TGS Pupils - Peter Stefanini

I was introduced to this website by Roy Goodman. We were in the same class throughout our time at TGS, both specialising in the sciences. Our paths have crossed only occasionally in the 37 years since we left TGS but we are now in contact again and have visited each other’s houses, even though I live in Yorkshire and he in Cornwall. As someone who enjoys looking back (my wife and kids tell me I do far too much of it) I am grateful to Roy for the introduction.

It was good to find some familiar names. Jeff Herford was one, and I read with delight his reminiscences. David Langlands was a name I did not recognise but it turned out he had lived only a few houses from me in Philip Lane, had been to the same junior school, and remembered details of my life from the age of five! I’ll come back to my memories of Roy, Jeff and other pupils and masters later. First of all a quick pen picture of my life since TGS.

I read Natural Sciences at Cambridge from 1965-8 and went on to do a PhD in Chemistry. During these early years I kept in touch with some TGS friends including Colin Mellis, John Dosset, Nigel Gotteri, Roger Elkin and Alan Wheeler. I remember clearly the weddings of the first three who all married rather young – I was best man at Colin’s wedding and an usher at Nigel’s. Alan Wheeler and I had a hitch-hiking holiday in Scandinavia in 1967. I think Alan worked in Sweden some years later, but I have lost contact with him as I have with John Dosset.

I enjoyed my research at Cambridge but decided my career should not be in research but in management. I therefore joined Unilever as a management trainee in London and stayed with them for 11 years, in various management jobs. To begin with I was a back-room boy doing work on acquisitions etc. In 1978 (which was also the year I married) we moved up to Newcastle where I ran a plastics factory. In 1983 we moved south (but not very far south) to York. We have lived there for 18 years during which time I have held a number of positions usually involving huge amounts of commuting (which doesn’t seem particularly sensible when I look back on it, though I am still doing it!) Most of that time was spent running chemical companies but I am now running (and attempting to float) a scientific instruments company.

I met my wife Mary at the London Chamber of Commerce where she was a new trainee just out of University and I was attending a function. As one of the hosts she had a name tag on her which meant I could ring her up the next day – which I did. The rest is history. She had lived most of her life in South America and Scotland. We have three children: Mark, 21, studying law at the LSE, Catherine, 18, on her gap year in China, going on to study modern languages at UCL, and Sarah, 16, who is doing GCSEs this year.

Well I think that’s enough of the formal CV type stuff – lets roll on to the nostalgia!

There are so many memories in my head it is difficult to know how to get them down in some logical order. I am opting for general reminiscences about events and contemporaries first, followed by notes on masters at the end.

My introduction to TGS took place a couple of months before the start of Term. As I recall, there was a preliminary meeting of new pupils in the Art Room where a number of people spoke to us including Dr Witt, Mr Topham and the school captain, Mills. I remember being somewhat overawed by the whole occasion and a little frightened by the art master, Harry Wright, who was roaming around when we arrived and interrogated me as to the origin of my name. Thereafter he always referred to me as “that Italian boy”.

Talking about art, who can remember getting their manilla envelopes from Faulks of St Loys Road for Harry Wright’s class? The idea was that beautifully decorated it would provide a fitting container for the rest of the term’s work. In my case a fitting container was the dustbin and the envelope itself always ended up looking washed out. Roger Elkin, who had access to poster paints always won the envelope competition.

Colin Mellis was the only person I knew on arriving at TGS since we were both from the same junior school and in the same scout troop. However, he was a sportsman and I a non-sportsman, so we tended to have different interests. Later on we became very good friends and I was best man at his wedding in 1969. Colin was a strong mathematician and subsequently became a successful actuary. Although we have not seen a lot of each other in the intervening decades – mainly keeping in touch by Christmas cards - I was pleased to be at his 25^th wedding anniversary a few years ago and to meet his grown up children.

