The Bay Horse at Totnes is cantering again

     When The Bull Inn in the Rotherfold closed in October 2017, a number of its long serving customers found a long term foster home with Kathy, Rob and Jo at The Bay Horse Inn, the pub with a garden at the very top of the town. 

    
    The Bull Inn re-opened in December 2019 and though it is an outstanding restaurant with lodging rooms its ambience was such that it didn't appeal to the former Bull Inn afficionados who have now taken up residence at The Bay Horse on a more permanent basis. And why not? the hosts are welcoming (there were a few glitches but these were largely straightened out). The beers and ciders are local and outstandingly well kept. I like The Pandit Ale, a local brew, but I am a letdown on the cider as I drink the Suffolk sparkling draught cider made by Spalls, I thinks it''s refreshing but also I am not enough of a real man to drink the local cider. 

    The Bay Horse and the The Bull have now re-opened following their closure during these months of special measures caused by the coronavirus pandemic. Bull Inn is providing excellent food again, yet so many in the Totnes area particularly at the top end of the town will be relieved and delighted that The Bay Horse Inn, the traditional, well kept, old fashioned, welcoming pub opens again at 4.30pm today. Any hiatus in human social activity changes the dynamic but The Bay Horse Inn is a pub with a lot of good will supporting it. 

The Bay Horse Inn, this morning

    
     Personal matters do not allow to return at the moment but on my birthday in October I am sure to present myself. I may even learn to knit.
     All the best to Kathy, Rob, Jo and all the staff. Long may you canter.

                        ______________

Comments

Hello Charles,

Thank you so much. A soft start with a light trot last night - we'll see what Friday and Saturday brings.

Kathy, for
Rob, Kathy, Jo et al.

Ten years of Leaving Dundee

     My vanity led me to writing this entry today, the tenth anniversary of my first blog entry to Leaving Dundee. When I started writing it my fancy may have been that it would be a considered, and weighty, anthology of  recollections and reflections of my life and thought. It has not turned out like that. It is not by any definition erudite or scholarly. It is a ragbag of scatterbrained passion, polemic and prolix, but what has amazed and gratified me is that people read it. I don't mean that people in their thousands and thousands follow Leaving Dundee but somewhere between 50 and 100 folk visit the sight on most days and some even make comments.

    Popular entries have been tales of my boyhood and school life in Dundee. Others which have been read are those of the fate of a Dundee FC supporter. My political outbursts sometime cause a stir and a number of the illustrations have created amusement and been admired. Tales of family members through the generations are pored over as are recollections of my life after leaving Dundee. 

   An entry I particularly like because it involves so many people from the Totnes community is A Load of Old Bull: the Tale of a Totnes Inn. This was written after The Bull closed in October 2017. Happy news it was when it re-opened in December 2019, only to shut its doors again in March 2020 because of the coronavirus pandemic. Anyway, I know I may be interrupting my flow, but the hot news I have for you is that the Bull Inn is re-opening to serve meals tonight!

     Returning to the blog some people have said they quite like the"poetic"doggerel  I write, but rather than discuss this further I thought I'd tell you something peculiar. The Leaving Dundee blog consists of about 50,000 words. One of those words, and it is used only once, is "Hitler." The piece containing this word is, I think, mildly amusing, but it's no great shakes, and yet it is by far

the most visited entry. Now tell me what that means?

     Finally let me say I have been fortunate in my close family and my wider family, as I have been with my friends, none of these people are perfect but they are all good people.They inhabit these pages.

    I was unwell recently and my young granddaughter painted a get well card for me. She entitled her painting - seen below - Sunset, Rough Seas and a Boat with a Flag. That'll do for me.

Bribery isn't even necessary: Labour Party members are meant to lose.

