I wonder what happened to Michael Tickner, Philip Broome and
Paul Driver.
They along with Jimmy O’Donnell, and John Cox were part of
the class of ‘61 which started at Samuel Pepys in the September of that year.
There were 180 of us, drawn from a selection of junior
schools and despite the diversity of our back grounds we all failed the 11
plus, that gold standard of excellence which guaranteed some a grammar school
education and the rest of us something else.
I have never quite lost that sense of being judged second
best and when I began teaching in the mid 1970s I was the only one from a
Secondary Modern.
And for a time I was very hard on Samuel Pepys judging it
against Crown Woods in Eltham where I went at 16.
Looking back that was unfair because like many other Secondary
Moderns it did its best to offer us as good an education as the grammar school
next door putting some of us in for “O” levels while recognising that for some
their interests, skills and aptitudes lay elsewhere.
So I do wonder what happened to that cohort of ’61 partly
because I am curious but also to prove that the 11 plus gold standard was not
the fine measure of who we were or what we could become.
But if I am honest it is also because I am curious.
Some took the option and left at the end of the 4th
year and more in the Christmas of my last year.
By then I think from memory the year group had shrunk from
seven forms down to two and fewer still stayed on for the sixth form.
For me the die had been cast in the March of 1963 when we
left Lausanne Road for Eltham and slowly the familiar ebbed away and sometime
around the beginning of 1965 the place I had grown up in just became a place to
visit for school.
I guess that is pretty much how it is for all of us who move
away. In most cases the decades roll by
with little thought of where it all started and when you do finally go back the
landscape has altered out of all recognition.
At best a few familiar old places still exist but even these look
smaller and less inviting.
All of which makes me think about the people I knew.
Most of the adults I have long forgotten although Mr Rhodes,
Mr Payne, Mr Vaughan and Mr Twigg from Samuel Pepys still surface from time to
time, as does Miss Prentice and Miss Reeves from Edmund Waller.
But with that passage of time I now do wonder about the lads
I sat in class with. Lads like Phillip
Broome the class joker and Paul Driver who fell in the pool after a swimming
lesson fully dressed and was for ever known as “Dribble.”
And then there was Michael who for a while at least none of
us were kind to and for which I remain ashamed.
Of my closest friends I did make contact with Jimmy a few
years ago. He did fine, got married,
raised a family and retired to the West Country.
Others like John I lost touch with and at least one from
Edmund Waller I came across on a family history site just a few years ago and I am
sorry to say he had lost none of the vain boasting which accompanied his time
in Miss Reeves’s class.
I suppose most of when we think back that half century or
more think of the buildings and the familiar places which time, the developer
and the Council’s plans have done for and less of the friends and acquaintances
we passed our youth with.
Pictures; from the collection of Andrew Simpson
Went to Samuel Pepys1962 left at 15 but have done ok sold my business in 1988 and am now living in Florida
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