JAMES TROTTER REMEMBERS

Spring 1972 until the end (summer 1976).

     I have so many memories of Spyway, some mentioned before on this   

    blog.

     I loved my rugby and remember receiving a spoon of honey in  

    Geoffrey’s study prior to heading out to the match. 

The Old Malthouse rugby team which had a tall boy who single-handedly beat us 

at home much to Eric’s annoyance. On the return match, I was given the job 

of sorting him out and at every lineout drilled him in the ribs until he left the pitch. 

I got extras for tea.

I remember not stopping while walking along the top of the cliffs on a Sunday afternoon

until we lined up two navigation masts.

I remember playing French and English on the huge field above Dancing Ledge as 

we had a day off for Princess Anne’s wedding to Mark Phillips.

I remember putting the old blackout blinds up to watch the Five Nations rugby 

internationals on a black and white TV.

I remember the only time I sat at the front right desk for one week having come 

first in maths in Colonel Withers’ lesson. Never again. Back left more like. 

I remember grabbing boys' cords around the knee and holding them tight as 

they had been standing in front of the common room fire for too long and got 

really hot. 

I remember in Latin prep waiting until the break, filling Brin Sheridan’s pipe up 

with plastic from the top of a Bic biro and watching him smoke it during the 

second half.

I remember the goats and helping Thomas Warner milk them daily and in time

getting goats cheese. 

I remember the sickening feeling of travelling from Darlington to King's Cross 

and then across to Waterloo, before catching the 'Hogwarts' train down to 

Wareham. 

I hated Weekly Tears with a passion.

I remember England following on after a streaker (John Arlott's 'freaker') jumped over 

the stumps next to Dennis Lillie in the 1975 Ashes Test at Lord's.

At Spyway,  there was a streaking craze after lights out: up to the top wall and 

back with all the boys in the dorm looking south, watching to see if they had 

got away with it. 

I remember being in the overflow sick bay in the spring term as flu ripped 

through the school every year.

I remember beating Alexander Hayden’s team at tip-and-run at the end of my 

first summer term. AH had to pick his brother first and I picked the 

god-of-cricket Charlie Benthall. I still have the stick with the notches cut out 

by Geoffrey recording the score.

Most of all I just remember being happy and loving our outdoor life.

DURNFORD BOY AT SPYWAY

I went to Spyway from 1948 to 1952. 

My father, Christopher Lee-Elliott, was the headmaster of Durnford in Langton from about 1936 to 1941 when the school was requisitioned by the War Office as a radar site, but the site was too high. 

The school lay abandoned for about 20 years until it was sold for its valuable Purbeck stone.

I went back to Spyway and met Eric in about 1972. I think it was about to close as a prep school.

 

Anthony Lee-Elliott

SNODGRASS

Eric and Geoffrey often mentioned a generic schoolboy called 'Snodgrass'? 

Does anyone else remember this? 

Who was Snodgrass?

THE LATE 1940s

I went to Spyway in the autumn term of 1947 after three and a half years at a traditional but dated prep school elsewhere.

What a liberating experience! One was immediately treated as a growing person, trusted and encouraged in every way

The day started with a brisk walk, deep breathing exercises and the obligatory cold bath, then the day proceeded apace.

Exceptional at swimming, good at rugby and athletics and having a distinguished  and stimulating father, I suited the Warners' model and as a result excelled for the first time in my life.

Responsibilities included wielding a full-sized scythe.

At my previous school we walked in a crocodile but at Spyway we had freedom and the many long expeditions including unsupervised trips to Hill Crest along the coast were as memorable as the Warners' reaction when we did not win 60-nil.

The school was built on trust and responsibility and it gave me an interest in geology which I still have.

The Warners loved Eton and probably about half of us went there. I did not. 

Parents tended to be upper or upper-middle class and I remember the sons of a Scottish duke who reputedly went there to minimise contact with their cantankerous father.

I think most people enjoyed it but I do remember a boy with petit mal who I don’t think should have been there. I suspect there may have been others who did not relate to the Warner ethos.

The rivalry with Langton Matravers' other school was a great feature as was the Lagonda, Eric’s open-top Morris and, of course, the Jeep.

Another memory is returning to Spyway aboard the Bournemouth Belle followed by the Swanage puffer, which made going back to school something to look forward to.

What fun it was.

Colin Barry 1947/49 

ANOTHER ENGAGING MEMORY

I was at Spyway from mid-1956 to mid-1961. It was at the end of my last term that the engagement was announced between 56-year-old Geoffrey and the 19-year-old under-matron Beverley. A few days earlier they had set off up the front lawn in full view of the prep room, bathers under their arms, for the Ledge. We all gaped in amazement while brother Eric maintained perfect composure.