    In recent times, and for a number of reasons, I've been feeling depressed. This has been particularly so over the Labour Party's defeat in the general election last December. I still struggle to understand why the most popular and principled politician in England in 2017 was defeated in a general election just two years later when in my view he was still the most principled and popular political leader in England even though he was unjustly vilified by the media and undermined by the treachery of a minority - yet surprisingly powerful minority - of  Labour MPs and officials.
Last week I heard of a  dubious, or possibly spurious group  (set up and selected by whom? certainly not the membership) which has decided that most of the blame for the election defeat must be placed upon Mr. Corbyn. How wonderful they must feel to be "truly" free of responsibility.

    Exasperated by this I sent a letter of protest to the Labour Party leader Sir Kier Starmer, and the Deputy Leader, Angela Rayner, both of whom, (unlike many of us who put up extra funds of money we could little afford for the 2017 and 2019 campaigns), are relatively comfortably off. Neither politician replied. Then I wrote an almost identical letter to the secretary of my Constituency Labour Party here in Totnes. I have not as yet received a reply. Here is the letter.

Dear -

I sincerely appreciate all the efforts which you and others put in to keep the Totnes CLP purring along but, before the Labour Party as it currently stands (or collapses) addresses any issue, it must first deal with the matter of the corrupt “officials” in the Party who despicably & dishonestly counselled against the Party Leader, Jeremy Corbyn & his team. They also built up a spurious case which implied that all those who rejoined The Labour Party because of Jeremy Corbyn were  anti-semite. Until we have clarity, these issues are the only matters on the agenda. Unless it is sorted out we have a Party without a soul tormented by an inner cancer. Blairites and their camp followers have ripped the heart out of our Labour Party. Predictably they are all now silently smug about it. 

The Party must deal with this matter now not in some investigation in the middle distance which inevitably would end up in a whitewash.

Yours faithfully,

Charles Sharpe

https://leavingdundee.blogspot.com/2016/03/better-watch-out-for-poetry-feelings.html

I have been left feeling that many members like me carry a sense of having been "stuffed" and nobody really cares. I was reminded of a passage from The Eyrie a novel by the Australian author, Tim Winton.

"We're meant to lose ,and campaign and calculate all we like, the bulldozers still arrive, the agencies wash their hands, the media enjoys its little flash of colour and silent influence and it's back to business as usual.
Like every arm of government it's a servant of industry facilitating its ongoing prosperity. Bribery isn't even necessary. That's the real insult the system works beautifully without it". 

Language or Dialect?

         Just after the Scottish Independence referendum in 2014. I  had a conversation with a  relative of my wife at a family gathering. My wife is English as is my wife's relative. I was telling this person how pleased I was that my home city of Dundee had overwhelmingly voted for Scottish independence. My wife's relative was not impressed with my information. Neither, he said, was he impressed by Dundonians' inability to speak the English language. 

     "In fact," he said,"your dialect massacres the English Language."

     My hasty response was, "No, it is the English language that destroys Dundee Scots." We finished our conversation there. We were both in the huff with each other. On this matter I believe we still are. I calmed down but over the years I have tried to make sense of my omnipotent claim. Convincing or not, here in the following lines, are my thoughts.                                                                                                                                     

    
      Recently I read an obituary in The Guardian for Edward Kamau Brathwaite, the distinguished Caribbean poet and historian. I was interested in something he thought about dialect and language. He insisted that the language spoken by the Caribbean peoples should be regarded as a “nation language" and not as an inferior form of English or as a dialect.

      I have similar thoughts about a much older language, Scots. I would go further, I think the language spoken in any locality should be considered its language and not its dialect. To call it otherwise is to presume it is a lesser form of some notional master language.  The Queen's English is a fake language. 

     The language the people of Dundee speak is genuine. It has developed organically through its usage by the people of Dundee. While the language spoken 15 miles away in Forfar is subtly different - and at times a not so subtly - from Dundee's but it too is a genuine language.

