were those who, by passing the Polytechnic School's Free Place examination, secured free tuition, but no grant. Since these boys would be a somewhat lesser charge on other people's money than scholarship boys, this examination was a little easier; but P.A. saw to it that it wasn't much easier. Finally, there, were the large number who came to the school as fee payers. For most of them there was a fee payers' examination. Since this was to admit boys whose parents would pay good money it could not be impossibly stiff, but P.A. of set purpose made it almost as hard as his Free Place examination:[29] In his 1921 Report, P.A. says: -

          "So great is the demand for admission to the school that on the average only one out of every five applicants can be admitted. Consequently the standard of admission has been raised, with results that will be felt in a few years' time."

          P.A. was thus no man for attempting the job of making silk purses out of sows' ears. Boys of inadequate ability by the high standards he set were kept out. If he stretched a point (as he often did in the earlier twenties) and let in boys who failed his entrance examination, they were not allowed to stay long enough to clutter his precious Matric forms with failures. They went out at the end of their fourth year, at the latest. Their places could always be filled: for news that this was a difficult school to get into increased the prestige attached to those who did get in. As early as March, 1922 there were 320 candidates for 19 Free Places.

          A word of caution is perhaps needed here, however, in order to keep the balance fairly between the new order and the old. On P.A.'s own showing, the Sixth Form began its record of successful examination results in the first two years of his headship. This means that the standard of ability among the boys already in the school when he took over cannot have been low. Mr. Lambert for instance insists that only twice in his thirty years in the school did he come across forms to equal in ability the one he taught in 1918 in his first year in the school. Some of the names on the School register in 1919 and 1920 were of boys as distinguished as any produced at any time before or since. R. G. Jenkins, T. Aldridge, L. E. C. Hughes were among the seniors, and lower down the School there were boys of the calibre of the elder of the two Qvists, Freddy Wort and E. Sarmiento. The Quintinian's first three numbers, published in 1920 (after which there was a lamentable break until it restarted under G. E. Dench in 1926) were edited by the senior boys themselves; and the standard of production and the general tone indicate beyond argument that whatever faults of organisation the school may have had before P.A. it had attracted to itself some very able boys indeed. In fact it was they who laid the foundations of P.A.'s own reputation; and through them, the old Commercial and Technical Day Schools gave the new united Polytechnic Secondary School a flying start. P.A.'s virtue was principally that he did all he could to encourage an even larger number of able boys to enter the school and gave them greatly increased opportunities once they were there.

          A school dominated by P.A.'s insistence on high academic standards could, of course, seem quite a grim place at times. In some respects and for some boys, particularly those to whom mathematics was not, as it was to the head master, a favourite subject, it could seem a rather soulless place. The first few years of a boy's career, unless he were in the top flight of ability, could be a real testing time. If in the end he made the grade he became a lord of creation (subject always to his awareness that Mr. Russell knew he was nothing of the sort). But on the way up, only those who were good at mathematics and mechanics could hope to feel genuinely at their ease, and even for them a strenuous application of nose to grindstone was the only sure way to official approval. In other schools for instance, boys were acclaimed for passing the General School examination. They were even ceremonially presented with their certificates at Speech Day and had their names printed in the local newspaper. But in the Polytechnic Secondary School to have passed General Schools was a disgrace. Boys were known to burst into tears with the shame of it: for merely to pass General Schools was to FAIL MATRIC.[30]  If a boy passed General Schools he could receive from the L.C.C. a scholarship and a grant to enable him to stay at school till he was nineteen, but it would not qualify him for admission into P.A.'s Sixth Form. To do that he had to PASS MATRIC: and to make sure that the examiners made no soft-hearted mistakes about the sort of boy they declared worthy of the Sixth Form, the School insisted on the further safeguard of arranging for a specially difficult maths paper to be set for its own exclusive benefit. For good measure, those boys who were going into the Science Sixth took an extra maths paper called, with deceptive modesty, "Mathematics (More Advanced)" presumably out of a sheer delight in showing off.

          No wonder there were some boys who found the lower school in the early twenties a sort of academic prison. The staff were almost without exception men with whom no liberties could be taken and what light relief there was, if it came at all, was provided by certain lower school History lessons - though even then in retrospect rather than when they were actually taking place and the boys were being summoned to" 'Old up the notebooks."