The next day the prefects were watching telly with Matron and there was a commercial for luncheon meat showing a happy family at table. Matron, with her usual ascerbic wit, called out across to Beverley - "Well Miss Lawson, you'll be serving that to Mr Geoffrey soon, won't you?" She blushed the colour of a beetroot. 

My grandfather and his two brothers went to Durnford from Moray, Scotland. My father, his brother and several cousins also went to Durnford. My brother and three first cousins went to Spyway after me. My father, and some of his friends from Durnford helped to build the lower playing field. I continued to see Mr Eric in Mull after I left and we maintained a friendship more or less until his death.

For me, Geoffrey Warner was a brilliant groundsman and extraordinarily talented man. I also loved Moonfleet and his reading. Eric was essentially a kind man and ran the school ably. I loved the trains and even managed to become one of his favourites.

Spyway was, I am sure a unique school. It had many good qualities. However the darker side has to be included, such as the spankings, beatings, group shaming, humiliation and mocking of individuals at Double. Perhaps worst of all the favouritism, particularly from Geoffrey, who was so biased towards athleticism and winning at sport - defeating the old enemy - "the Squeezerboxeraay" - which ironically closed only in 2007. 

For me, the only really sane person at Spyway was Matron. God bless her, wherever she is.

THE LATE 1950s AND AN EXPLOSIVE EXPERIMENT

I have only just noticed this excellent blog. I have pleasant memories of Spyway between 1955 and 1961. My memories are very similar to others: 

• the Warners lighting pipes and sharpening pencils with pen knifes; 
• their Cona coffee machines 
• Mr G mowing the playing fields with a Land Rover (or Jeep as someone else said); Mr E doing likewise with a little grey tractor
• their beautiful open-top motor cars 
• being frightened of ‘oiks’ in the Drove 
• horrid lumpy porridge
• delicious white glutinous spotted dick with hot syrup (the like never to be found in later life) 
• playing games with dates or capitals of the world at meal times 
• water wings in the pool at Dancing Ledge and later, a perilous swim off the ledge to prove I could
• the sting of Mr. Gray’s wooden spoon on my flat palm (I was no good at Latin but always thought it was the wrong way to administer corporal punishment)
• summer days lying on the upper playing field and playing the ‘Owzat’ cricket game and becoming a world expert on cricket (I was no good at the real game)

 

I was deemed to be a bit of a weakling and Matron was therefore required to feed me a large tablespoon of molasses daily. As a result I became Matron’s pet and was allowed to watch black and white TV with her in the evenings. I can’t remember her name.

 

The Warners were confirmed bachelors but while I was there, Mr Geoffrey quite out of the blue got married to the assistant matron who was much younger than him. This caused a lot of tittering, and must have come as a shock to Mr Eric.

 

Mr Eric was a kindly soul who cultivated my interest in science and allowed me to ‘repair’ his Bassett-Lowke O-gauge locos, working at the tiny table at the near right corner as you went into the model railway room. It was a wonderful layout with three control stations: Middle, Hill and Top. The controllers were these:

I think the complete layout looked like this:

Anyone know better?

I used to control from Middle. I remember once the boys controlling Top conceived a plan to retain trains in Top until they had a fair number and then to send them all back down the hill to me in a rush, hoping to cause a crash. Fortunately I had seen what they were up to and managed to handle the rush by judicious use of the sidings.

 

Mr Bailey was a very good science teacher who devised interesting experiments. I remember one where he poured a small amount of boiling water into a milk bottle and then sealed it with a shelled hard-boiled egg. As the interior cooled, the egg was sucked into the bottle. Boyle’s Law.

 

I and another boy (can’t remember who) once decided to make a rocket out of those aluminium tubes they sold cigars in. Over a period of time we stole a large number of the Warners' Swan Vesta matches, scraped the red stuff off them and packed the powder into the tube. We let it off in the middle of the night out of a dormitory window. It went quite well. Inevitably the Warners got to hear about it. Typically, there was no punishment. Mr. Eric simply asked me to demonstrate it again from the concrete bunker where they kept the mowers (before the proper shed for them was built). He gave me the number of matches I had told him we had stolen. Unfortunately I had lied about the quantity, so the demo was a bit of a damp squib.

