Once again my report starts with a thank you to the Old Bartonians: your generosity will once again help support younger Bartonians with their gap year plans. It was a pleasure to see many of you at the AGM and tea in early May.

At College over the past few weeks the emphasis has been upon staff training and development - taking advantage of the exam cycle and several weeks when students are not in their scheduled lessons, giving us an opportunity to bring staff together and reflect upon our practice. Much of the focus has been upon how we encourage our students to work harder, to become more independent, and to be better prepared for the futures.

A survey of student work habits suggests that students are not working so hard outside of their lessons as we would expect and, with the pressure of results and performance, teachers are trying to compensate by ever more effective teaching in class. The risk is that our staff are working ever harder, and our students progressively less hard!

So we are aiming to create a community in College which engages students with the pleasure of learning. Lessons are being turned on their head and students are being asked to come into class having done ‘pre-work’ rather than sent away to rehearse a skill or learn a concept taught in the lesson. Hardly new, you might say, for where did the word preparation or prep come from if it wasn’t getting yourself ready to learn? The theory is that when students find out something for themselves they have invested more in the process instead of being passive disengaged recipients of facts like those in the class of Thomas Gradgrind, Dickens’ insensitive, utilitarian teacher stereotype in ‘Hard Times’.

Anyone who has done any teaching will have experienced that realisation that you never really know your subject until you have taught it, or at least been able to explain it clearly to others. So asking students to learn something then come into College and explain it to the class or a small group of peers can be a huge incentive to getting to a higher level of understanding. Some of our staff have even started a technique called ‘flipped learning’ where they occasionally record an explanation or thoughts on a topic, place it on the internet and ask students to have ‘watched the lecture’ before they arrive at the lesson to discuss it further.

But to create a college where students really become immersed in their learning requires a rich culture of discovery, questioning and thinking to surround young people. We believe teachers, too, must be engaged in learning and developing themselves, sharing the delight they get from research and reading, acting as role models for their students. It is also important that parents show an interest in their children and what they are studying. Parents can help with wider cultural, sporting and academic opportunities through trips to the theatre, concerts, galleries etc. and they can help provide fertile conditions to study at home.

The culture at Barton Peveril is one of the healthiest I have come across in colleges but we are determined to broaden and enrich it, to ensure students work as hard as teachers, and young people have an education which prepares them for a bright future.

Jonathan Prest, Principal BP College.

As many of you may know, probably one of our most famous ex-Barton Peveril pupils is Colin Firth, who I believe does mention the school in his biography. Anyone who attended the reunion in May 2010 will remember that he was there! Well, not really, only a cardboard cut-out of him from the film ‘The King’s Speech’, but a friend took a photo of me standing next to this, which does look quite real!

This reminded me of another school reunion of mine in 2008.I attended three different grammar schools, as we moved around the country in the 1950’s & 1960’s, the first being in Cornwall, the second in Lincolnshire & the last being Barton Peveril. The 2008 reunion was at Poltair School in St Austell, Cornwall, which in my days there from 1957-1958 was known as St Austell Girls’ Grammar School, with the Boys’ Grammar School being next door.

The reunion was a special one, being the centenary of the school’s opening. I heard about it from a friend of mine, Jenny, who also attended the school, but we did not know each other in those days, but in more recent years through our interest in doll-making. We met at the British Doll Festival held at Fawley Court in Henley-on-Thames in 2001 & have been friends ever since. She still lives in St Austell & invited me to stay for a couple of days so that I could attend this reunion which was being held at the Eden Project. Despite being June, the night of the reunion was pouring with rain. Another ex-pupil friend of hers, Rod, drove us there and we went into the reception area at the top, where we registered, before getting the little train down to the main biome where the reunion was taking place. I met up with twins Jean and Josie, who I had not seen since our school days and have remained in contact with them and see them on our frequent Cornish holidays. There was live music and places to eat, in all, a lovely evening.

There were fireworks to round off the event and as the rain had now stopped the three of us decided to walk back up the path to the car park whilst watching the fireworks. Suddenly I heard Jenny say ‘That was funny, Nettles being here!’ I could not believe my ears, ‘What did you say?’

I asked her. ‘John Nettles’ she replied. ‘I saw him when we were registering’. Unfortunately, she did not tell me and I did not see him at any time, so had no idea he was there! I was pretty upset, being a big fan of his! Although I knew he was originally from St Austell and had attended the boys’ grammar school, I had no idea that he would be there! To this day I’m still so upset not to have met him and cannot understand how it was not at all important to my friend that he was there! I would have been so excited and would have had another autograph to add to my collection.

