Reward

Having beaten OMH by ten wickets at OMH, the team and scorer were given a special swim at Dancing Ledge on their return so avoiding Latin sentences on a Wednesday evening. Having scored 99 for 0, the openers Tony McCallum and Alistair Ross (I think) were given either balls or bats as a reward!

Dog Gone

The event that summed up Spyway and its ethos has to be in its final term - that hot summer of ’76. Beverley’s dachshund went missing on a Friday, so on Saturday, as there were no matches, everyone was sent out to scour the countryside for the missing animal. No sign. So on Sunday a similar expedition was planned instead of the Sunday walk. Geoffrey issued instructions that no-one was to go to Swanage- but of course three 9-year-olds did; they went straight to the police station. The loss of a ‘sausage’ was reported (the policeman teasing). Having written down the particulars, the said PC put the boys in a police car and returned them to school. Geoffrey ushered the policeman in for tea and while the PC was being entertained, Geoffrey scolded the boys severely for doing exactly doing what he told them NOT to do and sent them to bed (3.30pm). Having seen the PC off about 4.30, Geoffrey entered the dormitory and summoned the boys, their bottoms tingling in anticipation ! Into his house they went to be confronted by a special tea. Geoffrey and Bev had failed to go to the police themselves; so the boys having been punished for flagrantly disobeying orders were then rewarded for showing initiative! For that I will always personally thank Spyway and that incident has always stuck in my mind so clearly ever since. You can’t beat initiative!

Fire Practice

(1950s)
An occasional treat enjoyed by several would be on a Sunday afternoon, provided we had walked fast and were well ahead of Geoffrey, and Eric was still at golf! This was an early “scientific experiment” on balances and mass and the use of the Davy fire escape. The highest would “abseil” down to the ground, then the second lightest would come down on the second loop with the lightest going up again - and so on. The heaviest present was the only unlucky one to get a one way ticket! It reminds me of the Hoffnung story and the barrel of bricks.

The late 1950s

Best memories: being 'dropped' by parents after longish drive from North Devon. Bev Lawson's stockings. Trips to Twickenham for the Varsity match in Geoffrey's drophead Lagonda and 'away' rugby matches. Meeting RFU president at Sherborne Prep and smacking their over age winger, Christopherson, first in the teeth then in what was left of his remaining credentials. Eric's 'O' gauge model railway and his drophead Bentley. Swimming to the Flat Rock and becoming a 'B' swimmer. Becoming a longstanding joint admirer of Miss Cotter and eventually Francis Thomas. Shared number 42 with William Edge. Walks to Poole (first one aged 8 and 8 miles), then Corfe and Creech. (Shame we never made Worbarrow).........
Remembered contempories: Colin Cresswell (Head Boy), Mike Portman, Piers Inskip, Tim Guinness, Alastair (Black) Ross, Richard Bonsor, Tom Butler, William Outram, Nick Chadwyk-Healey, Martin Hudson, Malcolm Warner, Richard Pleydell-Bouverie, Robert Gosling, Robert Seward, Anthony Digby-Bell, Edward Lyttleton, Edward Hoare, Charlie Baxter, Anthony McCallum, Peter Facey, Will Best, Peter Kane, Michael Rule, Nicholas Warner, David Dean and Johnny Rodgers.

Bye for now, Nick Forman: Spyway May 1956 - July 1960

(nickinthedriversseat@hotmail.co.uk).

Ghost

The new boys in the first week or two of 1946 were reliably informed by their dormitory captain that there was a Spyway Ghost. So on a suitable moonlit night the boys were told it was a likely 'ghostly' time. They were keeping watch down the garden and sure enough a white spectre came eerily up the garden path and disappeared into the basement of the school.
(It was of course the dormitory captain under a white sheet, who was out the room answering a “call of nature”!)

Roof Space 2

My time was 1948-53. The roof space that I remember was the eaves space that connected Geoffrey's day room and the room where they (mostly Eric) had their model railway layout. I can remember using it to get to the cupboard where the stationery was kept. What I found particularly Valuable and Attractive were the maths square-ruled exercise books. I honestly cannot remember if I had any partners in crime, probably because even now I have a strong sense both that the taking of these books was morally wrong and that the intrusion into the railway room was somehow sacrilegious. So I would have been quite keen for noone to know my secret. As it happens I somehow made myself into a banker for the Dinky Club, using the ruled paper to make currency, so it was important that noone else had a source of the paper. Before the scam petered out I certainly made some real money from the fellow pupils who had more of that than sense.As to the railway room (a) I continue to believe that the LMS was superior to any other railway company anywhere ever and (b) as long as steam was there to be smelled, at Euston or wherever, I was always disappointed that in real life it failed to smell of Three Nuns.

