SENIOR GROUNDSMAN
Colin Dower
“ My favourite season is autumn with all the colours on the trees. As for plants, it is a real old favourite, the pelargonium, not to be confused with geraniums.”
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Colin grew up in the small Cornish village of Porkellis, near Helston, in a very rural setting. He first got involved with gardening as a young boy, helping his father in their large garden. Colin carried on this interest at Helston School, where he studied a subject called Rural Studies. Although his friends did not find the subject very interesting, Colin enjoyed it and went on to pass the exam. During the holidays, Colin would complete the 18-mile round trip on his bicycle from home to school to look after the school greenhouses and veg plots. Colin left school in the Easter of 1974. After a couple of weeks his father spotted an advert in the West Briton for a groundsman / gardener at Truro School. He went for an interview with the Bursar, Mr Jock Appleton (TS 1958-1979), who showed him around the school, which Colin explains was “a very different school compared to today”, before asking him “when can you start?”
“My first day was 12 July 1974 – yes, 47 years ago - and I’ve been here ever since. In the early years it was an allboys school with Wednesday afternoon off and Saturday morning school. The headmaster at that time was Mr Derek Burrell (TS Head 1959-1986), with Mr Alan Ayres (TS 1955-1988) at Treliske, as it was then. The main school site has changed a lot - there was no sports hall, an outdoor swimming pool, and an athletics track where the Sir Ben Ainslie Sports Centre is now, no Astro, no Burrell Theatre, no Wilkes Building and an old wooden cricket pavilion with a tin roof that mysteriously burnt down in 1977.” Prior to the blaze, Colin tended to the roses that grew in front of the cricket pavilion, and remembers the morning after finding a gas canister which had been split in half by the fire and flung 200 meters across the cricket pitch! Luckily no one was injured.