In fact Jenny is used to mixing with famous people. Her best friend Rachel is Jo Wood’s mother (Jo being the now ex-wife of Ronnie Wood of the Rolling Stones). I’ve met Rachel a few times, as she is also a doll-maker and was with Jenny when we first met. At the 2007 Doll Festival in Henley, on the Saturday evening there was the Gala Dinner, presentations of awards for all the competitions for various categories of making dolls, teddy bears, etc., ending with live music and dancing into the early hours. When Debbie, the event organizer, was doing the presentations, she mentioned that unfortunately Jenny and Rachel were not there that evening as they had a previous engagement in London - Ronnie Wood’s 60th birthday party! Jenny drove Rachel to London and they got back later that night, as Henley is not that far from London.

Another friend I met through the Doll Festival, Judith, lives in Norfolk and we meet up with her on our annual holiday there, is the ex-wife of actor Jack Shepherd, star of the Cornish-based detective series Wycliffe, played Hugh Grant’s father in About a Boy, lots of other film and stage roles, and most recently a couple of weeks ago one of the guest stars in Midsomer Murders (unfortunately now no longer starring John Nettles!).

Cornwall is a very popular place for filming and I have always been fascinated by the process of film-making. Charlestown, an unspoilt harbour near St Austell, just down the road from where I lived in the late 1950’s, has been used many times for film locations. Twice in recent years we have watched filming there, by companies from abroad. Well known films and dramas using Charlestown as a location include The Eagle Has Landed, Charles Darwin - The Voyage of the Beagle, A Respectable Trade, The Three Musketeers, Moll Flanders, Rebecca, Frenchman’s Creek, Scarlett Pimpernel, Mansfield Park and many others. As far as I can see from the trailer, the new version of Poldark has also used Charlestown.

In 2009 we watched some of the filming of Doc Martin with Martin Clunes in Port Isaac in North Cornwall. It was not the warmest of days and a couple of girls who were extras, dressed in shorts and tee-shirts as it was supposed to be summer, were cuddling hot water bottles between takes!

Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen has a home in Port Isaac and his wife has a ladies clothes shop there.

I have met him on two occasions in our local department store in Newbury when he has been promoting his cutlery. The second occasion was later in 2009 when I received one of his spoons on a card written by Lawrence to me with love and also one of the assistants took a lovely photo of me with him! On the first occasion around 2004, I made an excuse to take an early lunch from work so that I could see him. I asked him if I could kiss him and he said Yes, so he got a kiss on the cheek and I got a spoon from that collection, also signed by him.

I will go back many years now to various sports people I have been lucky enough to meet, mainly because I was married to a flat race jockey, Trevor, for 19 years, from 1968. Footballers are often horse racing fans so over the years met quite a few. Trevor knew Peter Osgood who played for Chelsea, so often met up with him when at Windsor Races. Robert Morley, the actor, could often be seen enjoying the races at this venue. In the 1970’s at Royal Ascot we met Alan Ball and Kevin Keagan with their wives and used to see Mel Smith at Bath and Newbury Races.

I was a huge football fan in the 1950’s, following Aston Villa and going to see them when playing at Villa Park with my father, as we lived in Birmingham. The goal-keeper, Nigel Sims, was my hero and I have an autograph book with all the players’ signatures from that time which he sent to me, as he had lost my original book I had sent him to get all the players’ autographs. Aston Villa won the FA cup in 1957 against Manchester United, with Nigel Sims in goal.

Because the flat racing season lasts from March to October, jockeys go abroad to ride during the winter months. In the mid-1970s we met Pele in Nairobi when he paid a visit to the Norfolk Club where all the jockeys and families spent a lot of time during the week swimming, playing backgammon and relaxing, as racing only took place at weekends. I have his autograph in my collection.

We also got to know two wonderful women when living in Nairobi, Michaela Denis & Beryl Markham. Michaela Denis, with her husband, Armand, filmed wildlife documentaries which

were shown on TV in the 1950’s and early 1960’s and she also wrote books. Trevor had met

Michaela and got talking to her and she invited us to visit her at her home. My mother and her friend, Mary, were coming to stay with us for a month in January 1978, so we arranged for all of us to go. We spent a lovely afternoon having afternoon tea in her garden and hearing about her experiences. She showed us around her home, pointing out interesting things she had collected. She lived alone, as Armand had died in 1971 and she died in 2003.