Another good friend from the early days at TGS was Roger Elkin. In addition to winning the form prizes for a number of years, Roger was a model-railway enthusiast – may still be for all I know. This included running his railway to a timetable. Since he lived in Enfield there was a rush for the 4.04 train from White Hart Lane station to get home in time. I last saw Roger Elkin in 1978 before I moved north, when he was in the Administrative Civil Service working for the Department of the Environment. We have exchanged Christmas cards every year since, but I still don’t know what he’s doing now.

In 1960 a group of us from TGS appeared on Crackerjack – Colin Mellis, Pete Clements, David Workman and I. We played a girls school. It all happened at the BBC studios at Shepherds Bush. Workman and I played off for the final bouncing balls off a drum to hit bottles on a wall. By some fluke I won and got to the final only to be beaten by a girl! I still live with the questions I got wrong:

Who was the first Christian Roman Emperor ?	Constantine
Of which state is Hobart the capital ?	Tasmania
What is the modern name for Cathay ?	China

Tottenham was in the news at the time, Spurs having just beaten Crewe by some massive margin (13-1?) and Eamonn Andrews referred to this in the programme including the song “Oh Mr Porter what shall I do, I wanted to go to Birmingham (or did they change it to Tottenham?) and they carried me off to Crewe.”

Two very sad incidents also stick in my mind. A first-form boy was killed in a road accident just outside the school when I was in the second or third form. I did not know him and cannot now remember his name, but I remember the sadness which fell over the school in assembly the next morning. The other tragic incident was the death of “Pop” Hunter. Insensitive kids like us did not realise how near he was to the end of his tether with the legacy of his war wound and our behaviour cannot have helped the situation. On a lighter note I remember that for the last couple of history lessons of the year Pop Hunter would offer us the choice of either listening to an account of how he got his war wound or hearing an essay he wrote on Alfred the Great when a student at Oxford. In the end we heard both.

I was not an accomplished actor but I did have a small role as the Priest in Twelfth Night. The play itself was wonderfully directed as always by “Len” Millard. Roy Goodman was a brilliant Malvolio and Les Daniels the School Captain played Orsino. Though I only had a dozen lines or so, I reckon I got the biggest laugh of the evening. I had a pocket watch attached to my cassock which I had to take out at a strategic point in my speech. As I did so, it fell to the stage floor disgorging the spring and other components. Scooping up the pieces I said “Since when my watch hath told me toward my grave I have travelled but two hours.” It brought the house down – but quite unintentionally! (I attach a photograph of the cast of Twelfth Night from that production.)

The enjoyment of being in that school play was enhanced by the freedom we had to move around the school at night during rehearsals. I remember one night several of us occupied the headmaster’s office (where there was a TV) to watch a live Beatles concert – this was 1963 and they were at the height of their popularity.

I mentioned Roy Goodman above. Malvolio was only one of his acting successes. I regard Roy as one of the great all-rounders in our year: a scientist who was interested in languages, art, and acting and was also a good gymnast. It’s good to have re-established contact and to find that he is a successful painter as well as a successful scientist.

Jeff Herford has referred to the Chess Club so I must say something about that. It is interesting how selective memory can be: I do remember teaching Jeff to checkmate Mr Topham with a bishop and a knight for his free chess club membership, but I have no recollection of the episode he describes which led to my being banned from the club. I remember Jeff as a rather rotund boy (I should talk!) who slimmed down remarkably in the third or fourth year. He preferred to play chess standing up, with one knee resting on a chair and eventually became a formidable player – though I don’t think it was due to the pose. There were other characters in the Chess Club – certainly Ollie Killingback was one and before him a guy called Axtell whose cry would ring out “Pick ‘em up and check ‘em” if a chess set was dropped on the floor. We had a successful team and in 1964 won the North Circular League championship.

I had the pleasure of re-establishing contact with Nigel Gotteri for the first time in 32 years just a few months ago. I remember first getting to know Nigel well when we both preferred to eat sandwiches in the cold lunch room, manned by Slasher Sklartz, rather than have school dinners. I think Nigel was one of the real characters of our year. He was brilliant at languages and music, and kept us hugely entertained with his outrageous sense of humour. On occasions when Bill Tunley would storm out of the class, Nigel would calmly take over the teaching of French until his return. He was also one of the few people – I think Martin Thorne was another – who had a good working relationship with Mr Fear.