          For, if there was no let-up for the boys, there was none for the staff either. P.A. picked a good team; they were not merely capable teachers but had strong personalities. There was hardly a "yes-man" among them. Yet he led them with determined, almost impersonal authority, judging them largely according to their pupils' examination successes. Appreciating them to the full, he paid them the dubious compliment of discouraging them from seeking promotion elsewhere. If they happened to fall ill, he expressed concern. not so much for them as for the possible damaging effects on their pupils' examination prospects.[31]  It is asserted that he worked out his examination-form teachers' records of matriculation successes to two places of decimals. Yet the rewards, for staff as for boys, were considerable. This driving concentration united the school in a fierce pride in its achievements and its ever growing reputation. There was always so much to show for their effort that the strenuous days and years seemed in the end to have been tremendously worth while.[32]

          P.A. did not of course imagine that "a great school" was created solely by examination successes, and he at once began a series of changes and new traditions in all the other departments of school life. By far the least popular of his innovations was his introduction of that characteristic feature of the good school, an insistence on the wearing of a school cap. Previous generations of boys had not it seems been required to wear caps: though a photograph of the scenes at a pre-war Sports Day shows various young gentlemen wearing something very like a school cap or else a ribboned boater in company with their Edwardian drainpipes and (in the case of the older ones) Edwardian watch chains.[33]  The innovation was naturally regarded as the imposition of a badge of servitude. The effect was heightened by the adoption of the traditional colours -school football jerseys had always used them - of red and green. This combination of colours has little to commend it artistically and its only justification (which occasioned further heart sinking among the boys) was that it made identification in the neighbouring crowded streets so very much easier. The design of P.A.'s red and green cap was outstandingly hideous, the cap being half green and half red, the position of the colours being reversed on the peak.

          Once the school had recovered from the shock, with the aid of the watchful care of the prefects, and the institution of detention (then presided over most efficiently by a lady) the cap situation became extremely involved. There was a whole hierarchy of cap wearers. There was a first eleven, a second eleven cap, a third eleven cap and a fourth eleven cap. (At first sight a moderately myopic O.Q. of those days might imagine that the whole of the present school played in the fourth eleven for something.) There was a Sixth Form cap and a Prefects' cap. House captains wore a prefect's cap with a silver tassel. The School vice captains wore the same cap with a short golden tassel: while the School Captain was glorified by a long golden tassel.

          Another institution of the time, though it had existed in a different form before the wars was the Walk. The Third Forms and the Fourth Forms (present First and Second years) were involved in this daily "unless wet" At 1.30 these forms assembled in an unenthusiastic crocodile, either on the floor of the gym or in the entrance hall, and were then conducted on a twenty minute walk around the less traffic-ridden streets behind Cavendish Square and the Queen's Hall. It would be difficult to decide whether the staff hated this institution more than the boys, or vice versa; but much prefectoral energy was spent after 1.30 in hunting down refugees from the walk, trying to hide in remote corners. Yet, with up to seven hundred boys in the Poly building between one and two o'clock and no playground available, it was only common sense to get some of them out of the place for part of the time. As a concession to their maturer years, the third and fourth year boys (Lower Fives and Fives then) were allowed to stay in the building, but not in their form rooms; while the Upper Fifths (the Fives of today) were permitted to remain in their rooms. This was, as always, not very good for the furniture, but it was part of the price the School had to pay for the absence of a play ground. It was also a price paid, in the disturbance of their lessons, by some of the Senior schools, who started their lectures at 1.30, and found themselves competing with the noise of the Secondary School still at play until two o'clock.

          Another oddity of organisation also arose out of the peculiar circumstances of the school: that connected with getting the boys back to their form rooms at the end of the lunch hour. There being no playground to assemble in, there took place at 1.55 daily what one writer has described as "The Ceremony of Awaiting the Bell". The following account of it by an anonymous Old Quintinian does not greatly exaggerate: -

          "All the boys gathered in a solemn mass at the foot of the stairs leading up from the Entrance Hall. Lining the stairs and keeping one side free for the other users of the place were a few impassive prefects. Prefects stared at boys and boys stared at prefects. When 1.55 was signalled the mob began to surge up the stairs. Whether they were restrained by the prefects or succeeded in crushing those wretched youths against the lift shaft depended on the build and stamina of the prefects: but such was the kindly spirit of those days that no prefect was ever actually killed while performing this duty.