Spyway Datecard

This post and comments were published in 2008. Since then, the original datecard has surfaced and can be seen in a post of March 2013 (well above this one). But here are some earlier efforts:

55 BC The Romans invaded Britain
410 AD The Romans left Britain
597 St Augustine’s Mission
1066 The Norman Conquest
1170 Murder of Thomas a Becket
1189 The Third Crusade
1215 Magna Carta
1265 Simon de Montfort’s Parliament
1295 The Model Parliament
1314 Battle of Bannockburn
1346 Battle of Cressy
1348 The Black Death
1381 Peasants’ Revolt
1415 Battle of Agincourt
1431 Joan of Arc burned
1455 Wars of the Roses
1485 Battle of Bosworth Field
1492 Christopher Columbus discovers America
1558 Loss of Calais
1588 Defeat of the Spanish Armada
1605 Gunpowder Plot
1620 Pilgrim Fathers set sail for America
1640 The Long Parliament
1645 New Model Army
1666 Great Fire of London
1715 First Jacobite Uprising
1745 Second Jacobite Uprising
1756 Black Hole of Calcutta
1776 American Declaration of Independence
1789 French Revolution
1805 Battle of Trafalgar
1815 Battle of Waterloo
1832 Great Reform Bill
1846 Repeal of the Corn Laws
1857 Indian Mutiny
1870-71 Franco-Prussian War
1899-1901 The Boer War
1919 Treaty of Versailles
1928 Universal Suffrage

The Old Enemy

One Sunday while on Nine Barrow Down we were met by some panicky OMH boys who had just had one of their number captured by some local lads. Being a runner, I was sent back to Spyway to alert Geoffrey, who set out in his Landrover only to be met by the Spyway boys returning off the hill with their trophy – a recaptured OMH boy!

Double Numbers

Eric and Geoffrey had a vision that Spyway should always be a small school and that the number of boys should never exceed 50. On arrival, each pupil was given a number to identify his shoes, boots etc.
One autumn term, at its peak, Spyway suddenly found itself with 51 boys. Rather than simply give the new boy the number 51, Eric and Geoffrey insisted the orginal ethos of no more than 50 pupils should live on, and instead made the boy share the same number as his older brother, thus leading to much confusion in the laundry and the bootroom!

Fighter Pilot

During the Second World War, the brothers gave a tea to a British fighter pilot who had crash-landed nearby and were informed by the lucky pilot that it was the third plane he’d lost (and survived).

Weekly Tears

Every Friday morning there was an event known as 'Weekly Tears'. This was when boys who had not yet learned the basics of arithmetic were made to stand on a chair in front of the class and declaim their times tables. When a parent asked why the lessons were so quaintly named 'Weekly Tears', she was told it was because when a child failed to remember his times tables properly, he often burst into tears and this served as a warning to other boys!

Home and Away

An amusing occasion was when the Spyway and Old Malthouse UXI cricket teams met on The Drove near the Scout Hut. Each thought they had the away fixture that day, so a coin was tossed between Geoffrey and Peter Mattinson. It was such a strange event I can’t even remember where we did play the game.

Roof Space 1

Exploring the cupboards in the roof spaces was great fun as well as illegal. It got so much fun , we ran a treasure hunt during the winter months for some time, until Alistair Foreman managed to put his foot through the ceiling of the playroom. Of course he had to own up - sensibly to Eric- who questioned him as to an how long this nonsense had been going on. “About three years, Sir”. “Good heavens, really? Very good-but NO MORE!” (so the story goes) and the Foremans paid for the damage.

Television

TV of course was persona non grata, with one exception (apart from the Varsity match for those not lucky enough to go). The programme we were able to watch with Miss Thomas was that 50s sensation Quatermass and The Pit. What a programme, made even better by being the only TV we could watch.

Spyway School - SHARE YOUR MEMORIES!

Please write about your time at Spyway School (1935-1976) on this blog. To submit a story or photograph, email your memories to Edward Gormon ('The Ghost of Old Tom Pellatt') at eye2eye222@aol.com and he will post it for you.

A bar of chocolate will be awarded for the best entry and a double-page essay for the worst.