Down With Skool! (1953) - first in the Molesworth series, by the great Geoffrey Willans and the very great Ronald Searle.
Very tempting to scan every single one of Searle's drawings. Will be visiting the other three books in the series in due course.
Clues in the end pages of this paperback about forthcoming books due April 1972 suggest I read the series in 1971 or thereabouts, aged eight or nine. The world described by Nigel Molesworth, purported author of these tell-all guides to surviving boarding school, would have been recognisable to me as a day boy attending a minor prep school. Blotting paper and ink-stained fingers, corporal punishment (not canes at my school, but a gym shoe), doing lines, the tuck shop, virtually inedible school dinners, the typology of masters, the typology of pupils (swots, cissies, etc), the kind of rousing, virtue-encouraging things headmasters would say, paper darts (just one of several crazes that would spread throughout the school, rage for a few weeks, and then expire just like that).... It was all pretty intact still, really not changed much from the just-after World War Two world described by Nigel M.
That's why things like the St Trinians films were both enjoyable and relatable. And why if.... - if you were allowed to stay up late enough to see it on BBC2 - felt intoxicatingly subversive.
Only a few things in Molesworth had become trapped-in-time period details, e.g. references to a New Elizabethan era, a notion then in the air on account of the young E II's coronation.
At my school the desks still had holes where the ink wells had not so long ago been. It was still blackboards and chalk - and as a result a classroom would have a faint misty quality from motes of dust in the air catching light through the big windows. In a few years time we would all be given slide rules. I can remember calculators arriving in the mid-Seventies and then towards the end of the decade, the blackboards switching to the white, wipe-clean kind for marker pen use.
I wonder if a UK schoolkid today could relate to anything in these Molesworth books? I know they would mean absolutely zilch to my kids, educated in the American equivalent to state schools, with a progressive slant.
I tried explaining to my daughter what a fountain pen was the other day, and blotting paper. I might as well as have been describing a traction engine.
Thanks so much for posting these. Looking at some Searle drawings always brightens my day, and those Masters profiles are wonderful.
ReplyDeleteFor what it's worth, most of this stuff (minus the officially sanctioned corporal punishment) was still very much in evidence in the poverty-stricken rural private school I attended in the 80s/90s.
Not a happy time, but revisiting the place a few years back and discovering that it is now abandoned - looking as if the owner/headmaster just locked the doors at the end of term one year and ran away never to return - proved an extremely eerie experience. I wish I'd had a camera with me, it would have made a great Found Objects post.
Yep, love Molesworth, and Searle was a genius.
ReplyDeleteMy introduction was 'Whizz For Atoms', which I bought from one of those catalogues that got dished out at junior school, circa 1976, '77 (I'd have been 8 or 9). I looked at the title and the cover illustration and thought: "Funny sci-fi? I'll have that".
My skool experience up to that point was modern, state, suburban, so a long way from St Custards, but I still lapped it up (once I'd got over my disappointment at the lack of sci-fi content). If anything the unfamiliarity was part of the appeal.
Thinking about it, that sort of stuff was 'in the air' generally back then, wasn't it? Via kids telly, old films (Ealing, Will Hay, the bloke with the walrus 'tache), radio shows, and - especially - comics. Lots of houses would have had olde books and annuals floating around, of the posh kids / posh school variety.
Speaking of comics and unfamiliar territory: around the same time, maybe a bit younger even, I got given a big pile of old comics annuals from my cousin, Martin. My absolute favourite was 'Oor Wullie'. A million miles from my south-coast suburban semi world, but I loved it! Pestered my mum to make mince an' tatties :D
A particular fave: https://clawcarver.files.wordpress.com/2012/01/gaulroman.gif
ReplyDeleteThe way schools and teachers were depicted in the Beano kind of stayed frozen in time didn't it - well into the Eighties the schoolmaster had a mortar band and would cane malfeasant schoolboys with their trousers down e.g. http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-ZJFqVd_YoJo/UqDE6n1KheI/AAAAAAAAJyU/88-Zigdl8x4/s1600/Beano_No_1991_257.jpg
ReplyDeletekids have catapults etc. it's like this frozen view of schoolkid misbehaviour somewhere between Just William and Molesworth / St Trinians.
Seem to remember that were a fair number of library-type books for kids in this vein. Jennings and Derbyshire. Tales set in boarding schools would be read by children who weren't in that world at all
Mortar board, not "mortar band"
ReplyDeleteLove that pic - a Roman centurion going past a Gaul warrior, right?
ReplyDeleteYep, "passing each other in the Alps". It's the extremely dry punchline to a 3-stage gag.
DeleteThe abandoned school experience sounds amazing. Must have been so eerie.
ReplyDeletei was given the molesworth books in the 70s, it was a world that had just gone but whose traces were still all around us, as bollops says.
ReplyDeletemy first two years at the local grammar school were in a 30s building that had barely been touched since. the tall curtains were rotting in holes - one fell down mid-lesson when i touched it. the headmaster taught latin from 30s textbooks. the chemistry teacher let us put our fingers in mercury, and gave me specimens of arsenic and lead ores for my geology collection (still carefully wrapped up somewhere in my mother's attic).
then we went comprehensive and moved to a brand new system built complex where we froze in winter and boiled in summer. bizarrely both sets of buildings are still in use as schools, though neither deserve to be.