COUNTY SCHOOL MASTERS ndash; 1930s
Guz
Guz (Mr. Deiniol Williams) was our Geography master - popular rumour had it that his first name was Augustus (Gus for short) but as he always pronounced ‘s’ as ‘z’, he was nicknamed Guz. In all the years I knew him, he never lost his temper with us, and was always smiling a cheerful grin. Yet we really hated it when he was assigned in charge of detention (where we were kept behind after normal school-hours), a punishment sometimes meted out to an entire class for infringements such as undue foot-shuffling in class by just one boy. While Guz busied himself with marking his class assignments, he’d instruct us to copy from our atlas a map of the world, or maybe just a single country such as Germany, or perhaps Africa, and to mark on it all the MAJOR towns and rivers. As soon as anyone was done, he’d assure us with a huge smile, that student would be free to leave.
So away we’d go, as it was important to get home as soon as possible to complete our regular homework assignments. In time, a boy would approach Guz with his very detailed map; Guz would give him an encouragingly benevolent grin as he cast a critical eye over it, with many comments of “Yez, very, very, good!” or “An exzellent map!” before suddenly dropping his bomb-shell with a remark such as “Oh, but don’t you think that Hoch Alteberg (or some such town) iz a major town?” We’d long-since learned not to disagree with Guz, so the boy would hang his head in shame and mumble “Yes, sir!” (all our masters were addressed as “Sir”). “Oh, dear!” Guz would sigh, at the same time giving him his usual great big smile, “I’m zo zorry, but you’d better go back to your dezk and try again, hadn’t you?” and he’d tear up the beautifully hand-drawn map into tiny pieces and drop it like a miniature snowstorm into a nearby wastebasket.
Only when Guz had completed all his own work, and was himself ready to leave, would our maps finally meet with his approval and we too would be permitted to go.
Bonzo and Tommy
Both Bonzo (Mr. W. E. Roberts) and Tommy (Mr. Louis M. Thomas) were our English Grammar and English Literature masters. I remember a time in my second or third year at County when Bonzo gave us an assignment to write a poem on the subject of Rain. Unfortunately, I didn’t keep a copy of my poem, but I do recall how pleased Bonzo was with two of my lines, which went :
It churns the swirling stream
Into a creamy froth of foam
Ever after that, for the remainder of my years at County, whenever our paths crossed, whether during a walk in the park at lunch-time or during off-school hours, he’d always smile and greet me with something like, “Ah, yes! Robert Jones. The boy who wrote ...” and he’d recite just those two lines, and remind me of what a beautiful example of alliteration and onomatopœia they were. As a result, I’ve never forgotten those particular lines myself!
Tommy had a great love of poetry, and also a peculiar custom of always closing his eyes during poetry readings, a habit which we often turned to our advantage. Sometimes, if we felt we had just a little too much homework for the upcoming evening, and Tommy had planned some Shakespeare or other drudgery for us, we’d use our wiles to persuade him to read us one of his favourite, interminably long, poems by Tennyson instead. We’d all dutifully close our eyes at Tommy’s command — the better to concentrate on the poem, he’d tell us — then he’d close his own and begin his recital, which he knew completely by heart. As soon as he was well under way, and totally absorbed in his poem, we’d dig out our homework assignments and get down to it, keeping a weather eye on Tommy the whole while. As you can guess, we became quite adept at quickly closing our own eyes and leaning back in our seat or bowing our head the moment his eyelids looked as though they were about to open.
Tim
Tim (Mr. D. Timothy Davies) was our Mathematics master, until his death some time in late 1936 or during 1937, I think it was. He was a legacy from the previous century, a hard taskmaster, if ever there was one, and a really strict disciplinarian to boot. Not yet bald, with a solid fringe of white hair, he had a reddish-brown, weather-beaten face with a rather hook-shaped nose and a pointed chin, so he looked to me rather like Punch (of Punch-and-Judy fame). I’m surprised, in fact, that this hadn’t been chosen as his nickname, but this wasn’t likely now, because the name Tim had been assigned to him many, many years earlier in his teaching career, when he probably looked quite different.
