While at school Steve introduced Vernon and I to the Mendip Caving Group, a club of Londoners who held an annual Easter camp, potholing in the Cheddar gorge area. I descended my first cave one morning. That night I was asleep in a tent when a cry went up in the camp. A second group had gone down the same cave that evening and a newcomer had fallen backwards while doing a high traverse of a chamber. I was told I, having rested through the afternoon, was part of the rescue party. Fortunately, shortly after we reached the injured youth the Mendip Cave Rescue group arrived, so we rank amateurs could be replaced. The youth survived, thanks to his helmet, which was split open. He never came potholing again.
That summer, Vernon and I spent a fortnight camped on the Mendips, exploring many potholes, taking the odd risk, but coming out unscathed. I recall the sheer beauty, after a difficult descent, of edging along a narrow V-shaped passage, a narrow stream rushing below, bottoms on one rock face and boots on the other as we edged along. The flame from our acetylene lamp head-torches illuminated the most wonderful array of stalactites above. I burst into the lines of a 'pop' song of the time, “For this is the kingdom of Heaven....” We also spent a couple of days crouched down a fissure in a surface rock, wielding a hammer and chisel in order to create a slot in which an explosive might be placed. Just as Cheddar gorge is the result of the collapse of a massive cave system, so the group thought that there could be a further large cave system which the fissure might lead to. Hence it needed to be enlarged so that a human could squeeze through. As Steve wrote, at a later time “I nearly killed myself whilst blasting, when hoping to breakthrough into a cave system.” A friend of his had supplied him with Amatol – a mixture of TNT and ammonium nitrate. The friend was relieved that it was not something more potent. Years later I returned to the scene. Alas, there had been no breakthrough.
In January 1956 Steve, Derrick Fordham and I, aged 16, went for three weeks to the Outward Bound School at Eskdale in the Lake District, courtesy of the then London County Council. When at HQ, a former country house, we started the day with exercises in the gathering dawn. There followed a concession. It being mid-winter, we didn't have to dive into the lake but had to take a shower – cold tap only. We spent twelve days, in total, camping on the hills, having been provided with a sleeping bag, a very large groundsheet and an ice axe. We had to create a bivouac which four people could make using their ice axes as corner posts. I recall the exquisite feeling of exiting the bivouac onto the snow in the grey light of dawn. On went the totally sodden clothes of the day before, a shiver, pack, then off on the next day's march. The next night a massive storm came through. It was sufficiently wild to have our instructors back at HQ worried. As Steve wrote, “an introduction to bivouacing in appalling conditions.”
After leaving School, Steve was called up for National Service and was commissioned into the Royal Air Force. He elongated his statutory two-year service and qualified as a pilot of fixed-wing aircraft but was never able to shake off air-sickness. Eventually he ceased flying and ended his service in a ground appointment. He subsequently settled near Ashford in Kent, where he married, produced two sons and two daughters and founded and ran a transport and haulage company. Sadly, he had health problems in later years. In 2017 he wrote that he had had three strokes and a broken back. Nevertheless, he struggled on to join the Tin Tab group, a cluster of Old Boys, at their thrice yearly meetings in London.
Vernon and I grew up 100 yards apart. We attended the same primary school, then to Alleyn's. Our primary schooling ended with a trip, with thirty-odd of our peers, to the Isle of Wight. There was a bus tour round the island. One of us challenged the other to be last off the bus. There followed an unseemly scuffle as Vernon and I tried to push the other out. The teacher in charge was not amused. We were given the option of taking a beating or being sent home. We opted for the former. Mr Abel had very gnarled hands. We were ordered to drop our trousers and underpants and bend over a bed. In addition to bruises, I ended with a few cuts on my bottom. Good preparation for the threat of 'Gaffer' Snowden's 'Bendy Willy' in later years.
In our second year in the Lower School many of us were housed in the Tin Tab, a large green, corrugated hut, put up as a 'temporary' measure during the First World War. It contained two class rooms and occupied the lower end of the quad. I recall what I term 'the Shedden roar', named after its originator, Bob Shedden, from our time in the Tin-Tab – Heah. Heah, Heah, Heah – expressed in a rising crescendo, when Colonel Snowden or Mr McDonald had their backs turned. Vernon was a co-conspirator. On one occasion, the colonel, a genial man but with occasional problems of crowd control, held back both 2B and 2C after School. It was all too much. When he was in 2B the roar went up in 2C. He would rush to 2C only to have 2B reciprocate. (Ken Grace, teaching older boys, stood in polar contrast. As Fred Goldner wrote in The Edward Alleyn Magazine, Grace “perfected a method of remote control that was the envy of many of his colleagues.” There was no mystery there. The slightest murmur and it would be “Talking Smith. Two hundred lines of Copperplate, to me by Monday, subject, Voice Control.”)
At Alleyn's, Vernon learnt the soprano saxophone while I took to the trombone. We both played in the military band. Out of school we formed a jazz band. One of the members was a contemporary of ours at primary school, Ginger Baker. He didn't stay with us for too long, moving on to partner more accomplished players. He later joined up with Eric Clapton to form Cream and was voted drummer of the year by Playboy magazine. In the late 'sixties I was in a pub in Sydney talking to some girls and I mentioned that I had once played with Ginger Baker. They gathered round as if I was a rock star. Their attention waned as I revealed how tenuous my connection was.
In middle school, Vernon and I spent too many Saturday afternoons working off detentions. The worst part for me was having to front my Housemaster, Fred Goldner, to get signed off for each offence. I don't recall how forgiving L.A.R. Shackleton was to Vernon. On one occasion Vernon and I, along with a friend, went to a dance in Dulwich. We left early and walked to Alleyn's to show the school to our chum. The Great Hall was packed with people watching the School's production of Anthony and Cleopatra. We must have been noisy as, shortly after, while crossing the quad, we were accosted by two senior boys. Once the play had ended we were taken to the Headmaster's study to be hauled over the coals. Vernon and I were to report again after school the next day, the last day of term. There were individual interrogations, before being dismissed. The Headmaster would make a decision on our fates over the holidays. Not the best way to start a vacation! We came back the next term and nothing was said.
Vernon, like Steve, took part in other Michael Croft productions, playing men of arms. Following Vernon's death, a press clipping was found in his wallet – a review of one of Croft's school productions by The Daily Telegraph's W.A. Darlington, the pre-eminent theatre critic of the time. What does that say about the charisma of Michael Croft and the bonding of his 'lads of life?'
Vernon left school after 5th form. Following National Service, he worked as a trainee trade mark agent in Rothman's patent office in London, which led to widespread travel. When the office re-located to South Africa in 1975, Vernon and a colleague set up the splendidly named Marshall-Law patent firm in Sevenoaks, where he worked for 40 years, prior to retirement. He was most proud of representing the World Wildlife Fund for Nature, as part of a team which won a long and hard-fought battle against the World Wrestling Federation over the right to use the initials WWF.
He married Linda and they set up home just south of Knole House, on the ridge looking over the valley towards Tonbridge. They had son Dominic and daughter Meridith and ran a few sheep to keep the grass down.
Vale Steve. Vale Vernon. Good men, both.
Hugh Pritchard (Brading’s 1958)
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Junior School Open Day
The next Alleyn's Junior School Open Event is from 1.30pm to 3pm on Wednesday 22 May 2024. There will be a Head's Talk at 1.40pm after which you will be offered a tour of the school with a pupil. There is no need to book a place at this Open Event - everyone is welcome.
Last updated on 20 05 24 at 09:12
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