School portraits / Stockport Grammar School, the 1950s
Roller Skates Out, Second-Hand Flute In
At Stockport Grammar in the 1950s a boy who could not stay upright on roller skates was given a flute instead, and found a Latin master running the recorder group. Our youngest is on his third scooter.
The recorder player John Turner owes something to a pair of roller skates. In his first year in the Senior School at Stockport Grammar, his father decided they had been “a complete waste of money”, because his son could not stay upright on them for more than a few seconds, and put the proceeds into a second-hand flute.
Our youngest has been through three scooters. At no point did we consider an orchestral alternative.
At about the same time, Turner joined the school recorder group, which was run by the Latin master, Donald (Bingo) Roberts. Among their favourites were the Davy Crockett song and the Swedish Rhapsody, and he still remembers the tunes. He was a shy boy, singing did not appeal, and he never took GCE Music. But after school a few of the recorder players would go round to the music department to be played, by Douglas Steele, anything “from pop songs to the Janacek Sinfonietta!”
Steele stars in a 2014 feature on the school’s music masters in the old boys’ magazine. One remembers keeping time on a tubular bell while Steele played the piano, and being rewarded with an unused South African stamp of the lowest value, from an apparently endless supply. Another lists him playing the Wurlitzer at Speech Day as it rose from below the floor, fish and chips after the Carol Service with the Boar’s Head Carol sung as the chips came in, and a demonstration of how he aimed his door key at the lock from the garden gate, arm outstretched. When anything interrupted a lesson, a third recalls, he blamed “the malevolence of inanimate matter”. One old boy failed Music O level and came away with a “lifetime’s love of music” anyway.
The malevolence of inanimate matter now covers, in our house, the printer, the dishwasher and all three scooters.
In the spirit of Mr Turner senior, I took the youngest’s roller skates back to the sports shop in March and put the refund towards a second-hand ukulele, £14, from a man in a lay-by. He plays one song on it. It is not the Davy Crockett song. It is not the Janacek Sinfonietta. It is the one about the shark, every evening at 6.30, until somebody asks him to stop.
Last night I tried the Steele door-key method. I set off from our gate with the key at arm’s length, eyes on the lock, and walked the whole path in a dead straight line.
I missed by four inches and dropped the keys in the boot rack. My husband, watching from the window, has asked whether the shop will take the ukulele back and give us the skates.
Sources
- A Question of Balance — John Turner — Recorderist, personal professional website
- The Most Memorable Music Masters, Old Stops’ Review issue 4, printed pages 14–15 — Stockport Grammar School alumni publication
- Douglas Steele: Autumn Sequence — the music of Douglas Steele and his circle — MusicWeb International, review by Christopher Fifield
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