Attending confession on Saturday evening at St Kentigern’s church, only about a quarter mile from school, provided weekly opportunities to share the Gazette sports extra with the footie results, buy chips with gravy from Devonshire Square, purge one’s soul, or if as usual you were broke, get unsold currant teacakes (reduced to a halfpenny each from 3d.) from the bakery next to the sweet shop on Beech Avenue.

‘Give us this day our daily bread’ has been commented on in several of the contributions recalled in such wonderful detail (especially cf: Joe Wright). My specific food memories are that ‘CONCRETE’ was a weekday lunchtime jam crumble (not a suet), served with custard, of buying cheese and onion sandwiches for 6d. from a day boy (delicious Lancashire CRUMBLY which I still buy from Blackburn Market (and find occasionally on Missionary visits in the South) and Sunday tea SPAM and cakes; year round, (presumably cook and maids were allowed a half day off) we sat 8 around a table and each in turn, moving to one end, was allowed to flick 4 quarter slices of spam from the handle of a fork, towards a target plate at the opposite end of the table; the winner, being the nearest, had first choice of the cake selection (inevitably the single chocolate éclair) and the last ended up with the stale cupcake!

Trips Age 10 or so I remember going to the dentist, near Talbot Square. I recall having ‘gas’ for a tooth extraction and then returning to school, unaccompanied, on the bus. We often went swimming at Derby Baths and once swam in the pounding sea off Cleveleys, in October. Organised outings included the Lakes, Shotton Steel Works and York which is still my favourite English city (sad admission for a Lancashire lad) but best of all were our unofficial Bank Holiday and ‘holy day’ escapades, hitch hiking to Morecambe, Southport and once to Manchester to see James Bond in the newly released Dr No. (imagine the uproar if 14-15 year boarders were found doing what we did.)

One memorable weekend just after mock O Levels was spent at the Hall’s Arms, Knowle Green ( Harry Nicholls' dad’s pub), where 5 of us boarders slept for a chilly night in a (cleaned out) disused pigsty (Pete MacDonald only had a summer sheeted sleeping bag and would have frozen but for the alcohol). We were feted by the locals in return for singing rugby songs, and ate singed (i.e., almost raw ) fried liver for breakfast.

The school trip to Lourdes in 1961 was my first experience of travelling abroad. Hazy memories of a vomit swilling choppy channel crossing, short, scented French girls, tall, smelly French trains with iron luggage racks big enough to sleep on, a shared hotel room (with our first ever red wine 'plonk' experience), bowls of milky breakfast coffee, croissants, minestrone soup and, oh yes, I knew there was a reason, candlelit processions and being ‘dipped’ in the holy water.

Sport Rugby was the school sport of choice for boarders especially because it led to the opportunity to get out, but cross country was enforced (though those of us who smoked bunked off in a pill box near the hospital and awaited the returning runners before joining back in at a ‘realistic’ position). Football was permitted on lighter evenings, crab football in the gym on wet nights was fun but best of all was ‘Chinese Wall’ in the dark school yard an cold winter nights after the juniors had gone to bed.

Indoors we explored Chad Valley, the tunnels under the dayroom floor, played billiards and snooker, and, in the TV room kept up with the Sixties’ world outside, (most memorably, on a Friday night in November 1963, the assassination of President John F Kennedy).

Pranks. Smoking behind the bike shed or at weekends behind the garden shed was a bonding ritual. After one such occasion, showing off my new catapult, I broke a window in the Science Block leading to ‘six of the best’ from Bro. Sreenan. Going into town on Sunday after lunch often meant spending whole afternoons sitting upstairs in the ‘TROC’ (Trocadero coffee bar) which mutated for a few of us into late night jaunts at the Tower Ballroom, dancing to bands such as The Dave Clark Five and Freddy and the Dreamers and finally culminating in my (our) ‘suspension’ from school as enthusiastically divulged by ‘Ernie’ (Eoin) O’Sullivan in his contribution (where are super injunctions when you need them?).