Each problem we got wrong in mathematics had to be written out ten times as punishment, with all auxiliary calculations included. Unlike the first, erroneous, attempt it was now no longer permissible to assume, for example, that 3 x 12 = 36. We had to write it all out in full in the right-hand margin, commencing with a 3 below a 12, then a horizontal line, beneath that a 30, and below that a 6, then another horizontal line, to be added up for a grand total of 36. Ten times!! Even for a simple 2 + 3 = 5, if you can imagine! Woe betide us if we omitted a single one of these side-calculations, or made another error, as the entire assignment would then be multiplied by ten again, which meant doing everything from scratch a hundred times more. All this in addition to our ongoing heavy load of homework assignments. But we learned our maths well (math in N. America) - it just didn’t pay to do otherwise with Tim!
Another ‘game’ of Tim’s was to set us all working on some assignment in class, on a complex geometry problem involving the theorems of Pythagoras and Euclid, let’s say. As soon as the problem was solved by anyone, the boy concerned would hold up his hand, and Tim would beckon him forward to his desk to study the mathematical solution, whatever it might be. If correct, the boy got a sincere congratulation from Tim, even a pat on the head (Tim genuinely appreciated a boy who got things right), then he’d be told to go back to his seat and see if he could find a different way of solving the same problem, and if successful to go back and look for a third way of achieving the result, and so on.
Tim was hard on us, really tough if need be, but he sure taught us mathematics - not only that, but his methods also subtly taught us that there’s very often more than one way to skin a cat, that we should always look for alternative, possibly better, solutions to any of life’s problems, mathematical or otherwise! Quite a character! I honestly liked Tim!
Brin
When Tim died, he was temporarily replaced by Brin (T. Brinley Reynolds), our French master, who’d also majored in mathematics at University. Brin was so very easy-going, everyone liked him and gave him of their best, not because they had to, as with Tim, but because they wanted to. Later, a new Mathematics master was appointed, Mr. T. R. James, a much younger man with whom I’d already spent a year while in Ynyslwyd Central School. And Brin went back to teaching only French.
For several months after I’d matriculated and left home to take up an appointment in the Civil Service in London, I corresponded for some time with Brin in French, just to keep fluent in that language. I remember telling my Aunt Mary once that I’d just “sent a French letter to Brin.” I didn’t know then that sending a French letter was British slang for having sex (French letter = condom), so I was naturally puzzled when she burst out laughing at me! And again when she passed on this little tidbit to her husband - my Uncle Billy - for another round of hilarity!
Steve 1900 – 1943
Steve was Mr. Ronald Victor Hoggins, our Commercial master, a florid-faced and heavily-built, almost flabby, man. In the early years I remember learning to touch-type to music. The whole class would be blindfolded, and we’d sit with our fingers poised over the keyboard of our typewriter, while he played a musical record. We had to type in time with the rhythm of the music, initially just simple keyboard sequences such as asdfg, or the vowels aeiou, over and over again. Later on, we progressed to actual sentences such as "Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of the party", or "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog", or "Dear Sir, I am in receipt of your letter of yesterday’s date", and so on, typing them repeatedly till the record ended. Then off with our blindfolds, to see what sort of mess we’d made!
When we became fairly proficient at Pitman’s shorthand, he’d also use records, consisting of long dictation speeches, so that as he pushed us towards speeds of 150 words per minute, he’d play the record first at a speed of, say, 200 wpm, all the while urging us to do our utmost to keep up. A hopeless task indeed at the time, but if we tried really hard, and he then played another piece at 150 wpm we’d find it incredibly easy to get it all down. Of course, by the next lesson we’d have dropped back more or less to our former speed, but after several such sessions, Steve managed to gradually nudge our speed ever upwards.
If we ever showed signs of becoming a little too smug over the speeds we were achieving, Steve had a ready method of deflating our egos somewhat by dictating from one or other of several pieces he kept specially for such occasions. These were fairly lengthy dictations, almost entirely composed of extremely l-o-n-g words and phrases such as antidisestablishmentarianism, counter-revolutionary intercommunications, intergovernmental counter-espionage, and so on, to name most of those I recall, making it extremely difficult, needless to say, to keep up with him and take down the words at even the lowly speed of 30 or 40 words per minute.
