Published in Windlesora 25 (2009)
© WLHG
(Windlesora 24 contained an article relating the history of Kipling Buildings, which had been the Imperial Services College before the Second World War. This stirred Michael Bayley to remember his boyhood, and his years enrolled as a day boy there.)
Life was very different when I was a boy. There was no Health Service, little traffic on the roads, and very little money about. A crystal set, headphones and a long wire aerial across the garden, and an occasional visit to a cinema took the place of television. But it was safe enough for my parents to allow me and my sister to wander anywhere we fancied on foot or on bicycles from the age of nine or ten.
I went to a small private school in Slough from the age of five until I was thirteen, and walked to and from school. Once a week we walked in a crocodile of little boys in white trousers and shirts and blue blazers through the town for games in Lascelles Playing fields. But I preferred to make my own way there via all the alleys and footpaths I knew, so sometimes I ran into groups of boys from the local authority or church schools and altercations took place, especially in the conker season. There were jeers about my fancy clothes, but if there was a fight, we had the same code of honour — it was one against one, and we parted friends, if dirty and a bit bruised.
On other occasions such boys taught me how to cross the local quaking bogs, running from one floating tuft of grass called a ‘monkey bump’ (1) to the next, before it sank. This was a skill acquired in the days of footpads and highwaymen on the Bath Road, and now used for raiding orchards!
Anyway, when I was thirteen in 1935 I was sent to Imperial Services College, which meant cycling in from Slough, summer and winter wearing a straw hat (a boater on a bike is difficult enough, but in a snowstorm it is ridiculous). For some reason the barrow boys from Slough market collected their fruit and vegetables from the Southern Railway in Windsor. They used to race each other in their little flat-topped trolleys, each drawn by a pony, which rattled along at a gallop down the Windsor Road. It made my journey quicker and much more fun if I could catch hold of the backboard of the trolley and have a tow — but if the driver, who was standing on the front of the lurching trolley urging his pony on, caught sight of me, his whip could lash out backwards just as well as forwards to the pony. (2)
Imperial Services College had a strong military bias, as its purpose was to produce the intake for Cranwell, Sandhurst and Woolwich to provide the men to protect and run the Empire, and if not in the services, in the police, foreign office or trade. The boys were not a collection of toffee-nosed upper class snobs, but included sons of small shopkeepers, builders, farmers, clergymen, actors, and the occasional Indian Rajah and Russian prince (I suppose the most illustrious pupil was an inky little fag known as Romanoff III — now the surviving heir to the throne of Russia).
School discipline was largely in the hands of the prefects, the senior boys, and involved beatings for infringing silly petty rules, like keeping your collar neat with a tie pin, and not walking on the grass of Big Side — the best rugger or cricket pitch. If one complained the rules were stupid or unfair, a patient prefect would point out that the school was there to prepare you for life — and real life was often unfair and many rules were stupid, but we knew the rules, and 1f we were stupid enough to be caught breaking them, we were being punished not for breaking the rules, but for being caught breaking them, quite a different thing!
The College prided itself, with this regime, in being able to take any boy thrown out of other schools, and make a man of him. The most extreme case was a boy expelled from Harrow — probably for being drunk and disorderly, or just violent. He naturally repeated the offence and was told to report to his housemaster for six of the best. He turned up as ordered, but on being told to bend over produced a loaded revolver, said ‘not today’ and walked out. I heard later that he had got into trouble with the police shortly after for forging half-crowns! That was probably in 1938. He then got into the RAF and I believe did quite well before being shot down in the Battle of Britain. (3)
The school ran on military lines, and we practiced drilling on the parade ground every day (this stood me in good stead when I took the King’s shilling and joined up in 1941). The College also had a small bore rifle range down the upper half of the dining hall, shooting from a balcony at targets set above the high table on the stage at the far end. The walls of the dining hall were decorated with hunting trophies which were presents from old boys. If one looked carefully at these heads of buffalo, antelopes and stags, one could see that the sides facing the balcony were peppered with little black spots – it was too much to expect little boys with rifles not to do a bit of big-game hunting if no one was watching.
Over the headmaster’s chair there was a glass case with the front half of a stuffed lion peering out from elephant grass. Inevitably one day the temptation was too great for one boy – only this time there was glass in the way of his shot! That was a beating offence, but the boy was told that he was being beaten for being a rotten shot since his bullet would not have killed the lion.
Occasionally the school’s Officers’ Training Corps put on a public show with a route march round the town behind our own military band. The highlight of these was marching down Imperial Road one day and passing a milk float which in those days was drawn by a horse. The horse was panicked by the band and marching boys and bolted, scattering bottles all over the road. We thought it lovely fun!
