OPUS 2024, issue 27 by The Portsmouth Grammar School

FOR ALUMNI AND FRIENDS OF THE PORTSMOUTH GRAMMAR SCHOOL

OPUS

ISSUE 27 | 2024

IN THIS ISSUE

10 A decade of making a difference

Celebrating 10 years of the William Smith Fund

12 A path well trodden

Andy Anderson recalls the landmarks on the route to school from the station

16 Intelligence rising

As the use of artiﬁcial intelligence increases, Ray Eitel-Porter considers the risks

18 OPUS turns 15

The magazine has undergone several new looks over the years

20 Inking it in

A suggestion from Emily Cotter’s aunt led to a change in career path

23 The old school

John Sadden gives a detailed history of the Upper Junior School building

26 Miles of smiles

Jon Doolan ran the length of the country collecting one-liners along the way

29 The inspirational Violet Pearse

Deane Clark and John Sharpe reminisce about their former art teacher

32 The quiet revolutionary Ever wondered how sound is relayed on TV? Martin Black gives an insight

35 Life lessons

Dan Frampton explains the Pastoral Curriculum at PGS today and how you can get involved

36 First tries

A look back at sport for girls at PGS as girls’ rugby is launched

38 A Heidelberg encounter

John Sweetman shares some of his research on the Dambuster Raid

40 A sense of freedom

A look at the history of the bicycle at PGS

Regulars

04 School news

A round-up of PGS news and events

44 OP news

News from Old Portmuthians

49 In memoriam

OPUS is saddened to report the deaths of alumni and friends

50 Ask the archivist

John Sadden delves through the records to answer your questions

51 Parting shot

Do you recognise any of these familiar faces?

IN BRIEF

Find more news and photos at www.connect.pgs.org.uk

MEET OUR NEW DEVELOPMENT MANAGER

Jack Collins joined the team in January as our new Development Manager and hit the ground running, attending the Annual OP Lunch in his second week.

Jack grew up in Portsmouth and read Sports and Exercise Science at the University of Portsmouth before joining their Sport Department.

Jack is looking forward to getting to know more of you and celebrating the 10th anniversary of the William Smith Fund with you all.

SO GOOD WE HELD THEM TWICE

It was wonderful to be joined by OPs from a range of eras at The Old Customs House in Gunwharf in May. Perhaps unsurprisingly, given our proximity to the Dockyard, there was a strong representation from the Royal Navy as well as those who shared a passion for sailing.

October saw us closer to the water at the Still and West in Old

Portsmouth. With attendees ranging from the Classes of 1956 to 2004, it was a privilege to be able to facilitate a reunion between two classmates who hadn’t seen each other for almost 70 years.

PGS will always be your school regardless of when you last visited and you are always welcome at our events. We’ll be hosting drinks again in London on 3rd April. Keep an eye on PGS Connect for details.

ANNUAL OP LUNCH

It was a full house at this year’s Annual OP Lunch. Once again the sun shone on Hilsea, although attendees had to brave sub-zero temperatures on the balcony for the obligatory group photo. They warmed up again by tucking into a delicious lunch from the Hilsea catering team whilst catching up with friends, some of whom hadn’t seen each other for decades.

Then it was on to the real business of the day – a ﬁendishly tricky PGS quiz from school archivist John Sadden. It was a tightly fought contest but the team headed by former Head Boy John Owens (OP 1963) emerged victorious, heading off into the sunset with their prizes.

Bookings are open for the 2025 event: www.connect.pgs.org.uk/events

CHRISTMAS CAROL SERVICE

If the festive season brings back memories of school carol services, you may be interested to learn that

LIFE AT 25

It’s been a turbulent few years since school ended for the Class of 2017 but it was a delight to welcome them back in early June. Their former teachers, some of whom have since left the school themselves, were waiting to greet them and the Quad was filled with excited chatter. Tours of the school and a fascinating display from the Archive brought memories flooding back, as did some specific memories from Mr Williamson (Chemistry, 2010-18), shared by the Head during his speech. After food, and before celebrations continued down the road, they were even treated to a blink-andyou’ll-miss-it flyover from the Red Arrows (part of Armed Forces Day on Southsea Common).

Class of 2018: your reunion will be on Saturday 14th June 2025. Whether you stayed for Sixth Form or not, you can book your place by visiting: www.connect.pgs.org.uk/events

December 2023 provided the chance for OPs and former staff to gather at the Cathedral for a carol service in the company of pupils from years 11-13 and their parents. This will be an annual event and we

would be delighted to see you there. This year’s service will be on Thursday 12th December at 7pm.

Reserve a seat by booking on PGS Connect: www.connect.pgs.org.uk/events

A CELEBRATION OF GIVING

Guests arriving at Hilsea were treated to ﬁzz in the early evening sunshine at our William Smith Fund summer celebration in June. The event brought together donors, OPs, parents and staff to celebrate the money raised for the William Smith Fund during the academic year, over £600,000. After enjoying a fantastic set from pupil band Morning After and a delicious two-course meal, Head David Wickes thanked everyone for their support and

CHORISTERS TOUR

In glorious September sunshine, the school welcomed back three Old Portmuthian Cathedral choristers, Andrew Mackney (OP 1972) Martin Black (OP 1975) and Peter Fellows (OP 1982), accompanied by former Music teacher and PGS parents, Anthony (1977-90) and Carole Froggatt. The party enjoyed a nostalgic tour of the school, conducted by the School archivist, John Sadden, which included a kick-around in the Lower School playground (not risk assessed) and an impromptu piano duet featuring Peter

updated them on the year’s successes. He was followed by Destiny RoseForde Kennedy (OP 2022) who shared how receiving a bursary provided her with opportunities she never thought possible, including going on to study Law at the University of Oxford.

This year marks 10 years since the William Smith Fund was created to increase educational opportunities for young people across the city. Thank you so much to each and every one of you who has supported us in that time. We hope you will join us as we celebrate our ﬁrst decade (see page 10).

SHARING SUCCESS

September saw former Wilkie Scholars reunite for their annual dinner in Port Solent along with Alice Larden, Development Director and donor and friend of PGS, Brian Wilkie. It was a lovely evening spent catching up on personal and professional developments as well as celebrating various achievements including promotions, engagements and getting

and Mr Froggatt on an upright in the old Lower School music room, followed by a performance on the grand in the old Lower School hall.

A bonus was meeting other former teachers from that era who were attending the 2004 leavers’ reunion which was taking place on the same day.

If any OPs would like a tour of the school, including what was the Lower/ Junior school, please register your interest with the Development Ofﬁce. (l to r): Peter, Andrew, Tony, Carole and Martin

on the housing ladder.

The Wilkie Scholarships were first set up in 2012, supporting two pupils a year from Mayfield School to attend Sixth Form at PGS. There are 21 former scholars and three currently at PGS. Scholars have gone on to study at Oxbridge and have careers in Law, financial services and at the Ministry of Defence.

THE UPPER JUNIOR

SCHOOL BUILDING

As a school we are committed to ensuring that the day-to-day running of the School is as efﬁcient and effective as possible. With this in mind, we want to make you aware that a decision has been made on a plan that has been

actively under consideration by our Governors for some time. Across the next two to three years we will bring the teaching of Years 5 and 6 back on to the main School site, making more effective use of the space we have in the School and making the school day for our Upper Junior School pupils and staff more efﬁcient.

This will then permit us to sell the Upper Junior School building (previously known as the Lower School) and reinvest the proceeds into the main site, allowing us to continue to enhance learning facilities across the School. It will also allow us to reduce the costs associated with operating across two sites. As we are sure you can appreciate, this will be a large and complex project which will require detailed planning. These decisions are being made for the beneﬁt of pupils, parents and staff alike as we seek to rationalise and modernise our learning environment whilst working to reduce the cost of an education at PGS. We will continue to keep you informed as the project develops.

See page 23 for the building’s history.

WINDING BACK THE YEARS

It was an absolute pleasure to welcome back over 50 OPs from the Class of 2004 on a sunny Saturday in September. They had requested a reunion to mark 20 years since they left PGS and were joined by some of their former teachers including Miss Bush, Mrs Giles, Mr Hampshire, Mr Knight and

Miss Meadows. After a delicious lunch, a tour of old haunts brought a rush of memories to the surface: achievements past, classroom hijinks, dramatic improv in the Gate House, supervised study in the library and concerts in the Rotunda to name a few.

Following a ﬁnal look at the numerous photos and artefacts from the Archive, they disappeared down

the High Street to The Dolphin. Rumour has it that whilst there they encountered some fellow OPs from the Class of 1985 who just so happened to be marking their 40-year anniversary! You are always welcome at your school. If you would be interested in organising a reunion for your cohort, please contact the Development Ofﬁce: development@pgs.org.uk

A MESSAGE FROM THE HEAD

As you may well be aware, from January 2025 fees for pupils at The Portsmouth Grammar School will be subject to 20% VAT, following the Government’s implementation of their manifesto commitment to do so. This is a mandatory requirement and not something which we, as a school, have any control over. As a result of this measure and others such as the increase in National Insurance Contributions and loss of business rates relief, we are entering a challenging period for the School and the independent sector as a whole.

We had been able to plan for the imposition of VAT and have already been making changes to ensure that the day-to-day running of the school is as efﬁcient and effective as possible.

Initiatives we have undertaken include:

• Increasing non-fee income through looking at the school site more creatively and letting our space for external use outside of school operations.

• Reducing non-payroll costs across the business, with signiﬁcant efﬁciencies

• Rationalising and modernising the learning environment, including investing signiﬁcantly in our digital network across the school.

To directly help with the impact of VAT on school fees, as of January 2025, we will:

• Introduce a new sibling discount of 5%.

• Absorb some of the impact of the VAT cost by reducing school fees by 3.5% for the Spring 2025 and Summer 2025 terms.

The Portsmouth Grammar School is currently in a relatively stable

position; however, we are not immune to the effects of these changes on the education sector. There will need to be some careful management of our resources and monitoring of our position to ensure the School’s ﬁnancial sustainability moving forward.

However, I wish you to know that we remain committed to being a positive force in the local community (recognised recently by the Independent Schools Council) and to providing a ﬁrst-class education, both academically and in the wider sense. Furthermore, we wish to continue to be a school that is accessible, and we will be seeking to raise even more funds than we have in the past for our signiﬁcant bursary provision. In short, we will do all that we can to ensure that our pupils receive an excellent educational experience, and we will continue to keep you updated.

UNVEILING OF NEW OXBRIDGE BOARDS

In early September we were joined by over 50 OPs and their loved ones as we unveiled new boards celebrating the school’s proud history of producing students who go on to study at Oxford and Cambridge. Installed outside the Memorial Library, these new boards extend the historic Oxbridge Scholarships and Exhibitions boards on display downstairs in G Block which stopped in 1982. Almost 500 OPs are listed, demonstrating the high level of academic excellence at PGS that continues today.

OPs from the 1980s to the 2020s attended, with some bringing their parents and others their children. While for some it was a chance for a mini reunion with former classmates, for others it was simply a chance to revisit the school for the ﬁrst time in decades. It was, as one attendee put it, ‘an incredibly special and memorable evening’. We look forward to continuing to add names in the years to come.

If you were unable to attend the event and would like to visit to see your name on the board, please contact the Development Ofﬁce. We would be delighted to welcome you.

Dates for your diary EVENTS

Wednesday 4

Christmas Concert

Portsmouth Cathedral

Thursday 12

Christmas Carol Service

Portsmouth Cathedral

Thursday 16 Annual OP Lunch Fawcett Pavilion, Hilsea

Wednesday 2 Gala Concert

Portsmouth Cathedral

Thursday 3

OP drinks in London Venue TBC

Tuesday 18 & Wednesday 19 Giving Day

Wednesday 24 –Friday 26

Senior School Play: The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time

Thursday 22 –Friday 23

Middle School Musical: Sister Act

Saturday 14 Life at 25 Reunion for the Class of 2018

Friday 20

William Smith Fund Summer Celebration

Friday 4

Founder’s Day Service

Portsmouth Cathedral

A decade of making a difference

2025 marks 10 years since we launched the William Smith Fund in the summer of 2015 with a vision to open our doors to bright young people across the city regardless of their circumstances

Thanks to the incredible generosity of our community over the past decade, we have raised over £5 million for bursaries, as well as academic and co-curricular projects. Thank you so much to each and every one of you who has contributed to this fantastic ﬁgure. Your gifts have enabled us

to give over 475 children the chance to experience a PGS education and all the unique opportunities it brings.

Your donations have also funded numerous projects to support current pupils from 3D printers and virtual reality headsets through to a fantastic new computer suite and learning support hub.

“The bursary has inspired me to be the best I can truly be. One day I hope to contribute myself and help another child”

Dinura, OP 2024

Looking to the future

As we approach January and the introduction of VAT on fees, we know that raising money for bursaries is more important than ever and, as we enter our 10th Anniversary year, we will be hoping to raise the most yet.

Our efforts will culminate on 18th-19th March as we hold our fourth Giving Day. Over 36 hours, OPs, parents and staff from across the globe will come together to #BeTheDifference. Look out for more news as we get closer to the day. We hope you’ll join us in raising much needed funds so we can continue to open our doors to young bright minds from across the city.

Another amazing year 2023-24 has seen yet more tremendous support with over £600,000 raised for bursaries and other projects. 300 donors supported the school, including OPs, current and former parents and staff as well as friends of PGS. Thank you to all those who donated.