Sometimes, our assignment might be that when next we went to the cinema we were to take down all the speech part of the movie, so there I’d sit in the gloomy interior of the cinema, with a notebook on my lap, writing the scrawliest shorthand you ever saw ... but we learned, and we learned, and we learned. We had the very best of teachers in those days! I recall doing this for a Shirley Temple movie called Captain January, which I afterwards wrote up as a complete story, with a detailed description of all the action included as well, to make it into a mini-novel. Long-since lost, sad to say!
It was peculiar, to say the least, that in Aberdare Girls’ County School the girls were not taught these subjects, especially shorthand and typing, even though it was more likely that a girl, rather than a boy, would take up a secretarial position later in life. They were taught Cookery and Needlework instead, on the assumption, I suppose, that they should preferably become wives and mothers! I’d have thought, though, that the School Board might have reasonably equated these womanly skills with the woodwork and metalwork taught to boys, and still instructed girls in the commercial subjects as well.
Years later, on leave from the Air Force, I visited my old school and learned that Steve’s son Dennis, also in the RAF, was killed in a flying accident, after which Steve himself rapidly went downhill, and died not too many months later. Commercial was then dropped entirely as a subject at County School, as the Welsh Board of Education didn’t bother finding a replacement for Steve. This was largely due to the fact that South Wales was by now a haven for evacuee-kids from all parts of England, mostly from Ilford, Essex - to escape the bombing - so schooling for everyone, including my sister Audrey, now in the Girls’ County School, and the younger members of my family, was of necessity shared on a split-shift basis with the evacuees.
Sammy
Sammy (Mr. Samuel Evans) was our Chemistry master, another easy-going guy, in spite of some of the pranks we played on him, such as occasionally changing labels on some of his bottles of chemicals. Our favourite trick though was to wait until he’d got some experiment going on his own lab-bench at the front of the class. Then, while something was merrily bubbling away over his Bunsen burner, a few of us would take a deep breath, put our mouths over the little gas-taps on our own benches, open them up and blow hard into the gas-lines to create a huge air-bubble in the main line, then close off our taps. Eventually the bubble of air would work its way down to Sammy’s Bunsen and the flame would go out; but the gas continued to flow, of course, and soon Sammy would interrupt his ongoing lecture to sniff! sniff! sniff! A hurried check soon showed that his burner had gone out for some mysterious reason, but he was never silly enough to try to re-light it while the gas-cloud still hung around. Neither did he ever tell us off, though I suspect he must have known perfectly well why the flame had died!
Sometimes we’d play this trick on each other - one boy alone, by careful breath control would watch an adjacent team’s Bunsen and keep blowing just long enough to make the solitary target-flame go out. School was so much fun - I still have very fond memories of the four-and-a-bit years I spent there!
Cæsar
Caesar (E. Ceredig Jones) taught Latin, so I had practically no connection with him at all, as I was Commercial. Indirectly, though, non-Latin students learned quite a lot of the basics of Latin merely through listening to those members of our class who took this language reciting verb conjugations, such as amo, amas, amat, amamus, amatis, amant (I love, you love, he loves, we love, you love, they love), and so on. Often-times we’d join in with their chanting, just for the fun of it.
Caesar had suffered a severe injury during his military service in World War 1, the scars of which were still clearly visible as a permanent reminder of what he’d gone through.
Charlie
Charlie (Mr W. Charlton Cox) was our Headmaster until his retirement in January 1937, when Billy-2 (one of the teachers) took over the reins of office. I remember Charlie as having fairly rosy-red cheeks, with rather translucent skin, but, all-in-all, we had very little to do with him, other than seeing him at morning prayers - and, of course, on the odd occasion when it was felt necessary for him to administer a lecture or other disciplinary measure (such as a caning) to a wayward pupil.
Not an overly strict man, he was nevertheless a strong believer in discipline as far as his pupils were concerned, and was apparently well-liked by the teaching staff. For some reason, he always described the first two terms of the school-year as the Michaelmas term and the Lent term - possibly a relic of the days he’d spent at Oxford University.
Dai Shavings
In our early years, woodwork was taught only on Monday and Wednesday mornings by a peripatetic teacher, a Mr. Davies - nicknamed Dai Shavings - who alternated with Gowerton Boys’ County School on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Fridays. He was a relic from the past, with his ramrod back, razor-edged trouser-crease, pince-nez glasses, wing-collar, cravat and pearl pin. Possibly in 1935, he was replaced by Mr. David Arthur Lewis (Claude), who then taught us both Woodwork and Metalwork on a full-time basis.
