Past Pupils

Clive Durston (1975)

I have been looking through your website and it has invoked some memories I had long forgotton.

I have fond memories of Mr Yellops (though can't remember his first name!) who came from 'oop North and supported Sheffield United. Thanks to Mr Yellops we all managed to speak with what we thought was a passable Yorkshire accent, but was nothing like. I remember also that he was a diabetic and most lessons one of us would be dispatched to the local shop to get him an apple or a Mars Bar. Mr Yellops would also come to watch The Spurs with us and introduced us to betting - If I remember rightly we put 10p in the sweep and drew out a player and if we held the player that scored first we won the kitty. know I wasn't the only pupil who enjoyed his lessons as he had a great sense of fun, and thanks to him I still understand Trigonometry 27 years later. Never used it since though!

I also remember Mr Yarrow, who would also arrange trips to Wembley for internationals and the London 5-a-side tournaments. Slightly madcap, but always had our interest at heart

And does anyone remember Ken Beddall's "Board of Education?" a piece of flat wood designed for hitting unruly boys (though never to my knowledge used). Instead, as punishment we would all have to put our names in a hat and if picked out in the following lesson we would have to stand in front of the class and lecture on a given subject. One particular lesson we all revolted and put in the names of cartoon characters and during the break before the "next" lesson we were wondering about our wisdom of the week before. However we never attended that lesson as it was then the school caught fire - did someone set fire to the names in the hat.......???

While on the subject of Ken Beddall, he also had another assistant not mentioned in your annnals, and that was the lovely Miss Schustock, the older sister of my classmate Martin, though I can't remember her first name.

Mr Smith - Geography teacher - I sure his first name was John and I instantly liked him when I was grassed up and he hit the other boy for grassing. Was brilliant at hitting a dozing pupil from twenty feet with a piece of chalk, or worse still the blackboard rubber.

Mr Rising.... we did not look forward to his lessons as he would always inspect our ties and woe betide anyone with the top button of their shirt undone. Once when I had outgrown my shirt a little and couldn't fasten the top button, he spent five minutes strangling me as he tried and eventually the button split in half.

Miss Valentine was like Margerate Thatcher with piles and I once saw her reduce one of the "tougher" boys to tears just from a verbal mauling. She also kept rats, gerbils and other rodents in her classroom which had the propensity to urinate and defacate by the bucketload once on your desk.

I also remember Mr Purdy who took us for RE - unfortunately he could not control a class at all and we all gave him a hard time - sorry!

You don't have Mr Smuts on your list who taught science at the lower school. He started the same day as me in 69/70 and drove a small orange sports car, either a Triumph or an MG which had Dymo Tape on the boot announcing a radiation hazard within to stop anyone tinkering. A nice enough bloke, but cruelly we used to sing to the tune of the Cadbury's advert "Smuts aint got no guts - Cadburys's took them and covered them in chocolate", though hopefully not within earshot

Taffy Evans....... Ginger PE teacher who thought football was for cissies and would often refer to a football as a cissy-ball, especially when playing crab-football.

Ken Creamer - I also remember the "Shower Scene" and he smoked small cigars that stained his beard. He had a keen interest in astronomy and was a member of ASH - the Astronomical Society of Haringey (as was my father)

I am saddened to learn of the death of Mr Cooper, who once came into the hall to find myself and a couple of other sheltering from the rain one lunchtime. We shouldn't have been there, but he proceeded to give us a history lesson telling us all about the paintings and how each carpenter involved in the making of the roof had left their individual mark by carving a different shape at the end of each beam.

I would also add that Mr Butcher and Mr Morgan (Maths and Geography/PE) both taught during my years at Somerset so were not just TGS.

Was Miss Reynolds the Scottish one? if it is who I am thinking of she had red hair and I saw her some years later at Camden Day college teaching something like general studies. This was used as a break from our technical studies and to introduce us to other users of the college. Nice lady from what I can remember. I also ran into Mr Moss at the same time who was pleased to see she was doing well as he had heard she had disappeared to a hippy comune and had a drug problem, not that I saw any evidence.

Well that's it for the moment, I am sure more will come back to me now you ahve started my mind wandering......

I left in 1975 to become an apprentice with Post Office Telecommunications, latterly BT, where I stayed for 18 years. (I remember after passing the initial medical I went back to school halfway through one of Mr Porter's english lessons and was promptly told that even getting a job was not as important as his lessons!) In the last few years I have been working on mobile radio, mainly as a network controller. I now live in a village in Cambridgeshire with my wife Marie, of eleven years.

I also remember our games lesson being the last period of the day at the Upper School which meant that during cross-country we had to pass the gates of Tottenham County School when they were coming out, suffering much derision when doing so. After the first time I managed to improve my time sufficiently not to suffer a second bout of cat-calls again!

Classmates I remember are: Martin Schustock, Glenn Franklin, Hugh Boyle, David Fox, Warren Grant, Norman Beckford, Steven & Colin Parsons, George Christodoulou, Kyriacous Kyriakou, SteveWhithread*, Alan Hutchings, Dave Emson, Jimmy Pickard, Jimmy McCarthy, GarySmith, Bevan Smith, Shaun Cherry, Terry Ashley, Mark Lewis, & cross country stars the Hoffman Twins Kevin& ???? plus a host of faces I am still struggling to put names to.