July 2003 Reunion - Outgoing President’s Address by Hector Cameron:

Madam Chairman, Fellow Old Scholars and Friends

I suppose I have had at least a year’s warning and preparatory time for this address but as we all know life doesn’t quite work out that way and so I found my self struggling late on Thursday night to put something together - doubly nervous because I knew also that this was no “one time forgive and forget speech” that no listener would remember the following morning but one which would find its way into print and perhaps come back to haunt me.

But it wasn’t that hard. Various ideas had popped into my head over the year from time to time and when I got down to it these stood me in good stead. Those who know me better will also know  that my first thoughts were to originality - to do something different. Lofty ideals. However at the end of the day none of you will be surprised to learn that what follows is no different from those who have trod this path  before me - and that it is, surprise, surprise - my address will be about me and my time at Brookfield.But maybe it will be different. Let’s see.

Well, every story has a beginning and mine begins in Glasgow in 1947. A mighty industrial city - second City of Empire - exhausted by war effort and pulling itself together as best it could.  My father was with MacBraynes. Our own Paul Graham is a keen member today of the MacBrayne Circle and regularly trips out in restored MacBrayne’s buses - how he must envy me my childhood weekends and holidays. On  a slack day my father would put me on a bus below his office in Glasgow as he arrived at work, have me hauled off it by the local Manager at Lochgilphead on Loch Fyne and put board the MacBrayne’s Steamer back to Glasgow  where he would meet me and take me home - all in time for tea. I think it reasonable to say that I must have travelled on every MacBrayne’s bus and every MacBrayne’s Steamer at that time - Paul might scoff and say many folk have done that. But very few, my dear Paul, did so and never paid a penny for the privilege!

My mother was a novelist. She wrote romantic and historical fiction always in a hurry to meet the next deadline - most of her writing appeared first in serial form - generally in the Peoples’  Friend - still going.  She was very ambitious for her children and her writing paid for my education and that of my sister. Little did Rob Gillies know that the fee cheques from my mother had their source in the Beano and  the Dandy men at D C Thomson in Dundee, the city of the three J’s - jute, jam and journalism.

My sister, after some time at the ParkSchool in Glasgow was sent to St Joseph’s Convent in Girvan. My mother thought she would do better there. My mother would get these thoughts and I wasn’t to escape them either. My sister’s experience was much the same I think as that of our former President Eve Tickle as many of you may remember from her excellent address last year. It may be that the regimen of that omnipresent religion passed also into their education systems with the result that it was cold and formal - a stark contrast from the openness and care we all experienced at Brookfield.  My sister said they also seemed so  rough and tough - we like many before us at Brookfield I suppose always tried to arrange our rugby fixture with the brother establishment St Joseph’s in Dumfries as late in the season as possible - we always had so many injuries after that game and our smaller numbers made replacement and substitution difficult.

But with grandfather a Colonel in the Salvation Army, a father in the Church of Scotland attending only when it was impossible to play golf, a mother who didn’t know quite what to do, my sister at a convent and me at a Friends’ school, I can safely say that we were a bit mixed up - but one result is that there is not an ounce of religious prejudice in us anywhere and I do feel so sorry for those who have - alas  still quite common in Glasgow.

I attended The High School of Glasgow from the age of 9. This was no mean school. It is the oldest school in Great Britain - 12th Century - pre-dating most of the Oxford and CambridgeColleges.  A school in the Home Counties does claim to be a couple of years older but in doing so omits to mention that it was shut for four centuries in the middle somewhere. I don’t want to be coy about this but this is no mere Fettes proud of producing its single Prime Minister, Tony Blair; the High School of Glasgow produced not one but two Prime Ministers in the 20th century alone and there a couple more further back, countless judges and statesmen of Empire, military men - Sir John Moore - of Corruna - it’s a formidable heritage. Money didn’t get you there. Entrance was strictly competitive and the competition was fierce. Not a typical preparatory school you might think - or one you might discard -  for the Friends’ School, Wigton.

