Early years at the Northgate School

Early Years at Ipswich’s Northgate School

In July, 1931, at the end of the summer term, the old Ipswich Municipal Secondary School (known locally as ‘The Muny’!) on Tower ramparts, near the town centre, closed for ever. In September the school was reborn as the Northgate Municipal Secondary School (destined to be called simply ‘The Northgate’) in new buildings in Sidegate Lane, in what was then virtually open countryside. Unlike in the past, the boys’ and the girls’ schools were on the same site though with strictly separated playing fields. There was a shared ‘utility block’ between the two schools.

I was among the first new intake as the school reopened. Ten years old (I have never understood how it was that I started a year earlier than practically everybody else!) I cycled the three miles from my home in Bramford Lane, along Valley Road and Colchester Road to the new school, wearing the regulation school uniform of grey trousers and blazer, white shirt with school tie, navy blue mac and navy cap with the school badge, the Ipswich Municipal Crest.

It was a journey that I was to make twice a day, in both directions, during school term for the next six years. Our days at school were long by today’s standards 9.00 a.m. till 4.30 p.m. Mondays to Fridays plus, once we had progressed beyond the first two forms, 9.00 a.m. till 12 noon on Saturdays. We did have an almost-two-hours midday break though and many of us, having sampled the school dinners (only 6d or 2.5p) opted to cycle home for the midday meal.

Mr Alfred Morris was the headmaster throughout my time at the Northgate. He was an august figure whom we saw mainly at Assembly every morning. Once we reached the fifth form though he would take us for what was then called ‘Scripture’. He was fascinated (but failed to pass his fascination on to us!) by Middle Eastern archaeology and would carry on at length about Assyrian kings with unpronounceable names and about the excavations of a Sir Henry Layard in what was then called Mesopotamia but is now Iraq.

Of other masters I have much more colourful memories. In the junior forms Scripture was taught by Mr Lord (‘Ginger Lord’ to us boys for obvious reasons). He was fully persuaded that every word in the Bible was literally true. ‘Never mind what other teachers may tell you’, he’d say, in a strong ‘Coronation Street’ accent. ‘In the centre of the earth on one side is Paradise or Abraham’s Bosom where the souls of ‘the Just’ of the Old Testament are to be found. On the other side is Hell – and between the two there is a Great Gulf fixed’. He’d draw a circle on the blackboard and write ‘Paradise’ on one side and ‘Hell’ on the other with two lines in the middle labelled ‘Great Gulf’. I wonder how he got on with his colleagues in the staff room?

Then there was Mr Bishop, who taught us Geography, and taught it very well too. I recall though, his assuring us, this must have been in 1933 or ’34, that Ipswich could never have a professional football team. ‘We lack the industrial hinterland to make a team viable’, he insisted.

Mr Edwin Day and Mr ‘Johnny’ Cousins I recall with gratitude. They taught me to appreciate English Literature and to string words together acceptably myself. It is the only real skill that I have ever possessed. There was Mr Rees-Jones, whose lessons gave me a somewhat cynical view of British and world history that I have retained to this day; Mr Litchfield, who failed to turn me into a mathematician, and Dr Kerby who was even less successful at teaching me French.

Dr Kerby, as any of my contemporaries would confirm, was a real eccentric. He was a little man who had constant trouble with classroom discipline. On one Armistice Day (11th November) when we were particularly unruly, he shouted, ‘I will have order. I’ll fight you for it! I can fight’. He added, pulling aside his jacket to display two World War I campaign medals pinned to his waistcoat. He then spoilt the effect by explaining that he hadn’t been ‘a real soldier’, only an interpreter. His wife insisted upon his wearing his medals on Armistice day (all ex-servicemen did in those days) but he didn’t want to display them – so he compromised and wore them where they couldn’t be seen!

