I entered the world on 29th September, 1940 as the Battle of Britain was moving towards its close. My father was a career airman who rose to Squadron Leader in Bomber Command. Mother had been a shorthand typist, the daughter of a detective constable in the Cairo City Police. They settled in England just before the War, bringing with them my grandmother. We moved from place to place over the rest of the War following the behest of the RAF. I went to primary school in Nottingham, where my brother Douglas was born. When the War ended we found ourselves in Officers’ Quarters at RAF Mildenhall in West Suffolk, but Dad bought a permanent home for us all in Barton Mills and sent me to primary school in Mildenhall. When Dad retired from the RAF he built a café and petrol filling station between our home and Newmarket, which we all helped to run for a number of years. My duties were to man the petrol pumps, while Doug was a washer-up in the café.
I received the “County Major Award” and at the age of eleven became a boarder at King Edwards in Bury, where I stayed from 1951 – 1959 under the eye of headmaster Bob Elliott who encouraged me to become a lawyer. I eventually passed my law and bar exams, emerging as an industrial barrister. Dad pulled some strings to get me into British Aircraft Corporation and I spent some years learning to cover up the many mistakes I made as a learner in that excellent but challenging environment! Slowly I got the hang of it all and was assigned to the Guided Weapons Division as a secretarial assistant, where I started to deal with minor legal issues and to write minutes of the many meetings of top management.
Later, under the tutelage of the kind and hugely talented Brian Cookson, Legal Director of the whole Corporation, I learnt how to draft respectable legal documents. That was when my career started in earnest. The years sped by as I climbed gradually to management then executive status in the Guided Weapons industry as a combined legal manager and company secretary. I travelled on business to many countries as part of contract negotiating teams, had great fun, saw great sights, and made friends with some truly excellent colleagues and dear friends at home and abroad. I used, to great advantage, my ability to write verse of the sort that could be used to celebrate special company occasions, and I continue to maintain that my unpaid poetic efforts actually advanced my career.
The defence industry went through many changes in my later years, my segment eventually merging with German, French and Italian defence firms. This involved many reorganisations, but when the dust eventually cleared from them, I found (to my great surprise) that I was still there – and still loving my job. And now I am a retiree, a Lay Leader of Worship for my village church at Benington near Stevenage and the Secretary of the Village Hall. Just wonderful!!
Would I do it all over again? You bet I would! I owe my happy life to the many kindnesses I have received from more people than I can count. God has been good to me, deserving no such thing. That is the main thrust of my autobiography. I have joined all the dots, and know how truly lucky I have been. Now it’s pay-back time! Thank you, King Edwards, for all you have been to me. I could never have made it without you. May success always attend you!
COLIN
Colin kindly sent a copy of his autobiography “My Life – Already?” which includes recollections of his time spent at the school as a boarder, participating in a number of the Dramatic Society productions, the CCF and the Skiffle group. He has a remarkably vivid memory for detail – we reproduce below his accounts of some of the hazards facing those involved in the plays.
Our dramatic society was run by Donald Tapster, our Art Master. Donald was a young and enthusiastic teacher and his skills were numerous. We presented a number of specimens of the thespian’s art with varying degrees of success to the public (consisting mainly of our relatives) each of them produced and directed by Donald. Those I remember most clearly were: “Reluctant Heroes” (Ian Hay); “Hamlet”; “Macbeth”; “Tonight at Eight-Thirty” (Noel Coward); “She Stoops to Conquer” (Oliver Goldsmith).
We did seem to have a remarkable propensity for making comedies out of our tragedies. In “Reluctant Heroes” a section of the scenery representing the barn that our army squad had appropriated for manoeuvres began to collapse forward of its own accord, and my younger brother Doug as stage-hand had to rush in panic across the stage to hold it up, although such an odd development had no obvious place in the script. His appearance must have baffled the audience as he appeared quite randomly as a deus ex machina, his place as a leaper-on rather than a passer-by being an avant-garde mystery unacknowledged and unexplained to the critical world.
In our “Hamlet” that was presented over three consecutive nights, the pivotal “Alas, poor Yorick” scene deteriorated on the closing night into hoots of mirth, a fatal technical lapse in production philosophy being to blame. The Art Class had been persuaded to fashion Yorick’s skull. For the purpose they had chosen to use a small pumpkin which they had hollowed out with great diligence and painted a number of dull colours to emphasise its macabre, sinister significance. The first night everything went well enough, and when Hamlet, who had been holding the object contemplatively while uttering his soliloquy, came to the word “Pah” and cast it down in disgust, the pumpkin made a satisfying thud on the stage. On the second night, against all reason, the self-same pumpkin was at hand, although it was beginning to look rather “tired”, and when cast aside produced a somewhat ambiguous muffled sound. On the third night the object, rotted by time and heat from the floodlights, when thrown down exploded like a grenade, scattering its shrapnel liberally to the obvious surprise of those on stage. Hysterics overcame the audience.
In “Macbeth” things became worse still. It seems that nobody had warned us not to name the drama but simply call it “the Scottish Play” to avert disaster. Consequently we achieved not one calamity but three.