But my mother sensed that things were not going so well for me there. And she was right. And so it was that in the late Spring of 1961 my mother and I attended an interview with Joe Carruthers at Brookfield, Wigton. He said they took automatic transfers from other Grammar Schools and so if we wanted - I was in. I wasn’t entirely sure of what “we” wanted at that moment but my Mother said yes and that was it. There  was no test. He asked me not a single question. I never met him again. He said nothing about his leaving.

And so it was that I attended Brookfield at the beginning of the September term in 1961. Well, when your Chairman introduced me to you at this meeting last year, she made the bad news for you even worse I thought in telling you all that “Kenneth Greaves and I arrived at Brookfield together.”  There those two words are out - Kenneth Greaves.

Now. We are at watershed here. The water I sometimes think is perhaps still shedding - in this room perhaps even as I speak. But, you know, 1961 is a watershed in anyone’s story. 

Last year we had to report sadly of two deaths from among the teaching staff - the multi-talented and charismatic Peter Iliffe of which much was recounted and remembered - and Kenneth Greaves. A  little less of him was recounted by my friend George Coulthard - not because George is ever short of a thing or two to say but perhaps he sensed his audience was - well, at another level in the history of the school than that  of Kenneth Greaves. But I remember distinctly what George said and his words on that day have come back to me several times since. He asked you to remember the irreversible  chronological  fact that Kenneth Greaves was “the only Brookfield headmaster that he and his fellow scholars knew” ; and he spoke of  “our leader, our mentor”…and added  “we knew no other”.

When I began this address I speculated with you my talk might after all be just that little bit different from addresses of previous Presidents’ times and adventures at Brookfield. And if  there is this difference, it would be this - like George, I am inescapably one of Greaves’s boys.

I was delighted to host the Northern Reunion at Loch Lomond this year. The plants and flowers you brought are now planted and we will remember you by them as they grow and flower each year for what I hope will be many years to come. Now you know where we are I hope those of you passing by in the future on a trip West - even those who couldn’t make it - will not hesitate to drop in and see us.

A few new faces turned up this year and one of them - for me - was Martin Raven. I hadn’t seen him since the day he left school. So, naturally we were chatting and I did mention that I found it a little odd to be regarded as one of the younger members of WOSA and to overhear comments like “we have a young President this year’.  Well, I can tell you, dear hearts, that I was 57 last month and that there are some moments in my activities when I struggle to recognise the youth that you attribute to me in this Association.  Of course, Martin and I lamented the absence of more of our immediate and younger colleagues and inevitably mention of the fact came up that the younger members of WOSA in the main stopped at Greaves. “Greaves” he said “isn’t that when it all started to go wrong?”.

Well, my dear friends, how often have we heard that?  Now, some of you might feel a little troubled at where we might be going here and some might even worry for me. But you should fear  not. Nonetheless,  I do have to record very plainly with you that when I arrived at Brookfield in September 1961 - straight into the new stewardship and regime of Kenneth Greaves - that is the precise moment in my education and in my life when far from it all going wrong, things for me started to go mightily right.

Now of course Kenneth Greaves and I didn’t actually arrive together at the school. Greaves, we all know, arrived a few weeks before. He writes some years later:-

“The introduction of co-education…happened by accident. I arrived… to find the buildings and the entire campus completely deserted. Having been assured from the first that this was a  co-educational school, I arranged mixed classrooms and mixed common rooms - how else? - and it was not until the first day of term that staff arrived….. and the full horror of the situation was discovered. But it was already too late to change everything back and the new arrangement had to stay….this was quite beyond the experience of the staff to control. Their ivory tower demolished, it was the end of their world. But the kids loved it!”

Now, of course, it’s not true - not wholly anyway. I can hear him laughing as he writes this. There was an imp in the Headmaster and sometimes the imp escaped the Headmaster - and never more so perhaps when he wrote that.

Note by HC: An advantage I now have in print  is to record that several members approached me after the address to explain that classes and several activities were already fully  co-educational long before Greaves. I know; we all know. It must of course have been my oratorial failing in not making it sufficiently clear in my address that these were not my words but those of Kenneth Greaves himself - written some years later and reproduced in Peter Carey’s History 1950 - 1985. Perhaps he himself did not know. I think that unlikely and that most probably there was an “artistic licence” in his words. Whatever, the inescapable truth is that it was to Greaves that Brookfield did become wholly co-educational.  

