Caludon Castle School

I remember your fall being held up to us in set 1 as an example how not "fitting in" could lead to demotion to set 4. I am pleased to hear this was only a temporary glitch. I also found I did not fit in to the regime, but not in a rebellious way. I had repetitive periods of juvenile arthritis that put me to bed for weeks at a time but afterwards instead of returning to school I would walk to the central library and read the subjects that interested me. I became expert at forging my father's handwriting. On obtaining a good grade for GCE Geography Mr Rickard congratulated me on having done it all by myself. My best GCE grade amazingly was English. I recall previously Terry Brown, my english teacher, tearing a homework essay out of my exercise book and throwing it in the waste bin humiliating me in front of the class, calling it "utter rubbish". Maybe "comprehensive" was trying to force us into a idealistic mold and could not recognise the damage caused to us outliers.

Regarding the two teachers that you mention, I quite liked 'Gyp' Rickard. On a couple of occasions he told me "Laddie, you are a procrastinator - a thief of time". Many years later I'm sorry to say that I still am so Gyp was probably a good judge of character. As for Terry Brown, he had his own specialised form of torture. He made you hold out your hand palm facing down and he would hit you across the knuckles with the edge of a wooden ruler - no bruises left but it hurt. He would hand out detention to anyone he caught looking at their watch during class. Once he criticised a pupil for over use of punctuation in an essay and as 'punishment' he made him write his next essay with no punctuation apart from full stops! That was funny. I'd like to say happy days but it really was not for me.

That is correct and was indeed mentioned in a CET obituary for Mike Rickard. Clearly he was a good egg as they say.

Terry Brown was the name he was known by outside of Caludon's pupils who gave him the nickename 'Ted', I believe because of his prominent sideburns that were a fashion statement of 1950's 'teddyboys'. Though he was somewhat of a nemesis to me, I have some sympathy for him because he was deeply affected by loss of his teenage son in an accident and took early retirement from teaching. After this he was associated with the Criterion Theatre. https://www.coventrytelegraph.net/news/coventry-news/funeral..... p.s. I find with some surprise that the first post in this topic was also about Ted Brown. I can mirror Walrus's comments, it has taken me nearly a life-time to appreciate his teaching.

Good to come back to this forum from time to time to see other entries or should I say posts? The mention of Tom Cook raises a memory. As Deputy head I don't think he was ever a House Master. House Master of Greene 1955 to 1960 while I was there was Ken Cooper. Tom Cook taught geography by filling the blackboard usually three times in the lesson and we had to copy it down - is that teaching?? Mr Tidy was the School librarian. The Library was in the Bridge over the entrance to school. The swimming pool was built below the gym at the far end beyond House Block 5 and opened in the later stages of my period and 'Dad' Drinkwater was one that instructed me. I don't remember the names of House Masters of Clifford and Preston. I think some five teachers played rugby for Kenilworth at the time. That may have included - Geoff Bennett, Ken Cooper, Blob Davies and one of the sports teachers either Lingard or Drinkwater. As Slash1 has written in earlier posts Keith Fairbrother was a pupil in our year and went on to manage Coventry RFC. Rugby was the school sport. There was mention of a Mr Simpson. The one I remember was a Segrave group teacher who taught History, he told some of us off on the first day at School Assembly for stamping feet as we marched in - come on we were eleven. I finished in Morgan fifth year group under Mr Jenkins - Art teacher and not someone I particularly liked. I left after GCE'O' levels, should there have been more encouragement for 'A' levels? well it was a different time. Moving on to work was more the norm. If I recall the Fifth year was two classes formed from the six 'upper' school houses and Sixth and Upper Sixth were around thirty to forty in total. The school was then ten Houses with around fifteen hundred boys in total. I would be interested to know if I have those numbers somewhere near correct.

In 69/70 Tom Cook was teaching Economics, not very effectively I felt. I don't think he ever set a piece of Economics homework and expected us to work things out from the set textbook. We called him 'Blow torch' but I'm afraid the reasoning for that eludes me due to the mists of time.

That's because economics is not a science. It's a pseudo-science, which is why so many predictions by financial experts and economists get it wrong. One thing I agree with Jeremy Clarkson on is his article heading in the Sunday Times where he said "Economics is guesswork - so anyone can do it". I speak from experience, having suffered A level economics at school for one whole year before dropping out. Little of it made sense, Loads of verbal waffle and copying down notes. Fictitious freehand curves, with no proper maths equations or anything where you could put in figures and calculate something. And the teacher told us incorrect stuff. Maybe he'd had it rammed down his throat at college. Whilst discussing fuels, he said that unlike coal, wood, gas, diesel, petrol, paraffin etc., "electricity has no transport costs". HUH? So electricity substations, switchgear, underground and overhead power lines, the national grid and so on cost nothing to manufacture and build? They cost nothing to maintain? And there's no loss of power, which has to be generated from coal or whatever, in the cables, no copper losses, no iron losses in transformers, no ionisation losses on a supergrid line running with uninsulated ACSL cables at 275kV or 400kV? Like most MPs, these people do not live in the real world. School was mostly chalk and talk (occasionally dictation) in my day. No wonder I hated school. An academic colleague of mine, a real boffin of an engineer (e.g. he would design the hardware of an industrial control computer, then write the operating system for it), who long ago took early retirement, used to say "chalk and talk is a p***-poor way of teaching students; one day it will all be done using IT". He was ahead of his time.

I attended the school mid 1980's and Geoff Bennet was still teaching there!

There was a Mr Simpson who taught me chemistry from the first year until 'O' level, not a particularly pleasant teacher if I remember. I recall him saying just before the GCE examination: "I have taught you 'O' level chemistry, if you stay for 'A' level chemistry you will need to forget what you have been taught, and if you go on to study it at university you will have to forget most of that." He left in 1966 I believe to teach abroad. Some of our bad teaching may have been having to be taught what was constrained by the examination syllabus. I recall Mr Simpson was interviewed on television about teachers pay and saying that he could have earned much more by working in industry but felt he wanted to teach. I continued with 'A' level chemistry under a newly recruited chemistry teacher whose name I can't recall. He had retired from the RAF where he had monitored fuels and lubricants. (Off topic.) I remember him telling us "...the last additive you want to put in petrol was alcohol", advice now contradicted by our present government. His reasons were: "...It dilutes the energy content, giving less miles per gallon and it absorbs water causing corrosion." I think my second teacher was able to make the subject more interesting because he had real experience.

Ken Cooper was House Master of Green, nice guy. I remember him saying hello to me 5-6 years after I left Cally whilst I was making a delivery at the Co-op on the corner of Brays Lane and Binley Rd. He even asked about my old friend Pete Marshall, he actually thought we were brothers, as we were always together. After all those years he remembered the face but not my name.

Lolipop, you must be on the 'elite list'. Once seen never forgotten.

Ken Cooper taught me A level pure maths 1964/6. I concur with Lolipop's experience of him. The A level applied maths was taught by Mr Tebbit. I recall my first experience as an electronics lecturer was that I was expected to demonstrate solving general engineering problems set by a mechanical engineering lecturer who had not provided solutions. This was for a small tutor group of 1st year undergraduates before they specialised in electrical engineering. Fortunately, after a late night of preparation the techniques taught me during A level were recalled. Two of my electronics colleagues, who were allocated different tutor groups, failed to find solutions (Smug ). Thank you Ken Cooper and Mr Tebbit.