          "The signal that started this daily representation of the Storming of the Bastille was a huge handbell wielded by a porter standing up on the Third Floor. In fact the porter rang this bell at the end of every period, and it resounded through every part of the building with a glorious disregard of the eardrums of all the other users of the Polytechnic for whom its fearsome tintinnabulations had no significance whatever."[34]

          In those other aspects of school life more naturally attractive to boys, P.A. provided the opportunity not so much of following old trails, as of blazing new ones. Games and athletics felt at once the effect of fresh organising zeal. In March, 1920, the six Houses into which the School was divided until 1956, held their first meetings. It is a little startling to discover that although five of them had from the start the names which they still bore in 1956 (Andrews-Hough, Broodbank-Stevenson, Hester-Lowe, Lambert-Newman and Russell-Matthews) the sixth missed by a very narrow margin being called the Kerridge-Bonacina House. In the first Cock House list, Mr. Kerridge is shown as sole house-master: Mr. Bonacina had obtained another post, and Mr. Swan had not yet arrived. The House system gave the School the stimulus of a completely new competitive games system, and the sense that they were building new traditions gave to those who took part in house activities a great sense of keeness. Apart from games, the house teas and concerts which have been a feature of the yearly calendar ever since were also begun in the first term of the house system's existence. Oddly enough, in a house which produced H. A. Davison, Kerridge's alone held aloof from such activities to begin with. Somewhat primly, the Kerridge's captain, T. Aldridge, wrote, "We are sensible and do not wish to indulge in orgies, the effects of which are felt for days afterwards. We believe in 'work before pleasure' not 'pleasure before work'."[35]

          In athletics, a more competent approach, coupled with the added interest of the House rivalries, made Sports Day something rather more than a jolly day out in the open with some races thrown in for fun, with selections from a military band to beguile the intervals.

          The new regime saw the institution for the first time of soccer and cricket elevens solely representative of a Secondary School united within itself and exclusive of other Poly boys' schools. The long and loyal reign in the sphere of games of such veteran masters as W. C. Lee and W. J. Saunders came quietly to an end, and the future was now in the energetic care of Mr. Lambert and Mr. Hough. Mr. Andrews was largely responsible for Sports Day, but within a few years Mr. Compton had come to assist. It will soon be a nice point to decide whether Mr. Compton's-association with the organisation of Sports Day equals in length of years the period during which Frank Matthews held aloft the starter's pistol.

          P.A. attached characteristic importance to games. He did once permit himself to express to a parent the human opinion that it was on the games field that boys make their closest friendships; but on the whole, he was interested in them mostly from the point of view of prestige. If to an excellent academic reputation the school could add success at games, then by the criteria that mattered, it was doing all that could be expected of it. For a school with no playground, no games afternoon, and playing fields as far away from Regent Street as Chiswick, the school did remarkably well, and its efforts were sedulously fostered by the careful keeping of the most precise records. Here again, P.A.'s particular cast of mind can be seen at work. Success in games, like success in examinations could be measured. When he set out to make "a great school" he made up his mind that there would be no bluff or humbug about it. He made sure he always had the figures to prove it.[36]

          In swimming, of course, it was not difficult to make the school pre-eminent, for possession of a swimming bath on the premises was, as in 1886, an amenity for which it now realises, as it leaves the Polytechnic building, it had every reason to be grateful. For over a decade, the School was regularly the champion swimming school among London secondary schools, a tradition of success which has of recent years been magnificently sustained.

          One other game which does not appear to have been played much if at all before about 1920 now came into its own for all time - netball, or as it came to be called in the later thirties, basketball. Much stimulated by the appearance in the school at this time of an American boy called Naar, lunch hour basketball matches were an obvious but exciting solution to the problem of what to do to provide a playgroundless school with something physical to do and watch between one o'clock and two. The house competition (eventually, like soccer and cricket involving four teams per house) and then matches between the forms provided a spectacle which aroused in those days a frenzy of howling enthusiasm from the gymnasium gallery. There were no inter-school matches (there are still very few) because no other school played this then unusual game: but the school team played other departments of the Polytechnic and of course the O.Q.'s, who for years have been the main source of England basketball intenationals. Basketball could not claim to be the sort of game that "a great school" would play; but for the Polytechnic Secondary School it was an additional and exciting skill as well as a flourishing native tradition.

          Clubs and societies were of somewhat slower growth, since their emergence depended rather more upon the boys than upon the organising drive of head master and staff. The success of societies was not as precisely measurable as the success of teams and examinees, and therefore less immediately valuable for prestige purposes. Nevertheless there was an early start. From the past, the Secondary School seems to have inherited only the Cadet Corps and the Ramblers Club. The first two clubs of P.A.'s regime were the Chess Club and the Literary and Debating Society, both of which held their first meetings in January, 1920. This circumstance, given its greater permanence than that achieved by the debaters, makes the Chess Club the oldest of the present school clubs. By 1926, although the Literary and Debating Society had languished temporarily, there was a flourishing Sixth Form Scientific Society; but it was not until the end of the twenties that clubs and societies became really vigorous. By Spring 1929, the School boasted Chess Club, Ramblers Club, and a Hobbies Club, a Sixth Form Scientific Society, an Historical Society, a Geographical Society, a Natural History Society with several sections, a Literary and Debating Society, and a Play Reading Society. The Forty Nine Club, the debating society of the Sixth Form did not begin till 1932, though it has proved more resistant to the ravages of change than most school societies. The expansion and permanence of these societies were always hampered by the lack of accommodation for after-school meetings and by the generally uninviting surroundings in which they had to be held; this was for years one of the most chronic of the disadvantages with which the school had to compete. But of the vigour and the popularity of the societies in the middle period of the school's history there can be no doubt, despite all the difficulties. Together with the academic and sporting activities of the school, they give an impression of a community bursting with both talent and vitality.