Trott
Mr Arthur Launcelot Trott taught Art, History and Mathematics, though Bobby was the master normally assigned to my form for History. There’s not too much I can remember about Trott, other than his teaching us the mechanics of precision drawing, so we spent a lot of time drawing large match-boxes, or houses, with lots of construction-lines converging on specific points on an optical horizon, all to be carefully erased afterwards. Which mainly tended, from my viewpoint anyway, to give a rather exaggerated sense of perspective to the objects in question.
Jimmy
Jimmy (Harold Ifor James) was our Biology master, and under his tutelage we learned how to operate high-powered microscopes to examine drops of pond-water and to make reasonable sketches of the weird life-forms living there. Plus lots of other biological objects, such as a fly’s wing, or a drop of blood, and so on. Not to mention the universal practice of cutting up worms or frogs to examine the various parts of their anatomy. I think we all liked both Biology, and its master.
Towler
I don’t recall too much of Towler (Mr. W. D. Towler) other than that he was fairly strict, and, if memory serves me correctly, carried a swishy bamboo cane as a symbol of his authority, though I don’t recall ever seeing him use it on anyone. I remember learning various laws of physics, such as Boyle’s Law, and also one of his favourite experiments where we’d try forcing a metal ball through a metal ring fastened to the end of an insulated rod. Impossible to do - unless we first heated up the metal ring over a Bunsen burner, and then it would drop through very easily. That way we learned that things expand when heated!
Pep
Pep was Mr P. E. Phillips, a smallish man with an extremely pallid complexion, and a high forehead due to a prematurely receding hairline. He taught music, or perhaps that should be music-appreciation, as he concentrated mainly on teaching us all about the lives of the classical composers and how to understand and appreciate their music, played to us on a small record-player. He also taught us how to sing, in addition to forming a school choir.
On top of all this, Pep took classes in French and Scripture, and even Economics, but for most of my time at County, Brin was the French master for my form, though Pep would take over when Brin, for whatever reason (possibly sickness) would be unable to attend.
Bobby
Bobby (Mr Aubrey Roberts) taught only History, I think. A very easy-going sort of person, he was liked by everyone. Not so with his subject-matter, however, as we were required to memorise a seemingly endless list of dates, such as the date when a particular British monarch ascended the throne and when he died, or the date of every battle fought by the English, whether internally against the Welsh or the Scots or externally against other countries. At the first opportunity I dropped History in favour of extra Art lessons.
Sasso
Sasso - I’m still puzzled as to the origin of that rather strange nickname - was Mr John T. Bowen, a very tall gentleman who wore glasses with extremely thick lenses. His main discipline was the all-important Scripture, on which subject I believe he’d written a theological volume. He also taught us Welsh. Scripture in those days, of course, was not in the least concerned with comparative religion - it was strictly a Christian Bible-study session, with a bit of hymn-singing thrown in now and then. As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, two of the boys in my class, Ikey Munn and Tom Cochlin, were Roman Catholics, and therefore excused from attending our Christian classes. Weird, to say the least!!
Excell
P.T. (Physical Training) was the domain of Mr. E. James Excell. This subject included Sports, cricket in the summer and rugby football in the winter, plus the annual sports events, all held in the school’s playing-field at the lower end of Tudor Terrace, Robertstown. A solitary wooden building at the far end of the field served as a changing-room.
Normally, we did our physical training in the school’s gymnasium, but if the weather happened to be inclement on those days scheduled for actual sports, we used to play netball (now called basketball) inside the gym instead. Because of my height, I did much better at this game than I did at either cricket or Rugby, as it was so easy for me to get the ball into the basket.
I used to admire an outstanding feature of Mr Excell on those days when I chose to eat my lunch in the school cafeteria, and that was the pronounced rippling of his facial muscles as he chewed his food. This held an enormous fascination for me, for some reason.
Optional Subjects
In my third year I exercised one of the many options available, and dropped History in favour of extra Art lessons; then at the start of my fourth year I also dropped Welsh in favour of extra French lessons. A dropped subject was not completely eliminated, however - it meant, in the case of Welsh and French for instance, that instead of taking three lessons in each subject during a school-week I’d now take one of Welsh and five of French.
A summary of the teachers and their subjects