Beryl Markham was a racehorse trainer and Trevor used to ride some of her horses. Although often not remembered, she was one of the first bush pilots and a pioneer aviator; she was the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic from east to west in September 1936. She was also the first licensed female racehorse trainer in Kenya. We went to lunch with her one day in the mid-1970s and my sons were slightly taken aback to find that the meat being carved for our main course was a whole tongue! It was delicious and we all enjoyed our visit. Her memoir ‘West with the Night’ is a wonderful read, as is the biography by Mary S Lovell ‘Straight on Till Morning’ and ‘The Lives of Beryl Markham’ by Errol Trzebinski. Stephanie Powers played the title role in the film ‘Beryl Markham: A Shadow on the Sun’. She died in 1986 aged 83.

Being a great lover of the natural world, spending three winters in Kenya was wonderful, getting the chance to see the wonderful animals roaming wild. One of the racehorse owners Trevor rode for was Ari Grammaticus, who owned Governor’s Camp in the Masai Mara Game Reserve, so we were lucky enough to fly there for a few days and go out on game drives to see the animals.

It was used as the headquarters for the TV series Big Cat Diary which had several series between 1996 and 2009.

One of Ari’s sons, Damian, is now a BBC journalist on TV and radio but I remember him as a young boy in Kenya and on our return to the UK we visited the family in Kensington and took Damian and his brother, with my two sons, to the Science Museum, just nearby.

The Royal Albert Hall in that area of London is the best place ever for concerts and I have been many times. In the early 1970’s, with another jockey and his wife, we went to see Andy Williams, who was enjoying great success in this country at that time. We had great seats and as we sat down to enjoy the show realised that sitting just behind us was Ronnie Corbett and his wife Anne!

We got chatting to them and I have the souvenir brochure of the show signed on the front by Ronnie Corbett.

For the past 50 years Eric Clapton has played concerts at the Royal Albert Hall - this year he returns in May to celebrate his 70th birthday. In February 1991 I saw a review in the Telegraph from his previous night’s performance and thought ‘Oh no, I’ve missed booking it again!’ I was at work, but thought it was worth a chance, so rang the Royal Albert Hall to see if any seats were available and there had been a cancellation in a box, so booked it - for that night! It was cold and had been snowing but Jon, my partner, and I drove up that evening, managing to park nearby. We were inside walking around looking for the door to our box when coming towards us was Richard Branson with his wife and family, who we later saw were sitting in the box next to ours. The concert was brilliant & Phil Collins played drums.

I have seen Cliff Richard several times at the Royal Albert Hall and will be going again on

14 October this year , which is actually his 75th birthday. I have been a fan since 1958,

when he, along with other singers such as Adam Faith and Billy Fury were always on the pop shows and in the music charts during those early days of British pop music. In the late 1990’s Adam Faith toured as the narrator with the show ‘A Chorus Line’ and I went with a friend, Joan, to see this show at the Hexagon in Reading. At the end of the show they announced that Adam Faith would be happy to meet fans at the stage door, so we were thrilled to be able to chat with him and get his autograph. He and Joan were reminiscing about places and music in London in the 1960’s and I joked that she was really a Cliff Richard fan! He was so friendly and charming and obviously delighted to chat to his fans. How sad that he died so young at the age of 62 in 2003.

Another star who died young, 66, was Davy Jones of the Monkees pop group. He was born in Manchester, as was my ex-husband, Trevor, and they met when both worked in racing stables in Newmarket in the 1950’s and Davy rode his first race at Newbury when he held an amateur riders licence. In around 1984 he paid a visit to Newbury racecourse, where he met Trevor after all those years and I also met him. I remember chatting to him while walking from the stands across to the car park after the end of racing.

Without a doubt, the most exciting snooker player we’ve ever seen, who also at the age of 14 was working at a racing stables in the hope of becoming a jockey, was Alex Higgins. He worked at the racing stables of Eddie Reavey at East Hendred, nr. Wantage, Oxfordshire. Trevor rode for this stable in the 1980’s, when Eddie’s wife Jocelyn had taken over the training. Alex was playing in a snooker tournament at the Hexagon in Reading and visited the stables and got to know Trevor, who was a keen snooker player. One afternoon in 1984 they went to play golf together and came back to our house. I had just cooked a Chinese meal for dinner and he happily ate my food on a tray, sitting in an armchair in the lounge! He was quite chatty and my sons were over the moon to be able to get his autograph and obviously ask their friends ‘Guess who came to dinner?’. They went along with their Dad to watch him play at the Hexagon. Alex also died at the early age of 61 in 2010.

I have enjoyed remembering all these various talented people I have met or nearly met! They were all very different, fun & interesting. Agreed, Carolyn. Many thanks for your contribution. Ed.

Several members showed an interest in John Foxwell’s compilation of “Young Words”……just a few pieces follow……… “BUNS” by C. Wren 6^th Form ……..This is the thought in every mind when the sound of the bell after the third lesson is heard. No more attention is paid to the unfortunate master or mistress, who perhaps through jealousy reprimands the malefactors. At last the word is given and the whole class stampedes to the upper dining hall. If the headmaster is encountered en route the wild surge melts into a suppressed and eager movement. At last ! There are the buns , all sticky and shiny, laid out in military rows waiting to be eaten. The staff and sixth formers enter the tuck shop by the back entrance leaving the unfortunate remainder of the pupils to be bullied into a straight line and to be parcelled into orderly groups. Let us watch one small second former. He edges forward in the queue with his eyes fixed intently on his lunch. He thinks he is only trying to get the person in front of him to move faster and would instantly deny that he is pushing. Finally he reaches his goal and rushes to his favourite server. ”Four buns and a cake” he shouts, omitting to say “Please”.. Then he is bumped and hustled out of the way of some impatient buyer and so makes his way to the exit, clutching his lunch firmly in his hand. Just as he is sinking his teeth into the delicious concoction he is ordered by an irate prefect to “Buzz off downstairs”. So he retires downstairs and getting at the bottom, shies half of a bun at a passing tormentor and then stops at a safe distance eating and wondering who shall be his next target.

The next piece is by Joyce Bolt, 13½ years………. I like school, The thud of the cane, the joy of maths, the rustle of papers on old wooden desks, the hubbub of traffic, numbing our brains, the scratching of pens, the zooming of planes. The changing of lessons, the banging of doors. The voice of the prefect, the keeping of laws, the rattle of keys and the boom of the bell. The sound of the music, the buns that they sell. The peals of loud laughter, the smell of the gas - an unpleasant report for a very bad lass !

Murray Hakesworth (1956-57) sent us this photo recently from South Africa with this accompanying note:

“Dear Fellow Old Bartonian. In a recent sort out I came across the enclosed photo of the 1956-57 1^st XI Soccer Team which I thought you might like. I remember a few of the names. I am in the back row 2^nd from the right next to the goal keeper “Bowles” I think. I am still in touch by email with Vernon Dover, back row 2^nd from left.

I would appreciate any info from you. I was at the school from June 1956 to July 1957. I later played for the Old Barts in the Southampton league.”

Dearest creature in creation
Studying English pronunciation,
I will teach you in my verse
Sounds like corpse, corps, horse and worse.