          One ancient tradition survived: that of dramatics. Despite the advent of the play reading society and, later, the full-scale dramatic productions sponsored by Mr. Wilkinson, dramatics in the school were always limited by the lack of a proper school hall. Consequently the school's actors were usually forced to confine themselves to one performance a year, of relatively short duration, as part of the Speech Day ceremonies. It is also not conceivable that P.A. would have permitted the disturbance of classroom routine that a full scale dramatic production would have involved. Yet under the historical partnership of Russell and Matthews each year's English Play, despite, or perhaps because of, the fact that it lasted little more than forty-five minutes produced acting of high standard and of immense gusto.

2.

PERHAPS P.A.'s major contribution to the School was one which outlasted his own period of office for something like fifteen years. This was his success in moulding into an efficient and formidable team a group of assistant masters of quite exceptional ability and, in the aggregate, quite exceptional length of service. By no means all of them were his appointments, but those whom he took over from the past had long chafed at the unsatisfactory state of the school's organisation, were more than glad at his coming, and formed the hard core around which the newcomers swiftly ranged themselves to create for the school a staff of hard-driven but extremely united men with a strong corporate personality. Perhaps only P.A. could have managed so variously talented a team of energetic individualists, but hardly any of the original group left the school until the time came for them to retire from teaching altogether; and so well developed was their sense of their unity that word got around that no new member of the staff was considered fit to express an opinion on any matter, connected with the school or not, until he had lived down his newness for several years. If the combined front presented by these men could thus intimidate an adult newcomer, their impact upon the boys they taught can be imagined.

          The permanence of these men on the staff gave to the school to its great advantage a sense of continuity which, given that its organisation has undergone so many changes, it might otherwise have lacked. Some of P.A.'s team had been in the school in the 1890's, and others were still active in the 1950s. Any account of the School's history which omitted to pay tribute to their qualities would be grossly out of proportion.

          First in order of importance (in his own estimation as well as in the fact that he was P.A.'s Second Master) was G. E. Dench. Having had charge of the Commercial School in the interval between Mr. Woodhall's retirement and the coming of P.A., he was in the running for the headship of the united school in 1919; but the dice were loaded against a man with an Arts degree. Tonsured and rubicund as the well-fed monk of popular legend, he moved about the School like a slow stately galleon with bellying sail, carrying before him a paunch of quite aldermanic dimensions. He cultivated his majestic demeanour so carefully and was so conscious of the sonority of his voice that he could achieve the remarkable, if quite unnecessary feat of rolling both the "r's" in the word "library". He was the only one among the staff who preserved the grand manner of the older generation of well-qualified schoolmaster: and he had been in the school since the early 1890's. Capable of silencing the whole School with a wave of one very fat hand, he could also graciously condescend with a quite melting kindness. He obviously set out to be a foil to the aloof and mathematical P.A., for Georgie Dench taught Latin and English and clearly thought of himself as wise and mellow and cultured and urbane. And so he was. A few more like him on the staff in the early twenties would have done much to rob the non-scientists among the boys of their suspicion that the school was a mathematician's idea of a penitentiary.

          C. W. Hester had also been there in the 1890's. As P.A. said in 1934, "Mr. Hester was already teaching when I first came to the Poly and he was there, to my great content, to say good-bye to me when I left." Crisp and at times a little irascible, but not unkindly, he commanded the Cadet Corps, though his voice cracked into a falsetto whenever he gave his troops an order. Forever caressing his well-groomed moustaches, he was in all a small and quite gentle militarist.

