I went to a good school. No doubting that. Of course, it wasn't a public school, just a decent local grammar school.
But then, there are some very decent local grammar schools to go to.
My parents moved to Bournemouth because my mother had always harbored the dream of setting up as a seaside landlady. And running the kind of bed and breakfast establishment that she would want to stay at.
The choice of Bournemouth came about because my aunt Jane had worked most of her life as a chambermaid in seaside hotels, and I suppose Bournemouth was therefore top of my mother's list, because her sister was working and living there.
We moved when I was 11, at Christmas during my second year at senior school. In some respects, it was a shame that I had left the school I had only been attending for one term, in Stratford, East London.
Before that, I had been allowed to follow most of my primary class into the new Comprehensive school that had just opened close to where we lived.
If I am honest, I was a bright kid, and this school didn't really suit me. After a year, in which I didn't progress much, my mother had me moved to a school much further away, but much better. In that one term, and earned much more than I had in the entire previous year.
But we moved to Bournemouth, and the first impulse for the local Borough Council was to place me in the nearest local Comprehensive.
But Bournemouth still had its grammar school system, and though I had missed my 11+ examination, which might have enabled me to be selected for this school, my mother insisted, and I was duly individually examined at the school to see whether I would be a suitable entrant.
Needless to say, I was immediately selected as suitable. Initially, I was placed in the lowest of three streams, but within weeks I was promoted to the highest stream.
Bournemouth is not the kind of place from which many interesting and successful people have come from. The only two that I was previously unaware of was Tony Blackburn and Benny Hill. Benny Hill actually attended the school that I found myself attending. He had been evacuated to it from where he had been living in Southampton, which of course as an important port, had been subject to intensive bombing during the Second World War.
But then, I recently discovered that a previous interesting person that had attended the school was Anthony Blunt. Keeper of the Queen's Pictures, and Knighted for his services, until he was stripped of his Honours when it was revealed that he was in fact a Soviet spy. In fact, the fourth man, along with Philby and Maclean, and Guy Burgess.
All of them had attended Cambridge, which had been a famous recruiting ground for Soviet spies during the Cold War.
Although in his biography, Blunt attended Marlborough School in Wiltshire, he had previously attended Bournemouth School, which no doubt had provided a useful preparation for attending one of this country's leading public schools.
He was the son of a Bournemouth Vicar, who was awarded the prestigious placement as the Church of England Vicar to the Paris Embassy, and his family moved to Paris in about 1910. Where he developed his love of paintings by numerous visits to the Louvre.
His parents were not of grand backgrounds, although when his father remarried, he had married a third cousin to the Queen Mother, and in fact would therefore have been a regular visitor to the house from which our present Queen travelled to Westminster abbey for her Coronation.
This would have been long before it would have been expected for the young Elizabeth to have become Queen of England, but it would certainly have made him quite an asset to the Soviet secret service.
It was only in 1979 that he was stripped of his Honours, as he was unmasked as the spy that he had been.
And he went to my school.
Needless to say, not a great deal was made of this fact when I was there, and in fact 1979 was the year that I left, to go to university.
I was never entered for the Oxbridge examinations, perhaps because of my class. I was a bright pupil, and gained a significant number of good GCE examination grades.
And in fact went on to study at UCL in Gower Street, one of the Russell group of Universities, and generally acknowledged to be the next best thing to Oxford and Cambridge.
And perhaps since I am not homosexual, I may not have been of interest to those Dons that seem to have been the major source of recruitment to the ranks of spies.
Whatever the case, it is an interesting reflection, that I went to the same school that Anthony Blunt went to. Before he went to the more prestigious Marlborogh College.
Which ironically was just a few miles from where my sister has lived for the past 20 years or so, and so a place that I have passed so many times when visiting, especially after my mother moved to be close to her.
Strangely a good friend and neighbour of mine did attend the College, perhaps because his father was a civil servant, and it would have been expected of him.
He did not think much of his education, and then I suppose you will either make something of school or not, whatever the circumstances.
I was good at school, and enjoyed learning. I would probably have been happy anywhere, that stretched me in the way that Bournemouth School did, for which I am very grateful.
At least, Anthony Blunt adds something more interesting than Tony Blackburn and Benny Hill provide.
No comments:
Post a Comment