Monthly Archives: October 2017

by jfwknifton | October 27, 2017 · 8:12 am

And here is the news (4)……

I was talking last time about a book which I have started writing about the High School’s war dead from World War 2. At the moment, the book has no title but that will emerge!

I intend to incorporate a few poems in the book. You will be glad to hear that none of them are by me.

One comes from the writings of ‘Granta’ in the School Magazine, The Nottinghamian. To paraphrase his words:

Nine Nottinghamians,
At the Forest Road gate,
One went to Bomber Command,
And then there were eight.

And the poem by John Maxwell Edmonds:

Went the day well ?
We died and never knew.
But, well or ill,
Freedom, we died for you.

This poem was written by R. W. Gilbert and was featured by my friend Pierre Lagacé in his blog « RCAF 425 Les Alouettes »

REQUIEM FOR AN AIR GUNNER.
The pain has stopped, for I am dead,
My time on earth is done.
But in a hundred years from now
I’ll still be twenty-one.

My brief, sweet life is over
My eyes no longer see,
No summer walks, no Christmas trees,
No pretty girls for me.

I’ve got the chop, I’ve had it.
My nightly ops are done.
Yet in another hundred years
I’ll still be twenty-one.

I may incorporate a poem by a Bomber Command veteran, John Pudney:

“Do not despair

For Johnny-head-in-air;

He sleeps as sound

As Johnny underground.

Fetch out no shroud

For Johnny-in-the-cloud;

And keep your tears

For him in after years.

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Better by far

For Johnny-the-bright-star,

To keep your head,

And see his children fed.”

I have not decided yet on which ones I will definitely use, except for the following words which will certainly appear. They describe perfectly the job that, hopefully, I will have done. They were written by (possibly Robert) Wace, a Norman poet who was born in Jersey in the Channel Islands between 1099 and 1111 and who was last known to be alive in 1174. Wace was brought up in Caen in Normandy and eventually became Canon of Bayeux:

Eventually
All things decline
Everything falters, dies and ends
Towers cave in, walls collapse
Roses wither, horses stumble
Cloth grows old, men expire
Iron rusts and timber rots away
Nothing made by hand will last
I understand the truth
That all must die, both clerk and lay
And the fame of men now dead
Will quickly be forgotten
Unless the clerk takes up his pen
And brings their deeds to life again.

In Jersey’s Royal Square stands the States Building and a granite memorial stone to Wace is built into one of its side walls:

It has on it a proud quote from Wace’s major work, the Roman de Rou, the Tale of Rou, which tells the story of William the Conqueror and the Norman Conquest, including Halley’s Comet :

Jo di e dirai ke jo sui
Wace de l’isle de Gersui

In Modern French it would be

Je dis et dirai que je suis
Wace de l’île de Jersey

And in English

I say and will say that I am
Wace from the Island of Jersey

It is also recorded in Modern Jèrriais, a language I had never heard of, but it still has an admittedly declining number of speakers on the island :

J’dis et dithai qu’jé sis
Wace dé l’Île dé Jèrri

It was Wace who introduced the idea of Halley’s Comet to the Bayeux Tapestry story:

Watch what you’re doing with that arrow !!!! You’ll take somebody’s eye out !!!!

Because I am a registered Nerd / parce que Je suis un geek de la langue française, I have the poem in Modern French and whatever language Wace spoke as well…Norman, Medieval French, Medieval Jèrriais, whatever. In the first section I have put ye Olde Frenche firste, and then modern French in Italics and then English. In the second section, see if you can think of the modern French words that ye Olde Frenche comethe fromme ….

Tote rien se tome en declin
Tout décline
All things decline

Tot chiet, tot muert, tot vait a fin
Tout meurt, tout va à fin
Everything falters, dies and ends

Hom muert, fer use, fust pourrist
L’homme meurt, le fer use, le bois pourrit
Men expire, iron rusts and timber rots away

Tur font, mur chiet, rose flaistrit
la tour s’écroule, le mur tombe, la rose flétrit
Towers cave in, walls collapse, roses wither,

cheval tresbuche, drap viesist
cheval bronche, drap vieillit
horses stumble, cloth grows old,

Tot ovre fet od mainz perist
tout ce qui est fait de la main des hommes périt
Nothing made by hand will last
………………………………………..

Bien entenz è conoiz è sai,
I hear the truth well and I am aware and I know

Ke tuit morront è cler è lai;
That all must die, both clerk and lay

E mult ara lor renomée
Emprez lor mort corte durée

And the fame of men now dead
Will quickly be forgotten

Se par cler ne est mise en livre,
Unless the clerk takes up his pen

Ne pot par el durer ne vivre
And brings their deeds to life again.

Wace, Romain de Rou, III, II, 131-142
(c 1170)

The translation is not such a close fit in the second bit rather than the first.