      You may wonder why I am raising this issue and some may just wonder what exactly my issue is. To explain this I need to go back to Dundee in the early to mid-1950s. If my parents heard me playing with my friends out on the street speaking Dundee Scots, I was hauled inside the house and told speaking like that was common and would get me nowhere. I discovered later that my parents' message was propaganda. Posh English was the language of the world of power, influence, wealth and status while trying to speak it was supposedly the ordinary folk's way of unlocking the door to that world. Well that didn't work out despite the elocution lessons my parents arranged for my younger sister and me to be taught by that snooty lady who had a big house on the Ancrum Road, Lochee.
     
     I am glad that it didn't work. Dundee Scots is the language of my soul even though down here in Devon I have little opportunity to exercise it.
    
       Yet English and Scots speakers can meet together and, with comic results. In the early 1960s,  Elizabeth, the Queen Mother, who lived in the nearby Castle of Mey, inspected the troops of the Queens Own Highlanders Regiment at Fort George barracks near Ardersier.

Fort George

     She walked along the line of soldiers presented for inspection and occasionally had a brief word with one or two of the men. She stopped in front of one Private and asked him if he had a family. 
   
     "Eh Ma'am, we have a hoose jist ootside the barracks"  
     
     The Queen Mother adopting her woman of the people mode continued,
    
      "And are you comfy there?"
      
     "No Ma'am," the private replied, "Eh come fae Dundee."


      

Omnes una manet nox

Formalities over,

visitor gone,

I am free to fart,

walk around in my droopy underpants,

scratch my itchy scrotum,

and cease acting as if I’m in a life assurance ad.

I didn’t ask for old age, 

it turned up with food stains down its front,

things grasped or brushed falling to earth,

as I will, oh! but not any more

for the incinerator calls me

to my fiery fate

where released from a hiccoughing hiatus hernia

I no longer struggle to rise from a sofa.

Be still my soul though no one’s on your side

Bear patiently the weight of the unknown

Leave those behind to order and provide

To ponder life and the turn to stone.

My Bannockburn Moment : a driving test saga

   

    

     The Coronavirus  has pervaded our lives completely. How can it not have? Everyday we hear of the victims of this cruel and deadly virus. On our televisions there are harrowing views of sufferers in hospitals, of victims' relatives mourning loved ones to whom they could bid no adieu; of our own imprisonment within the limitations placed on us by what is called 'lockdown.'  In our everyday lives we experience pangs of longing because we cannot be with family members and friends. We cannot give reassuring cuddles. There is so little we can do to assuage the traumas suffered by others and ourselves. .  
     During this time it can appear that the virus haunts every aspect of our lives. We struggle to escape not only the virus but also the whole social paradigm it has set up.  I've wondered if allowing the virus a monopoly of our being is healthy for us. Should we think or talk about other unrelated matters? find moments of escape? Without apologies what follows is an  escape for me as I allow myself to wander over past memories which have nothing to do with Coronavirus.

     I've always imagined that apart from those who make a decision never to drive a car, everyone has his or her own driving test story. Mine's is such a harrowing tale that I've waited 50 years to tell it and here I set it down as my contribution to motoring history.

     I attained the age of 17 years on October 1st, 1962. At my mother's insistence my father reluctantly offered to teach me how to drive and in the later months of 1962  he sat beside me in the front passenger seat offering instruction while I perched tensely behind the steering wheel of his brand new Standard Ensign and attempted to pilot what felt like a noisy live animal with a mind of its own.  These early attempts at driving through winding Warwickshire lanes were so dangerously erratic that by February of 1963 my father in order, he said, to keep himself from physical danger and to protect his sanity, decided to bring a halt to his tuition. He had found it hard to control his emotions when we were out together in the car principally because I exercised a propensity to drive into oncoming vehicles.

A Standard Ensign, a car I never took a test in. Granny and Grandad posing with their son's  new pride and joy.

   

     This brief early driving experience freaked me out to the extent that I did not lay my hands on the steering wheel of a car for another 7 years. At this time I was living in Gosfield, a village in Essex. The house my wife, my son and I lived in was off the beaten track and so it became increasingly apparent that by learning to drive, we could purchase a car and become less isolated. 