          Charlie Kerridge succeeded Dench as second master and survived to serve in that capacity to both Mr. Wilkinson and Dr. Worsnop, retiring in 1938. Lean and anxious, he worried almost as much about 4B's stupidity at mathematics as he did about the fortunes of his House at Chiswick. His life was full of boys who did not do their sums quickly enough, did not attack their opponent's goal with sufficient resolution, or did not stop talking soon enough. He appeared to us to be doomed to fight a losing battle with the lumbago whose twinges punctuated his lessons. We underestimated him. At the time of writing this, it is good to think that Charlie Kerridge is still undefeated. He was one of the many who by his example gave us the feeling that what we did and how well we did it in school was something that genuinely mattered.

          Frank Matthews, apart from his three years at University College, where he was contemporary with Professor Andrade, spent virtually his whole life at the school from the age of about eleven. He joined the Technical School as a scholarship boy in 1898, matriculated in 1903 and immediately joined the staff, leaving it only for his degree course and returning thereafter to serve until 1950, being joint second master with W. J. Russell from 1938. In the 1920's he took his Ph.D., but the conferment of a doctorate was not needed to prove that he was a brilliant chemist. Nor did it even begin to define the abilities or the interests of his keen mind. A devoted concert-goer, he was also with W. J. Russell, jointly responsible for the school dramatics and long associated with the organisation of school swimming. A product of Quintin Hogg's Middle Class School in Regent Street, he had the quirks of personality, the incisiveness of mind and the breadth of interest popularly supposed to be characteristic of the occupants of the senior common rooms of the colleges of Oxford and Cambridge. He would have made many of them seem tepid and narrow in comparison. He was the most remorseless critic of the school and yet he devoted to it the obstinate loyalty of a man to whom it was his life. If at times he seemed to fuss a great deal, it was because he was liable to see the remotest implication of the simplest utterance as soon as it was made. "Boys who are swimming tomorrow, will report at the bath at 10.30," he might announce. There would be a tiny pause. He would lean slightly backwards, and feel the strands of his moustache with the little finger of his right hand, blinking in an immensity of thoughtfulness. "That is to say, those boys . . . " and soon every conceivable contingent circumstance affecting the arrival of any boy at the swimming bath would have been exhaustively explored and analysed as if he were reading aloud from Henry James. It was a quality which made him an invaluable man on a committee. He thought of everything; and equally important, he remembered everything, for his memory was prodigious, with a capacity, for example, for retaining accurate cricketing statistics reaching back over fifty years. Not that he was uniformly the slow retentive thinker. He was not a bit stodgy, even though snags and repercussions rarely escaped his worrying analysis of them. He could at other times sum up a complex situation in a sudden phrase or splutter into a neat crackling epigram. His most intimidating foible was his abiding conviction that London Transport was an involved and malevolent conspiracy against his own and everybody else's comfort and convenience. "They do it on purpose . . ," he would declare, whenever there was greater delay or congestion than usual, and he would say so with such intensity of belief that he almost made one hear the sneering laughter of all those horrid little devils with whom his mind had peopled No. 55 Broadway.

          Yet the enduring memory of him is of a man of immense intellectual alertness and, beneath the mannerisms and despite the occasional flashes of cross-grained anger (which he always regretted) one whose abiding qualities were those of kindness, modesty and gentleness.

          Partnering him in the Russell-Matthews House, in dramatics, as joint Sixth Form Master at one time, and at a later period as joint Second Master, was W. J. Russell, who stood to so many generations on the Arts side much as F.M. did to so many who studied science. By the standards Bill Russell set, few could hope to escape censure. As we of the younger generation grew up, we regarded him first with fear, then with awe, then with respect, and at last with affection and admiration. No man was more relentless in his refusal to compromise with the second-rate in either behaviour or work; yet no man's praise was more worth having. For successive generations of boys he was a permanent Father-Figure. His very sternness was accounted a virtue, for it testified that here was somebody to whom what a boy did, how he worked, and how he behaved himself, were things that really mattered. At a time when the slack and the sloppy and the silly hold sway over the minds of too many educational theorists, it is bracing to recall that Bill Russell stuck to the simple truth that to educate a boy is to make him feel that it is a matter of importance that he should try to behave like a responsible human being: and not merely because, if he was a boy in this school, Bill Russell would soon find out if he didn't so behave himself. It was also because, since Bill Russell cared so much about how a boy behaved, the boy himself learned to care too. Here, it could be said with pardonable exaggeration, was one "whose shoulders held our sky suspended."

          J. B. Lambert made nonsense of the notion that schoolmasters were by nature embittered frustrated creatures. By Hector and Lysander (as he himself is liable to say still) he enjoyed being a schoolmaster if ever a man did. Arduous days at Regent Street and energetic hours with football elevens or urging on his House at Chiswick left him forever good-humoured and high-spirited and nothing seemed able to take the edge off his keeness. How he roared out the solutions to those bewildering algebraic equations of his! J. W. Andrews was once giving an identical geometry lesson to a parallel form to the one Lambert was taking in the next room. The former gave it up. "Just listen to Mr. Lambert doing it in the next room," he told his class, and himself remained silent.