And we can see so easily now how he gathered detractors from “the old school”. He continues with the story of the “nigger brown velour hats” that the girls wore to Sunday Meeting. Besides the fact that today the expression “nigger brown” might get you the jail, he expressed the view that they might - in 1961 - no longer be appropriate. The answer he gets of course is total assurance that every girl in the  school was proud and fond of their hats and brown dresses and wouldn’t dream of being parted from them. One imagines here a distressed Gwen Bagwell giving this assurance - fearful of the abandonment of even more history -  forgetful nonetheless of collecting the actual views of the girls on the matter. So, Greaves continues, “as an experiment, we made these items not compulsory but optional;” . As you read this there an enormous pause in the narrative, albeit there is only a semi colon - and of course you know the punch line even before you read it -  “ and they were never seen again”. Yes, the imp could most certainly escape the Headmaster and for those passionately in support of standing still in 1961, it would easily have been taken as hurtful - a mockery too far perhaps.

There are times when you can look at history and recognise some really quite long periods - decades sometimes - when things by and large did stand comfortably still. Indisputably, 1961 was not  one of them. Change - and change amongst the country’s youth - was not just in the air - it was building up to a howling gale.

My parents - and I have to suppose most of yours - must have been much astonished in their lifetimes. When they were young technology was by and large limited to extravagant applications of steam  power. In their time, they saw impossibly heavy metal unsupported in our skies hurtling passengers towards unthinkable and improbable destinations in a day; they could speak to people at a distance on a telephone - older people rarely said goodbye on the phone; my Dad didn’t; the reason was he didn’t recognise it as a true conversation; it was false somehow; a man at Alexandra Palace at the BBC in London would speak and be heard - and later quite bafflingly be seen -  on an instrument in the corner of the living room; the Russians had even caused a dog to encircle the moon in a sputnik.  The lights might have gone out all over Europe, “never to be relit in  our time” in two world wars but our island survived.  But all that change was but nothing to the shattering of our mores, our cultures, our structures, our habits and of our dependable and comfortable societies that took place in the permissiveness of the 60’s. Harold MacMillan - the world’s last statesman perhaps - was on the way out, his Government exhausted by scandal - plus ca change - with Harry Wilson, able and articulate - warming up in the wings. Fine, but witness here the end of statesmen - and the entry of professional politicians. You didn’t have to look far for evidence of change. And that change - like it or not - was going to affect all sectors of  our society - and secondary boarding education was not exempt.

If WOSA was going to be critical of change at the school, it was not exempt itself. The 1962 magazine announced “Wives and husbands of Old Scholars will be made very welcome at the Reunion  Weekend in August”. Hitherto spouses had been rigorously excluded.  Can you imagine? Surely there would have been some stiff letters, resignations even. 

But I am poking fun and maybe shouldn’t in this company. Nonetheless,  I think my point is plain. In the 1950 - 85 School History, Peter Carey, in a masterly description of the pressure cooker of change boiling up beneath, describes the precarious position of both the school and of WOSA in 1961 and in this most descriptive way - “the walls of Jericho” he wrote, “were beginning to crumble ”.

The kids, however, didn’t need to be told this - they knew already because Bob Dylan had told them - in a song now trite and old hat - the times, they are a changing.  A mere five years  earlier and McCarthy would have had Dylan locked up as a communist traitor. Don’t laugh at me mentioning these popular songs. Worse was to come for those who liked to hang on to their hats. My friend Patsy Wilkinson on a Xmas  holiday went to stay with her boyfriend’s - later her husband John Castree - parents in Liverpool. They visited one evening the Cavern Club and Patsy brought back for us demo and other records of the band she heard performing  there - long before any of us had. We played them at our Saturday Dances. This of course was the Beatles and everything that that entailed. They exploded onto the world a few months later but courtesy of Patsy we all felt quite  special at being in on it at the ground floor.

Youth as anyone had ever known it or had expected of it would never be the same again. That wind of change was now a hurricane and those whose job is was to teach and educate that youth - had to  buy a new rule book  - or give up and go home.

