Roger attended Ardingly from 1940-45. By the time he left, he was Head Prefect, captain of cricket and soccer and had won an exhibition to St Catherine’s College, Cambridge to read history. He is a retired headteacher.
Why Ardingly?
“My father had arranged for me to go to Winchester College as a Quirister, that’s a choir boy. I had three years there, very effective years, and they then thought that – I thought I was going to the grammar school where my brother had been, but they decided that really I ought to have a better chance, as it were.”
Signs of war
“Because of the air raids – of course Ardingly was right on the flight path of the Blitz, and so we had to put up blackout shutters every night – but to start with we had to go into a sort of bunk dormitory, underneath what was the Head’s House. I don’t know if you’ve ever been under there. It was alright, but of course if you wanted to go to the loo or anything, it meant you had to go out in the dark somewhere! Oh dear, oh dear!”
The staff
(Interviewer: Who was your headmaster?)
“Crosse.”
(Interviewer: And what do you remember about Crosse?)
“Well, I thought he was cross, a bit, really, but I didn’t know him all that well. But actually he was much better than that and actually very generous to me, especially in the way he supported me going further on, so that was that. He taught us Latin, but actually not very well. It was Mrs Burgess, who came, and she taught Latin, and taught me all the Latin I knew, which was really rather good.”
“There was Williams, D’Arcy Williams as we called him. D’Arcy Williams was my History teacher and English teacher and he was marvelous. He was a graduate of St Catherine’s at Cambridge and it was he who trained me up to go in for that, and I got an exhibition to St Catherine’s eventually, not least because of his efforts, so that was marvelous, actually. He was a very, very good teacher. As was Mrs Burgess, actually. Of course it was, I suppose, really quite odd to have a woman teaching in a boys’ school in those days, but it worked very well.”
Pipe smoking
“I was in School House, yes, School House, under Herring. We called him Mr Kipps, of course! Oh dear, lovely man, we got on extremely well. And I think I told you that my father was a pipe smoker, and I used to have to go and get his tobacco and everything, and I thought, ‘I shall need a pipe one day.’ So I bought one when I was about 12, so I had one to hand, and I started smoking there, at Ardingly. Kipps turned a blind eye to it, which was rather sweet of him, actually. I used to go out on the Terrace and have a smoke, that was rather good.”
Reflections
“Yeah, I won’t say I wasn’t homesick from time to time as most youngsters are, and worried about my parents, because they lived just outside Southampton, which was very vulnerable.”
“They were wonderful years, I must say. Very enjoyable, on the whole.”