Our French pronunciation appalled him.‘You’re mutilating my favourite European language’, he would say to us with total contempt. ‘It’s le lendemain not ‘le laundryman’. He constantly complained that we weren’t taught English properly. ‘Yes, I know. You probably know more about Shakespeare than I do, but how can I teach you French grammar when you don’t know any English grammar?’ I wonder what he would think of English teaching today?

I believe that Dr Kerby was, in fact, a very distinguished scholar. During my time at the school the French President paid a state visit to the UK and Dr Kerby was among those invited to meet him. Thereafter he would sometimes punctuate his lessons, not altogether seriously, with, ‘As I said to Monsieur le Président…..’

Northgate School in those days liked to imitate the public schools. We were organised into ‘Houses’, and sport and games played an important role in school life. We played rugby during the autumn term, hockey during the spring term and tennis and cricket on alternate weeks during the summer term. I was uniformly useless at all of them. It wasn’t until decades later that I discovered that one of the reasons for this was that I had non-stereoscopic vision. Each of my eyes functioned satisfactorily, but not together. When one was working the other ‘switched off’. Consequently I saw nothing in 3D – and was hopeless at any game involving a fast-moving ball. I was a good shot with a rifle though, and not bad at lawn bowls and ten-pin bowling!

As well as being required to take part in team games every week, we were also expected to turn out on at least three Saturday afternoons during each term to ‘support the school team’.

Not that academic work was neglected. We were kept hard at it during each day, and with homework during the evening. In the first two forms we were expected to spend an hour each evening on homework, in the third form an hour and half and in the fourth and fifth forms two hours. There were written exams at the end of each term and regular tests throughout the term.

Each term saw the production of a school magazine. Very occasionally, when a teacher was running out of ideas, we’d have a lesson devoted to ‘writing a contribution to the magazine’. For some reason we all seemed to find verse easier than prose. I blush to think of some of my contributions that may be still in the school archives!

On one such occasion a classmate, totally bereft of inspiration, passed the time by idly copying from a poetry anthology Tennyson’s fairly well known verse fragment ‘The Eagle’. ‘He clasps the crag with his crooked hands…….etc’ The teacher, glancing over his shoulder, recognised this as being real poetry but, almost incredibly, failed to recognise its source. He snatched it up, enthused about it, and submitted it to the School Magazine editor in my classmate’s name. The editor didn’t recognise its source either (which doesn’t say much for my school’s teaching of English Literature) and published it in the Christmas 1934 issue of the magazine, still available in the school archive. A first former blew the gaff ‘Please sir – this poem by Tomlin in form 4b is in my poetry book!’. I would have been 13 at the time so Tomlin would probably have been 14. I don’t know what happened to him. Nothing much I suspect. He always said that he had never, for one moment, claimed that he had written the poem. The teacher just assumed that he had.

All our academic efforts were in preparation for the London University School Certificate Examination that we took in the fifth form at the age of sixteen. To be awarded the General Schools Certificate you had to get a mark of 40 percent or above in at least five subjects of which English (including both language and literature), Maths and French had to be three. If you failed in one of those five subjects you failed the whole exam. If you were awarded a credit mark of 50 percent in those five subjects you were exempted from the Matriculation (entrance) examination of London University. Because of this the school-leaving exam was often referred to simply as ‘the Matric’.

Headmaster Alfred Morris was strongly opposed to last minute swotting for exams. Consequently he had established a tradition that all School Certificate candidates spent the day before the exams started, boating on the Stour at Flatford Mill. We cycled from Ipswich to Flatford (we were all cyclists in those days) taking sandwiches with us for lunch. We spent the day on the river in skiffs hired by the school, rowed up the river to Dedham for tea (again provided by the school) and then rowed back to Flatford for the ride home. Many of us sat the exam the next day with blistered hands and an aching back!

Be that as it may, I left the Northgate in July 1937 with my School Certificate and Matriculation Exemption. I had taken the exam in English, Maths, French, History, Geography and General Physics. The last of these was guaranteed to be an examination on the principles of Physics only – with no mathematical problems to answer!

For a sixteen year old it was not, I think, too bad a preparation for life.