Brookfield would never have escaped this and those who express a view - even today - of “if only’s” is frankly dreaming. I do not know what would have happened had things had not changed - and radically so. I’ll guess the school wouldn’t have lasted as long as it did. I do not know what type of Headmaster was the better equipped to manage this change - perhaps you do - but I do know that Creseus had a better chance of holding back the tide than it would have been to make Brookfield stand still in 1961 and pretend that the times “they were NOT a changing.” 

So what was it like in this “orgy” that used to be a school?  Well, as a caring,  character building school, there was truly no change. Yes, the hats and the caps were going   and we were into full tilt co-education. Evening readings were still with us - a comfort on the night of the Cuban Missile crisis - we sang, For those in Peril on the Sea, as I recall - and the night of the Kennedy assassination. And it was truly quaint and still very protected and insular. In all the time I was there it was still seriously tradition bound and old fashioned. And it was good for me.

I had come from a massive impersonal male bastion of Scottish education. It may have been good for countless MP’s, judges, civil servants, lawyers and accountants but as my Mother had spotted it wasn’t doing the business for me. And the cure all of course was corporal punishment - the belt. You were belted for this and belted for that. I was belted in the Primary school in spelling failures - one of the belt for  each one wrong. It followed me into the Latin Vocabulary tests in SeniorSchool - identical principle. I was belted for talking, for not talking, for smiling at the wrong time, for looking vacant, for being late.

One night in my first few days at Brookfield, David Griffiths, the Biology Master, was on duty and disturbed an “Olympic Games” in our dormitory. I think it was during the final race - round  the room twice without touching the floor. As you can imagine, those who had managed thus far to remain asleep in these proceedings - suddenly weren’t. The punishment for four of us was to take four stones - clearly unique and geologically identifiable to Griffiths - and leave them at the foot of a five bar gate on the six mile round where he would expect to see them - from his motor car - the following day.  Imagine today sending thirteen year olds out alone into the near dark at half past nine at night in running shorts! But for me I’d have taken 6 of the belt in preference any day.  Lack of corporal punishment - or rather the recognition of the  uselessness of it - was a big one for me. Staff who actually talked to you, who seemed to care, was another. I couldn’t quite get used to this. I was laughed at as I stood to rigid attention whenever addressed in class or out  of class as if for an inevitable row or lecture. I called female staff Ma’am, not Miss.  I was very defensive.

Moving from the Scottish 2nd Senior Year and into Brookfield’s  4th Form found me behind in some subjects but seriously ahead in most - none more so than in Latin - and Greek for that matter if the school had catered for it. I remember the art teacher finding me out to discuss and seek my help with a translation she had come across. I thought it was a wind up. No master or mistress in my previous world would have dared to break down that barrier - or even betray their lack of knowledge.  So, new concepts of caring, communication, openness, fairness and even simple encouragement came my way for the first time in a tidal rush. At first I was suspicious of it but very soon I found I could respond. I moved - Brookfield moved me - across that chasm from surviving and containing the flow around me to actually contributing to the flow itself. What a discovery!

And who was still there? Well, all the names you love to recall. I’ll not disappoint and will recall some of them again for you now. Charles Marshall, of course, bemused I think rather than angry. Gwen Bagwell who left soon after I arrived and who I didn’t really get to know well - I would have liked to. I think she was a bit suspicious of me - as if there was a connected truth in the statement that Greaves and I had in fact arrived together.  Fred Bell opened my interest in sport as well as a legacy of being quite handy in the workshop.  Having playing fields at the bottom of the garden as it were instead of getting on a bus in the centre of Glasgow to get to them made a world of a difference. He pushed me into participation; I was quickly in the 1st XV and became a useful cross country runner. As my attentions turned more and more to the academic I think he started to class me as “too clever by half” - it was a Fred expression as you’ll all remember, not a truth he actually believed or wanted to cause hurt with.

And Miss Twentyman. I think there’s misleading information in the school history - she was all pervading throughout this period in keeping house. I may be wrong but I associate her directly with a Pork and Cracklin I have rarely tasted since and Yorkshire Puddings too. I’m certain these were hers. Mass catering is always a challenge even today - but as I look back I remember the consistency of quality and it was  quite remarkable. And Pearl Waldron - such fun, such energy - the jolly hockey sticks, the very embodiment of a Joyce Grenfell of St Trinians. I was so pleased to meet her here a couple of years back. Forever the teacher and  improver, we were talking about architectural inconsistency and I mentioned that we even had a Gasometer in Glasgow as a listed building. Remember your classical education she shrieked. It’s a gasholder not a gasometer - which from the Greek is of course a device that measures gas not holds it. She was right - although no one calls it that all the same.

To Miss MacBeath I owe much. I contracted Bells Palsy at school. It’s a paralysis of one side of the face muscles. I was in the cottage in a trice. The Doctor was summoned and said there was  nothing to be done and I might as well get up. Dorothy MacBeath thought otherwise. Parents and a car were dispatched en route  from Glasgow and in the meantime I stayed put in the cottage. The Doctor had to call the next  day as it happened and as he came into the cottage and saw me still there, he raised an enquiring eyebrow at Miss MacBeath - I’ll never forget how she stared him down daring him to question her decision. Of course he crumbled  without a word. I spent every morning that summer at the Western Infirmary, Glasgow having electric currents reactivating the muscles on the left side of my face back into action. It would not have got better of its own - it would have become even more irreversible by passing time and today I’d be talking as if out of the side of my mouth. I would probably have ducked out of talking at all. I have a lot to grateful for to Dorothy MacBeath.

J H Joachim - a tall schoolboy - but who was on the staff - of irrepressible fun and interest in learning. Oh yes, I was one of his boys all right. I remember he thought it a good idea one term to enrol us all in CND. My mother - who I should explain was then the Chairman of her local Conservative and Unionist Party - was on the next train South. But it ended well and happily. No one could be angry with JHJ for very long.

I spent my first year in the large dormitory in school; in the fifth form at Hillside with Fred Bell; lower sixth at Sunnymede with Charles Marshall. In Upper Sixth I had my own room and in my third year sixth I occupied one of the staff bungalows on Cuddy, taught a Latin class, stood in frequently as a Master on Duty and took breakfasts on Saturdays and Sundays - I remember in this privileged position getting Kenneth Greaves’ special coffee tray - the only person in the room to get coffee. It was delicious.

A third year sixth, you say? In Upper Sixth I had been given the very strong nod that I was to be accepted at ClareCollege,Cambridge - Greaves’s own college. But I was still young and a third  year sixth would be helpful to see me into the following year’s intake to Clare. Well, all were cock a hoop. Me too. Brookfield with an OxBridge entrant. But in my first term back it became clear that my place had evaporated. My A and S Level grades had fallen short of expectation. Some suspected unfair play - a favour granted to someone deemed more important perhaps. Who knew the true answer? I know now it simply wasn’t on the agenda life had in store for me. But it was a bitter disappointment at the time - both for me and for the school. I felt I had let it down and it, me. It left me probably with a drive of over-ambition as if to prove there was nothing wrong with  me despite being rejected in that manner. I had - in my back pocket as it were for over a year before - an open ticket to St Andrews, the oldest of the Scottish Universities and even then the most sought after on students’ choice after Oxford and Cambridge. With Prince William there now, I think many a young girl - or more likely her mother - would today find it hard to see how that was a consolation prize. But it was in some senses for me - and  it took me a while to get over it.

So there it was for me. Childhood’s end. As a tailpiece I can tell you it all came flooding back thirty years later when I hired a van and drove my son with every possession he owned piled up  in the back - we drove to …Cambridge. Not to Clare College but two doors down - to the mighty Trinity College, the richest and most powerful of all Oxford and Cambridge colleges to do pure maths - his professor, one Stephen Hawking no less. I walked around a little, pausing at the gates of Clare College, regretted little, accepted what I did regret and leaving my son to his new future drove all the way home.

The following Summer on a slack sunny day in Corporate Law Glasgow, I drove to Wigton. I had lost touch and wanted to see the school again. It was demolished. I had not known. Nothing could have prepared me for this. As I walked - floated - up what was the driveway, it was as if my very legs, the crutches of my whole life had been cut from under me. I regretted everything; it was difficult to accept any of it; and leaving the land and what was left of the buildings to their new future, I drove all the way home.

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