          J. W. Andrews did in fact provide, by his more economical methods, a piquant contrast to his breezy colleague. The cutting edge of his tongue carved for him a great silence wherever he went. His skill at elucidating the obscurities of mathematics for the benefit of the stupider among his pupils was the pedagogic equivalent of the precise operations of a surgeon's knife. "Jacko" (or even "Jack the Ripper") was certainly a terror: but there were times when one felt almost as sorry for the mathematical problems he so mercilessly dissected as one did for oneself and for one's petrified classmate. As an exponent of the art and craft of teaching he was quite without parallel.

          Tinny Newman was another among the staff who was so much more than just a pedagogue. Teacher of geography and economics, he had taken his first degree in philosophy, his M.A. by way of a thesis on Nietzsche and his B.Sc. (Econ.) because he thought it a good idea, to do so. He spoke German, French and Spanish. He had been a sub-editor of the Morning Post, had served it and other newspapers as sporting and dramatic critic, and had a passion for, and an expert's knowledge of music. In a previous post, it was not until after he had for some time been brilliantly successful in coaching Sixth Formers for Divinity examinations in the Epistles of St. Paul that his employers discovered that he was in fact Jewish. In classroom and staff room he was voluble, witty and lovable. Out of them he was connoisseur of sports day performances, a recorder of late names and a coach for the boxing club.

          H. O. Coleman brought to the school qualities that were not far removed from genius. Originally a classical scholar, he mainly taught German: yet he was of international repute as an authority on phonetics and philology, once offered to teach the Sixth Form Russian, and on another occasion modestly observed that his knowledge of Chinese was a little rusty.[37] He confounded the basic impression of him as a distracted eccentric scholar by taking an active part in the work of the Cadet Corps, of the Boxing Club and of School Basketball. Yet he was also a typically idealistic Socialist of that time as well as a minor poet whose writings reveal a mind which, though undisciplined, was both passionate and sincere.

          Of the many others it is impossible to assess how much the school and its boys owe to such men as the uninhibited and forceful Arthur Broodbank; to J. Stevenson, coming into the classroom with an air of great haste as if he was anxious to get back as soon as possible to his Surrey garden, but teaching quite a lot of French before he went, and also organising, in succession to W. J. Saunders, the great part the school played in the work of the Polytechnic Christmas Dinner Fund; to G. Chevrollier, indefatigably and selflessly plugging away at French grammar through the years, forever pessimistic about the results of his labours, and never with good reason; to J. S. Hough, energetically concerning himself with the preparatory school, football, the choir and mathematics, a robust critic of pretty well everything, but with a bite rather less mordant than his bark; to J. B. Coates, whose arduous English lessons were but part of a life which found room for the organisation of the Personalist Society in later years and in earlier times a Natural History Society on whose rambles senior boys divided their time between observation of redstarts and willow warblers and solemn discourse on the ideas of Wells and Shaw and Dostoyevsky and Samuel Butler, and were made aware of the intellectual currents of the time, of which for the most part the School, like the Polytechnic, remained complacently ignorant; to P. J. Walford, a former Polytechnic student, who reigned in the Art Room from 1913 to 1953, first with Preston Davies, then with S. Merrills, and then alone; to Charles Eckersley, the successor to G. E. Dench as Editor of the Quintinian, and like him something of an exception to the general tendency to dourness among the staff, as well as being internationally famous as an authority on the teaching of English to foreigners; to Harry Beadon, master of the gymnasium through the long years and still capable of showing a class a thing or two when he was seventy, efficient and unfussy; and to C. Simmons who, as an English Olympic diving representative of 1912, did much for school swimming, and whose daughter, Jean, is now known the world over both in her own right and as the present Mrs. Stewart Grainger. Finally, who shall assess what so many boys of the School retain indelibly in their memory of that legendary teacher of History, at once identifiable by the nickname "Rubber" and by his association with that most venerable of school societies, the Ramblers?

          Few of these men served the school for less than twenty years and most of them were there for something like thirty; and although all of these are now gone, the Quintin School still has on its staff four men who were appointed by P.A. - Mr. Compton, Mr. Robinson, Mr. Checkley and Mr. Sambrook - and but for his untimely death in 1946 there would have been a fifth in R. H. G. Byrne, the tall, mannered teacher of Spanish, whose Mephistopholean appearance went with a passionate belief in a strange variety of outworn notions such as the flatness of the earth, a delightful assortment of prejudices such as an abhorrence of motor cars, and a carefully cultivated pose as a man of the eighteenth century so lordly that he claimed never to have carried a parcel home from a shop and never to have stooped so low as to enter his own kitchen.