We also welcomed a number of OPs back to the school to give careers talks, advice and to help with practice interviews and other co-curricular events. In total almost 100 OPs volunteered their time to help pupils, contributing valuable advice and skills - thank you!

We ﬁnished the year off in style at our inaugural William Smith Fund Summer Celebration (see page 6) where over 100 guests gathered in Hilsea for a delicious dinner and entertainment from our very own pupils. We were joined by OP and bursary recipient Destiny Rose-Forde Kennedy (pictured left), who is currently studying Law and Spanish at Cambridge and already has a graduate job lined up in a Law Firm. She explained that she would not be where she is now and have achieved her successes without the support of donors who contributed to the William Smith Fund.

“I am beyond thankful for the opportunity to study at PGS. The bursary changed my life and I will forever be grateful for the impeccable quality of teaching and genuine care the teachers have for the students”

Esha,

2020

A path well trodden

For decades term-time has seen a steady stream of children bedecked in PGS uniform making their way across the city from the train station. Andy Anderson (OP 1965) recalls the historic landmarks of the well-worn route to school

Aproportion of PGS pupils will always have made daily journeys to school from regions off Portsea Island - from Hayling, Gosport, and from the ribbon of suburbs that bordered the old A27 from Fareham to Havant and beyond. From 1955 to 1965 I came in from Rowlands Castle, one of a dozen or so boys who rode the Waterloo line train to Portsmouth and Southsea (Town) station. Others travelled further, from Petersﬁeld, even from Liss and Liphook.

Doubtless the late lamented public transport guru Tim Runnacles (OP 1965) could have explained why our train sometimes arrived at the street level terminal platform and sometimes came in at the high level and continued to Portsmouth Harbour - the variations never seemed to have any discernible rationale.

I once received a form prize from Sir Arthur fforde of the BBC and saw Gerry and the Pacemakers. Not on the same occasion.

Opposite:

Aerial view of the school and its environs (PGS Archive)

Below:

In the seventies and eighties I rarely visited Portsmouth, but in 1995 I found myself in the Guildhall again, a guest at a council-organised send-off reception for participants in the second London-Mexico car rally, held on the 25th anniversary of the original World Cup Rally in 1970. As I wandered out of the lobby and down the wide steps to prepare for departure to France on the rally’s ﬁrst leg, I spotted Queen Vic giving me a hard stare from her new plinth on the other side of the square. It was the ﬁrst time I’d been there since the late sixties, and frankly my heart sank at the dispiriting changes in architectural infrastructure. I suspect she was none too pleased about it either.

View from an Upper Platform of the Town Station (Portsmouth and Southsea), 1972.

The walk from Town station to school was something over a mile, and though it became rather tedious after ten years, there was a fair amount of interest along the way. The ﬁrst hazard after heading south from the station was Greetham Street, which lay roughly where Isambard Kingdom street now runs. At the time of day when schoolboys were, to paraphrase Shakespeare, ‘creeping like snails/Unwillingly to school’, this wide, dangerous and confusing intersection with Guildhall Square teemed with buses, trolleybuses, cars and swarms of Dockyard workers on bikes who would hurtle round the corner from multiple directions, apparently oblivious to the safety of young pedestrians.

The entrance is on the right. (From Portsmouth Through Time, John Sadden, 2009)

In earlier years Victoria’s view across to the Guildhall and the station through the skyscape of trolleybus cables would have included the wonderful old Verrecchia’s Cafe where many tender encounters between PGS boys and High School girls took place. In its upper salon were narrow marble tables in private booths of dark wood and etched glass, where discreet rendezvous could be conducted in relative privacy over indifferent coffees, gelati, sticky pastries, and perhaps an illicit cigarette. Local art students were frequent customers too: Bohemia in Pompey. La Coupole? Les Deux Magots? How passé - the sixties cultural revolution was all happening at Verrecchia’s. The old caff is long gone, I fear - though I think the brand name is still used for an ice-cream business.

Those who made it across unscathed found themselves perched on a small, paved triangle of relative tranquility. Here stood the Green Queen, a large copper Victoria on a stone pedestal, gazing across at the vast Guildhall where

To continue. Just across a side-road from Victoria’s triangle was a stationery shop, crammed with school necessities such as pencil-boxes, ink, and rubbers, and with fascinating gadgets like spring-clip pencil holders, and, wonder of

Clockwise from left:

The Guildhall Square showing Verrecchia’s Cafe and the Town Station, 1969 (From Portsmouth - Archive Photos, John Sadden, 1997)

A Verrecchia’s private booth, preserved in the City Museum. (Photo John Sadden)

Pre-war view of what is now Guildhall Walk, showing Kimbell’s restaurant and the Hippodrome, c 1925 (From Portsmouth - A Century of Change, John Sadden, 2009)

The Nufﬁeld Club, 1950s. (From Portsmouth Then and Now, John Sadden and Mark Wingham OP, 2010)

The Cambridge Road roundabout and Lower School, 1966. (Photo Tim Runnacles OP)

Aerial view of the Army recruitment ofﬁce, part of the United Services Ground and the Polytechnic Students’ Union, 1970 (PGS archive)

The Theatre Royal, 1971 (Photo Tim Runnacles OP)

The Guildhall Square showing the war-damaged Guildhall before rebuilding, 1950s (From Celebrating Portsmouth, John Sadden, 2022)

View from the Guildhall steps during redevelopment, 1972. (From Portsmouth Through Time, John Sadden, 2009)

The Queen Victoria statue on its original site, 1957 (photo William Burbage)

Opposite: The Senior School, early 1950s. (Photo Michael Peters OP)

“I remember waitresses in white blouses and black skirts, paper doilies, tea in tall china pots, and toast with anchovies”

wonders, calculators. In the ﬁfties? Yes, but these had no batteries - they were operated by sliding a stylus in a series of slots and holes. Pure magic: items of fascination and lust to reluctant young mathematicians ground down by the oppression of log tables.

On the next corner, at the start of Guildhall Walk, was Martin’s Bank with its smart gold grasshopper logo on an overhead swinging sign. The night deposit box in the wall had six brass studs around its sides - it didn’t take long to discover that one of these was a fake. A surreptitious ﬂick would spin it round to reveal a keyhole - naturally this became a daily routine. The stud eventually gave up the battle and dropped off, a shiny casualty of scholarly mischief.

On the left was Kimbell’s, an adjunct of the popular Southsea music venue. This outpost was a large, slightly formal restaurant that I only visited a few times. I remember waitresses in white blouses and black skirts, paper doilies, tea in tall china pots, and toast with anchovies. It sometimes had concerts too - Manfred Mann played there on at least one occasion. A quick online map search indicates that the building is now occupied by a wine bar or coffee chain.

The Theatre Royal, a venerable fixture in Pompey’s thespian history, was almost opposite. I seem to recall that its normal offerings were lightweight comedies and dramas, supplemented by the panto season around Christmas. In 1971 Ken Russell used it to film the stage sequences of The Boy Friend, starring Twiggy. Local legend sometimes has it that Russell also filmed The Who’s Tommy here, but a few of my contemporaries who were in the film deny it - the theatre on South Parade Pier and The King’s Theatre in Southsea were the main stage settings for that one.

This stretch of the walk featured a couple of cinemas. First was The Palace, which showed mostly horror ﬁlms like Night of The Demon, The Thing From Another World, Attack of the 50ft Woman and so on. Shining examples of the cinematic genre - I wonder if they’re available to stream. Sometimes The Palace ran saucier movies aimed at Portsmouth’s large complement of naval ratings and their girlfriends. In my preteens I was much too shy to stop and stare directly at the black and white promotional picture cards in the glass cases outside; furtive sideways glances on the hoof were all I could manage without embarrassment. But in my ﬁnal PGS year, I did take a High School girl there to see Darling with Laurence Harvey and Julie Christie.

After a nondescript terrace of employment agencies,

confectioners, furniture shops and so on, Guildhall Walk petered out close to the current location of The University of Portsmouth Students’ Union. The street layout here has changed radically since my youth, but there was another cinema close to this spot. I cannot recall its name and precise location, but I remember it for two reasons. It was the ﬁrst time I saw the name Cliff Richard on a poster, when he was playing opposite Sylvia Sim in a forgettable popﬂick called Espresso Bongo. One autumn night a few years later a biblical windstorm relocated large chunks of the cinema’s upper facade to street level, causing our next day’s school bound stroll to be subjected to diversions.

The Nuffield United Services Club was here too. Along with other PGS pupils, I was occasionally press-ganged into putting on smart clothes to attend parties or dances there. Opened by the late Queen in 1951 as an Officers’ Club, it became the Nuffield Centre and is currently a building site following its recent demolition.

The last leg of our journey was in more open country, though bounded on the left by a high wooden fence screening what has become University territory. On the right is now HMS Temeraire and the old United Services sports ground, where our PE classes were sometimes enlivened by vigorous softball games. If we were to avoid temporary silent incarceration in the Late Room during Prayers, this was where we had to quicken our pace.

Approaching the roundabout at Cambridge Junction, the red brick monolith of the Lower School hove into view on the right. Just before the gate was some kind of military building, currently a recruitment ofﬁce. Though my memory is hazy here, I have a faint notion it fulﬁlled exactly the same function way back when. On the other side of the roundabout was the long, functional facade of the Upper School. Between these august faculties, where St George’s Building now stands, was a bomb site across which gowned masters and capless students could be seen scampering between the school sites like characters in an animated Benny Hill sketch.

Upper and Middle School pupils got one ﬁnal glimpse of earthly pleasures before heading through the archway that is imprinted on all our minds. Macs. Mr Mac ran a small sweet shop opposite the main gate and also had the franchise for the school tuck shop which sold doughnuts, cream buns and various other teeth-rotting delights from a subterranean room somewhere below G-block. But the provision of sustenance on PGS premises is a story for another day…

Intelligence Rising

There is no shying away from the rising use of artiﬁcial intelligence (AI) and the risks involved are ever present in both current affairs and ﬁction. So, how can we ensure it is used responsibly?

Ray Eitel-Porter (OP 1980) is an expert in AI safety and ethics…

When I joined The Portsmouth Grammar School it was a direct grant grammar school. I remember the vigorous campaign which was waged to try to save the status of such schools that supported broad access to a high standard of education, independent of the ability to pay fees. As we know, that battle was lost and PGS was forced to become independent, ushering in an increasing number of changes to the school, including the arrival of four brave girls in our Lower Sixth year.

After leaving in December 1980, eager to improve my German before studying French and German at Christ Church, Oxford, I took a job as a waiter in a Swiss ski resort. Back then I didn’t know that Swiss German is pretty much unintelligible to someone who has learnt “Hochdeutsch”, so it did little to improve my language skills, though it was a great work and social experience! Two others from my year at PGS were working close by: Tim Harding in a mountain hotel in the same resort (but he couldn’t come down to town in the evenings because the lifts were closed) and Chris Marks in an unconnected resort over the back of the mountain but two to three hours away by train.

After university, I joined the management consulting company L.E.K. because I knew I wanted to go into business but had little idea what business entailed or what the options might be. I had grown up working during the holidays in my dad’s newsagent shop, so I was accustomed to small businesses, and it didn’t occur to me that being employee number 10 at L.E.K. Consulting (a spin out from Bain and BCG) might be risky. Luckily for me, L.E.K. ﬂourished and I spent 10 years there learning about business and structured problem

solving, together with ﬁnancial analysis and modelling. I supplemented this with an MBA from INSEAD.

The entrepreneurial instinct which had been fostered by working in my family’s shop then led me to found a software business which provided data and event information for the newly emerging electronic calendars and handheld devices. This coincided with the advent of the internet and so began my life-long passion for technology and how it can be harnessed to make our lives easier and better. The business rose and fell with the internet boom and bust and was ﬁnally sold by

the investors to a US travel technology business.

Over the following years I held a number of senior management positions in the USA and Asia before returning to the world of consulting in the UK, with a focus on technology. Perhaps it was my training as a linguist which has helped me play a ‘translator’ role, understanding and bridging the gap between technology and business applications. I led the European business for one of the pioneers of ‘Big Data’, before moving to Accenture in 2013 to head their Data and AI business in the UK, and being appointed global lead for Responsible AI in 2020.

We typically help companies and governments build effective governance structures, risk controls and technical capabilities to ensure they can scale their use of AI safely. It seems odd now that there was relatively little focus on the safe and responsible use of data and AI until some six or seven years ago, when I ﬁrst started consulting in this area. Initially, the focus was mainly on data privacy and the negative impact of bias but we now work to mitigate a much wider range of risks associated with AI, including:

means that it is extremely difﬁcult to know how the system arrived at its output, in turn making it much harder to check for accuracy or bias.

Copyright and Intellectual Property

With the explosion of generative AI (think ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude etc.) important lawsuits will help determine what is considered fair use of information on the internet for training generative AI models.

Disinformation and Fraud

Unfortunately, the very strength of generative AI to create extremely realistic graphical, written and audio content is itself a huge risk in the hands of those wishing to spread false information or perpetrate fraud.

Workforce

Studies suggest that AI and especially generative AI improves productivity by some 20-40% and eliminates many tasks currently undertaken widely across the workforce. Companies and governments need to help people to use AI as a tool to enhance their work experience without it leading to widespread job losses. This will also entail fundamental changes to the education system.