In its fullest version, the poem runs through about 800 of the most vexing spelling inconsistencies in English.
Attempting to spell in English is like playing one of those computer games where, no matter what, you will lose eventually. If some evil mage has performed vile magic on our tongue, he should be bunged into gaol for his nefarious goal (and if you still need convincing of how inconsistent English pronunciation is, just read that last sentence out loud). But no, our spelling came to be a capricious mess for entirely human reasons.
The problem begins with the alphabet itself. Building a spelling system for English using letters that come from Latin – despite the two languages not sharing exactly the same set of sounds – is like building a playroom using an IKEA office set. But from Tlingit to Czech, many other languages that sound nothing like Latin do well enough with versions of the Latin alphabet.
So what happened with English? It’s a story of invasions, thefts, sloth, caprice, mistakes, pride and the inexorable juggernaut of change. In its broadest strokes, these problems come down to people – including you and me, dear readers – being greedy, lazy and snobbish.
Invasion and theft………
First, the greed: invasion and theft. The Romans invaded Britain in the 1st Century AD and brought their alphabet; in the 7th Century, the Angles and Saxons took over, along with their language. Starting in the 9th Century, Vikings occupied parts of England and brought some words (including they, displacing the Old English hie). Then the Norman French conquered in 1066 – and replaced much of the vocabulary with French, including words which over time became beef, pork, invade, tongue and person.
The Norman conquest of Britain in 1066 - shown here in the 11th-Century Bayeux Tapestry - introduced a number of French words into the language (Credit: GL Archive/Alamy)
Once the English tossed out the French (but not their words) a few centuries later, they started to acquire territories around the world – America, Australia, Africa, India. With each new colony, Britain acquired words: hickory, budgerigar, zebra, bungalow. The British also did business with everyone else and took words as they went – something we call “borrowing,” even though the words were kept. Our language is a museum of conquests.
What does this have to do with spelling? When we “borrow” words, they often come from other Latin-alphabet spelling systems, but have sounds different from the sounds we make in English. Many other languages, therefore, fully adapt words they borrow: Norwegian turned chauffeur into sjåfør and Finnish turned strand into ranta. In English, though, we wear our battle scars proudly. For some words, we have adopted the pronunciation but modified the spelling: galosh (from French galoche), strange (from French estrange). For others, we didn’t change the spelling, but we did change the pronunciation: ratio (originally like “ra-tsee-o” in Latin), sauna (the Finnish au is like “ow”), ski (in Norse, said more like “she”). Or we kept the spelling and, to the extent reasonable, the pronunciation too: corps, ballet, pizza, tortilla.
Lazy tongues…………
Adding to the greed is the laziness – or, as linguists call it, “economy of effort”. Sounds tend to change to save effort for either the speaker (dropping sounds out) or the listener (making sounds more distinct). Under Scandinavian and French influence, we tossed out troublesome bits of the complex Old English inflections, so a word like hopian got whittled down to hope, and over time, the e on the end stopped being said. In more recent centuries, we have often kept the spelling when sounds wear down: “vittle” is still written as victual. We simplified some sound combinations – “kn” became “n” and “wr” became “r.” We also stopped using – but not writing – some sounds altogether: the “kh” sound we spelled gh got changed to “f” as in laughter or just dropped, as in daughter.
Sometimes sounds just change capriciously. The most significant instance of this in English was the Great Vowel Shift. From the 1400s to about 1700, for reasons that remain unclear, our long vowels all shifted in our mouths like cream swirling slowly in a cup of tea. Before it, see rhymed with "eh"; boot was said like “boat”; and out sounded like “oot.” But when the sounds shifted, the spelling stayed behind.
Copper engraving after a late 16th-Century image of Dutch typesetters (Credit: Alamy)
Tongues and ears aren’t the only lazy things. Scribes and typesetters can be, too. If you bring over scribes from France or typesetters from the Netherlands and Belgium, where the first presses in Britain came from, they will tend to the standards they’re used to. The French scribes, with their Latin influence, didn’t see why we would write cwen when obviously what they heard should be spelled something like queen. The Dutch typesetters felt that gost was missing something, so they slipped in an h to make ghost.
And, heck, if you charge by the letter, why not add in some extra e’s? They seemed to be all over the place anyway.
And then came snobbery………
What really made sure that English spelling was a losing game, though, was snobbery.
It started in the 11th Century, when French became the high-class language and loaded up our culinary, legal and poetic vocabularies. But the snobbery kicked into top gear in the Renaissance, when scholars developed a crush on the ancient classics. They started borrowing words wholesale; many of our scientific and technical terms come from Latin and Greek (and most of the Greek terms came first through Latin, with Latin ideas of how to spell them). But they also decided that words that we already had ought to display their classical heritage, too. Does peple trace back to Latin populus? Then it ought to bear a special amulet to show its nobility – let’s add the o and make it people! Det owes a debt to debitum? Then put a b in so we know it! Many words had letters added by this indi(c)table fau(l)t; sometimes, they changed their pronunciation to match the spelling, as in fault. And sometimes the re-spellers were wrong about the etymology. While isle (formerly ile) comes from insula (hence the s), for example, island does not; it’s from Old English iegland.
During the Renaissance, English speakers started borrowing Latin and Greek words wholesale - or changing words we already had to show their ancient heritage (Credit: Alamy)
One more layer of snobbery has added further complications across the Atlantic over the last couple of centuries: national pride. The (relatively few) American simplifications of spelling – color for colour, center for centre – largely owe their existence to Noah Webster’s desire to create a distinctive American English. Canadian preference for keeping many British spellings, on the other hand, has the same nationalistic origins… just in reverse.
And now? Now we don’t even want to spell things as they sound. How do spellings like hed, hart, lafter, dotter, and det look to you? Uneducated, perhaps? Annoyingly simplistic? Exactly. We enjoy our discomforts – and we really enjoy arbitrary practices that allow us to tell who are and aren’t the “right sort”. We’ve taken a useful tool and turned it into a social filter.
Greed started the problem of our language and laziness entrenched it, but snobbishness lionizes it. The history of English is a tale of vice… and that is a word, by the way, that we got from the French – even if we can’t blame them for the vices themselves.

In this Issue my thanks go to John Barron, Michael Arnold, Henry Lassiter (USA correspondent), Jonathan Prest and Carolyn Rogers for their contributions.