There was a ‘corner bog’ on the dormitory floor into which one would furtively sneak with a copy of Parade, 1/6d. at all good newsagents. It was a girly magazine of the time with all ‘detail’ airbrushed out. The other advantage of that toilet was that we could climb out of the window, up a short drainpipe and onto a flat roof with a big water cistern, perfect for sunbathing and water to cool off.

During the Illuminations the Sixth Form boarders were allowed a night out to ‘walk’ the lights…yeah, yeah, (hic) yeah. A Liverpool boarder, John Nicolson I think, told us probably around 1961 about a group called The Beatles who he said were all the rage – we laughed that anybody could take a group of that name seriously and thereby missed the chance to see them when they appeared in Blackpool during their early career (10 years later I was at the London Hospital Dental School with a chap called Roger Taylor who ‘dropped out’ of the course after one year because he thought he’d like to play in a band called Queen).

Dorms. I remember the Tower searchlight traversing the dormitories, listening to Radio Luxemburg on a transistor radio under my pillow, and delighting at the request for Elvis, singing Jailhouse Rock for the boys in ‘Joe’s Jail’ ( April 1961) when I was 13, feet tucked into my dressing gown sleeves, (without appreciating that 2 boys would be expelled). Joe Wright’s recall of the dormitory arrangements is exactly as I recall. We were awakened in the mornings for several years by the hideous racket of a school hand bell (until one of the boys stole it?), to be replaced by the brother (usually ‘Ossul’ O’Sullivan) walking around both big dormitories clapping a loud rhythm.

In the VIth form there were 2 smaller rooms with about 6 beds in each which permitted much greater licence for talking, smoking and ‘nicking out’ at night.

Staff
What different memories we have! Terry Taylor describes ‘Paddy’ O’Brien’s advances to a tee but even ‘OB’, from my perspective, had redeeming features. I don’t know why this Irishman taught us songs such as Hearts of Oak, D’ ya ken John Peel and The British Grenadiers or how he persuaded coarse youths to take to the stage in Gilbert & Sullivan’s Mikado and Pirates of Penzance but he did and broadened my outlook on life in the process.
Bro. McGovern though, who he remembers fondly, I recall as a vicious sadist, a man who humiliated the junior dormitory boys (to the extent that as a sixth former I once told a second year who he was bullying to go elsewhere and warned McGovern to desist). He seemed to me the imperfect example of the most scandalous, nasty behaviour of ‘the religious’ which has subsequently been revealed to be commonplace and world-wide. Bro. Dowling (Joe Snow) already seemed old when he first taught me. Terry Taylor also recalls the hopelessness of his incompetent method of teaching A Level Physics - rote reading in class - and I also recall that each week’s homework would be to write out TEN A Level answers from the question section at back of the book (these were repeated, helpfully to indicate the popularity of certain themes over the years), but it often meant answering the same question, 2 or 3 times in the same homework week, in long hand with a fountain pen (no COPY facility then). It was as pointless an exercise as man has ever devised. I left St Joseph’s with an E in Physics A Level, B in Biology (thank you ‘Taffy’ Johns) and B in Chemistry (thank you Bro. Sreenan). Despite the consequent delay in getting into Dentistry and Medicine that resulted from having to resit Physics (as a direct result I used the ‘gap’ year to discover Manchester and London, court my wife to be, and grow up). When I later met Joe Snow around 1982, he must have been 80, strolling around the boarding house gardens, in Plymouth and he seemed to me unchanged.

Conclusion(s)
Risk enjoyment was the single most significant outcome for me after 11 years as a boarder at St Joseph’s along with self-reliance, astute guilt management, and a stubborn independent philosophy, reflecting on the frailty of human nature, and concern for those less fortunate. The real revelation since is that people of other or no religious outlook are often the kindest, most charitable and caring people one meets. Not all boarders adapted to school at age 8 and I certainly know of youngsters who were damaged by the experience. When it came to my eldest son’s turn, when he was 13, a free spirit who chose to board at St Boniface’s in Plymouth, albeit only for 2 years, he has appreciated the experience without regret. Since leaving school I read Dentistry then Medicine in London, married in 1968, and we have 2 sons, a daughter and 2 grandchildren. I worked as an NHS consultant surgeon at The London Hospital until 2007 when I ‘retired’ to Devon.