School life / A Speech Day at Wellington College in the mid-1950s
His Parents Came From Berlin. He Was in the San.
Our daughter was getting a prize at Speech Day, and I prepared as if her grandmother were flying in from Berlin. She was, in fact, driving from Shrewsbury.
“The only Speech Day I remember was the one where I was in the San,” writes William Young, who was at Wellington College in the mid-1950s. His parents had come over from Berlin to watch him receive the John Falconer Prize. He was in the sanatorium. It is the most perfectly built school memory I have read, and I read it the week our daughter was told she was getting a prize at Speech Day, which is the wrong week to read it.
Her grandmother was coming from Shrewsbury. Not Berlin, but she had booked a Premier Inn. I took our daughter’s temperature on Monday, Wednesday and twice on Thursday, the second time while she was eating toast.
Then the outfit. Hilary Moriarty, a former head, remembers going up for her own prize in a suit and heels, terrified of tripping, while a classmate came in jeans. Of the suit she says, “I looked as if I already worked in an office.” I bought a navy dress for £139, then a jacket for the dress, then shoes for the jacket. My husband, who wore a fleece to our own wedding reception, asked which of us was getting the prize.
The speaker worried me most. The Wellington memories are not encouraging. Peter Marshall, there in the late 1940s, found the speechifying “something to be endured”. George Nicholson remembers the Duke of Gloucester dropping his notes, and the Head Boy handing them back in the wrong order, to the confusion of the Duke and the delight of the school. I timed ours. Thirty-one minutes, on resilience, with a slide.
Speech Days, it seems, are remembered for everything except the speeches. Roger Ryall, at Wellington in the 1950s, remembers a wet afternoon on which a friend’s sister, about twelve and at a convent school, kept loudly asking what nuns wear under their habits while her mother grew more horrified and everybody nearby collapsed. Nobody, in seventy years of Speech Days, has ever remembered the speech. I have now joined them.
Our daughter’s name was called at 3.42. I stood up to film her and the man behind me asked, not quietly, whether I could sit down. I sat down, and said something about the back of his head that I had meant to say inside my own. I have nine seconds of footage. It is mostly his head.
In the car my mother asked what the speaker had said. Nobody knew. Our daughter knew exactly what had been said in Row F, though, and repeated it for her grandmother, word for word, in my voice, all the way to the M54.
Sources
- Speech day: mark my words
- Speech Day, Wellington College Decades Project
- So what does it take to win a prize these days?
Notes from the School Gates is a light-hearted column: home scenes and family characters are invented; schools and public facts are real. About the column