          They made, as can well be imagined, no normal Grammar School Common Room, these hard-working, talented eccentrics. They were not cloistered academics, and still less were they intellectuals; indeed they were rather self-consciously the reverse. The atmosphere they would best like to remember would be that of their former staff-room on the second-floor back of the Poly, Room 80. Preposterously too small for them (and how typically Polytechnic that was) it was a turmoil of boisterous backchat and a blue hell of choking tobacco smoke. Byrne would be propounding a theory, slow, mannered and nonsensical, and Jimmy Hough would be bawling him down; Coleman would be explosively propagating something entirely subversive and Broodbank would be ferociously grumbling about it; Coates would be gloomily complaining that C. E. M. Joad was too frivolous to be a serious collaborator in the spreading of advanced ideas in the progressive society which Coates had persuaded that controversial public figure to join; Tinny Newman would be muttering over the Times crossword or else ruining somebody else's argument with a facetious interruption; "Rubber" would enter furtively and promptly go out again; Lambert and Stevenson would be reminiscing at the top of their voices; whatever Jack Andrews said would become instantly audible and probably cause all the various arguments and discussions to coalesce into a general uproar; on a good day Bill Russell would be reminding Frank Matthews what Robert Mitchell had asked about the "average cost of a book" when it was a question of having a school library; and Eckersley would be contemplating his locker studiously, wondering whether he had time to smoke a half-cigarette, a three-quarter-cigarette or a complete one - he kept a supply of varying lengths to be, used according to the length of time at his disposal between lessons. It was hardly the scene the outsider would regard as appropriate to the common room of "a great school": but if one had to point to any particular place or group and say, "There was what made the Polytechnic Secondary School a 'great school'," the choice would be most wisely made if the place selected were that suffocatingly noisy Room 80 and the group, the varied and vigorous personalities who inhabited it.

          And over it and them, in the 1920's, there was P.A. For he was as much the Head Master to the staff as he was to the boys. He was in many ways quite opposite to his staff in character. They for the most part were noisy, gregarious and open-hearted. He was quiet, solitary and incalculable. In appearance he was not imposing. He had round shoulders, a flat-footed shuffling walk and a large egg-shaped head. In his early days as an assistant master he had been nicknamed "Scraggy" but as a Head he had no nickname. This was because although his staff abounded in eccentricities, he had none. Of showmanship of any sort he was entirely innocent; and although he could be convincingly angry, he was never bumptious. On ceremonial occasions he presented himself as a neutral mouthpiece recording the latest statistics of examination successes, not as a great Head Master airing his views before a captive audience. He may have suppressed everyone else's personality to his campaign to create and maintain the prestige of the School, but his own personality was perhaps the most completely suppressed of all.

          It was supposed that he had no interests at all outside the School. The facts concerning his other educational activities were not made public till he retired. That he had been a goalkeeper for the Arsenal in its amateur days and was, while Head Master, one of the directors of the club was never made public at all. So that it was with something like a shock that a very left-wing Sixth Former, attending a public meeting of the Fabian Society one evening, found himself sitting next to a Head Master whom he imagined as having time for nothing but reading boys' Report Books. The shock became something like bewilderment when P.A. turned to him and said, somewhat conspiratorially, "It's a good thing nobody knows we're here."

          If indeed one succeeded in meeting P.A. at reasonably close quarters (and for a boy it was a privilege to be earned only by the achievement of some tremendous athletic or academic feat performed at the end of a long and blameless career in the school) one found a rather soothingly benevolent old gentleman with a twinkle and a comforting air of understanding rather more than one would have thought possible in one who moved so rarely out of his poky little office. It was a pity he kept this side of his character so much in the background, for the result was that he did himself rather less than justice. He left behind a formidable reputation as a Head Master. Had he been less reserved he might have been remembered for what one suspected he was at heart, a kindly man who, though shrewd and stubborn, could on occasion be sympathetic and understanding.