Any discussion of AI must, of course, also consider the debate about existential risk. Sufﬁce to say that there are diametrically opposed views by leading experts on whether AI could ever pose an existential threat to humankind and, if so, by when. But even a small chance of such a risk warrants serious research. Clearly, no country or company can act alone in this interconnected world and I was delighted that the UK took the initiative to bring together world leaders at the AI Safety Summit last year, leading to the signing of the Bletchley Declaration by 28 countries and the EU.

I sit on the Strategic Partners Board of the Alan Turing Institute, co-chair the government’s Data and AI Skills Taskforce and worked together with TeenTech to establish the ﬁrst national data science prize for schools. I am deeply passionate about harnessing the immense beneﬁts of AI to improve people’s lives and help solve some of the biggest challenges we face today. I am equally committed to ensuring this is done in a safe and responsible way that keeps human best interests at its core. I love my work for corporate clients, but will in future divide my time between this and addressing the broader societal challenges of AI working with academia, government and other organisations.

Postscript: since writing this contribution Ray has left Accenture to focus on writing a book about how to use AI responsibly and provide independent consulting on building trust in AI.

OPUS turns 15

It’s not just the William Smith Fund celebrating a special anniversary in this issue - the very ﬁrst edition of OPUS was published in Autumn 2009

The inaugural issue of OPUS was launched in 2009 under the Headship of James Priory (2008-18) with Alasdair Akass as Development Director. The word ‘opus’ of course signiﬁes a great work or achievement and the ﬁrst issue held within its 26 pages stories ranging from an OP’s polar expedition to plans for a new science building (the Bristow Clavell Science Centre which was opened in 2010).

Since then, the magazine has gone from strength to strength, winning an Independent School Award in 2010 when it was

praised for its diversity of stories and breadth of appeal to alumni.

In the ensuing years it has undergone several new looks and doubled in size to 52 pages. Opposite we’ve included a selection of the covers from the years which may bring back memories for you. We hope that it continues to bring you news of your school and your fellow OPs for many more years to come.

As ever, if you would like to share your news or contribute to an issue, please get in touch with the Development Ofﬁce: development@pgs.org.uk

First tries Girls’ rugby comes to PGS

OPUS turns 15 We look back

Inking it in Life as a tattoo artist

FOR ALUMNI AND FRIENDS OF THE PORTSMOUTH GRAMMAR SCHOOL

“Invaluable. I have every copy since it was ﬁrst published”

“An excellent magazine which makes me proud to have been a part of it, albeit a long time ago”

“I always read it from cover to cover”

“Really stands out as an alumni publication. I devour the content”

Inking it in

When she’s not working as a Client Engagement Lead or looking after her two boys, Emily Cotter (née Hakin, OP 2005) can usually be found with a pencil or tattoo needle in hand

Tell us a bit about where life has taken you since you left PGS

Life has taken me all over the world

-I have been rather transient! I left PGS just before the last year of my A levels, travelling down to Totnes in Devon rather unexpectedly. I had a chance to complete my A levels, discovering a passion for photography at a college in Ashburton. This led me to London where I achieved a degree in Interior Architecture. From there, with a sense of adventure I couldn’t shake, I moved to Abu Dhabi to work for Etihad airways. I wanted to travel the world, I just needed to get my degree behind me ﬁrst.

Have you always kept drawing?

Yes! It has always had a way of creeping into my life, throughout my degree and then in my downtime as an air stewardess where I found my love of drawing again.

What is your style?

I now take commissions for realistic pencil drawings. I draw pets, but predominantly family portraits. I use Procreate to merge photos together, and I draw from there. Recently I have been dabbling in some abstract painting as well.

Where do you tend to take your inspiration from?

I have followed some fantastic artists over the years. I have

taken inspiration from a fabulous pencil artist called Kevin Hayward who actually lives in Warsash, amongst others. Five years ago, just before my ﬁrst son was born, I undertook an MA in Drawing at the Arts University Plymouth. My inspiration was my family as a whole but particularly my Grandparents. I volunteered at an assisted living complex for a nationwide charity where I often drew the residents, whilst researching their backgrounds and stories. I have always been inspired by relationships, and what and who makes us who we are. Our elders won’t be here forever, so how do you capture them and their personality using drawing as a medium? I loved every minute of my MA.

What made you decide to become a tattoo artist?

My aunty! She saw a Facebook post from a tattoo studio advertising for an apprentice and suggested I should contact them. I was in London at the time working as the PA to the Sales and Marketing Director and the CEO of the largest land developer in London. Feeling stressed and overworked, I moved back to Devon to my Mum telling her I was giving up the corporate world forever as I “just wanted to be an artist”. I enrolled on the MA after one week at home and, after showing the artists at the tattoo studio my portfolio of portrait drawings, was offered a tattoo apprenticeship at the same time.

Was it always a dream of yours?

Absolutely not. I was 29 years old at the time and had only ever had one tiny tattoo on my thigh. It was actually my younger brother George’s (OP 2007) dream to be a tattoo

artist (something he has gone on to achieve – he has his own studio an hour away from me in Cornwall). But I thought, hey… if I get good at this I could create art forever, learn a fantastic craft and build my own business.

How did you go about it?

I started the tattoo apprenticeship, worked part-time in a bar, and began my MA within three months of arriving back home. I actually met my husband as well and, as I was completing my ﬁnal module and drawing for my exhibition, I fell pregnant with my ﬁrst little boy. Although a tattoo apprenticeship is tough, with no pay, long hours and the pressure put on by the other artists (we regulate ourselves and so the apprenticeship lasts for years), I never gave up. I loved it and steadily built up my own network of clients through the drawing commissions and tattoos I did. Many of my clients have been coming to me for over seven years now, and lots are very good friends!

Do you have your own studio?

Yes, after staying in the same tattoo shop for six and a half years, my amazingly supportive husband and I ﬁnally took the step to renovate our garden room. I have two young boys now, and the increasing demand from clients meant I was often up at the tattoo shop until 11pm, having been able to tattoo in the evenings only due to raising my boys. The studio gives me more ﬂexibility.

Do you ﬁnd tattooing a natural extension of your drawing?

It is a natural progression, however I tattoo a lot of ﬂorals, tiny, dainty and feminine tattoos, which are more illustrative. In the last year I have found that I have done more realistic and bigger pieces with portraits intertwined with the illustrative style. When I tattoo a portrait, the understanding I have of facial features, structure, lighting and tone has come from the years spent learning to draw.

Which creations are you most proud of so far?

I have a few I have done recently that I am very proud of. Artists will have a vision in their minds of what they would like the ﬁnished result to be, and my gosh it takes years of being critical of every piece we do and learning from our mistakes, however the tattoos you see here are the ones I am most proud of.

And which one(s) have you found most challenging?

I have recently tattooed two portraits of family and friends of my clients. This is the biggest challenge there is, with the most amount of pressure attached!

Do you ever worry about making a mistake while doing a tattoo?

YES! We all do, when tattooing names, dates or script, check, check and check again before putting ink to skin.

You have another job as well – what does that entail?

I do, I currently work two days a week for an accountancy practice as Client Engagement Lead. I form one quarter of the leadership team and am involved in strategic planning. I do anything that isn’t compliance based. I run the website, all social media, sales and marketing and I manage the client accounts. I do the fun part!

What might a typical day look like for you?

Gosh, a typical day for me is starting with the school run, and either going straight to the ofﬁce or my studio. Heading off for the school pick up at 3pm, doing dinner and bedtime for

Opposite: An intricate tattoo

Below left: The garden studio

Below right: Emily hard at work

the children and then either sitting down to draw for the evening, tattooing or playing netball.

Has anything (or anyone) from your time at PGS helped you along the way?

I had the most incredible art teacher – Christine Derry (Art, 1998-2006). I believe she moved to France, but my friends and I loved her. We would spend our break times in the art department. I really believe that is where it started for me, we were pushed to try everything and the creative freedom it gave me and my love for art has clearly never left. I can also say that my oldest friend Stefan Canavan (OP 2005) has always been there in the background, a great friend and a total achiever. We are still friends now and we have always supported each other. He was the reason I managed a GCSE in maths all those years ago.

Do you have any advice for aspiring artists?

Never give up, keep the creative ﬂair alive in yourself, even if you are stuck in a corporate environment, ﬁnd some space to make something, draw something.

I cannot stress enough about having patience to learn and make mistakes, but giving yourself the opportunity to focus on your skill. Practice makes perfect. I am still learning every day, and will continue to do so always.

If someone is interested in your work, where can they ﬁnd you?

You can ﬁnd me on Instagram @tantrum_tattoo_plymouth (named in honour of my boys) or on my Facebook business page: www.facebook.com/emilyjoyhakin

This page:

A selection of some of Emily’s favourite pieces so far, including a drawing of her grandparents (bottom right)

The Old School

The impending sale of the Upper Junior School building (previously The Grammar School, then the Lower/Junior School, but also known as “The Old School”) provides us with an opportunity to look at the re-founding of the school and the genesis of a building that has served the Portsmouth community well for nearly 150 years.

It was down to the passion, energy, inﬂuence and single-mindedness of the Chair of Governors and Vicar of Portsmouth, the Reverend Edward P Grant, that a new school was built after the Penny Street school fell into ruin and education ceased to take place. In 1876, the school building, the Headmaster’s house and the entire site was sold off for a paltry £500. This barely covered the amount awarded to the departing Headmaster, the Reverend A Russwurm.

A few months later, the bricks, window frames, doors, ﬂoorboards, plumbing and roof slates were advertised for sale in the local press. Fortunately, the Penny Street school’s replacement has Grade II listed status and is not expected to suffer the same fate.

The UJS in recent times

Above: Front elevation by architects Davis and Emanuel, 1877

Below left:

The school in the early 1900s, with horse-drawn tram and a newspaper seller

Below right:

The Motor Licensing Ofﬁce which occupied the building in the 1930s and generated income for the school

Gloucester Square off King’s Road appears to have been considered as a potential site for the re-founded school, but Canon Grant insisted the school remain in Old Portsmouth. This was a wise move as, sixty years later, the King’s Road area of Southsea was one of the heaviest bombed areas in the city.

The site chosen covers the north-west corner of what was Town Mount Bastion as well as a wide strip of moat at the rear. The anticipated cost of this land – believed by the school to be around £200 an acre – was a wildly optimistic estimate. It was sold to the school by the War Ofﬁce for £2,000. This left only £3,500 from the intended budget which was planned to be raised by Grant to cover the actual building of the school. Architects Davis and Emanuel of London were appointed. However, the lowest builder’s estimate which met the Governors’ requirements – a central

Overleaf:

hall at least 70ft x 30ft ﬂanked by eight classrooms, 14ft high, to be reached from the hall and playground without disturbing other classes – was over budget.

Finding the money was a challenge. The school attempted to auction off founder Dr William Smith’s farm on the Isle of Wight, but there were no bidders. Fortunately, Canon Grant persuaded a neighbour, Edmund Clark, to lend the governors £6,000 (at 4% interest) which enabled building work to begin.

The speciﬁcations included that the walls be constructed of red kiln bricks in Old English bond, the windows in “Corsham Down mullions in Bath Stone” and the gable-ends “to be crowned with white terracotta terminals”. The brick arches enclosed a covered playground, echoing the design of the Penny Street school, with an open but interior space beneath the large schoolroom.

The

block of the Cambridge Barracks in 1926-27. This enabled the Lower School to be rented out to the Motor Licensing Agency in the 1930s.

Above right (clockwise from left):

War heroes and the most popular boys’ author of the 1930s were educated here:

Norman Holbrook VC Percy Westerman

William Henry Nickerson VC

Francis Harvey VC

Below left and right: Rear view of the Lower School, 1985

Three months after its opening in 1879, plans were approved for its expansion, with new additional classrooms and a science laboratory. In 1899, a large science and art block were added, along with ﬁves courts and a corrugated iron gymnasium. Built to accommodate 250 pupils, the school’s popularity necessitated further expansion in the 20th century and led to the acquisition of the former Ofﬁcers’

Just over a year after pupils had been evacuated out of the city in September 1939, the Lower School was set aﬂame by one or more incendiary bombs. More serious damage was caused during an air raid on 27th January 1941 when “much of the roof had suffered badly and rain was entering in many places”. The Governors’ minutes record that in the same raid the gymnasium and woodwork shed were damaged beyond repair.

Many OPs will have memories, both good and bad, of their time in the Victorian School, but it is gratifying to know that the style of the building, described as “neo-Jacobean” has helped establish the building as a popular and distinctive historic landmark for locals and visitors to Old Portsmouth, and that it will remain so.

We will be holding an event to give those who are interested an opportunity to visit the building before any sale takes place. Please register your interest with the Development Ofﬁce: development@pgs.org.uk

Above left:

Grammar School, from a school prospectus in the 1900s

One baking hot summer, Jon Doolan (OP 2002) left his young family at home while he ran from Land’s End to John o’ Groats. Along the way, he collected jokes, japes and jests from the good folk of Britain.

Ihad always wanted to do a ‘Big Adventure’. Land’s End to John o’ Groats (LEJOG) seemed like the perfect antidote to my itchy feet – I didn’t have to change any money, I didn’t have to get any ﬂights and there were few language barriers. There was that one time in a Scottish chippy when I ordered a saveloy and was handed a Seven-Up, but otherwise I didn’t have to reach for Google Translate once. Not even in Liverpool.