     I decided to hire a driving instructor who operated from Braintree which was the nearest driving test location.  He was a man in his early 40s  -  who, I remember, felt duty bound to tell me repeatedly that he was a Tory voter  -  and he always ate a pie, or a cake or a sandwich while he sat beside me. He gave me my lessons in his Hillman Imp, the car in which I would fail a number of my early driving examinations. 

My Braintree driving instructor

     In fairness to my new tutor these driving lessons took place in a calmer atmosphere than those I had "enjoyed" with my father though there were some hairy moments when disaster was averted only by my instructor's judicious use of the dual braking pedal which was fitted to his car. Nonetheless after about 12 lessons I began to fancy myself as having some competence and I asked him if I should now apply to take my driving test. He was hesitant but agreed that I could proceed  given that once my application had been processed I would be offered a test date 4 or 5 weeks hence and that, my instructor said, might give me time to make improvements.

      Two o' clock in the afternoon of Thursday, February 27th, 1969, was the time and date nominated for my test and my instructor presented me at the driving test centre in Braintree. My examiner stood erect in the manner of, I imagined, an ex-military man or ex-policeman. The examiners for all my tests seemed to give off this aura. It gave them intimidating authority even though they were invariably civil to me. 

A Hillman Imp  -  a car I failed in

     I was nervous throughout my first test. My left leg and foot developed a shuddering shake which was a concern since I needed them to function normally in order to depress the clutch pedal when attempting to change gear. It was surprising to me therefore that I managed to manoeuvre my way through a test punctuated only by two or three near collisions with other vehicles, while only one pedestrian had to jump out of my way to avoid being run over. As I recollect my examiner only used the dual pedal brake system twice during the test. As the examination came to an end I was feeling quite chipper and when I was informed that I'd failed the test I was somewhat disappointed. I was handed a slip of paper which was the assessment form. I found that I had failed on every skill I was required to demonstrate though my knowledge of the Highway Code was deemed acceptable.

      When I look back on my first test it is something of an irony that my knowledge of the Highway Code had been its only satisfactory factor for at the end of my second attempt to achieve fully qualified driver status, my examiner asked, 

     "Mr. Sharpe, how would you know you were entering down a one way street?" 

     So relieved was I to have another motoring ordeal behind me I momentarily became incapable of retrieving information from my mind. In my panic a response that I thought valid  flashed up from the depths of my soul and I desperately spluttered out,

     "Well, you drive along the street and when you get to the end of it you look behind you and you'll see a No Entry sign." 

     My examiner raised an eyebrow and looked at me knowingly.

     "This is important you know." 

      It seemed I may have driven down a one way street the wrong way, or at least given him the impression that I might happily do so.  I had failed again. 

     Following another lacklustre performance behind the wheel I was unsuccessful on my third attempt to gain a full driver's licence but yet just a few weeks later, during my fourth attempt, from the slough of despond came the promise of triumph. A couple of minutes into this assay while negotiating the three point turn exercise, I reversed on to the front lawn of an old lady's bungalow. She was sitting on a bench by her front door and seemed to be in a state of shock following what she had just witnessed. My driving examiner immediately got out and assured himself I had caused no permanent damage and apologised to the old lady explaining that I was a learner driver. He got into the car and asked me to drive off. I was in despair. I insisted that we return to the test centre there and then since it was clear that I had already failed the test. He appeared alarmed at this. He asked me where I had been born.

     "Dundee,"  I replied. He pressed me further.

     "And where is Dundee?"  
   

      Bemused by this turn of conversation and though I knew the answer, I replied in a questioning kind of way,

      "Scotland?" .
  

     "Yes!" he cried stridently, giving me a sense that he had got me back on the right line of thinking. "And what is Scotland famous for Mr Sharpe?"

      "Whisky?" I suggested.

Not this,

     " No!" he answered,  leaving a space for me to provide another response.

