David Baker Remembers

These two tales are different from our normal tales.  These come not from an ex-pupil but from an ex-teacher.  David remembers these two tales from the old days.

Sam Clements' Golfing Skills

A teacher you might remember was Sam Clements, RE teacher, very near retiring age if not over it. An anecdote I don't think you'll have come across concerns my first staff meeting as a paid teacher.  You might remember that there was a project to build a swimming pool and money was being raised for it.  One teacher came up with the suggestion of asking parents (and possibly teachers and pupils too) to dig the hole, thereby reducing the cost by 12%.  Sam was sitting next to me in what might have been dubbed "Rebels' corner" and whispered to me "If you give me a golf club and a sufficient number of golf balls I'll dig the bloody hole myself."

The Skull and Crossbones

You will remember the caretaker, Eric Gosling, nicknamed Patch by pupils since he permanently wore a black patch over one eye.  I don't really know all the background to this but there must have been some breaking and entering into the School which obviously was cause for concern.  A sixth-former I saw for music lessons, we will call him Mr Smith (not his real name), inappropriately told me (and I rather indiscreetly listened) that he had overheard Eric Gosling telling Mr Howard that he reckoned he had fixed things so that should anyone break and enter again it would be with greater difficulty and it would also be easier to find a culprit. This, Mr Smith confided, "Was too good an opportunity to miss" and when Patch was doing the rounds locking up, he hid in a cupboard.  He used the opportunity later to fly a skull and crossbones flag from the flagpole at the top of the Tower.  He was particularly tickled at the idea of the caretaker, bearing in mind that he looked like a pirate with a black patch over one eye, was duty bound to retrieve it.  I think Mr Smith was brought seriously to task over it eventually.