(1920-27)
“J.T.” and the Golden Twenties
The Secondary School, as it was then called, was known to the townspeople as a font of learning, and also as a rather toney place where some boys grew too big for their breeches. To its Headmaster, the inimitable Mr. Joseph Turral (1904-33) (“Joey” or “J.T.” behind his back), it was an oasis of gentility in the desert of the North Country, a fortification holding siege against the Philistines around -- the summer visitors who brought business to the landladies and merchants to help them pay the taxes to maintain the Secondary School. This humbling contradiction is not one that occurred to a twelve-year-old, and we appeared there fired by the knowledge that we were entering a special regiment, where you put on a blue suit and a black tie, learned to talk about “our School”, memorised the lyrics of “Ta-Ran-Ta-Ra”, and a few years later mastered the Charleston behind closed doors while a look-out listened for the imperial warning of the Headmaster’s cough, which at a corridor’s length sent us vaulting back to our desks and a deep pre-occupation with solid geometry or the Seven Years’ War.
It is impossible to dip into this ocean of memories without seeing the gallant, slightly comical figure of J.T. riding every wave. For he dominated the School and everybody in it, the one great Dickensian character that Dickens forgot to invent. A small, dapper man with a springy, almost a dandy, stride : a handsome Roman profile and blue eyes as alert as gas-jets : a bald head glistening like a billiard ball, cushioned by two pads of silver hair and decorated and decorated by a whitening moustache burned yellow at the fringes by cigarettes that sometimes went on smouldering long after they disappeared from sight. His nostrils expressed more disdain than a bloodhound’s. He used to put his wrists against his waist and make his gown billow out over his elbows like the wings of some watchful eagle. An eagle that always carried gloves and a walking-stick.
This man was always where you expected him to be, and many other places besides. He stood at five-to-nine, tut-tutting, with his watch out, at the late boys sneaking in. He would hover near the lockers to overhear a snatch of talk, and groan in his resonant Southern voice at the solecism of “Arnell Douse” (“Arnold House, boy, House !”) If some doggy character, in the Fifth Form usually, came porting a striped tie or a pair of Oxford bags, he would shrug his shoulders and eyebrows, predict the imminent decline of the whole tradition of the gentleman, and trot out his immortal definition of a bounder : “A man who wears a Guards tie without even knowing that it’s a Guards tie !“
On Saturdays he guided his lawn-mower like a regimental pony, and paused only to flick that nostril in silent tribute to the cattle who were passing out in droves in the nearby abattoir and emitting their abominable funereal odours over his beloved cricket field. On Monday mornings he would circulate around the Sixth Form and accuse the bleary-eyed, though in an amiable way, of having spent the weekend “ruining your minds at the kinema” (the fact that Greek “k” passed into English as a “c” never bothered him, the cinema was always the “kine-ee-mah”). He deplored the movies till the day he died but he thought he’d better see everything that might corrupt his pupils. [The point of] this rule never struck us at the time, [but] we always marvelled at the [near] accuracy of the mistakes he made in identifying movie stars. Those were the great days of Douglas Fairbanks and Rudolph Valentino, and he swore that he wouldn’t cross the street to see Douglas Valentino or Rudolph Fairbanks. The movies were trash all right, but he considered it his duty to look them over, as a police sergeant must stoop to search every suspect. His free pass [came to be] as worn down as a puppy’s pet bone.
These were the endearing absurdities with which small boys tried to hide their fear of his immense authority and their dependence on him as their judge, father-confessor, and the model of their manners and their tastes. He stood like a rock against an angry wash of criticism from the town whenever he thought [it] was short-sighted or provincial. But for all his concern with mere elegance, he put first things first. He helped poor, promising boys without any show of sentimentality. He treated their parents with the simplest chivalry and understanding. His type is dying almost everywhere, but it was a great thing in its day. And to the fumbling army of adolescents who wandered into his School in a trembling daze, he gave the most that anyone can : he gave his all. Once you joined the School, he made you know you were set apart. He set the standards –– of dress, of the curriculum, of plain English writing, of what was allowed as fun and what was [deemed] to be intolerable. He chose the masters and had a fierce pride in them. And when a master failed him, or violated his code, there would be a brief, stormy session in the little study under the stairs and the master appeared no more.