    
     "Porage?" 

nor this,

     "No, Mr. Sharpe, it is famous for its fighting spirit!"

but this !!!

     
     Patriotism welled up within me.  Just as Robert the Bruce had done before me,  I stirred myself with these words, "If at first you don't succeed, then try, try and try again!" Here was my Bannockburn moment. I determined to go ahead with the test. Certain that my examiner's appeal to my martial nature would not have been made if he had not felt I might succeed in my drive to victory, I was persuaded success was a possibility. I started up the car, drove away as he directed and went on to drive reasonably well with perhaps only a few errors more. When I completed this latest trial by torment, I felt quite emotional. I had completed this test for Scotland and myself!  He failed me. This, he said was due to my inability to carry out satisfactorily a three point turn. His duplicity in getting me to continue the test from the point where I originally wished to terminate it embitters me to this day.

     In April 1970 not long after this test we moved to Johnshaven, a small fishing village in Kincardineshire, where I had been appointed to a teaching post. Upon my arrival I immediately hired a driving instructor who worked and lived in Montrose where I would be taking my next test. My instructor, who had an Austin 1100, was a man of about thirty years who smoked cigarettes incessantly during my lessons. I was a smoker myself at the time but his style of smoking irritated me.  Once he lit his cigarette he would leave it drooping from his lips his rather like Humphrey Bogart and Robert Mitchum used to do in black and white movies. I think he thought he was the essence of cool. 

My Montrose driving instructor

I persuaded him to allow me to apply for a test right away. “Och! ye’re no ready yet,” was his response, but he allowed me to go ahead with my test application. 

In late May I had my first test in Montrose. I thought it went quite well. I was a little slow reacting to my examiners’ emergency stop gesture and he had to operate the dual brakes once when I pulled out of a side street into the path of a lorry loaded up with sacks of coal. I was failed again but, given it was my first attempt at the test in Montrose, I was not too hard on myself.

I continued my lessons with Bob Mitchum and though he thought I wasn’t really ready for another test I believe he decided I wasn’t ever going to get any better at driving and so he consented to allow me to put in for my sixth driving test. 

   In the late afternoon of Friday, July 24th, 1970, in the Burgh of Montrose, I presented myself for my sixth driving test. The inspector seemed a rather cold and rigid man and this, when he and I sat in the car,  had the effect of re-awakening  my old shaking clutch leg problem. Despite this I managed to drive around Montrose making a series of driving errors but none on this occasion required my examiner’s intervention, yet failure seemed certain to me and I waited for the post-test talk in which all my faults would be listed. 

“Mr. Sharpe,” he said, “sometimes when I am examining, my boss, the senior examiner, sits in the back of car to check that I am keeping to the standards expected of me while I carry out an examination. Also Mr. Sharpe when I finish work today I am going on a fortnight’s holiday. I have to tell you Mr.Sharpe if my boss had been sitting in with us and if I hadn't been going on holiday this evening you would have failed but I have decided to allow you to pass. "

An Austin 1100  - a car I  failed and passed (?) in. 

    I can't describe how relieved I was to have passed. Yet over the next few hours as I slowly digested my  examiner's concluding comments I began to feel that I had gained my driver's qualification in a backhanded way and to this day I am left feeling that I didn't really pass the test. I'm not a real driver.

___________

Contagion and Pestilence: my sermon this week

       

      As I imagine millions of others have, I've felt depressed in this time of special measures brought about by the advent of  COVID-19. I think this is especially so because it is dawning on me that, science or no science, no-one really understands just what is going on.

What I feel, even if, like the science, I don’t understand it, is how much we miss not just our friends but those people who are our nodding acquaintances as we go about - or used to go about - our everyday lives.  I met such a person by Totnes’s ancient Northgate while on the walk I take every day as part of my ‘permitted’ exercise. He lived alone, and he wasn't complaining about it, but he had discovered that he missed people.  “After forbearing these weeks of self isolation I find that I am missing those I meet in the café or the library or wherever. Whether I live on my own or not, I am a human being. I crave the company of other human beings. Sometimes I think this imposed self-isolation is more like moral blackmail and then I feel guilty for having this thought.”