Life became much more relaxed in the sixth form. Apart from snooker in the prefects room, there were various card schools in progress. I remember Colin Mellis, John Dosset, Alan Wheeler and I playing a game of Black Widow which went on for about two months – the points totals getting into the thousands. After that we graduated to Bridge. It’s been one of my regrets that I never found a Bridge school again after TGS.

I also remember the theatre outings we went on in the sixth form: Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, Son of Oblomov (with Spike Milligan), and A Funny Thing Happened on the way to the Forum (with Frankie Howerd). These were great adventures because we were free to roam around London afterwards. One of these outings was on the night of the first Cassius Clay – Sonny Liston fight and I remember none of us gave Clay a chance! There were other more educational theatre trips. “Len” Millard took us to a production of Twelfth Night at the City of London School and Mr Wiggins took a group of us to see a production of A Man for all Seasons (before the film made it famous.)

The headmaster organised a trip to the House of Commons for a group of us. We were shown round by Horace King who later became Speaker. It must have been 1963-4 because Sir Alec Douglas Home was PM. We were surprised to see the front-benchers with their feet up and one or two members nodding off. Only one question and answer stick in my mind.

Q. “How much closer are we to a debate on ….. than we were a week ago?”
A. “One week closer”

Presumably this trick still works. I must confess I have not been to the House of Commons since.

I remember going to the Founders Day service at Westminster Abbey to read a passage in Latin at the tomb of Sarah Duchess of Somerset in the presence of the Dean. I gather there was a Tercentary service there in 1992 which I would have liked to have attended had I known about it.

Perhaps I had better leave the general reminiscences there and move on to specific memories of certain masters. I am going to restrict myself to just a few who made a big impression on me.

DR REX WITT

He was an impressive scholar – I think few headmasters today could make that claim for themselves – but he did give the impression that administration of the school and dealing with the more mundane issues were simply distasteful to him. As a result this work tended to be done by Messrs Topham and Cooper. His Latin lessons were bizarre. He would say things like “Cicero has just walked through the door. What shall we say to him?”

He also organised some fairly weird events. I remember a group of us performing Clerihews for an audience of parents who seemed less than convulsed at the rather weak humour we could extract from these verses.

Roger Elkin and I were involved in a Classical Greek demonstration class in our second year and after that he seemed to take a personal interest in our academic development. Therefore I would often find myself called down to the headmaster’s office in the middle of a lesson to discuss some idea which had just occurred to him. Irritating as this was both for me and for the master whose class was interrupted, I look back on it now as positive encouragement.

Dr Witt had himself done research for a PhD at Trinity College Cambridge and encouraged me to apply. Maybe the connection and a good reference helped me get in! He certainly focused my mind on the objective and I remain very grateful to him for that. Knowing I was going to his old college he invited me to tea at his house in Southgate one Sunday. When I arrived I got the distinct impression that he had forgotten about the invitation. However, tea was hastily conjured up and I met his wife and daughter. An hour or so later he announced that he was giving a sermon at a local church and would anyone like to come. His wife and daughter both declined on the grounds that they heard enough sermons at home and I explained that I had to catch my tube back to Tottenham. We never referred to this occasion when back at school on Monday.

I remember one visit that Dr Witt made to Cambridge in November 1965 to visit his son, just a month after I started there. It was a curious experience meeting him when I was no longer part of the school, but I remember still being rather deferential. At one stage the strap on his briefcase broke to be followed by the request “We seem to have a problem do you think you could fix it please?”

We communicated next in 1968 by which time his reign at TGS had ended. He told me that 1967 had been a very difficult year for him and he had taken up the study of Cuneiform writing as a distraction. In 1972 he contacted me again having seen my name in a list of people taking degrees at Cambridge at the same time as his daughter. By then he was teaching at Queen Mary College, London. I cannot now remember whether we met or simply spoke on the phone. He was still very enthusiastic about Greece and was going out there again. I never saw him again but learnt that he had died in 1980.