26 Comments

Filed under Aviation, Bomber Command, History, Nottingham, The High School, Writing

by jfwknifton | October 22, 2017 · 7:46 am

The High School Hell’s Angels, Chapter 6

More about the Free School, as it was called in 1858. It was called that because the school was free at this time. And it was not in Arboretum-street as it is nowadays, but in Stoney-street. Look for the orange arrow:

And is the lack of school fees reflected by the background of the pupils? Well, on the one hand, I have found in the Register the sons of bakers, butchers, cellarmen, clerks, a Foreman Porter, grocers, joiners, machinists, overlockers, painters, plumbers, porters and warehousemen. Some of them might have worked in the very centre of Nottingham, only a town at this time, not a city. It was very different, even around 1900:

Set against these jobs are a number of occupations which are decidedly less working class. They might require varying levels of training or education such as architects, bookkeepers, dental surgeons, doctors, draughtsmen, engineers, an engraver, a gilder, the Governor of the Town Gaol, the High Bailiff, a photographer, physicians, a Professor of Languages, solicitors, the Supervisor of Inland Revenue, surgeons, the Surveyor of Taxes, tailors, an upholsterer and a veterinary surgeon.

Others are jobs with managerial aspects…auctioneers, a beer house keeper, a bookseller, brokers, a coal master, a confectioner, an earthenware dealer, a hosier, an iron monger, a jeweller, Manager at Manlove & Alliott’s, a newspaper correspondent, a patent agent, publicans, shoemakers, tobacconists and a Victualler. Manlove & Alliott’s, by the way, was an engineering company set up during the 1830’s in Radford, and who later moved to their Bloomsgrove Works just off Ilkeston-road. The main entrance was on Norton-street. They moved to Scotland in 1970 and, like Augustus Caesar’s Spanish 9th Legion, they have never been heard of again:

Most interesting, of course, are the occupations directly linked with that of the period, 1858-1868. Some clearly had their place in history. Not many fathers nowadays are, quite simply, Gentlemen. And it is impossible nowadays to be the Adjutant of the Robin Hood Rifles. Bleacher is not really a very probable trade in this day and age and neither is cap manufacturer, cheese factor, coachmaker, cork cutter, framesmith, hatter, hay dealer, potato merchant, steam railway engine boiler maker or twisthand, a man who had to be strong enough to carry out certain specialised operations on a lace machine. A yarn agent is nowadays surely more likely to turn up telling stories in the Children’s Section of the local Library and if there is still a Clerk to the Lunatic Asylum then the job description is probably expressed in more delicate words. The Lunatic Asylum was on Porchester-road:

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So too, there are pawnbrokers nowadays, but not too many of them, and you don’t see Life Insurance agents traipsing up and down from house to house like you used to, even in the 1950s and 1960s.

Some of those jobs, though, back in 1858-1868 , are just the first of many. They foretell the future with Estate Agents, Gas Fitters and Sharebrokers, wh0 are surely now called Stockbrokers. What we don’t have any more are all those jobs connected with religion. But back then, the parents included a Baptist Minister, the Incumbent of St Luke’s, an Independent Minister, the Minister of Canaan-street Chapel, a Sexton, two Scripture Readers, a Town Missionary, a Wesleyan Minister and an ordinary Missionary. Religion was so important it was even on the side of the horse drawn trams as a destination:

Best job of all though was Charles Bown of Carlton-road. He was a Butler.

19 Comments

Filed under History, Nottingham, The High School

by jfwknifton | October 17, 2017 · 8:19 am

Eagle Comic foretells the Aeronautical Future

In 1962, Eagle Annual carried an article about the aircraft of the future.

I thought I would take just a quick look with you at what the aviation buffs of that distant time though we were going to see in 2017. This was one of their suggestions:

Strangely reminiscent of a Convair Sea Dart for me. Did the writers know something that the readers didn’t know?

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Alternatively, was it the doppelgänger of the Saunders Roe SR53? The rocket powered interceptor of the 1950s that was so unlucky to have been scrapped. It would have been a brilliant aircraft. And why didn’t the Germans buy it?

Here’s one I photographed myself at RAF Cosford, I think:

Here’s another suggestion from Eagle:

Rather like the B-70 Valkyrie, n’est-ce pas?

This is more like a completely fresh thought, not based even subconsciously on anything the writers had ever seen:

Well, perhaps not. This is Fireball XL5 from the Gerry Anderson puppet series of the same name:

The likeliest aircraft to make the cut is this VTOL workhorse. It’s rather like the cultivated well mannered cousin of the Flying Bedstead:

The Flying Bedstead, of course, had no covering of any kind over the structure of the machine:

Although the Short SC1 did, and that took it a huge leap towards the Eagle VTOL aircraft of the future:

To me, it almost looks as if the writers of the Eagle article, perhaps subconsciously, included real aircraft, usually experimental types or prototypes, in their portfolio of supposedly imaginary aeroplanes of the future.

This was the real aircraft of the future when it made its appearance:

23 Comments

Filed under Aviation, Film & TV, History, Personal, Science

by jfwknifton | October 12, 2017 · 8:15 am

And here is the news (3)……

In my Last Post, I told you what I had been up to of late. I have always been very impressed by a fellow teacher and friend of mine, Simon Williams, who has researched at very great length the young men from the High School killed in the First World War:

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I decided that I would have a look at the war dead from the Second World War and I have been working for the last 18 months, two years, on researching those particular individuals.

