Issue 43 — March 1999
Memories of
wigs and cassocks
Music class at St. Barnabas More recollections from Jo Elvidge, now in Somerset
It was heart-warming to hear from friends who remember 'Josie Rumble' following my 'Jericho Childhood' article (May 1998). Eric Clarke kindly sent me a school photograph, probably circa 1932. Sadly, Eric says that many of the boys lost their lives in the War, and others have died since.
Some teachers leave a lasting memory, for good or ill,
and infant-school days were coloured by green hammocks, in which we took
our rest, and by Miss Johnson of the Reception Class, a lady with a severe
chignon hair style, and later on, by Miss Coles, who inspired a fearful
respect, and who we imagined wore an auburn wig.
As St. Barnabas was a church school, Canon Bisdee came to take Scripture
lessons. In his black cassock and biretta he seemed remote and austere;
and the Church itself was dark and forbidding. The Senior School Headmaster
was Mr. Miles, a white-haired bachelor, who sometimes forayed with pupils
to unlock the secrets of our famous city. I once won half-a-crown for
an essay written after a visit to the Sheldonian Theatre and the Bodleian
Library, because I mentioned their 'Corinthian and Ionic pillars'.
With music in the family, my parents struggled to buy me a piano, paying
weekly by instalments, and I took lessons for sixpence a week with Miss
Pratley in Cranham Terrace. She was a strict Victorian lady, who wielded
a heavy pointer and lifted one's wrists to the correct angle. The piano,
of course, needed tuning from time to time, and that introduced us to
Oscar, a blind man, well-known in the area.
Hedges, the Butcher (now Ali's), had a shop on the corner of Albert and
Gt. Clarendon Streets, and most weekends I was dispatched to ask for 'the
blade end of a half-shoulder of lamb, please'. Phyllis Hedges, the daughter,
once took me to the family farm in Temple Cowley to savour the delights
of 'almost country' as Cowley was then. Of course we also had the freedom
of Port Meadow when we were old enough to fish for tiddlers and collect
frog-spawn at Medley, passing a Catholic Seminary at the top of Walton
Well Road, where we sometimes stopped to be shown the aviary by the Brothers.
The friends who most influenced my life were those at Walton St. Methodist
Church, since demolished (like my home in Wellington St). I am indebted
to them for introducing me to art and literature, to summer plays in College
Gardens, to boating on the Cherwell, and to the wider world of learning,
in short, to the treasures of Oxford - 'my city'.