My overriding feeling about Dr Witt is that although he had an eccentric turn of mind which was a source of continual amusement to all of us, he was also a first rate scholar and a promoter of academic excellence, which encouraged pupils like me to lift their own horizons.

FRANK THOMAS

I was pleased to read that Frank Thomas had become Headmaster of the Somerset Upper School. As our Latin master one always felt he had a really powerful grip on the class. His lessons were full of humour and we liked him. He repeated his jokes often but it did not matter – we waited for them. “Cecidit in aquam” – “he’s fallen in the water” was one which eluded those of us who did not listen to The Goon Show. He would also talk about Hannibal’s fish and chip shop – an allusion to the way Hannibal when crossing the Alps used vinegar to break up the rocks.

It may be a cliché but he did make Latin live for me. He also encouraged me to enter the Latin reading competitions at University College London, taking a couple of us down to Gower Street to perform. As a school without a huge classics tradition we did pretty well in these competitions.

He had one or two hang-ups about English usage. He preferred “in the circumstances” to “under the circumstances” – and would snap back “ the very fact that circumstances (from the Latin circa) are all around you, means you can’t be under them!”

Another of his favourite Latin expressions was “Vae victis” – woe to the vanquished which he claimed to use in letters to English friends when Wales beat England at rugby.

KENNETH BEDDALL

Like Roy Goodman I feel I owe a lot to Mr Beddall but unlike Roy I never got round to writing that letter of appreciation.

He really took the job of teaching Chemistry seriously, and since it was my favourite subject anyway, his lessons were a delight. He had quite a dry sense of humour. He would ask you to assemble the apparatus for an experiment, which you would do with some trepidation. He would then say “Do you mind if I leave the room before you start!”

Mr Beddall also gave me some private tuition to help me through the Cambridge Scholarship exams. I certainly could not have got through them without his help. After A levels but before the end of term he allowed me to do some chemical experiments of my own when the labs were not in use by other classes. It was great fun having a full range of chemicals to play with, however this was always under the watchful eye of Mrs Howell who ensured I did not blow myself up.

For those of us interested in Chemistry he took us to evening lectures at The Royal Institution. He would wear a DJ for these lectures which seems amazingly formal today. The Nobel Laureate Sir Lawrence Bragg presided over the meetings and a reception was held afterwards. It helped to give us a view of the bigger picture in science and made us feel quite important. It was another example of how seriously Mr Beddall took his responsibilities in broadening his pupils’ outlook.

I visited Mr Beddall once after leaving TGS – probably 1968. We talked about the problems of the two site comprehensive school as well as the recent death of Pete Corns - one of his star chemistry pupils tragically killed in a car crash. He was really sad about the death of Pete Corns who had been working on cancer research. The change in the structure of the school was something he was having difficulty coming to terms with, but I guess he must have reconciled himself to the changes if he remained there until 1984.

LAURENCE COOPER

I thought Mr Cooper was not only a splendid teacher but also a really nice man. I felt he treated us as mature people and not as schoolboys. His calm manner in all situations was most reassuring.

I got to know him a lot better in the sixth form mainly because he often gave me a lift to school. This was completely unplanned. I would walk along Philip Lane towards Tottenham High Road to catch a bus to White Hart Lane. If I was lucky Mr Cooper’s Morris Oxford would magically appear at the kerbside and I would be chauffeur driven to school. The reason for his route was that he would take his daughter to Tottenham High School. I much enjoyed our conversations, usually about the school, politics, and cricket. Occasionally he would have the Headmaster on board (I do not think Dr Witt drove) and I would be privy to some insider gossip!

I did not enjoy maths but I regarded it as a necessary evil if I wanted to be a scientist. Mr Cooper certainly made it more palatable. Colin Mellis, Alan Wheeler and I used to help him with the marking of GCE O level papers. Looking back on it I wonder whether this was really allowed by the exam board. However, I think his view was that if we all went through all the papers there was less chance of an error.