I have been sadly surprised at just how many of them there were. I started with 82 from the official list but I have now pushed it up to at least 105 with probably quite a few more to come. The reason for this is that if Frederick Cyril Smith of 189, Station Road, Beeston, attended the High School from May 10th 1901 onwards, there is no way of being 100% certain whether or not he is the same Frederick Cyril Smith who was Able Seaman Frederick Cyril Smith, killed on May 23rd 1941 on HMS Zulu, particularly if there are no details of either his age, home address or parents’ names recorded on the Commonwealth War Graves Commission website:

And so far, I have found around 150 such cases, all of which are possible matches. They won’t all be ex-High School pupils, but if only one of them is an Old Nottinghamian then I don’t want to miss him.
And there is absolutely no way of guessing. One Old Nottinghamian was called Albert Frederick Aylott, born 1911, lived at 96 Glapton Road. Is he the same Albert Frederick Aylott as the Albert Frederick Aylott killed on March 31st 1945 in northern Germany ? In actual fact, probably not, but who would have thought so with such an unusual name?

On average, I’m producing around 4,000-5,000 words per person, listing his school record fully, his adult life before the war if possible and then his career in the forces with, hopefully, the reasons why he was where he was when he was killed. And if possible, the name of the man who pulled the trigger or pushed the button. The casualties took place everywhere, from Arnhem to Yugoslavia, with one ex-pupil who lived in Zimbabwe but was killed, probably, in Ethiopia.

Some more details next time.

14 Comments

Filed under Aviation, Bomber Command, History, Nottingham, The High School

by jfwknifton | October 6, 2017 · 8:15 am

The High School Hell’s Angels, Chapter 5

Last time, sad, sad, person that I am, I was sharing with you the electronic version of the Nottingham High School Register from the old Free School, which was then, of course, in Stoney Street in the Hockley area of Nottingham. Dating back to 1858, the Remarks Column in particular gave some very striking details of life in the school some 160 years ago:

January 1859 saw some fascinating details. Going down the column they read “ill. Out of town”, “middling”, “behaved well” and quite simply “dead”. That was poor William Henry Copley, of 2 Stafford-terrace off Shakespeare-street. He was the son of a Warehouseman and only 14 when he passed on. Stafford-terrace, I suspect, is now under the concrete and plate glass of Nottingham Trent University. A more spectacular death affected Benjamin Arthur Heald of High Pavement: “(at home) Died from the effects of over-bathing.” Well, you can have too much of a good thing. Or perhaps he was sharing the bathwater with the horse.

Quite a few boys were elected to a place at the Free School, but then “declined” to attend. Some “could not be found” as if alien abduction stretched back to 1858. Ironically, the boy labelled “cannot be found” lived on Forest-road within 100 yards of the school. Forest-road played host to one of the commonest means of transport of the day:

Some boys needed to buy a watch. “Did not come at the time appointed & was ordered to be crossed off.”

Not everything was easy. “Sent back twice, declined to try again July 1860”. Some abused the system, “Left without giving any notice”.

Some boys “behaved well” and others “Behaved badly, especially out of school hours”. Truancy had been recently invented, “attended very irregularly”. Sometimes it was the parent’s fault “Behaved well and made good progress for the time, but was taken away too soon”. And what about poor Richard Thorpe, an orphan residing with his sister at 1, Northampton-terrace, off Portland-road? “did very well, obliged to leave from ill health.”

Portland-road is close to Waverley-street and the General Cemetery. I was very surprised to find this grave was in the General Cemetery during my researches:

Indeed, the Remarks column of the Register often comes very close indeed to stating the obvious truth about a boy’s transgressions, namely that it was the parent who should have been punished, “Junior Prize 1860. Suspended in consequence of the Father’s claiming the right of keeping him from school at pleasure” and “Suspended because his father took him away from school for a fortnight without leave. Not allowed to return.”
The staff could be hard men. “Expelled for dishonesty at home” and he was then sent to Trinity National School which may be the ancestor of present day Trinity School. And what about lucky Thomas Henry Naylor, the son of a Lace Designer from Hutchinson-street in the Meadows, a thoroughfare now long disappeared: “Suspended for being privy to another boy’s dishonesty. Allowed to return on sufferance.” Or else, it may have been “previously a private pupil. Removed by his father at my request.”

Many of the Remarks are not very different to what they would be nowadays. The same cannot be said of Nottingham. Here is the exact area, and the orange arrow marks the approximate site of the old Free School:

In the middle of the 16th century, this is where Mr.Francis Pierrepont, or “Collonell the Right Honourable Francis Pierepont”, had a large residence built next to the school, and wanted certain windows of the school building “stopped up” so the naughty pupils could not watch the serving wenches being chased around the extensive gardens . Pierrepont’s mansion was the second largest in Nottingham, after Wollaton Hall. It had 47 rooms with fireplaces. No photograph of that survives. Here is the only one I have ever seen of the old Free School: