WOSA Presidents Speech - July 2008 - (Jim Swithenbank)

The First of the Summer Wine

Madam Chairman, Ladies and Gentlemen:-

My arrival at Brookfield was due to a Ghost and travel sickness!

At the beginning of the war, my brother Colin (who was then half my age) and I were evacuated to a farm near Ingleton where we learned to milk cows and sit side by side on a two-seater pit toilet.  Similarly, a mother and two children from Kent were evacuated to a house called Beck Hall that was renovated in 1610 in the Yorkshire dales village of Malham.  The morning after their arrival the mother went to tell the lady at the post office that they were the new tenants of Beck Hall.  The chatty postmistress enquired if they had encountered the ghost.  They immediately took the train back to Kent since they apparently preferred living with bombs to living with spirits.  Since we were familiar with Beck Hall Guest House our mother took over the business and we had a beautiful old home and a village school where I failed my 11-plus exam. Due to my travel sickness problem, a daily bus ride to school in Skipton was not practicable, and thankfully our parents decided to send me, and later Colin, to Brookfield.

It seems to be traditional for WOSA Presidents to present the memories of their activities during their schooldays at Brookfield.  As a self-confessed delinquent, this presented me with an embarrassing decision: should I “cherry-pick my memories”, or should I “be honest”.  At the risk of shocking you all, the School motto “We Seek the Truth” guided my decision, and to the pain of my conscience, here are some of my revelations.

I expect that you are all familiar with the television characters in Last of the Summer Wine.  So far as I am aware, they never revealed where they learned their skills in everything from their undoubted scientific curiosity, to “dealing with Auntie Mabel and others of the opposite sex”.  However, I believe that together with two of my Brookfield colleagues, we were the “The First of the Summer Wine”. Thus from an early age, we learned to hone our interests, activities and personalities at Brookfield.

First of all, in the interest of accuracy, I should identify the three delinquents in this phase of my story.  Although to avoid being sued for deformation of character, I will avoid mentioning specific names and who played the part of Compo.  Nevertheless, one member of the triad had interests in biology and became a doctor; one was more concerned with physics and chemistry, whilst the third member of the group who had nautical interests, tried (often unsuccessfully) to keep us on the straight, narrow and generally unsuccessful route to rationality. 

As with all our learning, the real basis of our knowledge was provided by Charles Marshall and Freddie Bell.  Charles, known to us as Ninnie for reasons lost in the depths of time showed us that scientific knowledge comes from experimentation and careful observation. Most of you will remember your first science lesson where you put a finger covered in salty water in your mouth as a result of not observing that his finger used to stir the salty water was not the finger that he sucked, before inviting us all to copy his actions. Fred on the other hand inspired me in gymnastics, but must have despaired of getting me to kick, hit or throw a ball in any game.  In fact I believe that he did not really understand that games are contrary to scientific and even Quaker principles.  For example, if the aim of the game is to put a ball into the goal between the posts, then I believe that both teams should get together and support each other to send the ball into each goal lots of times.  A similar rule should apply to cricket, and I ask you seriously “why should someone stand in front of the wickets with a bat to stop the bowler hitting them?”  Surely they could enjoy the game better in a spirit of mutual co-operation.

One of our first scientific experiments concerned the small cast iron door that happened to be in the wall behind my bed in the South Dorm. This was a mystery that demanded investigation.  So one evening in the period before lights out, our obvious action was to exploit the moth balls that matron put amongst our clothes in the wardrobe.  Our idea was to drop these moth balls down the hole behind the door, which turned out to be a port for cleaning a chimney, and see where they emerged.

The solution to our problem was almost immediate when the master on duty came charging up the stairs.  We had thoughtfully stationed a lookout at the window overlooking these stairs and generally graded the severity of our offences by how many stairs were taken at each stride.  Apparently the moth balls had come rattling down the chimney in the staff room and bounced out of the fireplace over the feet of the male staff.  The score on the stairs was six steps at a stride, and we still consider this to be the record.

It is useful to have some knowledge of biology since it allowed us to identify that hops, or perhaps something similar, was growing in the school hedge on the way to the playing field.  We soon learned that in the early days of the school, (that is at the beginning of the 1800’s); beer was served to the pupils.  We therefore concluded that the hops were a historic relic in the garden.  With help from the British Encyclopaedia kept by the eagle in the library, we set up a small brewery in the boiler house underneath David Reed’s study.  The resulting brew was in some ways a disaster since it tasted horrid, but it had an educational spin-off since to this day I do not like beer that contains a lot of hops.

It was our triad’s belief that “he who never makes a mistake never makes anything” so we tried a different approach.  This grew out of the observation that fallen apples on the ground in the school orchard were being wasted.  Our next investigation was to change our manufacturing facilities to the production of cider. This was much more successful and I must confess that scrumpy cider is still one of my favourite drinks.