We said our farewells at the Northgate in the shadow of Totnes  castle and I wondered how many plagues the castle had stood sentinel over. I wondered too how the experience of our current pestilence compared with those who had lived through them in the past. 

Looking towards the Northgate, Totnes

When I returned home, in order to satisfy my curiosity, I looked through my copies of the diaries of John Evelyn and Samuel Pepys who both lived in London at the time of the plague in 1665-1666. I discovered there had been fear and terror among all the population, and those who suffered most lived in the most insanitary, crowded accommodation while the threat of poverty compelled them to stay at work in order to feed themselves and their families.. 

The wealthy took every opportunity to take themselves and their families out of city to their country residences away from the worst ravages of the plague but for most business went on as usual. It is remarkable reading the diaries to find that Evelyn and Pepys, who as government officials remained in the city, seemed  just as  anxious, if not more so, about a naval battle with the Dutch than they were with the plague.  Businesses across the city closed down not as a consequence of any government edict such as we have today but because the owners and their employees had succumbed to the plague. Mainly the poor and the agèd died. Not much changes.

     During the 1665-6 plague in London  -  a city which then had a population of 460,000  -   more than 75.000 souls perished.  Every day bodies were carted away to mass graves. 

    

London, 1666

A high proportion of the poor and the vulnerable have died in our current plague and this may lead us to question the mantras we hear daily from government ministers, senior scientists and medical officers like “This virus is indiscriminate,” or, “We’re all in this together.” My first thought was to go along with these - as they seemed to me -  truisms, but as the weeks have passed I have become less certain. We are seeing patterns develop related to who actually dies and these are beginning to offer some answers to the question, "Why are they dying? Of course the answer is, "Because they caught the virus." Yet we are becoming aware, if we did not know already, that there other issues which make a considered answer to the question more complex. The Government, as we see by its manipulation of statistics would prefer that we did not concern ourselves with these complexities.

The following is an excerpt from Jacqueline Rose’s impressive essay review published in the current issue of the London Review of Books, “Pointing the Finger.” which challenges  government propaganda and begins to eke out some painful aspects of the pandemic which our government, our community in the United Kingdom, and the world community should confront.

“Today the insistence is that ‘we’ are all in this together, even as social disparity  -  the frailty of that ‘we’  -  has never been so obvious: in that the gulf that exists between families and those housed in airless, cladded tower blocks, a distinction disregarded by police rounding on people in parks; between the jogging culture of North London and the slums of Bangladesh, where the idea of social distancing , let alone soap and hand sanitisers in abundance, is a sick joke; between the medical care given to the prime minister, assigned an ICU bed at a time of acute shortage while still fit enough - or so we were initially told - to govern and the negligence suffered by Thomas Harvey, a nurse from East London who had worked in the NHS for twenty years, whose family were advised he didn’t need to go to hospital (they called four times) before he died gasping for air in his bathroom.”

       COVID-19 may be indiscriminate but in the way we set ourselves up as a community we are guilty of discriminating. We are not all in this together.

      We may have lessons to learn that we have not yet formulated, nevertheless, despite all the human disorganisation and frailties that will inevitably obstruct our way, we should be determined to seek these lessons out.  They must lead us to learning how to look after each other and how to share things more fairly. This pandemic has thrown a great deal up in the air. We should not let it all fall back in the same place.
     I hear people say that this will be the lesson drawn after all this is over and that altruism will outweigh cynicism. If so, it cannot but be a mighty struggle and this time we should not allow the powerful and the selfish to inherit the earth. 

_______________

Notes  

Jacqueline Rose “Pointing the Finger” in London Literary Review  Vol. 42 No. 9   pp3-6  May 2020

This is an essay review of  The Plague by Albert Camus.

The Diary of John Evelyn Vol II, 1665-1706

The Diary of Samuel Pepys (Complete) 1660-1683

Ejjercayshun: the thots of Charles Sharpe,(aged 74)

    I have adapted this admittedly polemic article from something I wrote many years ago but the changes which have occurred in the education of our children in these last weeks must have given children, parents and teachers cause to consider how we help children learn. The hiatus may give us time to think if we could, or should, explore other avenues to promote learning. Here I am taking an opportunity to reveal my prejudice. 

    There is a predominant assumption in western society about the proper way to give our youngsters an education, that is : in formal groups in a classroom with a nominated teacher who has professional training. Yet I don’t know of - and I may be missing something - any universal biological or physiological law which demands that children must be educated by this method or indeed if they should be formally educated at all. 

    A politically radical of way of looking at this might be to say that schooling as we know it developed from powerful families among the primeval horde deciding that if their offspring were to sustain or build upon the dynasty’s potency and wealth they must learn a thing or two about how to be on the right side of their own kind of God and how to count and defend their money as well as all the other things which flow from that. It was inevitable that this kind of education became more focussed on protecting the wealth and power of “clan rich.” This was achieved by organising and developing learning in groups called schools, which, in the interest of gaining more control of the children were eventually broken up into smaller groups called classes. This exclusive system also kept the little rascals out of their parents’ hair. From this a curriculum grew which kept everyone in place and led those, not sufficiently privileged to attend school and learn, to lag far behind, usually in penury and poverty. These are characteristics evident in the schooling we have in the United Kingdom now.

Those in accord with the idea that education developed in the way I’ve described may also agree that schools are institutions which are used to protect the status quo and the vast majority of our youngsters are  educated to look after and sustain the needs of the powerful. Even when eventually, “education for all” was deemed by the powers that be, a not too dangerous path to follow, the schools the rich kids went to were different from the schools the poor kids attended. Over centuries, occasionally those of a socialist leaning have cried out and railed against these matters but nothing much changes and even if they do things soon fall back into their old place. 

Accepting that schools, if nothing else, can play 
an important a role in the social development of 
children I have reluctantly - and shamefully some may say - I have come to an accommodation with this "education" system that defends the current economic and political state of affairs. It is a powerful juggernaut,  difficult to stop, but I can never accept that it is based on a valid ethical philosophy of education. I can’t say for definite which of any - education at school, education in the family home or indeed no education at all - is the superior but I  have a personal view about how children learn best.

I trained as a teacher in the early 1960s when teacher training was influenced by educationalists such as the Forfar born Scottish educationalist A.S.Neill who suggested that if parents get the emotional upbringing right then intellectual development and learning will follow naturally. Neill also suggested that children learn best and become more imaginative and creative if they are helped to learn through their own natural curiosity and their own discoveries and not by having a narrow taught curriculum foisted upon them. The trouble with children educated in the AS Neill way  at Summerhill School is that they become inquisitive, they question things – particularly the status quo – and though society might have time for a few oddballs doing this, it can't tolerate the majority questioning things like the distribution of power and wealth. This is why teachers trained in the 1960s were labelled permissive and have been condemned, certainly in England, as being solely responsible for damned near destroying the education system and thank goodness that Mrs Thatcher came along and saved the nation from the fate people like me had in store for it.

A.S. Neill at Summerhill

     As I said, I haven't reached the stage where I think I've got a definite position on where and by whom children should be educated, but you will have guessed I do believe children learn better from a stable emotional base and okay, I'll admit – at the risk of being condemned for envy and not understanding just who it is that has created the quality of life I apparently enjoy – that I think children develop best not only when they are helped to learn through their own discoveries but also by being given a great deal of responsibility in choosing their own learning path.

_______________

Two quotes from A.S. Neill

Kids weren’t designed to sit on their arses for 6 hours a day.

If someone from Summerhill became prime minister I would be deeply disappointed. I would feel we had failed.