Rather than just doing the journey for the sake of it, I decided to spice it up by asking random strangers along the way for their best jokes. I hoped it would push me out of my comfort zone. It would force me to engage with the people I met along the way. Being a natural introvert, this idea terriﬁed me.

Maybe I could find out what jokes made the country tick. Would I find the same one-liners in Cornwall that I would see in the Highlands? Would Bristolians have the same funny bones as Scousers? What would be the best joke I’d find on my travels?

I mean, everyone has a joke in them, right? Right?! Could I create an unending chain of jokes that spread from the bottom corner of the West Country to the uppermost edge of Scotland?

And as I went, would I make the world a slightly happier place with my plethora of groan-worthy dad-jokes? Would each person I met walk away feeling just that little bit more chipper? Would I spread miles of smiles?

The adventure began. On the first day of the summer holidays, I left my family in a train station car park and headed down to Land’s End. Standing under the famous sign, I looked around for my first unsuspecting victim… I mean, joke aficionado. Luckily for me I found Hugo and his family. Hugo was a four or five-year-old kid with straight brown hair peeking out around the brim of his blue bucket hat.

“What do you call a burger that burgles?” he said. “A hamburglar!”

It was brilliant! The perfect ﬁrst joke to set me off on the long road north.

I set off in the warm evening sun, jogging gently along the road, listening to the seagulls crying and smelling the salt in the coastal air. It was glorious!

From that day forward, I met loads of incredible, fascinating and, most importantly funny people. I met 71-year-old George near Dartmoor. He’s an American who was over here cycling the length of the country in his two-week holiday. Marcus came to meet me on the Offa’s Dyke Path. He’d previously cycled around the world on a tandem bike with his girlfriend. It couldn’t have gone too badly as they’re now married. John put me up for a night in Southport. He’s on a mission to be the ﬁrst person to stand up paddleboard in every country in the world. Elaine looked after me in Preston. She’s a powerlifter by day and senior crown prosecutor by night. And I shook the hand of Masai Graham in Edinburgh, winner of the Joke of the Year. He didn’t believe I knew who Jeremy Beadle was, let alone met him at my PGS prom.

Did you hear about the claustrophobic astronaut?

He just needed a little space

What do you call a teacher who is always late? Mister Bus

Why did the scarecrow receive an award?

Because he was outstanding in his ﬁeld

Opening myself up to the opportunities of the road also gave rise to many unusual situations, like standing at a mic at a vintage vehicle festival to collect jokes from drunken punters, delivering a stand up comedy set in a basement in Liverpool and appearing on stage dressed as a cow in Edinburgh. “Why a cow?” you say. Because the mermaid lady asked me to, obviously.

Overleaf: Sun rise over

Running (well, walking mostly – shin splints and countless blisters were the bane of my life for thirty-four days) the length of Britain allowed me to explore some of the more stunning areas of our beautiful country. I was thrilled to be traversing the Welsh hills on the Offa’s Dyke Path, delighted by the dramatic mountains of the Cairngorm National Park and mesmerised by the view the morning I woke up in my wild camp on the hilltop in the Lake District. And let’s not forget, the mountainous regions of the UK aren’t just funny places to be, they’re hill-arious.

Dartmoor

Below:

shooting stars as I drift off to sleep, waking up to the sunrise and a face full of fresh air rather than staring at the inside of a canvas tent. Sleeping in a tent is just a really terrible form of sleeping inside, while wild camping in the open air is what proper adventurers do. For food, I relied on supermarket meal deals and regular visits to Wetherspoon’s pubs to reﬁll on greasy calories. It was adventure travel at its rawest. The only way I could have been more adventurous would be to catch wildlife and cook it over an open ﬁre.

Camping by the side of the road in Scotland and an impromptu stand-up performance

Above: Made it!

My trek across Dartmoor in the Saharan heat also brought back fond memories of completing the Ten Tors Challenge with PGS. The experience with the school was the ﬁrst time my eyes were opened to the possibilities of great adventure within our own borders. It was one of the early sparks that led to me attempting this end-to-end challenge.

Other than the odd offer of a spare room, though, I spent most of my nights sleeping under the stars, bivvying in my sleeping bag at the side of the road. It reminded me a lot of my ﬁrst experiences of sixth form at PGS when a group of young people who barely knew each other took part in a team-bonding exercise bivvying in the woods. On my LEJOG journey, I was carrying everything I needed in a tiny backpack. I was roughing it, partly because I’m a massive cheapskate and couldn’t justify the cost of all the hotel rooms I’d need, but mainly I slept rough because I think wild camping is freaking awesome! I love watching satellites and

Did I make it all the way to John o’ Groats? Yes. Yes, I did. I jogged the ﬁnal mile in the pitch black at two o’clock in the morning after a day in which I’d walked for ﬁfty miles. Seeing the sign was in equal parts incredible and completely underwhelming.

There was no big fanfare. There were no crowds cheering me to the ﬁnish line. The lonely resort was silent apart from the gentle clanking of halyards in the shipyard.

But I’d done it. I’d ﬁnished my ‘Big Adventure’. I’d created a chain of over ﬁfty jokes stretching from one corner of Britain to the other. And hopefully, I’d raised one or two smiles along the way.

And I was tired. I just wanted to go home to see my family and sleep in my own bed.

What do you call a man who runs the length of the country collecting one-liners? Knackered!

Jon’s new book, Miles of Smiles: Finding Britain’s Funny Bone, is out now.

The Inspirational Violet Pearse

Artist and teacher

Two OPs who last saw each other seventy years ago recently reunited in the school’s Memorial Library to catch up, reminisce and share their memories with the archive. One of the highlights of their school experience was being taught Art by one of the few female teachers at that time, Violet Pearse.

Mrs Pearse was born in Sidmouth in about 1892, the youngest of four. She attended Teignmouth School of Art as a teenager and by 1911 her occupation is recorded as a “governess”. In 1919 she married a rubber planter and, in 1939, is carrying out “unpaid domestic duties”. But the artistic impulse was clearly strong. She was recruited to the Lower School shortly after evacuated pupils had returned to the war-damaged school in 1945. Though her time at the school was brief - not much more than a year - her inspirational teaching helped nurture a lifelong love of Art with Deane Clark (OP 1953) and John Sharpe (OP 1953).

Pearse, who, in her spare time, published commercial greeting cards and calendars featuring her drawings of local scenes, as well as small booklets with compilations of her sketches.

The Upper School

Above (Clockwise from left):

The Lower School

The Inner Camber and Power Station by Deane Clark OP (with thanks to Deane, from his Portsmouth volume)

Pembroke Road (with thanks to Ronald Rabbetts)

The High Street, 1939

Both boys joined the Lower School on the same day, 1st May 1945, in the ﬁnal months of the Second World War. “It was freezing because there was no heating and it was very cold and bleak,” Deane recalled, “but the one thing that made it all worthwhile was Mrs Pearse. A marvellous teacher…I owe her much.”

Deane credits his continuing passion for drawing to Mrs

Deane and John were regulars at Mrs Pearse’s Art sessions at her home in Villiers Road, visiting three or four days a week during school holidays. John remembers her Siamese cat – an uncommon breed at the time – which would leap onto her shoulders and curl around her neck. The boys would be set challenges drawing en plein air, from imagination or copying from her work. John recalled, “It was very generous of her and we explored various techniques like etching on copper plates and then printing on a roller press. All good grounding for a sketching hobby that I kept up for a number of years”. One of John’s sketches, which was published in the Portmuthian, shows commercial shipping at the Camber. “She used to take us out in her car with three or four boys in the back”.

During the school holidays, the boys would apply watercolour to Mrs Pearse’s printed monochrome pen and ink prints and learned a lot about colour in the process. Deane remembered, “she had a good eye for colour... she was very keen on purple and we used it a lot for foliage in New

There is no ﬁner example of how a dedicated teacher who is passionate about their subject can change lives

Forest scenes.” She appears to have come from a creative family. John recalls her saying that she was a niece of Anna Sewell, author of Black Beauty.

Both boys left PGS in 1953. Deane was accepted by the Portsmouth College of Art, School of Architecture, where his training included sketching en plein air. In retirement, he published two handsomely produced books of sketches. “Deane Clark’s Portsmouth” includes detailed townscapes, street scenes, portraits of buildings and maritime views, providing a tour of the everchanging city over six decades, seen through Deane’s distinctive eye and

Above (Clockwise from left): The Camber Grand Parade

Bomb damage in the High Street, 1941 (All Violet Pearse)

The Camber (1951) by John Sharpe

Below: Calendars from 1946

pen. “My style has loosened,” says Deane, whose preferred medium - like Mrs Pearse - is pen and ink. The Portsmouth volume was followed up by “Deane Clark’s Hampshire, Sussex and the Isle of Wight”. John continued sketching for some years until the “pram in the hall” and making a living took over.

Both OPs’ memories and praise of Mrs Pearse are undimmed by time and there is no ﬁner example of how a dedicated teacher, however temporary, who is passionate about their subject can change lives. Though Mrs Pearse does not feature in an ofﬁcial list of PGS staff of the post-war period, she was fondly remembered by the school in the Portmuthian when she left in 1946. “Her teaching of Art has been a real inspiration, and to all of us she has been a true friend”. She died in 1965 at the age of 73.

John Sadden

With thanks to Deane and John for sharing their memories, and to Martin Fern and Peter Barnes for the donation of Violet Pearse’s calendars to the School archive.

The Quiet Revolutionary

Martin Black (OP 1975) has always been interested in how things sound. Over his 45 year career as a sound engineer he will have had a direct impact on how you hear things through your television. From mono to stereo to ultra high deﬁnition, it’s been quite a ride

Music has always been a passion of yours. Were you involved with it during your time at PGS?

I became a Cathedral Chorister (treble) when I joined the PGS Middle School. I also played the starring role in Oliver! in 1970. That was towards the end of my treble career so some of the top notes were a bit of a challenge! It was produced by Roger Harris (Chemistry, 1958-93) and there were a lot of other staff involved including John Hunt (Chemistry, 19652003), Christopher Gower, David Williams (Music, 1966-75) and Tony Stokes (1963-89) who played Fagin.

Do you still sing?

Oh yes, if you’re brought up as a Cathedral Chorister, I don’t think it ever leaves you. I’m a founding member of the Saint John Singers which is a choir that deputises for Cathedral Choirs when they are on holiday and still sing with them today.

During your time at PGS you worked at Portsmouth Hospital Broadcasting (founded by OPs, see OPUS issue 21), is that right?

Yes, I started quite early on in my school career in the Lower Fifth so 1971. I certainly remember that I took on the role of Studio Controller and gave it up to focus on my O levels. It was quite a pioneering enterprise. During my time we revamped it, building two new studios and expanding the network so it was broadcast at QA and the Royal Hospital as well as St Mary’s.

Is that where your interest in sound engineering began?

It’s hard to say to be honest. I think the reason I chose to get involved was because I had an interest in the area already, but it certainly developed it and gave me the opportunity to build on my practical experience from working on the audio of school productions. My real interest was in live television and that drove everything I did. Although it wasn’t television, hospital radio was live while the school theatre productions were visual (I was involved in the lighting as well) so it all added up.

What came after PGS?

I went on to the University of Surrey to take their Music and Sound Recording (Tonmeister) course. That was in 1975, the ﬁfth year the course had been running – there were just six students in my year! Compared to today it was all rather primitive. We only had a four-track recorder (recording studios had 16 or 24 track by then) but we did have a mobile unit which I used to record evensongs at Guildford Cathedral so I got early experience of outside broadcasting.

Tell us about your ﬁrst role after graduating I joined Thames Television as a Sound Assistant at the Euston studios which produced the live end of their programming (news and current affairs, Afternoon Plus with Mavis Nicholson etc). At that time Thames had two other sites: Teddington (which handled light entertainment and drama) and Hanworth (which handled outside broadcasts). Due to a historical quirk I regularly got to assist with outside broadcasts which was considered a promotion, despite having the same job title.

One of those outside broadcasts was the Royal Wedding of Charles and Diana. How was that?

Very exciting. I was at St Paul’s Cathedral for about a week before the ceremony helping to put all the audio equipment in, including microphones in the Whispering Gallery. We had to go in through the Crypt amidst tight security. I was there for the dress rehearsal and my mother and sisters were furious that I couldn’t describe the dress to them in any detail. For the ceremony itself my Sound Supervisor managed to get me a pass for the Whispering Gallery which was amazing. My abiding memory is of how much noise the photographers’ camera shutters made.

You worked on quite a few well-known programmes. What were they?

The role was so varied. We would do everything from live news to location work for dramas and situation comedies. I worked on The Sooty Show, The Bill, Morecambe and Wise, Magpie, Rumpole of the Bailey and This is Your Life to name a few. I was the Sound Supervisor for all the location work for French Fields with Anton Rodgers and Julia McKenzie.

What’s been the most memorable job you’ve had during your career?

