Interviewed by Troy Jenkinson
Miss Brown was a Maths Teacher at Dayncourt between 1975 and 2015.
Mr King was a History Teacher at Dayncourt between 1977 and 2006.
Mr K I was looking for some theatrical explosives to set up the battlefields at The Big Push. I rang up the Theatre Royal or the Playhouse and said when you want a big bang on stage, what do you do? They said, put them in a dustbin. They also without remotely wondering who I was, said the best supplier of theatrical maroons is these people out in Birmingham. This must have been 1992 with the first Big Push, or maybe it was the last one. They had had race riots in Birmingham within a mile of where I went to go and get them. I remember they didn’t ask who I was. They welcomed me in. I remember asking what do you recommend. They said they used these ones for training exercises with the fire brigade but they leave lots of craters. I’m thinking John Jones was a very tolerant head of PE but he would love it if Bingham Road Play Fields ended up with craters so we settled for a slightly lower key… those maroons were fantastic. The thing is the Big Push went right across the school and people took responsibility for stuff. Dave Downs was fabulous and Joy the technician took charge of the electric detonators. One day they must have been a bit bored in the science prep room and they thought they would try one out to see what it was like. They exploded it in the middle of the school day. By repute, Mr Andrew was in his office and was like “By God what was that!” I’m trying to remember, it happened several times but it finished in 1992. As with many of these things they grow and grow and grow. I mean it became quite something from starting with a budget, when budgets in the world of education were so tight. The first Big Push I struggled to find five or ten quid to pay for reprographics and by the end of it you are talking thirty years ago when a pound was worth something, I raised a budget of the best part of two and half thousand pounds. All from outside of school. It got to the stage we were nominated for a Sainsbury’s Arts Award. We went down to London and those things are really sad if you come away with nothing, which we did. And the kids come away with a certificate. But it was also, to everything there was a season. The number of people who were doing stuff was decreasing and the number of people claiming credit for it was increasing. I remember going to a meeting with the then head of humanities and the then head. I was on leave of absence and was proposing to set this up and yet we seemed to be part of the new wave of education who were putting in obstacles and didn’t recognise that we had got something fantastic.
TJ I remember it being on the news…
Mr K Yeah, I did a five minute live interview with Derek Jamieson on Radio 2.
TJ Do you have a recording of this? It would be great to include this.
Mr K Probably. I’ve probably got all the papers. I’ve got all sorts of stuff.
Miss B I think I’ve got the Pendle Hill Camp papers. Pendle Hill is in Lancashire. We took kids to a camp. They used to camp on this campsite where there were all these steam engines and then they used to also stay at Slaidburn Youth Hostel so we switched them over at some point. They would climb up Pendle Hill. Go on the canal. Go on the railway children railway. Went to Howorth. I’ve got a leaflet at home. You can have that.
Mr K Are you good friends with Dan Philpotts? Nudge him along and tell him that those two totem poles in the grounds of SNA are actually in need of painting and treating. They are important. They are part of the history. In the rush to disassociate themselves from Dayncourt, I mean Dayncourt had a really proud tradition. How many Oxbridge kids did we send? Seven one year. But also the Canadian connection. The original Dayncourt was opened by the Canadian High Commission and to have a school where kids were pursuing a Canadian syllabus alongside an English syllabus. That’s unique. The physical things too – they had Canadian maples planted around the campus.
Miss B The new badge has the maple leaf on.
Mr K The recognition of it…
TJ Are the maple trees still there?
Mr K You tell me. More recently, how many schools have got a tree at the National Memorial Arboretum, a bell in Belgium and a tree in Normandy at the German Peace Park. Dayncourt has but nobody is interested.
TJ How do you know about the tree and the bell?
Miss B Because he sorted it.
Mr K Because I was part of it.
TJ That’s the sort of information that gets lost.
Mr K The Big Push… when we had the, in 2014, the commemoration of the anniversary of the start of WW1, the history society did a terrific exhibition and a week of talks and so forth that was fantastic. I was honoured because they asked me to do the night to coincided with the outbreak of war. I told Dave Barton that we should do a showing of the Big Push video and he was very not sure about it. I convinced him and the place was jam packed with either the parents or the contributors, some of whom are now sadly gone. And the kids, because the kids like you who went off to university who were involved in the first Big Push and came back to play in the band as undergraduates… that sort of stuff.
Miss B There needs to be an Alumni. There needs to be something set up because there are a hell of lot of people who have done really well.
Mr K (Talking about the lower school building). It was an open plan classroom…. You’d be teaching one thing and people next door to you are teaching something else and at times I would think ooh that’s interesting and find myself veering towards that…
Miss B Well I would be teaching two classes, in that form. Then Maggie Bruce, David and Maria Kavoca had to do two years before she could become an ed psychologist. These lads used to finish their work and would be about to play up so I would drag them into my class and I used to give them extra work. Maggie used to say if it wasn’t for Maggie Brown, you would have been disruptive.