The presentation of this Tragedy took place on a trestle stage before a packed house – namely the schoolroom. I witnessed its result at close quarters, having been cast as the Third Witch. The Second Witch of our wicked coven had been entrusted with a packet of smoke powder, a modest pinch of which he was expected to throw in the cauldron at the arranged moment after his incantation as we all prepared the fatal decoction that would spell Macbeth’s ultimate ruin and death. The effect was intended to be a reasonable puff of smoke, since the powder would fall on a sheet of glass positioned over a small bar heater inside the cauldron that had been switched on when the contraption was carried onstage by the stagehands. But nobody had gone over the technical actions in the scene… for smoke powder costs money and is not to be casually tossed around at rehearsals……so the contents of the entire packet of smoke powder was thrown into the cauldron. The consequent billow of smoke was huge and appalling, spreading with awful rapidity and swelling in volume, until not only the stage but the whole auditorium languished in choking fumes. Moaning and gagging, audience and players together were escorted upstairs to the playground. Half an hour went by before the schoolroom was once more habitable and the play could re-start.
The second disaster was just as serious, but at least it raised a laugh. In Act II…the Earl of Ross, played by Keith Jordan accompanied by an “old man”, standing before Macbeth’s castle, is required to say “Here comes the good Macduff!”, as Macduff enters – stage left – to break the news of Duncan’s murder. On this occasion, despite Keith’s “intro”, Macduff fails to enter. What is an actor to do in such a case? Keith, like a good old trouper, elects to repeat the line in a more resonant and emphatic tone. Still no Macduff. In the meantime a ripping and tearing sound beneath the trestle stage gives stark warning that all is not well with the good Macduff, whose cloak is now securely wedged under a trestle. Keith stands nonplussed with the old man for company, then bravely invents the “ad-lib”: “Well, he ought to be here very soon, anyway.” Muffled titters break out in the auditorium. The two unfortunates on-stage continue to commune silently. Perhaps, Keith decides, it would be appropriate to give the truant Macduff a final chance, which could be accompanied with a lordly gesture. He points abruptly and dramatically stage left and in a voice of ringing conviction and recognition, cries despairingly, for the last time, “Here COMES the good Macduff!” A frenzied rustling and wrenching ensues beneath their feet. Then abruptly from stage right, a pitifully dishevelled and cloak-less Macduff lurches on looking like one who has just been molested by the spirits of the Blasted Heath. His arrival at their rear so astounds the other two, already unnerved with the waiting ordeal, that they nearly jump out of their skins. The audience welcomes this fine impromptu with a gale of laughter that stops the action for some minutes.
One more disaster delivered the coup de grâce. As the play struggled on to its gory dénouement, the final skirmish took place that was to see the well-merited death of the upstart Macbeth. This required some careful staging. As Macbeth falls in the mélée, one of the stagehands, dressed as a soldier, is to grab the wig from his head, and during the final moments of the fray must clap it with lightening speed, secrecy and accuracy upon a heavy and bloody-looking plaster substitute head, the work of our ever-active Art Class, smuggled on to the stage by yet another soldier. Macduff has then to greet Malcolm with the words: “Hail King! for so thou art. Behold where stands Th’usurper’s cursed head….” The head is duly lifted up by Macduff to the public view. But alas, the wretched stagehand has somehow contrived to place the wig on the false head back to front! Instead of the gory face, all that can be seen by the devoted audience is a mass of hair, through which protrudes a long red nose. The audience cheers hysterically, then falls about laughing.
But the most memorable stage disaster I ever saw at KEGS was during an ambitious attempt to perform extracts from Noel Coward’s “Tonight at Eight-Thirty”… One of these was called “Family Album” and was set in an Edwardian household. It tells of the adult children of a “profligate and pompous” old father on their return from his funeral. They go through the expected show of grief for the passing of “poor dear Papa” until one of the daughters undergoes a personal epiphany and shrilly cries out “To hell with Papa!” whereupon the show of mourning collapses, and all Father’s sorrowing progeny cheer up most enthusiastically. They begin to reminisce about their childhood.
The subject soon turns to the musical box they used to love in the nursery. The old butler is summoned. Does he know what became of it? The ancient retainer vanishes, and returns with the self-same instrument, quite a large one, still intact from the attic despite years of neglect. He places it lovingly on a low table, centre stage, blonde-haired Harriet in a blue silk gown, trips forward impulsively to wind up the loved old device and sets it tinkling an old song of the days of yore, entitled “Hearts and Flowers”, penned, of course, by Noel himself.
By the kind of mischance that had followed “Macbeth”, Harriet’s dangling wig of tresses somehow began to stray into the musical box, an authentic Victorian instrument, German-made and operated by the standard cylinder with tiny spikes that engaged, as it revolved, with a comb of tuned metal prongs. A mechanism better designed to intermesh with human hair could scarcely be conceived. Harriet’s well-simulated ecstasy at liberating the loved music from the dear old box turned to genuine panic as the heirloom began to swallow her tresses as though it had been starving for years. Back went her head to reveal the wispy reality of his normal poll, while the musical-box continued, tinkling ever more obscurely, to chew its voluminous meal rather as a goat might – until it stopped choked with surfeit. By this time the audience were in convulsions and Harriet, shorn of her crowning glory, played the rest of her lines standing bare-headed like a penitent behind the rest of the cast. Of what the owner said when he received back his excellent musical box with its internals mysteriously embedded in coils of horse-hair, there is no record.
Colin does not relate any further disasters that took place in the other Dramatic Society productions in which he participated so one can only imagine that they were flawless performances!
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