Thanks to the breadth of our general science training we felt compelled to also carry out experiments in the physical sciences, and chemistry promised to give us some excitement.  The most appropriate technology for inquisitive minds was obviously explosives and we investigated several with mixed results.  One of the most successful was ammonium tri-iodide.  This was safe on a filter paper when wet, but was rather sensitive when dry.  Unfortunately, when I was showing a batch to the girls between classes in the classroom next to the headmasters study, it exploded leaving everyone’s ears ringing, and my hands stained with iodine.  This was very embarrassing since it looked rather like a nicotine stain and smoking in the school was banned.  Fortunately I managed to hide my hands for a few days until the evidence wore off.  Gun powder required rather more care and experiments with small cannons made out of piping were confined to the playing field.  I will not tell you about the result of a single test of a small batch of nitro-glycerine! 

One of the unsuccessful chemical experiments was the result of a visit to the school by Miss Ashford's brother, who worked for the Meteorological service and came to give us a lecture.  Thanks to my interest in strange devices, it was my job to operate a strange device for him, namely the enormous ‘epidiascope’ in the lecture room.  Perhaps he was grateful for my assistance because he gave me a huge meteorological balloon and its radio-sonde that is used to send back information on conditions in the upper atmosphere.  The possibilities of partial flight inspired the idea of filling the balloon with hydrogen and attaching it to a rucksack harness.  This should reduce your weight and allow huge jumps into the air.  Unfortunately, I did not remove all the acid from the hydrogen filling the balloon and it rotted the rubber when it was only half full and just able to float.  Maybe I will have a future opportunity to explore the possibilities with our grandchildren?

So what about our experimental episodes with physics?  You will all know of the massive sparks that could be created with the Wimshurst machine in the laboratory, and the remarkable way that your hair stood up on end when you were connected to the high electrostatic voltages that it could generate.  This triggered a number of experiments with electronics, largely based on my being presented with faulty items such as radios.  Fortunately, it was often possible to repair radios in those days and return them to my sponsors in good working order.  Nevertheless, some faulty parts, such as secondary transformers yielded interesting possibilities as a source of “invisible wire”.  This wire is thinner than a human hair and could be used to make strange things happen at a distance.  One example was the result of threading the wire over the map hook at the top of the blackboard then attaching it to a piece of chalk.  A simple pull on the wire from the back of the classroom would cause the chalk to float in mid air and return to the shelf before the member of staff could turn to see what we were all laughing at.  I leave it to your imagination to envisage other intriguing possibilities.

You will recognise that I was allergic to ‘so called’ sports that required you to don cotton shorts and singlet and chase pointlessly after a ball on a cold, wet day.  The answer was to hide in places varying from treetops to the school roof, and in the summer hut under the trees on the school front.  The latter proved to be very educational since drilling a small hole through the back wall made an excellent pin-hole camera.  This provided an inverted image of the vehicles coming over the railway bridge on the other wall of the hut and led to a profitable lifelong interest in optics.  As you will hear, fortunately and unfortunately, the school adapted to my games allergy problem and the solution to the dilemma was an alternative occupation for me during games periods.  Thanks to my interest in engines, the school put me in charge of mowing the lawns using a large power mower fitted with a Ransoms engine.  In our final year before the school certificate exam our whole form decided that we needed a vehicle to tourCumberland after the exams.  In the true spirit of “the First of the Summer Wine” our obvious answer was to build a car.  The whole class set too with appropriate enthusiasm and a construction site was obtained with the co-operation of the local farmer.  The mower engine mounted at the back of the vehicle was in charge of the ‘engineer’ and the driver operated a tiller to control the steering. Braking was accomplished by a foot against a wheel.  The first test drive was down Cuddy Lonnen and all went well until we arrived level with the playing field.  At that point Freddy Bell and Tosh appeared on the horizon.  The car was dismantled in a flash and the engine was back in the gas-house yard before they caught up with us!  Nevertheless, we had the satisfaction of one short but successful trial run.

Finally, I must tell you that we had very attractive girls in our form.  But I was always very shy and until I met my wife Margaret I was generally considered to be a confirmed bachelor.  However, the mention of Miss Ashford reminds me of the time she caught me in the girl’s dormitory above the Cottage music room.  I believe that I had been delegated to set up a microphone and speaker between our dormitory and the girl’s dormitory, so that we could communicate after “lights out”.  For several weeks, I had to report to Miss Ashford’s room and write an essay on Hayden, so he is still not my favourite composer.  Thinking back, I was lucky not to have been reported to the head master who may not have understood my relatively honourable intentions.

Perhaps I should close my revelations at this point with the comment that “The road to hell is sometimes paved with good intentions!”  Nevertheless, thank you all for listening to these embarrassing stories.

It has been a special year for me as your President and I hope that I can continue to enjoy the warmth of Friends in all senses of the word.

Jim Swithenbank

Tony with his wodden model of the school - now residing at Wigton Meeting House.

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