That’s a difﬁcult question after so many years. The toughest would have to be the eight weeks I spent in India with the England Cricket Team during their 1993 tour. We didn’t have any outside broadcasting (OB) trucks, just three Antonov An-32 aircraft from the Indian Air Force Training Squadron. We had to load 80-tonnes of gear and a 32-foot satellite dish (in three pieces) into the planes and travel with them to each of the nine venues. At every ground we had to build a control room and rig all the cables for the nine-camera shoot ourselves. There was only one other sound person and I had to look after the commentators as well (including David Gower) so it deﬁnitely kept me on my toes! I knew very little about cricket beforehand but have followed the team ever since. A few years later I got to spend Christmas and New Year on tour with England again in Zimbabwe. It was quite something to spend Christmas Day partying on the rooftop of a hotel with the likes of Ian Botham and Bob Willis!

Below:

Did you work closely with the actors in your role?

Do you have any interesting anecdotes?

Most deﬁnitely. We used to use radio mics so we regularly had to ‘mic-up’ actors. I remember during the ﬁlming of French Fields, we grew tired of the rich food being served at the remote Chateau we were staying in and walked to a ramshackle bar at the end of the nearest road. We tried to communicate that we wanted something to eat (our French wasn’t good – I failed it at O level three times!) The next thing we knew, three Mercedes turned up and took us down the road to a bowling alley with a restaurant. We had such a good time that the next night the riggers in the crew came and picked us up in their truck and took us back!

You’ve overseen outside broadcasts for other sports including golf. What does that involve?

The Ryder Cup is a tough gig, especially in surround sound. You usually get immersive audio from a sports event by capturing the crowd sounds and atmosphere of the arena. With the Ryder Cup, not only is there no arena but the winner can be decided at any point on the course so it’s very challenging to set up and capture. You’re also on air for 12 hours a day which is exhausting.

What goes on behind the scenes at an outside broadcast that an average viewer would be unaware of?

It depends a great deal on the people involved, the problems that arise, where you are and the nature of the locations. There is a lot of rehearsal and a bit of temperament. There can be some clashes of ego as well as some excellent teamwork and the weather can be a real nightmare. Period dramas are always an interesting challenge trying to mask or remove things both visually (telegraph poles, pylons) and acoustically (aeroplane noise, police sirens).

When I worked on The Bill the entire programme was shot

Opposite: Martin conﬁguring Studio 4 Sound Control at Sky

The Master Control Room at the 2006 Munich World Cup

on location. We used bases instead of a studio for the police stations, cells, hospitals etc. To start with we’d work with an OB truck then technology moved on to Portable Single Camera (PSC) where the camera could be carried on a shoulder and the sound recorder followed behind. Then the recorder got built into the camera but the sound recordist would always have a trolley of equipment, similar to a ﬁlm shoot. Before too long there was so much equipment we were back to keeping it in a truck again! Probably the most memorable location was when we had to ﬁlm in a derelict Battersea Power Station in the depth of winter. It was freezing.

Technology has developed signiﬁcantly during your career starting with the change from mono to stereo sound. Were you involved with that?

I certainly was. Back in the days of analogue there was a technical transmission system called Nicam which enabled the transmission of stereo sound for terrestrial TV. It came in during my time at Thames Television and we pioneered a few stereo transmissions using it including the Epsom Derby. I think the ﬁrst live stereo broadcast Thames did was the Marchioness Disaster Memorial at Southwark Cathedral. We had a microwave link on the roof of the cathedral, beaming it straight to the transmitter at Crystal Palace. When I joined Sky in 1993 they weren’t broadcasting their live programmes in stereo so I was instrumental in introducing it.

From stereo we’ve moved on to High Definition (HD) and then Ultra HD (UHD). What impact did they have on your role? Their arrival had a massive impact. HD was when we started to use 5.1 surround sound. I had been a Sound Supervisor at Sky for 11 years when they asked Keith Lane and I to find the right sound desk to enable them to broadcast live in surround sound and to design the workflow. This led on to me designing and configuring the live audio systems for the new Sky Studios a few years later. When UHD came along we had to adapt Dolby Atmos from its multi-channel format (designed for cinema with its numerous speakers) into one appropriate for TV. In the end we designed four height channels to be added to the 5.1 format which we dubbed ‘5.1+4’. We subsequently modified all eight live Sky studios to this format.

This was being introduced as Covid arrived and, with it, a push for remote production. This involved a minimal crew being sent to site with cameras and microphones. Each output was then fed back separately to the broadcast centre. The production control room (or studio gallery as we call it) would then put together all the feeds so they could be transmitted as if they were the outside broadcast. This had a lot of attractions with reduced staff travel and associated costs and meant that we had to adapt the studios again to take in additional feeds.

As well as leading on new technology introduction for Sky, I was co-chair of a European Broadcasting Union subgroup called the European High Deﬁnition Forum (later the audio subgroup of the Forum for Advanced Media in Europe) which enabled me to pass on my work on HD across Europe which was really important for ensuring compatibility.

As well as adapting to new technologies you were involved in a huge change to how television audio levels are measured. Can you explain a bit about that?

Well, this grew out of an issue most people are familiar with where the adverts were louder than the programme and you had to turn them down. The single biggest complaint about audio in TV was speech intelligibility, whether it be background music that was too high or dialogue that was too low in the mix. This was a very difﬁcult problem to solve because audio was metered on the peak level of signals but compression allowed the output to sound signiﬁcantly louder without exceeding the level. In the end we came up with an algorithm which measured the loudness of a programme rather than relying on peak levels. It has revolutionised the way we measure sound in TV. As part of my work with the Digital Production Partnership, I played a lead role in introducing it to the UK and it’s a standard that has since been adopted worldwide. I received an award for this work which was rather wittily entitled ‘The Quiet Revolutionary’.

How would you sum up your role?

‘Pioneering!’ Over the years I’ve had the privilege of being at the forefront of designing a wealth of infrastructure to support the sound we now take for granted when enjoying TV.

Above left: Martin and Keith Lane in Studio 7 HD 5.1

Above right:

Martin conﬁguring UHD transmission chain audios

Life lessons

As a school we want our pupils to be happy and thrive both in and out of the classroom. Dan Frampton (OP 2011), Head of Pastoral Curriculum at PGS, explains how we work to prepare our pupils for the world beyond school and how you can get involved

We all have a memory, I think, of what we were or weren’t taught (or were taught badly!) about sex in school. For some people it’s that ‘one lesson where the nurse came in’, that time the teacher ‘made us put a condom on a banana’, or when ‘we saw those images of horriﬁcally diseased genitals’. If you were lucky enough to get lessons on sex, it was probably strictly biological, focused on risk, and took no account for diversity.

Thankfully, sex and relationships education (SRE), made statutory for schools in 2020, has come a long way. Pupils at PGS are lucky to have regular PSHE sessions (Personal, Social and Health Education) in the Junior School and fortnightly Pastoral Curriculum lessons in the Senior School and Sixth Form. There is a focus on elements of biology, yes, but also on navigating the arguably trickier social side of relationships, both sexual and non-sexual, in the real world and online, too.

The curriculum here is actually much wider than SRE, and split into three core themes, Sex and Relationships, Health and Wellbeing and ‘Being in the World’, where pupils look at everything from careers to ﬁnancial and media literacy. It is a spiral curriculum, meaning that we return time and time again to the same topics, building and developing as the children do. There is, of course, an age-appropriate discussion of particular subject content, but more so, the focus is on character building around the PGS core values: compassion, courage, commitment, curiosity, collaboration and creativity.

Privacy, the recovery position, consent, free speech, vaping, sexuality, advertising techniques, the rule of law, gambling, coercive control, taxes, dealing with bereavement, standing up for others and what you believe init’s all in there!

Indeed, as a school we like to think not just about our children at 18, but where they are at 25, and PSHE and the Pastoral Curriculum are a key part of this. Often guided by a ‘what we wished we’d known’ approach, we hope to equip pupils with the knowledge to navigate the adult world but also, in recognition that this world is always changing, the skills to ﬁnd good answers for themselves in the future too. Privacy, the recovery position, consent, free speech, vaping, sexuality, advertising techniques, the rule of law, gambling, coercive control, taxes, dealing with bereavement, standing up for others and what you believe in - it’s all in there!

It’s a real joy to be able to help pupils grapple with these issues and learn, I would argue, some of life’s most important lessons. We’d love to hear from OPs about their own experience of learning about these topics in school and maybe even share what you wish you’d learned when you were younger. Similarly, please get in touch if you’d be able to contribute to the curriculum in any way, in a personal or professional capacity - the pupils would beneﬁt enormously from your experience and wisdom.

First tries

Girls’ sport at PGS has come a long way since the 1970s when the ﬁrst female pupils arrived. In fact, 2024 will go down in history as the year the School’s ﬁrst girls’ rugby team was established. We take a look at then and now

Ididn’t do any sports while I was at PGS recalls Alison Dean (OP 1979), “there was only one of me in my class and I think it was felt it would be too difﬁcult to organise”. It was, of course, a similar story for Tracey Villar, the very ﬁrst girl at PGS, who attended for one term in 1976. By 1980, however, there was a small offering.

“We could play basketball in the gym under the labs near the Museum Road roundabout” says Heather Sullivan (OP 1980) but “the closest we got to football was the foosball table in the Sixth Form Common Room or avoiding air ﬂo balls as pupils kicked them across the quad”. She really wanted to play rugby but wasn’t allowed. Tina Morgan (OP 1980) remembers playing tennis at Hilsea and the ﬁrst ever girls’ race at Sports Day, a “very light-hearted 100m dash of which I am proud to say I was the winner”.

In the early 1980s, with the number of female pupils still too low to form a team, there were slightly different opportunities to get involved. Amanda Barron (OP 1982) taught sport to some of the boys in the Junior School where she was given sole responsibility for the class. It is “not something that would happen these days” she admits but “it was great fun and I learnt a lot”. In the summer term she enjoyed sailing on one of the teacher’s yachts in a group of girls and boys and was able to gain her RYA competent crew

during the holidays. Alison Walsh (OP 1982) played lacrosse with the girls from Portsmouth High School (PHS) once a week but also recalls playing squash at Hilsea with both boys and girls.

These mixed sports became a key part of the School’s offering for girls during the mid to late 1980s. ‘Mixed’ was a somewhat loose term though says Anne Perriam (née Oliver, OP 1986) as the vast majority of players were still boys. Anne, who came to PGS for Sixth Form from PHS, threw herself into any sporting opportunity available. She represented the school at hockey and played house cricket thanks to the support of her Housemaster, Beefy (Roger Harris, OP 1951, Chemistry 1958-93). She also learnt to row although the boys wouldn’t let her help carry the boat to the water saying it was too heavy. Despite requesting to play, the closest Anne was allowed to get to rugby was being a touch judge.

Ali Bailey (née O’Keefe, OP 1989) was involved in rowing in a different capacity: she was “snapped up, quite early to cox the school rowing team”. Initially drafted in to cox the house rowing team she was “immediately asked to continue coxing for the ﬁrst four”. They were very successful and received school sports colours. Ali believes she was the ﬁrst girl to receive colours and says it was the result of the solidarity

of her teammates: “at the time there was a suggestion that I would not be given them, but the boys in the crew said that they would not accept theirs if I was not given equal treatment.”

PGS mixed hockey holds an affectionate place in Amanda Verny White’s (née Dore, OP 1990) heart: “A sometimes dangerous option, I remember Wednesday afternoons at Hilsea with fondness. We introduced quite a few male novices to the sport and both my sister (Sarah Dore, OP 1994) and I sport scars on our faces from this era!”

Not all memories of sport in the early days for girls are as happy. Samantha Job (née Purdy, OP 1988) remembers “rather ducking out of sport at PGS” and opting to undertake charity work on Wednesday afternoons instead. Another OP from the late 1980s told us about some unpleasant experiences with the School swimming lessons. There weren’t any female PE staff or dedicated changing facilities (just the staff toilets) and “some of the older male teachers didn’t know how to deal with girls.”

Opposite:

Some of the team at the School rugby awards

Above left:

Netball squad 1987/88

Cue 2024. With the women’s game experiencing unprecedented growth worldwide and after much petitioning from some of the senior girls, preparations for girls’ rugby began in earnest. The spring term saw excitement reverberate throughout the School as the ﬁrst ever trials for a girls’ rugby team were announced. There was an impressive turnout and just three weeks of training later, the girls were ready to take on their ﬁrst competitive match.

Above right:

Mixed tennis squad 1987

Below left:

Mixed hockey at Hilsea (date unknown)

Below right:

National mixed rounders champions in 2009

Facilities improved with the arrival of girls throughout the school in 1990. Since then, PGS girls have enjoyed the opportunity to play a wide range of sports from netball and hockey to tennis, athletics and rounders to name a few. They have been incredibly successful too being crowned National Athletics Champions, National Rounders Champions and British Independent Schools Ski Champions over the years.

There were plenty of ﬁrst match jitters as the team travelled to take on a tournament at Reigate Grammar School but within minutes of kick-off the School’s inaugural try had been scored. A spectacular try line defence in the dying seconds ensured that the girls’ ﬁrst ever game ended in a draw. In the words of the girls, what they lacked in experience they made up for in spirit with their courage and conviction making them a force to be reckoned with. Three games later, they ended the day “covered in mud and bruises but with the biggest smiles on our faces.” School history made.

There was no school uniform for girls in the early days let alone a PE kit. The school has come a long way since then but perhaps some things never change - the match report for the girls’ ﬁrst game concluded with the sentence: “thanks also to the boys for lending us their tops!”

One frontier has remained uncrossed though – rugby.