In later correspondence with Neill’s daughter Zoë Neill Readhead. the current Principal of Summerhill, wrote saying Neill also used a different version of the quote. He replaced “Prime Minister” with “teacher.”  (I mention this along with apologies to my wife, my daughter, my daughter in law and my many friends who are teachers. I hope they know what I'm getting at).

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Wider reading

Freire, P (1970) Pedagogy of the Oppressed   New York : Herder and Herder

Neill, A.S. (1962) Summerhill   London :   Gollancz

Charles William Scott Sharpe 1926 - 1985 : My Dad

Young Chic Sharpe  1933

   

     Thirty five years ago today my Dad died. I miss him. I think it’s because I have a deep regret that I did not get to know him better. Always known as Chic, he was a brilliant design engineer. He helped design watches for Timex in Dundee, in Waterbury, Connecticut, and in Besançon in the Jura. Later he designed robotic submarines used to set up the oil pipes that were being built under the North Sea. 
     
    When I was born in 1945 he was serving as a rating with the Royal Navy in Holland clearing barges of mines left by German forces with the intention of slowing the advance of the allied forces. 

    As a boy I handed spanners to him every weekend when he was renovating his old cars. I got to know the difference between Whitworth, AF and Metric spanners but I was never as interested in mechanical things as he was. While I was growing up we did have brief conversations but we never got on to discussing deeper things. He had lofty ambitions for me, none of which I achieved. He was quite alarmed when my Mum told him I wrote poems. 
    
  Apart from one memorable occasion he kept his emotions close to himself. On rare occasions when he returned from his lengthy - both in time and distance - business trips he would make gestures to engage with us and these left a big impression upon us.   In our childhood my two sisters and I didn't dare be cheeky to him although my youngest sister managed to draw out a funny side to this on those Sunday afternoons when we enjoyed family outings to Arbroath.


As a young man he was keen on building model aeroplanes with balsa wood and tissue paper. He would temper the tissue by painting it with something he called “dope”. I don’t know what it was but I remember it had a particular and characteristic smell. I’d recognise it even now. The planes had tiny petrol engines and every Saturday morning he'd take me with him to a park in Forfar where the members of the model aeroplane club met to fly their planes. The noise of the engines was a high pitched rasping whine. It was exciting for a boy of four years old to hear. 

Later in my early to mid-teens my Dad took me to watch motor racing. Unlike me Dad was not a man overly interested in sports but motor racing was an exception. We shared a joy in it.  We’d get up really early and he’d drive us from our home in Coventry to Mallory Park in Leicestershire, where I first watched a legendary future world champion  Jim Clark driving a Lister Jaguar for a racing team called the Border Reivers. Later he also took to me to watch formula one races at  Silverstone.

My favourite story about his boyhood is of an occasion in 1936, when, at the age of 10 years, he took his father’s Beardmore car and drove it several times around the square in Letham, Angus. I am told his friends were very impressed with this, and I heard that my Grandad Sharpe was very angry about it, but I suspect he was in fact proud of his precocious son.
  
    My father's full name was Charles William Scott Sharpe. It was a name which had been used for a number generations alternating with George Muir Sharpe which was my Grandad's name and if tradition had been followed George would have been my name too but Dad decided I should follow in his footsteps and carry his name. Family folklore has it that the original Charles William Scott Sharpe made a name for himself in the mid-19th century as the harbourmaster at Sydney in New South Wales. I've never found any evidence to substantiate this but it makes a good story to  pass through the generations of our family. I have no idea how my namesake got to Australia!
     
     My Dad and my Mum were married for 40 years. He was a young father: only 19 years old when I was born but Mum and he worked hard to make us a strong family. On the whole I think they succeeded.

     In the way that he could I think my father loved me. I love him. He inhabits my  dreams still and though he didn't live as long as I have - I am 74 years old - I still see him as a man to whom I would defer.

My Dad died of cancer the pancreas at the age of 58 years. I wish I'd got to know him better.  

To be continued....