To those who never revelled in it, it may sound like a dictatorship, but he never questioned the prefects’ authority or, so far as I know, went over them. If he was away for a day (nothing less than an imminent pneumonia could bed him), you felt that the place was coming apart at the seams. The masters were a little more rattled than usual. But once the old war-horse was prancing down the corridors again, even the masters settled back into the shafts and it was “Giddy-up, Joe’s back in the saddle again.” There was good work to be done, and that back-stroke to watch ; the Friday afternoon debates ; there were School dances to beam on ; and Moss, the wheezing groundsman, to be considerate of ; along with sudden genial little homilies, delivered in the middle of anyone’s classes, about the Romans, or the pleasures of music, or the superiority of the French, or the nauseating unsightliness of a girl on the streets who had forgotten her gloves.
We were, in fact, swathed and suffocated by his peculiar form of affection. And in the dim but certain knowledge of it, we were able to frolic in the golden days of the Nineteen Twenties when war was far away, when foreign policy was an occupational headache of remote statesmen, when no enemy was more formidable than Arnell Douse or Kirkham Grammar, and when no earthquake, assassination or other outside crisis could begin to excite the School like the rumour that the new master with the fine eyes and stoop had once played for Warwickshire. The marvel spread and by the time it rebounded it had been improved with the hint that he had been the Warwickshire captain, then that he had played for England, very probably in the Test Matches. My own impression to this day is that Mr Parton came home from Australia expressly to teach us mathematics. < “Sam” in fact entered School in 1921, Cooke’s second year. >
So the decade turned, and the Twenties dimmed and shrank, as I suppose one’s schooldays always do, whatever is happening outside. Distant Wall Street [in its] collapse [would soon] shake our own houses. On the edge of Blackpool’s horizon, still lusty with trippers, was the low steady thunder of the Depressed Areas. And, further off still, the maniac of Munich [starting to] scream about Lebensraum .
But the Twenties, however reckless and trivial they may have been in the big world, shine through th[eir] deadening aftermath. There was a big game on Saturday, and the prospect of Ken Jones’s bulldog charges. There was the day we heard of the School’s first “First” at Oxford or, better [yet], Cambridge. There was Ennis Garstang and Phyllis Dunkerley teaching you the veleta in the Memorial Hall just before Christmas, and the brunette who hung over the piano as you played “Blue Skies” (never mind her name). The picnics to the Pennines. Sports Day and R. G. Shepherd lugging his game leg over the bar to win the high jump. The lazy twilights when Mr Curnow (1914-46) gave up all pretence of teaching history and reminisced about Cardiff on Saturday nights, or Mrs Patrick Campbell. “Bumps” Haythornthwaite (1919-58) never disciplining anybody but never having trouble either, making oafs look foolish with a pause and a mild word.
All these crowded incidents were held together as pleasures by the feeling that you belonged in a settled society, over which played the gay and impudent light of the Twenties. America called the tune of our leisure, and however much the bishops and magistrates (and J. T.) might bemoan it, we wallowed like kittens in the novelties pouring across the Atlantic : bobbed hair, crossword puzzles, the yo-yo, fresh slang, jazz, electrical recording, the nights leaping with all the best tunes of [Irving] Berlin and Jerome Kearn, Vincent Youmans and Rogers and Gershwin, without which no modern dance band could keep playing for more than half an hour. There was the agreeable business of ageing (but visibly, especially around the upper lip) and going into the Sixth, and being free to exchange a joke with hitherto untouchable masters who, after all, were mellowing too : with the Messrs Starkie (1921-47) and Parton (!921-48) and Coombes (1919-58) and Curnow (1914-46) and the beloved [Harry] Duguid (1921-29), the ash dribbling from his cigarette and joining the foam of egg on the flap of his waistcoat.
And darting through it all, like a fine spaniel, there was J.T., the nervous, dapper, exasperating, charming and forever cocky little figure who was, whether we liked it or not, our god. For in the beginning he inherited just another town school and made it, in his own image, into our world
Alistair (formerly) Alfred Cooke November 1908 – March 2004 Article submitted by a former pupil
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