A Heidelberg encounter

John Sweetman (OP 1953) has written numerous books on military history. In 1979, his research led him to Heidelberg to interview Albert Speer, German Minister for Armaments and Munitions at the time of the Dambusters Raid

Pre-war, Air Ministry planners aimed to undermine Germany’s ability to wage war by neutralising the Ruhr concentration of armament industries through directly bombing its factories and supply facilities. In 1937, an alternative concept was advanced. If just two dams, Moehne and Sorpe, were breached, loss of water from their adjacent reservoirs would bring processes like steelmaking literally to a grinding halt.

By July 1939, the list expanded to seven dams comprising ﬁve connected with the Ruhr and two further east, part of the waterway system of the Weser Valley. The Weser dams and the Sorpe would feature prominently in Speer’s critical observations.

attacked. With orders to report personally to Hitler, he immediately ﬂew to the stricken area, landing at Werl airﬁeld close to the Moehne shortly after dawn. He was in no doubt that the RAF had ‘tried to strike at our whole armaments industry’.

Below: John (left) in 1998 with Sergeant (later Squadron Leader MBE DFM) G. L. Johnson, bomb-aimer of a Lancaster, which attacked the Sorpe Dam.

During the night of 16/17th May 1943, 19 RAF Lancasters set off from RAF Scampton to release Barnes Wallis’s famous ‘bouncing bomb’ against six of the 1939 targets. The Moehne, Sorpe and Eder dams were hit. Speer was woken in the early hours of 17th May with ‘the most alarming news’ that the Moehne Dam had been breached, its reservoir ‘emptied’ and that three other dams had been

Travelling by car, he spent two days inspecting damage in the vicinity of the Ruhr dams. A direct hit on the centre of the Sorpe dam had only narrowly avoided a breach. ‘Just a few inches lower and a small brook would have been transformed into a raging river, which would have swept away the stone and earth dam’. All the other target dams were heavy masonry structures held in place by gravity and their own weight. This one comprised a vertical concrete core stabilised by supporting banks of earth, loam and stone requiring an approach along its crest with Wallis’ weapon unspun, rather than bounced towards it over the water at right angles as depicted in the ﬁlm starring Richard Todd. Speer then sensationally averred that the war would have ‘ended early’ if the Moehne and Sorpe had been breached, their reservoirs drained.

At the Moehne, he found a large V-shaped hole in the centre through which the reservoir had almost totally emptied. As a result of widespread ﬂooding below this dam ‘the electrical installations at the pumping stations were soaked and immobilised’. A large power station at the dam had been swept away. The day after the raid, 18th May, he despatched a provisional plan of action to Hitler, who signalled his approval. Industrial specialists and replacement machinery were to be commandeered from throughout Germany, together with 27,000 labourers (many from building the antiinvasion Atlantic Wall) ‘as soon as possible’.

On 20th May, Speer ﬂew over the Eder Dam with a similar V-shaped breach and signs of destruction downstream on his way back without a ground inspection, which underlined his concentration on the raid’s effect on the Ruhr. Once in Berlin, Speer pressed for strong military defences - ﬂak guns, barrage balloons, smoke generators, troops to deal with

paratroopers - swiftly to be stationed at ten dams, including those attacked. Speer explained that, after reporting to Hitler in person on his return, ‘details of the damage contained in my report on the situation made a deep impression on the Fuehrer. He kept the documents with him’. Speer emphasised the priority of ﬁlling the large gaps in the Moehne and Eder dams before the winter rains: the Sorpe required less extensive attention being only ‘lightly damaged’. A fourth dam attacked had not been affected. The emergency repairs ‘up to the over ﬂow’ at the Moehne were completed on 2nd October and the following day Speer attended the celebratory ceremony at the dam, during which he received a congratulatory phone call from Hitler. The Eder Dam was similarly temporarily plugged by the end of September. Speer made no mention of a celebratory ceremony there.

Speer then mused over the impact of the raid. He could not understand why such a limited force had targeted the Eder. That he believed ‘a waste. A single mistake which puzzles me to this day. The Eder Valley dam had nothing to do with the supply of water to the Ruhr’. In reality, as the case for attacking gravity dams gathered pace pre-war, the Eder acquired signiﬁcance because it provided water for the Weser river and Mittelland canal, which transported armaments manufactured in factories like those in Kassel. Speer was unconvinced. ‘The Ruhr must surely be the focal point, especially for such a small number of aircraft’.

He reinforced this criticism by querying why so few (two) attacked the crucial Sorpe. He was not persuaded by the explanation that the planners anticipated a minimum of eight from the initial 14 aircraft attacking it with a back-up wave of ﬁve available. Designated Lancasters had been forced to turn back or been shot down, plus more bombs than intended were used at the Moehne. He repeated his belief that the two easterly dams (Eder and Diemel) and two others feeding the Ruhr (Ennepe and Lister) was too ambitious.

Above:

Hitler with Speer in 1942. Speer is considered one of the “grand conspirators” - men “of station and rank who did not soil their own hands with blood, but who knew how to use lesser folk as their tools”. Speer denied any knowledge of the holocaust, though historians point to his eviction of Jews from their Berlin homes, him having personally inspected concentration camps and actively taken part in the persecution of the Jews and exploited forced labour - Jews and Soviet prisoners - a third of whom died of starvation and exhaustion.

involved with the Nazis. Speer insisted that he was primarily an architect intent on an academic career and an assistant professor when Hitler gained power. He claimed that to secure a professorial chair practical experience was required and the Nazis offered him a commission at ﬁrst to design a new party headquarters in Berlin.

Photo: Bundesarchiv

He admitted to being captivated by Hitler personally since hearing him speak in 1931. ‘That stirring evening swept away any scepticism, any reservations’, appealing to ‘the idealism of youth’. Speer said he found Hitler’s personality ‘hypnotic’. He agreed, on reﬂection, that he had not been inquisitive enough about the Nazi philosophy and behaviour in later years, emphasising that ‘I was above all an architect’. In passing, he thought Goering ‘boastful’, shielded by Hitler’s support stemming from their mutual struggles for recognition in the 1920s. Failure to annihilate the Dunkirk escape route in 1940 was due to Goering, Speer alleged. He had attended a decisive meeting at which Hitler halted the advance of the German tanks because Goering assured him that the Luftwaffe would clear the beaches.

Among the random topics discussed after the Dambusters Raid, some remain etched in my mind. The Speer family home was in Mannheim, a manufacturing centre during the First World War and a Zeppelin base. Aged nine, when that conﬂict began, young Albert became familiar with the Zeppelin crews and used to wave them away on their raids against targets in France and England. However, the war ultimately reached Mannheim, when allied aeroplanes began to bomb its industries. To move out of range, Speer’s family relocated just 50 km (31 miles) east to Heidelberg.

Intrigued by Speer’s organisation of the vast searchlight illuminated pre-war Nuremberg rallies, promoting the Nazis, and his design of the grandiose Germania, capital of a Greater Germanic Reich, I asked how he had become

At the 1946 Nuremberg trials, Speer was sentenced to twenty years imprisonment served in Spandau prison in the Soviet zone of Berlin.

Naturally we touched on Speer’s activity during the War, especially the use of forced labourers, who were frequently ill-treated. He argued once more that he was a technocrat in overall charge and pre-occupied with the bigger picture. He was unaware of the stafﬁng details; a reprise of his defence at Nuremberg.

Throughout the interview Speer was courteous and helpful yet I retain the distinct feeling that his explanation of involvement with the Nazis, and perceived strictly professional conduct during the War, had been defensively fashioned over the years; ‘not me guv’, too pat.

A sense of freedom

John Sadden takes a look at the history of the bicycle at PGS

In the late Victorian period, a larger proportion of pupils lived on Portsea Island, within walking or cycling distance of the school. At this time there was a cycling boom, with the hazardous “boneshaker” - the penny-farthing - being superseded by the “safety” bicycle which had two equal sized wheels. The invention of the pneumatic tyre further increased comfort and popularity and by the mid 1890s, around a million and a half cycles were on the road in Britain.

The hazards of riding a penny-farthing were highlighted by a pupil in 1889 when an article appeared in the Portmuthian, describing his novice attempts to learn to ride one. He bought a “54-inch boneshaker”, found a deserted road, probably on or around Portsdown Hill, and came a cropper after an encounter with a cow, ending up in a thick hawthorn hedge. His injuries did not prevent him recommending that “bicycling is a splendid form of exercise”.

The ﬁrst edition of the Portmuthian, published in March

1883, carried a letter appealing for a bicycle race to be added to the Athletic Sports Day programme. “A great many boys can ride and there is a cinder path around the ground...” (the United Services Ground, now HMS Temeraire, behind the Victorian Grammar School building). The Games Committee, which organised school sports, embraced the idea and a onemile bicycle race became a popular annual event. Alas, the school archive has no photographs of a “boneshaker” race, though a photo of the 1895 race shows pupils on “safety” bicycles about to start.

By 1896, “nearly all the Masters” were described as “expert riders” and “a considerable number of boys”, instead of “creeping like snails unwillingly to school elect to come down on wheels”. An edition of Cycling World Illustrated carries a grainy photograph of Science Master Mr Lilley (1885-1905) surrounded by a large group of pupils with their bicycles, posing in the open school playground. The covered playground (later the gym and now the dance studio) had the appearance of “a ﬂourishing cycle emporium” and was

Above: Bicycle race on Sports Day, 1895

“the scene of eager discussion on the various makes and the methods of mending punctures”. This, then, was the School’s ﬁrst bicycle shed.

One pupil who was at the school in the 1890s, Percy Westerman (OP 1894), went on to write articles for Cycling magazine, before becoming the most popular “ripping yarns” author of the 1930s. His early articles chronicle his cycle expeditions through Hampshire, “Thomas Hardy’s Wessex”, “In and around the Selsey Peninsula”, Scotland, the Midlands, North Wales and the Yorkshire coast. The articles include illustrations which show the young author on his travels. A contemporary of Percy’s, George Snook (OP 1893), became “a venerable ﬁgure who rode a bicycle in the streets of Portsmouth almost up to the day of his death”. After a healthy lifetime in the saddle, he died at the age of 91.

In the 1930s, Norman Barber (OP 1939) was one of many pupils who cycled to school. His memorabilia, which has been kindly passed to the archive, includes an annotated street map showing his route to school, with trafﬁc lights and a skull and crossbones at what one imagines was a particularly hazardous junction. A photograph, taken by a fellow pupil, shows Norman in his school cap alongside a steamer docked at the Camber.

we methodically wore out tyres and damaged forks and frames, and invented unlikely explanations for decreasingly indulgent parents. We rode through Havant thicket, or down the escarpment of the downs.”

Above right: Pupils and Mr Lilley proudly show off their bicycles in the old school playground, 1896

Below left: Norman Barber (OP 1939) with his bicycle on the Camber c.1936

Below right: Westerman travels the countryside

Another OP, G Horne (OP 1937), enjoyed cycling to school from his home near Eastern Parade along the seafront, as well as lunchtime trips taking in the many sights and sounds of events like “(military) parades on the Common, the Royal Marines band marching between Eastney and the Dockyard and HMS Nelson going aground in the Harbour entrance”.

An account of the pupils’ “predominant bicycle culture” was described by J L Goodall (OP 1935). “The Hercules at £3 19 6d was rather shoddy. For about £4 10 0d the favoured marques of Rudge, Raleigh or BSA were available. One popular destination was a wood near Fort Grange where he and his friends “discovered or contrived, a desperate circuit with exciting curves, hidden gullies with steep gradients, banked corners or corners with reversed banking.” “Here

A new sport, “bicycle polo”, was being taken up across the country and had become an Olympic sport, leading to an interest at the school. One of the less vaunted advantages of the expansion into the High School barracks site was its former parade ground. This space was soon commandeered for what was described as “bicycle hockey”, until one pupil broke an arm and the game was forbidden. Fear of such hazards did not prevent former 1st XI Hockey player, Lee Galbraith (OP 1996), playing bicycle polo for England in India in 2000.

History teacher Mr Bayes (1931-39) and Chemistry teacher Mr Strawson (1938-40,45-47) took pupils on cycling tours of Western Europe in the years before the war. In an account from 1938, pupils crossed the Moselle into Germany and were immediately struck by the growing military presence, preparations and fortiﬁcations. The school party was apprehended for taking photographs and feared that their cameras would be destroyed by Nazi ofﬁcials.

Wartime evacuee Ken Bailey (OP 1944) recently described how he rode from his billet to school in Southbourne and, during holidays, would send his luggage home by train

in advance, then save the seven shillings and sixpence train fare back to Portsmouth by cycling. When term started, he would return the same way. Ken describes the sense of freedom the bicycle offered and from that deep appreciation, a close bond and care for one’s bicycle followed. Ken has happy memories of cycling with friends and having picnics of egg sandwiches in the New Forest en route. Sometimes he would travel both ways in one day to meet up with a friend who lived full-time in Bournemouth – a round journey of 104 miles.

Post-war, the devastation and reconstruction of Kings Road meant that Christopher Wilding (OP 1959) was not allowed to cycle to school – it was too hazardous. Later, after the completion of the construction of the Kings Road ﬂats, he found that he could “meet my High School girlfriend on her way to school and still scrape into the cycle sheds as the bell went and the gates were locked”. These encounters, he recalled, were possible despite the schools’ efforts to prevent fraternisation between pupils on their respective journeys to school, largely but not entirely achieved “through careful timetabling”.

One of the novelty events in the Lower School Sports in the 1950s was the slow bicycle race. In 1954, a Portmuthian reporter noted the disappointment on the face “of the ﬁrst boy over the line when told that he was not the winner”.

Tim Owens (OP 1963) remembers the popularity of cycling. “We spent ages looking in the windows of Cadman’s in Arundel dreaming of the day we could afford a Williams cotterless chain set and Campagnolo Record derailleur gears. The pocket-sized book – Bike Riders Aids – was bedtime reading for years with every new edition.” Martin Waldron (OP 1964) describes an aid that was not commercially available. “On windy days it was difﬁcult to keep our boaters on our heads. We used string and crocodile clips to attach them to our blazers”. Arnoud Roele (OP 1972), who brought his bike across on the Gosport ferry, remembers “being told off many times for not wearing his cap” which

“regularly “used to ﬂy off when going at any speed”.

Dave Allen (OP 1967) recalls the bicycle he did his Cycle Proﬁciency Test on in around 1960. “I was on a black Raleigh sit-up-and-beg with a dynamo and metal rod brakes” which had been bought from the Co-op in Fratton Road. Dave still cycles around the city today.

The bicycle offered a way to ameliorate the effects of the school’s reputed conspiracy to prevent pupils from supporting the game with the round ball. Geoff Goble (OP 1963) remembers cycling to Hilsea for Saturday sports, then “dashing away as quickly as possible, pedalling like billy-o and arriving at Fratton Park to see a bit of the second half as the guys on the turnstiles would let you climb over the top”.

A Debating Society motion that “This House moves that bicycles should be taxed” was easily defeated in the 1980s. By then the school had a very active Cycling Club. Tours took place

Kenneth Lanyon (OP 1931) with his bicycle. Pupils cycling to school were expected to look smart and wear a cap at all times. Kenneth appears on the school’s war memorial, having died in a prisoner of war camp in 1940.

of the Isle of Wight, Gosport to the Meon Valley and other areas in Hampshire and Sussex. The Portmuthian reports that a tour of Normandy took place in 1985 followed by one to the Pyrenees in 1989.

One of the hazards of cycling in Portsmouth in the early and middle of the twentieth century was the tyre-trap presented by tramlines, which sent riders over the handlebars to be met by a road that was often surfaced with cobbles. But a bigger threat was the rise of the motorist. Post-war planning of the densely populated city was dominated by the needs of car drivers, with the number of registered vehicles doubling in a decade. Steve Wentworth-Pollock (OP 1991) used to cycle in from Cosham in the late 1980s and early 90s. “Negotiating Hilsea at rush hour was always... interesting.”

Below opposite:

There was an average 92% success rate between 1990 and 1995. Today, training comes under the rebranded Bikeability scheme.

A penny-farthing and tandem on display at Cadman’s cycle shop in Arundel Street, 1970s (Photo by William Burbage, from Portsmouth -archive images by John Sadden, 1997)

Above: Cycling Proﬁciency tests in the Lower School playground c 1992

Below right: Bikeability at PGS –the rebranded cycling proﬁciency c 2014

The ﬁrst Cycling Proﬁciency course and tests took place in the Lower School playground in the Spring of 1962 and were actively promoted by the School. Successful pupils were listed in the Portmuthian and wore their triangular metal badges with pride. The courses were initially taken after school on Wednesdays by two police constables, though later they took place over two days during school holidays. Mr Cairns, the caretaker, helpfully painted road junction markings on the playground in white paint and Portsmouth City Police declared it the best course in the city. After each session the constables played cricket with pupils, presumably using Mr Cairn’s painted wickets that were, and continue to be used, though periodically refreshed, on the exterior walls of the school.

By the 1990s, pupils were required to wear cycle helmets and, later, ﬂuorescent jackets and had to pass the testwhich required a good knowledge of the Highway Code, seven hours of training and three supervised hours on the road - before permission could be granted to ride to school.

Over fifty years ago, Friends of the Earth launched a campaign in the city for a network of cycle paths and a demonstration took place of several hundred local cyclists who honked their horns and rang their bells as they rode bicycles, tricycles, penny-farthings, tandems and Chopper bikes through the main roads of the city. A petition was presented to the council on the Guildhall steps and an alderman called for “a city fit for cyclists”. Local OPs, who have kept fit in the saddle, lived long and are still pedalling, will have welcomed some progress over the past half a century, but there’s a long way to go. With relatively few current pupils cycling to school, an expansion of safe routes would help limit the traffic of parental drop-offs in the High Street, promote children’s independence and encourage a return to cycling as a routine and healthy way of living.

OP NEWS

Find more news and photos at connect.pgs.org.uk

Terry, Laurie, Mike and John Clarke (OP 1949, 1950, 1954 and 1957)

The four Clarke brothers from Drayton who attended PGS in the 1940s (all Whitcombe House) are still alive and ‘reasonably well’: T.L. Clarke aged 93 in West Sussex, L.R. Clarke, 90, in the north of Hampshire, M.D. Clarke, 86, in San Francisco, and J.B. Clarke, 83, also in North Hampshire.

Roger Purkis (OP 1949)

Great to see Roger Purkis exhibiting some of his ﬁne art work at the Cathedral as part of the Portsmouth and Hampshire Art Society Summer Exhibition in August. Roger made a successful career in the commercial art world in London, Paris and Brussels after having many of his cartoons published in the Portmuthian, signed with his initials, “ROMP”. His early drawings provide us with witty reﬂections and insights of school life in the 1940s (example above).

Roger has generously supplemented the school library’s art section recently, helping inspire future generations of budding young artists. His work recently displayed in the Cathedral - a highlight of the exhibition - gave a sense of his wide range and talent with different media and subjects.

Chris Lucas (OP 1956)

After PGS, via Trinity Hall, Cambridge and Guy’s Hospital, Chris practiced for most of his career as a Clinical Research Physician for the Nordic area for a US based Pharmaceautical Company. Now he is living in a stupendous location in rural India.

Mike Taylor (OP 1965)

Mike has lived in Canada for 43 years. Before moving there he was a nuclear submarine engineer ofﬁcer, reaching the rank of Commander. In Canada, he worked for the nuclear regulator and, after retiring, became a member of the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission. He then did consulting work until a few years ago. He and his wife have been married for 58 years and have three grown up children; an architect, a civil servant and a university professor. They have been active in local theatre and other groups and still are, to a lesser extent. Mike occasionally gives talks on historical engineering topics and the couple are keen boaters and bird watchers. Canada has been more than kind.

Mike Daw (OP 1965)

Mike is still happily married to his High School girlfriend after 62 years. They have moved 23 times since getting married although, since retiring in 2002, they have been in one house in Cape Town. Life is good.

Tony Morris (OP 1968)

The third edition of Tony’s book The Filmmakers’ Legal Guide was published in June this year. This updated version features a wealth of new material and topics including executive producers, music supervisors, trade secrets, dealing with artists’ agents, casting agents and casting advice notes. The book was

launched at the Raindance Film Festival in June. Copies are available online and from all good bookshops.

David Finlay (OP 1972)

We were delighted to welcome David to the school in March to run The Public Finances Game for the Politics Society. The Game, devised by David after his career in the public sector, challenged the pupils to decide how to allocate public funds between health, education and transport after listening to pitches for each one from the Head, Mr Lemieux and David himself. Lively debate ensued and it was an excellent chance for pupils to put theory into practice.

Jeremy Price, Andrew Walker, Martin Walker (OP 1973, 1974 and 1976)

Recently, three OPs got together after over 45 years of not seeing each other. Jeremy Price met up in Edinburgh with brothers Andrew and Martin Walker for a few days of catching up and condensing whole lifetimes into lots of meals, coffees and sightseeing! The three were united in a love of music, particularly church music. Andrew and Martin were Cathedral choristers and Jeremy was in the voluntary Cathedral choir but all sung in the school choirs and various stage productions and have continued singing in various guises all their lives.

Andrew moved to Miami, Florida, in 1977 and has worked at St Michael’s Episcopal church in Orlando as Director of Music and is an established composer to boot! Fascinated by all things that involve ﬂying and technology, he combines them with hobbies in virtual reality as well as the outdoor life in more pleasant climes. Martin spent a lifetime in ﬁnancial institutions such as insurance and banking and currently lives in Tunbridge Wells, Kent with his wife where he is happily retired and looking forward to spending more time with his grandchildren and indulging his hobbies. Jeremy started a career as a journalist before leaving to join the police. He had a successful career in and out of mainstream policing, rising to Chief Superintendent before retiring and returning to writing - mainly comedy sketches, short stories and comic verse from his home in the Highlands of Scotland.

Jeremy and Andrew had maintained sporadic contact via social media over the years and on his latest visit to the UK, Andrew and Martin travelled north to Scotland whilst Jeremy travelled south from the far north and the three met up in Edinburgh, exhausting themselves with raking over old memories and catching up with their various life histories!

From left to right on the photograph: Martin, Andrew and Jeremy

Nick Magnus (OP 1973)

Composer, producer and keyboard player Nick Magnus released his seventh solo album of symphonic progressive rock music on September 16th, entitled ‘A Strange Inheritance’. The album takes us on a cinematic voyage; a swashbuckling tale of love, loss and revenge. An unexpected bequest reveals the story of a young woman whose misplaced love

condemns her to the grim streets of 18th century London. She is deported, travelling across the high seas to the New World where imperialism and injustice rule, and an island paradise that is not what it seems.

A Strange Inheritance is available on CD from Nick’s website: www.magnus-music.com

Richard Whiteley (OP 1974)

Congratulations to Richard who was honoured to receive a Lifetime Commitment Award from the Royal Yachting Association at their AGM in November. He joined Hill Head Sailing Club in 1997 and has served in numerous roles since then, including as Commodore in 2021. Richard was presented with the award by HRH Princess Anne.

Chris Goss (OP 1979)

Having left the RAF in 2012 and then

finished working for an air field support services company in 2015, Chris decided to research and write full time. His subject tends to be Second World War, NW Europe and Germany. His first book, which came out in 1994, was Brothers in Arms which were the stories of a German and RAF fighter squadron in the Battle of Britain. He then wrote the history of 102 Sqn (a bomber squadron which suffered dreadful losses in the Second World War) and then the air war over the Bay of Biscay (this book has been reprinted twice and translated into a number of languages). Chris has now published over 50 books and currently has four with publishers waiting to be edited, with contracts for another five. All the titles are available on Amazon.

Richard Lingard (OP 1981)

Congratulations to Richard who has been appointed as Head of Assistant Directing and Floor Management at the National Film & Television School in Beaconsﬁeld after 25 years in the ﬁlm and High End TV industry.

John Longley (OP 1986)

John’s book, Castles in the Air: Logic, Mathematics and the Human Mind, was published late last year. Mathematics may be the closest thing we have to an unshakeable ediﬁce of certain, reliable knowledge. Yet the very nature of mathematics poses some deep and perplexing questions. What, after all,

is mathematics? Is it a window onto a realm of absolute truth, or just a creation of our own minds? Is all of mathematics really true beyond a shadow of doubt, or are some parts more questionable than others? Are there limits to what can be known in mathematics? Could a computer perceive mathematical truth in the way a human can? Do statements about inﬁnity have any real meaning?

In this absorbing fantasy adventure, mathematical sleuths Anna and Emily embark on a breathtaking tour of mathematical logic, a subject that casts light on these profound questions. Unlocking the secrets of the Castle with the help of Turing, Gödel, Cantor, Hilbert, Cohen and others, they are led through an entrancing labyrinth of ideas and encounter a wide range of philosophical viewpoints. Along the way, they are introduced to self-biting serpents, ordinal staircases, superinﬁnite stars, universes within universes, and much more — all portraying a wealth of mind-bending concepts, many of which have never before been presented at a popular level.

Glen Maxwell-Heron (OP 1986)

Glen read Engineering at the University of Cambridge before serving as an Engineering Ofﬁcer in the Royal Navy for over 10 years. This was followed by a period working in consulting and ﬁnancial services before an opportunity arose to live and work in Japan.

In 2020, having returned to the UK,

Glen set up Springboard to the Future (STTF) along with former army ofﬁcer Felix Spender. STTF helps organisations develop a more productive and proﬁtable workplace – potentially saving organisations hundreds and thousands of pounds. Find out more at: www.springboardttf.com

Class of 1987

Late June saw a PGS reunion take place at the Oval cricket ground. In the picture are (standing left to right) David Ormrod, Philip Webb, Jon Lisher, David Harris, (kneeling left to right) Chris Brotherton and Mark Rice-Oxley. They were joined by Robert Ross and Murray Gold. By sheer coincidence the group found themselves sitting in front of Stephen Millard, another classmate whom none of them had seen since leaving school. It’s a small world!

Mark

Rice-Oxley (OP 1987)

Mark’s worked for the Guardian for 20+ years as an editor, and before that as a correspondent in Russia and eastern Europe. He wrote a book in 2012 called Underneath the Lemon Tree, part of which recalls the heady grammar schools days of the 1970s. He married Sharon in 1998 and they have two sons and a daughter, all on the cusp of adulthood. He’s still in touch with half a dozen alumni from the class of 87 including Chris Brotherton, Jonathan Lisher and Paul Wootton, all of whom are thriving, wearing trenchcoats and wondering if the Garrison church still stands.