In 1934, P.A. retired, to be succeeded by Mr. F. Wilkinson. Mr. Wilkinson had been Senior History Master at Liverpool College and, from 1927 until he came to the Polytechnic, Head Master of Wallasey Grammar School. Under him, that school had prospered greatly, and it was easy to see when he arrived at Regent Street that here was one who, given a congenial atmosphere, could provide a school community with inspiring spiritual and intellectual leadership. In the event, Mr. Wilkinson was destined to find that atmosphere, and to provide that leadership, at the Latymer Upper School, from 1937 to the present time; his three years' sojourn at the Polytechnic served to offer what was all too brief a glimpse of a personality whose ideas about education and its purposes were as exalted as they were sincere. Unhappily, for reasons which are touched upon later in these pages, there was much in the constitution of the School as part of the Polytechnic which an experienced Head Master accustomed to the scope and the freedoms of an orthodox school was bound to find difficult and frustrating.

F. Wilkinson

     "I find," he said on Speech Day, 1935, "a great deal of courage in the school, courage in dealing with the very real and almost baffling problems that are forced upon us by our lack of playground. We need more freedom, more tranquillity, more chance to develop in our own way, more opportunity to be ourselves.

          But there was not, in 1935, any very obvious way out of this "almost baffling problem" of lack of space, or the even more baffling problem of how to develop, on the lines Mr. Wilkinson had in mind, a School that had no premises of its own but was housed inside a technical college which was also an adults' social club. To Mr. Wilkinson, his School must be everything; but to the authorities of the Polytechnic it could not be everything. In these circumstances it is perhaps not surprising that Mr. Wilkinson left for Upper Latymer after only three years in Regent Street.

          While he was with the School, however, he did something to humanise the rather grim atmosphere of academic severity which P.A. had so rigorously maintained. A school (they are Mr. Wilkinson's words) "is so very much more than an examination machine;" and music, the drama and art ceased to be the merely occasional activities they had been under P.A. Distinguished visitors from spheres of life not normally associated with the Polytechnic, such as Sir Harold Nicolson, Sir William Beveridge and Vernon Bartlett made their appearance in the School. The Head Master, among other ventures, produced, at the request of the composer, a masque by Dr Vaughan Williams based on Dickens' "Christmas Carol." The religious life of the School, which under P.A. had been somewhat perfunctory, showed signs of revival and for one brief period even boasted (if that is the right word) nine avowed members of the Oxford Group.

4.

Dr. B.L. Worsnop

IN September 1937 Dr. Worsnop succeeded Mr. Wilkinson, and in terms of Head Masters, the School's modern history had begun. Dr. Worsnop brought to the School higher academic distinctions than anyone else in its history, and at a time when the air is filled with complaints of the difficulty of getting qualified physicists to become schoolmasters it is not inappropriate to remind the School that for nearly twenty years its affairs have been in the hands of a very able physicist indeed. Dr. Worsnop had graduated at King's College London with a First in physics in 1913, and had been officially rated the best student of his year. After serving in the Royal Engineers in charge of a Sound Ranging Section he returned to King's as a lecturer in Physics in 1919. In 1927 he had obtained his Ph.D., and became Senior Lecturer in Physics in the college. In 1932 he left King's to become Head of the Maths and Physics Department of the Polytechnic, a position he was holding at the time of his appointment to the Secondary School.

          To leave the relatively secluded and comfortable life of a university for the strenuous, not to say strident, world of the Polytechnic suggests a mind not willing to contemplate an existence spent in quiet conformity, through long years, to a settled and sheltered routine. To proceed thereafter to take on the Headship of the Secondary School was to show clear and unmistakable signs of unorthodoxy. If to these qualities were added a robust temperament and ready spirit of initiative, it will be seen that the School had acquired in 1937 a Head Master of no ordinary mould. Here was someone quite different from the monotonously predictable and personally aloof P.A. and from the passionately idealist Wilkinson. The staff, one feels, must have been a little bewildered at the arrival, so soon after P.A.'s retirement, of yet a second violently contrasting personality. It was soon evident, however, that this third Head had in common with his predecessors the one quality that mattered - like them he was a loyal partisan of the school and as determined upon its preservation as they had been. Very soon this quality was put to severe tests; and quickly, days of adversity wielded the old assistants and the new Head into a union which triumphantly came through the extraordinarily difficult years that lay ahead. Of Dr. Worsnop's years as Head Master, only one - his first - can be said to have been spent under normal conditions. His second year began with a rehearsal of evacuation owing to the Munich crisis; and on 1st September, 1939, evacuation began in real earnest. It was an event which was followed by no less than seventeen years of homelessness for the school. To have succeeded in piloting the school through these long years of dispersal until at last in 1956 it had for the first time in its history, a home of its own must always be regarded as Dr. Worsnop's essential service as a Head Master. He will, we think, be well satisfied if there is applied to him in the future, for the benefit of enquiring visitors to the St. John's Wood building, the classic phrase, si monumentum requiris circumspice.