MEMORIES FROM THE LATE 1940s

I have very mixed feelings about Spyway.
It had some good things about it as it was extraordinarily advanced in its understanding of ecological issues, being green and natural, way before its time.
It had two headmasters, brothers, who ran the school, both bachelors, who seemed obsessed with success in games as a way of defining how successful the school itself was.
By the time I was thirteen I saw through this and thought it absurd. Quite a lot of my time there I was not particularly happy and I was very glad to leave.
It was a boarding school, and although I was not particularly lonely, I did not like rugger or swimming. I disliked the latter as I found being thrown into the sea so terrifying. I have been back to Dancing Ledge where we were taught to swim and, for someone who couldn't swim, it is quite an alarming place to have to enter the water. One associates fear of water with cold as well; heated swimming pools hardly existed in the late 1940s.
I do remember three teachers: Mr Gray who taught classics, was a wonderful teacher; Mr Broom taught geography and mathematics; I liked the science master, Mr Bailey, and what really impressed me was that he was building a dinghy himself in a workshop in Swanage, and we would go to see how he was getting on.
I did like cricket and was captain of the under 11s but the Warner brothers decided I didn't bowl correctly and by thirteen had put me off cricket completely.
I started to take photographs with a box Brownie when I was ten and I still have the negatives from my days at Spyway, in fact I have all my negatives.
Books and reading were probably the things I enjoyed most. Mr Geoffrey, the younger of the headmasters, with the new boys in their first winter term would always start with 'Moonfleet' by J. Meade Faulkner. It is still one of my favourite books and has a Jungian undertone that one does not realise as a child. I have read it to my own children who have absolutely no intention of reading it to their children as they can't really see the point of it.
Eric, the other Headmaster, read Conan Doyle's 'The White Company', which I also enjoyed. Being read to I always thought was magical.  We hardly did any music apart from singing.

ROBIN FEILD REMEMBERS

Isn't nostalgia a weird and wonderful thing?  Coincidentally, I was recently contacted by the Old Port Regian   Society, which was odd, since I was taken out of there within the first year, I believe. 

Anyway, this led me off on a trip down memory lane, and from there to the Spyway blog.

Although I wasn't there for the full term, as it were, my memories of Spyway far outweigh those of my other prep schools, and the blog has bought back long-forgotten memories.

Here are a few, in no particular order:

I had totally forgotten the railway set.  I remember the privilege of being allowed to see it.
The odd ability that I can still remember almost all the words of La Marseillaise and wondering why we were made to sing it. 
Swimming at Dancing Ledge (the first time I remember having my breath taken away by the cold).It seemed like a very long walk to get there as  well.
Playing rugger on frozen ground and then getting chilblains when we came off and warmed up.
Chopping firewood, very uncomfortable seating in classrooms, those damned cold baths, sagging  mattresses and open fires.
There was a teacher who drove a yellow Triumph Stag and who had massive mutton chop              sideburns -  he is in one of the prospectus photographs down bythe pool. I think his surname was   Dean.
I think most of us fancied Henrietta Warner.
I also remember being on the pitch when Eric died.
Colonel Withers, whom I remember as being a friendly face, had known my grandparents; my      memory of his teaching style was patience under fire  from us children.
I DON'T remember the Lagonda.

Also, please can someone correct me, but weren't there huge heating ducts UNDER the building which could  be explored if you took the front off the windowseats in one of the rooms? 

I remember my Mum coming to visit one weekend not long before the school closed and being horrified at    how thin we all were. It was after Eric had died and I think times were tight and the food budget was the first to get squeezed. 

Memory Lane is a selective place, but I do remember Spyway fondly, despite the obvious reasons to forget it.

CARRY ON MATRON

I was an assistant schoolmaster at Spyway for the spring term in 1966 while it was under the Warners. 
I thought the place a very strange set-up - I knew about prep schools as I had been at one myself - but Spyway was small and quirky. 
My main memory is of another supply teacher (a law student) who formed a relationship with the assistant matron (female). 
They were not allowed to be seen together by the boys so I had to walk with them until they were out of sight at which point I returned to the school and left them to their own devices.
I think I am right in thinking they did in fact marry. The restriction did not seem fair as the senior matron was well known to be carrying on with another master. 
There was another master who had retained his title of Major.

"GROWING UP IN RESTAURANTS" - SPYWAY CHAPTER

'Growing up in Restaurants' by James Pembroke. The Spyway chapter. 

 CLICK ON ANY PAGE TO ENLARGE.

Full book available to buy here.

BLITHERING IDIOT

Mr Geoffrey used to call me a "blithering idiot" and say I was "on the primrose path of dalliance to the everlasting bonfire" (Hamlet).
Any other notable Spyway quotations spring to mind? Post a comment (below), if they do.

SPYWAY TODAY (now known as Langton House)

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View from the attic 

Bedroom created from the attic

Looking down into the Old Wing dormitory

The Old Wing dormitory 

A kitchen created from the Old Wing dormitory

Part of the Little Boys' dormitory

The Common Room windows on the right, the door to the verandah on the left; there was a wall in between.

Part of the Dining Room (southern end)

Part of the Dining Room (northern end)

Part of the Dining Room (beside the Little Boys' table, the hatch to the kitchen was above the sink).

MISCELLANEOUS PICS

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NOW CLICK ON 'OLDER POSTS' (bottom right) FOR MORE