The College cadet force was useful to help out with the police and real soldiers from the barracks to line the route for important royal occasions. We were called out for the funeral of George V and again for the proclamation of Edward VIII. And then again for the abdication. By then we were getting tired of polishing buttons and boots and badges, so the proclamation of George VI was restricted to senior boys only. Those not on parade were allowed to join the crowds in the street or not, as they chose, and three weary teenagers decided that they would not go. Then they realised that they were completely alone in a deserted College! What could they do to amuse themselves? They thought of the rifle range – and even shooting at the stuffed big-game heads as much as they liked – then the thought of real big game came to them – the deer in Windsor Great Park. So they armed themselves with service rifles from the school armoury, and ammunition, and set off on their bicycles for the Park. But the Park keepers had not all gone off to the proclamation. They soon realised someone was shooting in their Park, and the boys were caught, disarmed and marched off. The story soon got round the school. And with memories of Robin Hood and medieval punishments we boys were quite sure that hanging was the only reasonable punishment for stealing the king’s deer – and perhaps we would have to line the route for a public hanging! We were quite disappointed to hear that the culprits were only beaten and sent home. I think they were allowed back the next term after a severe telling off by the Headmaster and their parents.
Because so many boys had a military or colonial background, when war broke out in September 1939 overseas travel back to school was not possible. Added to which, all senior boys who had taken their Certificate A military exam were whisked off to military college for a crash course and an early commission. School numbers dropped dramatically and the establishment was no longer viable. So the remainder were sent to Haileybury, which had suffered a similar but not so severe loss of boys.
The empty school then proved just what the war-office wanted and became the No. 2 ATS Officer Cadet Training Unit, to train up officers for the Auxiliary Territorial Service. (4) This must have happened fairly quickly as I remember that when still a private soldier on leave I and a former school friend decided we would go and see how ‘the girls’ were getting on in our old school. Sadly we were sent scuttling off by a ferocious large ATS Sergeant Major! But later, when I was a commissioned officer on my first leave after VE day, straight from front line service and dressed in not quite regulation uniform of an airborne beret, corduroy trousers and Canadian high boots, I decided to visit my old school again, as I thought my girl friend of the time was there. I walked boldly in, found my way to the orderly room, and enquired if Cadet O. Owen was still there. I think the clerk or sergeant, seeing my oversize shoulder pips from Princess Louise’s Kensington Regiment mistook them for crowns and having formed the iden that I was someone of importance, saluted smartly and said he would go and find out.
Cadet O. Owen was in the Commanding Officer’s lecture, but she was taken out and marched into the orderly room. Visiting officers are not mean to kiss cadets — not with a roomful of clerks and NCOs! In fact it did Olwen no harm — I was introduced to her company commander and, I gathered, approved of. Sadly I was then sent out to the Middle Fast, and I have the idea that Olwen was posted to Italy, and I think married an Halian count in the end.
Other memories of Windsor from schooldays include seeing shire horses hauling coal wagons up the cobbled alley from Goswell Lane to the GWR sidings. I also remember the smells of the Goswell Road gasworks, and of wet straw and horse dung and used leather from the Windsor barrow boys’ stables where Ward Royal stands today. And – innocent as I was – I remember asking my parents why the prettiest young ladies lived in the poorest cottages of Arthur Road and Goswell Road. The area was out of bounds to boarders at the College – but that couldn’t apply to dayboys who passed by twice a day. I remember there was a bit of trouble when two such ladies brought a slightly drunk boarder friend of mine back to school after a half-term holiday – you could say that Imperial Services College gave us boys a broad education!
: Sadly it must be recorded that of my intake year, largely sons of survivors of the First World War, only 25-30% survived the second one, and of those many were left wounded or otherwise unfit. I was one of the lucky ones.
Michael Bayley
Footnotes
- This name derives from the Lowland Celtic language, an unwritten language spoken in the countryside, some of which I learned from my grandfather: MYNCOW-BOEN-BAS = ‘the platforms of high places of the ox-shallows.‘ Farms by marshes grew lush vegetation to allow work oxen to eat enough nutritious food in the evening to take them through the next day’s work.
- From memory this usually happened in summer, when I had to get to school for a lesson from 7.15 to 8am. This left more time for games in the afternoon. I had breakfast before I left home, so my poor mother had to get up at about six!
- Coins worth 12.5p today (2009).
- This change of use was not featured in the article in Windlesora 24.
Windsor Local History Group 