9 minute read
Wheelbarrows to Beer barrels
Fast forward five years and The Radleian 1976 gives the JCR a report that any OR would have been proud of after their own time at the College.
“In the six years of its existence, the club has not yet had to be closed for bad behaviour. This record is one few schools can equal, and is due in the main to the cellar in which the club operates. Its admirable preparation has given the room a congenial and friendly atmosphere, often remarked upon by visitors. Members take a pride in the club-room and in general very good care is taken of it.”
The amusements on offer had increased, with bar-billiards joining the existing dartboard, as had the number of beers on offer. More recent ORs may also be astounded to know that pints costed between 18p and 24p a pint! The dances continued, with termly offerings organised by the committee for the JCR members. “The success of the JCR cannot be denied. Its position and importance in the leisure life of the senior boys grows term by term”. And its importance continued to grow.
Strong spirits
JCR was also used for other social events. Robert Hall recalls, not so much a memory of alcohol, but the winter of discontent… During the industrial unrest of the miners’ strikes of the early 1970s, Radley, like the rest of the UK had frequent power cuts. That meant we moved around by torch or candlelight in the evenings.
At that time I was sharing a study in the Octagon with Tony Shelley, The JCR in more sedate use in 1977. whose dad, Norman, was then a very well-known actor, particularly on the radio, where he played Dr Watson to Carleton Hobbs’ Sherlock Holmes. Not sure who cooked up the idea, but Norman agreed to read ghost stories in the JCR; spooky goings on by flickering candlelight….we were all looking behind us by the time we went back to socials through the empty passages and pitch black campus..!
When Peter Leroy left Radley in 1984, his vale records how what was “potentially a flash point in college life” was run through the committees with “an appropriately jovial atmosphere, thereby sustaining morale in the senior part of the school, providing an important link between young and old.”
eJCR
Fifty years later and the Covid-19 pandemic lockdown saw the Radley summer term move entirely online as the boys did not return to the College. One might imagine then that JCR would lay dormant, awaiting the start of the new academic year (hopefully!) in September. However, as lessons and pastoral care became virtual, so did JCR. Boys joined up with their friends over Zoom and sat in ‘groups’ to chat over a beer, just as would happen in the JCR.
These proved to be lovely social occasions and soon the boys were keen to ‘catch up’ with dons in the more informal environment fostered by JCR. So, the Zoom invitations were extended and dons and boys were able to virtually ‘drop in’ for a drink, even using appropriate photos of JCR as a backdrop on the calls! A fitting 21st century example of the jovial, morale-boosting atmosphere of
JCR’s early days.
Above: Keeping the spirit going through lockdown, from the email advertising the video conferencing JCR sessions. Right: Perhaps the invention of Radley Pool? Jake Hubbard (2015) sent in this picture of Sam Perez Quane (2015) ‘assisting’ in a game of JCR pool in December 2019.
As the boys returned to College in September 2020 for the start of the new academic year, it was not immediately clear how the JCR might run. But by making use of the marquees set up on site and also the more open space of New Pavilion, JCR sessions for the boys here over the past 50 years, JCR is as much a part of life at
sixth-form boys have been able to continue.
These sessions have provided a very welcome opportunity for groups to get together, suitably socially-distanced of course. And 50-year home, of the cellars underneath Mansion, the ethos is still the same as in 1970. The original article in The Radleian from Lent 1971, introducing JCR, concludes with the sentiment that it was “in the process of becoming an integral part of Radley life”.
This process took very little time to come to fruition, and for the whilst at present, it may not be in their traditional, and now
Radley as Hall, Socials, Bigside and Chapel.
Below: A photo from 2020 that could almost have been taken at any point in the last 50 years - Radley boys chatting over a beer in the JCR.
“YOU CANNOT
FURLOUGH FISH” ...or, how ORs in business have responded to the problems and opportunities brought about by the Covid lockdowns.
Sam Petty (2002)
All has been upside down with my business but we have been making face masks and thankfully these have been very popular.
We usually print British art onto pocket squares, cushions, ties, and scarves but have turned our hand to face masks! Artwork includes local artists, iconic William Morris, collaborations with cartoonist PUGH and the National Motor Museum.
10% of the sales go to the Covid 19 response fund and we have also launched a rainbow range of products with profits to the NHS.
www.davidwatson.uk
New products from Sam Petty’s business, David Wilson, showing fine art prints on facemasks and rainbow scarves to support NHS fundraising.