There is an excellent interview with Mr Millard in the 1958 School Magazine. I joined TGS in September of that year and we were given the previous year’s magazine for background information. Anyway it meant that we knew quite a lot about him before he taught us.

It is always good to find a teacher who has done more with his life than teach, and Mr Millard certainly drew on a much broader experience than most teachers. As everyone knows who visits this site, he took part in the first TV play, but I believe he also acted in a number of radio plays.

His method of teaching was diametrically opposite to that of Mr Porter (Bockers). The latter would produce copious sheets of notes, diagrams showing the relationships between characters, and other aids to learning. From the point of view of passing exams Bockers was definitely the safer bet. Millard never did anything like that. He believed in just reading the play (or book) but he brought enormous expressiveness and interpretation to everything we read. You just had to make your own notes! He was legendary as a school play producer as Roy Goodman’s article in the 1964 magazine made clear.

In 1979, 14 years after I left the school and he retired, I bumped into Lionel Millard on Victoria Station. I recognised him immediately and he remembered me after some prompting. We were both going to Brighton - I to a conference and he to visit friends. We shared a train going down and coming back to London. We had wonderful conversations both ways and I thoroughly enjoyed renewing the contact. He had remained really lively for a 79 year old. He told me that after retiring from TGS he had taught at Harrow. He also described how during the thirties he had taught in a private school in the Pyrenees and he had a wealth of anecdotes from that period.

I also learnt that he had been a great friend of Stephen Potter, the author of Gamesmanship, One-Upmanship etc. There are many references to Lionel in a book on Stephen Potter by Alan Jenkins. According to the author as an undergraduate Lionel “wanted to be an actor but was opposed by his puritanically religious family.”

We wrote to each other over the next few months and he invited me with my wife to lunch at the Commonwealth Club in Northumberland Avenue. There amazingly enough and completely unplanned we bumped into another former TGS master, Tony Cash who had taught Russian. He was by then working for Melvyn Bragg on the South Bank Show.

The sad part of this story is that between these two meetings Lionel had been savagely mugged in the street and thereafter had become more nervous about leaving the house.

We continued to write to each other over the next two years and he appeared to be getting over his mugging experience. He was looking forward to a holiday in Canada, where he had “masses of relations” – his father was Canadian. However his health started to fail and the last letter I had from him was on 28 July 1981 from the Officers Convalescence Home in Osborne House on the Isle of Wight. (He had been an Officer in both World Wars and therefore qualified for this privilege.) He was really happy to have found such a beautiful location to convalesce and was going to “subdue my socialist conviction and revel in the Royal Wedding tomorrow”

This is where the guilt on my part comes in. I did reply to his letter but after not receiving a letter from him, took no further action. If anyone knows what happened to him I would like to know. He was born in 1900 so it seems unlikely he is still alive.

Pete Collinson was in quite a different category from the masters described above. He was young – seemed at times as young as us – and conversation with him tended to be more like that which you would have with your friends. He was a great propagator of school gossip in a way that pupils really enjoy – and he did not hold back as far as comments on his colleagues were concerned.

He came from Leeds and exhibited many of the Yorkshire characteristics which I have since come to know well in my 18 years in God’s own county. Unfortunately for us Yorkshire were doing well at cricket, Leeds football team were on the up and up, Harold Wilson had just become PM – so southerners were losing on all fronts. He rubbed it in.

He used to refer to me as the “Cardinal Archbishop of Philip Lane” because he thought I argued dogmatically and also because of my Italian ancestry. He once said to my mother at a Parents evening “Peter seems a year younger this year” and then said to me when I quoted it back at him “Yes, only 64 this year!”

As I recall he married a really attractive German girl from Dresden, which made us extremely jealous. I believe when he left TGS he moved to Nottingham. It would be interesting to know what happened to him after that.


I am the priest marrying Orsino (Les Daniels) and Viola (?)		The full cast from the 12th Night Performance.