Samantha Job (née Purdy) (OP 1988)

Congratulations to Samantha who has been appointed His Majesty’s Ambassador to the Kingdom of Sweden. She took up the post in August.

John Hayward (OP 1989)

IVP recently published a set of daily Advent readings that John Hayward originally compiled for his adult children, both then at university. Available from all good bookshops and online, Rediscovering the Magic of Christmas has been selected as a Big Church Read for Advent, encouraging churches, organisations and individuals to read through the book together.

Further details can be found at ivpbooks.com/rediscovering-themagic-of-christmas

The Bailey Family (OP 1989, 1991 and 2024)

This year’s celebration for Year 13 leavers at Hilsea was an all OP affair for the Bailey family as both of Diarmuid’s parents, Jeremy and Ali, attended PGS as well. We couldn’t let the occasion pass without grabbing a quick photo. Diarmuid is the third generation of the family to go through the school –Jeremy’s father, Ken, is also an OP (1963).

John Hemmings (OP 1993)

John Hemmings is pleased to be rejoining the DKI-APCSS, a US Department of Defense regional center in Honolulu, where he will be a faculty member, teaching seminars and courses related to military studies and international relations to military fellows.

Nick Temple and Kieron Boyle (OP 1995 and 1999)

Huge congratulations to Nick and Kieron who both received an OBE in the King’s Birthday Honours in June. Nick, Social Investment Business Chief Executive Ofﬁcer, was awarded the honour for services to Social Enterprise while Kieron, CEO and Director of 100x, received his for services to Impact Investment and Impact Economy. To the best of our knowledge this is the ﬁrst time two OPs have received an honour in the same list.

Rob Clarke (OP 2004)

Rob sucessfully rowed the Atlantic Ocean in December 23/January 24 with a crew of four other Royal Navy Submariners. The team name was HMS

Oardacious and this was as part of the “World’s Toughest Row” race, which they won, beating 38 other teams. They completed the crossing in just over 35 days and raised tens of thousands of pounds towards Submariner Mental Health support projects in the process. Rob remembers being introduced to rowing whilst in the sixth form at PGS, where rowing sessions were undertaken in Portsbridge Creek!

Peter Coulthard (OP 2004)

Peter has become a member of the RFU Laws Sub-Committee, having been the General Secretary of the London Society of Rugby Football Union Referees (LSRFUR) for the past seven years and refereeing (and assessing) at the top of the community game. In addition, he is chairing a working party for the Chartered Institute of Taxation (CIOT) undertaking a review of their Chartered Tax Advisor (CTA) Qualiﬁcation.

Clare Hammond (OP 2004)

Clare has recently had her ﬁrst book published. In 2016, while working as a journalist in Yangon, she discovered an obscure map that showed a web of new railways spanning the length and

breadth of the country - railways not shown on any other publicly available maps. She was determined to uncover the railways’ origins, purpose, and most of all, the silence that surrounded them. She would spend three months travelling on these mysterious railways, and the next ﬁve years piecing their story together.

Her journey would take her from Myanmar’s tropical south to the embattled mountain towns that border India and China. In dilapidated carriages, along tracks in disrepair, through contested ethnic states and former sites of forced labour, visiting temples, tea shops and festivals, Clare encountered a colourful and contradictory Myanmar through the stories of its people. Simultaneously a lush and evocative travelogue, an unsparing account of Myanmar’s recent history, and an astonishing, conversation-shifting engagement with Britain’s colonial legacy, On the Shadow Tracks is that rare and necessary thing: a book that ﬁnds and tells the truth. Available from all good booksellers.

James Peters (OP 2011)

Huge congratulations to James who represented Team GB at the Olympics this summer making the medal race for the Men’s Skiff (49er) with crewmate Fynn Steritt. Conditions were challenging and, unfortunately, a medal wasn’t to be on the day, although they still ﬁnished in an impressive 7th place.

Joseph Lockwood

(OP 2014)

Joey’s passion for science was ignited at PGS, where the coastal environment, coupled with his love for sur ﬁng and water sports, sparked a curiosity in the natural world. This early fascination led

him to delve deeply into mathematics, geology, and geography. After completing his undergraduate studies at the National Oceanographic Centre, Southampton University, he went on to pursue MSc degrees—one in Data Science and another in Atmospheric Science in Canada.

His academic journey continued to the United States, where he earned his PhD in Applied Physics from Princeton University. He is now a research scientist at the Data Science Institute, Columbia University, exploring the complex dynamics of climate change, coastal ﬂooding, and extreme weather, integrating these ﬁelds with cuttingedge machine learning and deep learning technologies.

Reﬂecting on his journey, he offers this advice to aspiring scientists: follow your passions. When you are truly interested in what you do, work becomes less of a chore and more of a compelling challenge. This not only makes the experience enjoyable but also accelerates your progress.

Alice Acklam (OP 2020)

Are you a budding architect? Or do you know one? If the answer is yes, then Alice’s recently published Into Architecture guide is for you.

Written from gathered sources and experience, the step-by-step guide includes many tips and tricks to help you with applying for architecture at UK universities. You can expect easyto-follow advice on: A-Level choices, your personal statement, choosing the right course for you, portfolio content, interviews, and many more valuable insights.

So, if you’re considering architecture, or you’re ready to apply, then this guide is your next best step towards studying architecture. Available on Amazon.

Old Portmuthian Lodge No.8285.

The Lodge was consecrated on 28th April 1969. The Founders of the Lodge were all old boys of The Portsmouth Grammar School. For many years the Lodge was open to old boys and masters of the school, who wished to become Freemasons. Although it is now an open Masonic Lodge, old boys and masters who wish to join will usually be given priority and will always receive a very warm and hearty welcome.

Each year the Lodge donates a prize to the School at the annual prize giving and a mention of the School is always made at the conclusion of the evenings on which the Lodge meets in High Street, Old Portsmouth. All members of the Lodge, who are either old boys of the school or masters, usually wear the Old Portmuthian Club tie at Lodge meetings.

The Lodge Secretary, Tony Payne, is pleased to assist any old boys or masters who would like to join the Lodge. His email address is oldportmuthian8285@gmail.com

Southey Hall School, Bookham, Surrey

Did you go to Southey House School before PGS? If so, you are asked to contact Nigel Sufﬁeld-Jones, SHS 1947-52 about a reunion in London on Wednesday, 27th August 2025: nigelsj2@gmail.com

Credit: Robert Deaves

IN MEMORIAM

OPUS is saddened to report the death of the following alumni and friends.

OPUS is saddened to report the death of the following alumni and friends

Colin Small

OP 1944

September 1930 – 2 February 2024

Lionel Scovell

OP 1950

21 September 1931 – 15 June 2024

Alan Bucknall

OP 1951

December 1931 – 19 September 2024

Alexander ‘Sandy’ Tullis

OP 1950

24 January 1932 – 12 January 2024

John Passey

OP 1950

March 1932 – 2024

Joan Buck

Former staff 1980 – 2001 1933 - 2024

Hugh Rump

Former staff 1983-98 1934 - 2024

Bryan Yates

OP 1952

May 1934 - 2023

Michael Bucknall

OP 1951

July 1934 – 2024

Peter Downham

OP 1953

23 June 1935 – 18 May 2024

Gareth Perry

Former Staff 1964-2001

June 1935 – 2024

Michael ‘Mike’ Perrin

OP 1953

October 1935 – 2023

Gerald ‘Gerry’ Houldsworth

OP 1952

1 February 1936 – 27 June 2023

John Dryden-Brownlee

OP 1955

6 September 1936 – 14 May 2024

Roger Pead

OP 1955

8 April 1938 – 6 April 2024

Peter Hall

OP 1956

26 July 1938 – 12 June 2024

Peter Hawksworth

OP 1957

December 1940 - 2024

David Dipnall

OP 1957

5 August 1941 – 27 July 2023

Ralph Huckle

OP 1960

September 1941 – 2023

Trevor Rayner

OP 1961

4 March 1942 – 21 November 2022

David ‘Dave’ Lythall OP 1961

June 1943 – 2023

James ‘Jan’ Needle OP 1961

August 1943 – 2023

John Webber OP 1963

February 1945 – 31 December 2023

Martin Bowyer OP 1964

November 1945 – October 2023

Geoff Foley

OP 1965

10 May 1947 – 22 July 2024

Hedley Ashbee OP 1965

1 October 1947 – 15 November 2022

Adrian Bradbrook OP 1966

22 April 1948 – 23 June 2024

Keith Richardson OP 1968

29 December 1949 – 4 June 2024

Alan Davey OP 1969

20 February 1952 – 26 July 2023

Ralph Booker OP 1970

3 April 1952 – 3 December 2023

Jeremy ‘Jerry’ Munro OP 1971

January 1953 - 2023

Trevor Bench-Capon OP 1972

25 November 1953 – 20 May 2024

Nicholas ‘Nick’ Ball OP 1972

19 March 1954 – 27 August 2024

Anthony Forhead OP 1989

October 1970 – May 2021

David Chandler OP 1997

3 March 1979 – 8 May 2021

Rachel Jefferson OP 1999

8 July 1981 – 5 July 2019

Kurtis Chapman OP 2016

December 1997 – 29 December 2023

Tributes (where provided by family and friends) can be found online at: connect.pgs.org.uk/news/obituaries

ASK THE ARCHIVIST

If you have a question for the Archivist or would like to donate any photographs or artefacts from your time at the school, John would be very pleased to hear from you on:

j.sadden@pgs.org.uk or 023 9268 1391

How hard was it to pass the Eleven-plus?

Passing the Eleven-plus was a deﬁning moment in many lives in the second half of the 20th century. For many, the exam cast a pall over their ﬁnal carefree Junior (Lower) School days, its approach also dreaded by anxious parents.

As an independent school, PGS had its own entrance exam and an average of around 60 Lower School boys passed this while a few lacked success (the “f” word is no longer used). A further 25 boys from other schools who successfully sat the exam were accepted and an average of a further 30 boys were nominated by the Local Education Authority after sitting the Eleven-plus. This process was described in the ofﬁcial school history by Washington and Marsh as “a somewhat mysterious process” designed to ensure that “the more able boys” were shared out amongst the city’s other (state) grammar schools.

So how difﬁcult was it? Test yourself with some sample questions:

General Intelligence

My friend is tall and dark. I am nine and he is ten. He is one of four boys below. Read the following sentences and write down my best friend’s name.

Harry is younger than me. He is short and dark.

Dick is ten. He is a tall boy with fair hair.

Tom has dark hair. He is older than me and is a tall boy. Frank is a tall boy with dark hair. He is nine.

Essays and Compositions

Imagine that you are an Englishman who lived a hundred years ago revisiting England today. Write about the changes you notice.

General English

The following are answers to questions. Make up a good question for each answer and write it down.

a) It is hanging up in the cupboard

b) Because I was tired of waiting

c) That is the new teacher

d) As soon as I have eaten my dinner

e) About ten or twelve inches

Arithmetic (in which the examiner admits to losing his marbles)

I have 40 marbles. I lose 0.2 of them and give away 0.5 of the remainder. How many marbles have I left?

Blasts from the past!

If you’d like to view photos from the archive, one is posted every day of the year on the popular PGS Alumni Facebook group. There are approaching 4,000 searchable archive images available with around 2,100 OP members who comment as much, as little or not at all, as they please. You can join the group at: www.facebook.com/groups/PGSAlumni

Mr Keall and pupils in the 1960s

Editor:

Alice Larden Development Director

023 9236 4248 a.larden@pgs.org.uk

Ruth Wade Alumni Relations and Events Manager

023 9268 1392 r.wade@pgs.org.uk

Jack Collins Development Manager

023 9268 1749 j.collins@pgs.org.uk

John Sadden School Archivist

023 9268 1391 j.sadden@pgs.org.uk

Ruth Wade

CONTACT US

We are keen to hear from alumni, former parents and other supporters and friends of the school. Please share your reminiscences with us, submit content for future issues or nominate someone to receive a copy by contacting us at: development@pgs.org.uk

High Street, Portsmouth, PO1 2LN @PGS_1732 facebook.com/groups/PGSAlumni linkedin.com/groups/3796965

PARTING SHOT

It’s all about the taking part...

While reasonable care is taken to ensure the accuracy of the information in OPUS, that information is obtained from a variety of sources and neither the publishers, the printers nor any distributor is responsible for errors or omissions. Reproduction in whole or in part of any matter appearing in OPUS is forbidden except by express permission of the publisher.

Do you recognise yourself in this race in this undated photo, taken, it is believed at Alexandra Park? Who are the runners, when did it take place and, incidentally, who won?

From Issue 26

Here’s the Netball Squad of 1988-89. A short and solitary paragraph in The Portmuthian of that year explains that two teams were mustered which played against other schools and colleges “with considerable success”, but no details are given. Do you recognise yourself or others in the squad?

Thank you to Andy Sanderson (OP 1984) for naming some of the pupils in this shot believed to be from the late 1970s. From right to left they are: Lines, Wingate, Andy Chappell, Robins and John Atchinson (all OP 1984)

Our thanks to eagle-eyed Audrey Dryden-Brownlee who spotted her late husband, John (OP 1955), ﬁfth from the left waiting to start a cross country race in the early 1950s.

DEVELOPMENT OFFICE development@pgs.org.uk | Tel: 023 9236 0036 www.pgs.org.uk