Philip Jenks (1976)
Philip Jenks has spent most of his career with Harriman House, the book publishing company he set up in 1992, but now works full time on his daughters’ videography business, Jenks&Co. Since 2010, Daisy and Kitty have been filming parties and weddings and have made a name for themselves with ‘lip-sync’ videos.
“It’s a great job: they have a ringside seat at happy family events, create a product which people like, and word-of-mouth keeps them busy.”
What could possibly go wrong? A-hem. On 15th March, Jenks&Co had 37 bookings. On 20th March, 0.
“The only good thing was the clarity: either we changed tack or went bust,” says Philip.
The problem was that with live events cancelled, Daisy and Kitty had nothing to film. The solution, they thought, was to persuade hosts to put on a ‘remote party’ in which guests would film themselves lip-syncing at home and send their clips back to Daisy and Kitty who would edit them into a video of ‘the party that never happened’. But would anyone go for the idea? They weren’t sure, but with no other ideas, it was worth a try.
So they asked Matt, their IT developer, to build a system which would allow clients to create a project on Jenks&Co, choose a song, add guests, allocate lines, and send out email invitations. It also had to provide a way for guests to upload their clips back to the system and for Daisy and Kitty to import them into their editing software. Matt coded manically for four weeks and in late April, Jenks&Co launched its new ‘Home Movie’ service with an email to its clientbase.
The response was instant. By then, people had been in lockdown for five weeks. Families and friends had been unable to celebrate birthdays, weddings and anniversaries. The opportunity to collaborate on a funny, silly, uplifting lip-sync movie was a way to release all that pent-up social energy.
Jenks&Co has now done over 230 lockdown movies for all sorts of family occasions. As well as lip-sync, it now offers a ‘Spoken Word’ option in which guests film themselves speaking, not miming to a song. “If someone is 80, the last thing they want is to watch their relatives jumping around to ‘Bust a Move’,” explains Philip. “Far better to have them speaking messages of congratulation, and to add photos and favourite soundtracks to the movie.”
That sentiment is a pointer to the business’ future. Philip now thinks of Jenks&Co less as a videographer of events and more as a keeper of family memories, with photo-scanning and conversion recently added to its repertoire, because “so many families have boxes of loose photos, shelves of albums, and drawers full of slides and negatives which need to be safeguarded”.
The key, he says, is that Jenks&Co doesn’t just hand the client back a hard drive; it puts the images and footage online, lets the client decide who can access them, and makes it easy to create photo albums and videos out of them. “Most photo archiving services start and stop with storage. For us, storage is important, but we think it’s much more fun getting clients to *do* things with their archive once it’s online.”
Was COVID a blessing in disguise, then? “No, it’s a scourge, but from a business point of view it pushed us in a more interesting direction.”
www.jenksandco.tv
Alex Ledger (1997)
I left Radley in 2002 and for the last 15 years I have run an Adventure Sports company called SkySchool, which teaches people how to fly a specific type of microlight called a Paramotor. We’ve operated predominantly overseas because of the weather limitations in the UK however due to Covid-19 our clients, who are mainly British, could not travel abroad. We therefore returned to our base in Oxfordshire and fortunately the weather turned out to be amazing. Alex Ledger (1997) giving advice and guidance to a SkySchool student. The moment lockdown was eased we were inundated with people looking to make the most of the weather and take to the skies.
At the end of a particularly glorious day of flying in late May I was out running near our training location and bumped into a family friend, Oscar Manville-Hales (2009), who also happens to be an OR. He had recently left Edinburgh University and was looking for work as a photographer and film maker but due to Covid-19 there was not much work for him. I therefore invited him to join us at the flying site the following day and continued on my run half expecting him not to turn up. What a fortuitous meeting it turned out to be!
Since then we’ve been flat out teaching people how to fly. During this time Oscar has become an integrable member of the team and produced some amazing work, which has led to an ever-increasing number of people signing for a course. Now that the UK weather is starting to change, along with people’s attitude to travel, we are heading back to the continent and I’m glad to say that Oscar will be joining us. Covid-19 could have utterly destroyed our business, however by reverting back to basics and working with like-minded people, such as Oscar, who wanted to make the most of this difficult situation, we managed to not only survive, but thrive.
I have continued to work with Oscar, filming in the UK, France, Portugal and Spain and we’re in the process of setting up a production company together - Whitecap Media - with Oscar as the Head of Creative/Videographer and me as the Producer.
So all very exciting!