TJ In those days you could get away with more in those days…
Mr K I’ve got a cracking story about the Battlefields Trip… what you could get away with… Did you come across a man from Cotgrave called Ken Taylor who was part of the army careers? You might have been on the Battlefields trip with him. He was the Sergeant Major that we got as the centre of the Big Push. He was a terrific man and a great friend of Dayncourt. When the Big Push started, teachers were all pacifists and it was all sensitive around anything that would glorify war. I would hasten to emphasise that anything we did, whether it was the Battlefields Trip or the Big Push did not glorify war… it was actually a really good lesson in peace studies… that you did have to stand up sometimes for what you thought was right and you had to physically take up arms.
Mr K I remember in the early days of the Big Push… a crackers idea… it came out of the back of one of those awful bloody meetings you used to have. It was with Peter Barker He was a lovely man but he loved garlic. And garlic at 8 in the morning when you are feeling a bit fragile is not good news. We had this departmental meeting that wasn’t achieving very much and somehow, he and I talked about whether rather than teach kids about the first world war, we could do it. It went on from there. I remember having contact, trying to phone the British Army saying we wanted to recreate the first world war and some military person probably thought this man was a complete nutter. Subsequent to that, I went into town one morning and I thought, I know, I will go into the Army Careers Office and here I am with hair all over the place and a bit sort of scatty. I went in and found Ken. Ken was one of the British Army’s senior NCOs. He was a Gibraltarian who lived in Cotgrave and he loved the idea. He was a fantastic man and great friend of the school because we got to the point that we invited him to join us on the Battlefields Trip; a) he was a military man and b) economics came into it and we didn’t have to pay for him. If we made him a member of the staff team, that was one less supply cover to fund. He was absolutely fabulous. He was very good.
Did you come across Andy Fyall? Andy was a Methodist priest and he’s gone up the Methodist tree and his wife, Helen was the Minister for the church in Cotgrave. Andy and Helen were joint ministers here in Radcliffe. In their different ways it was good for the kids to see. Ken came on the tours with us in the same way the Files did. Neither were ever “recruiters” for their particular beliefs but they stood up to be counted.
This you really have to edit out. You mentioned how things have changed. I can’t remember whether it was Normandy or not, but we had Philip Andrews (headteacher) and Ken as part of the staff team so we had got the head and one of the most senior warrant officers in the British Army. We had this Battlefield Tour. We always used to say half past ten; in your bedrooms. Eleven o clock; lights out, shut up and get some sleep. You know it’s a real struggle to get teenage kids, multiple kids in rooms to go to sleep. You know if they are up all night yacking, they are not going to get the point of what their parents have sent them abroad for. Everything was all settling down apart from one bunch of teenage boys. We had tried to shut them up. Anyway, Mr Andrews said, “Jason would you like me to go and counsel theses lads?” So I thought ooh yes, we’ve got the head. He comes back and it was initially a bit quiet and then it starts up again and I’m thinking, that didn’t work did it. Then Ken (he and Philip got on really well – total admiration for one another – different sides of the street), so Ken in mimicry said “Would you like me to go and counsel these lads?” To which, I replied that would be awfully good. So off he goes and comes back and total silence. Absolute silence. And we were sitting around as you did in those days drinking and making small talk. We were talking about the following day and this and that but everybody wanted to know… in the end, my nerve broke and I said “Ken, what form did your counselling take?” He said, “I told them, I went in and said if they didn’t shut up, I’d come in and knock their f-ing block off.”
Miss B I thought you were perhaps going to get them up and make them go out on a run.
Mr K Well that got me into trouble on a Battlefields Tour… Taking kids for a run. We had this institution called the Wally Run. You know kids who were a pain… I was quite fit in those days. As was Neil Matthews. We both ran in the Robin Hood Half Marathons. So any kid who misbehaved was on for the Wally Run. They were got up early in the morning to go with us for a run along the beach. I remember one morning, we went out… The kids started being annoying to deliberately go on the Wally Run as a badge of pride. Anyway, this lad, I think he then became a lecturer at Nottingham Trent, I had a bit of contact. He was on the Wally Run so we take him down the beach and so off we go. Neil and I wanted to stretch our legs and go on a bit. I mean health and safety and responsibility. So we said “You take that turn…back to the hotel.” We didn’t want this kid in toe. When we got back, he wasn’t back. So its getting worse and I was running all over the place and we couldn’t find him. Neil was running the programme for the day. I was getting more and more… I was getting visions of the judge putting on the black cap and saying, “I put it to you that you were in a position of loco parentis and you have wilfully and obdurately neglected the welfare of the children in your charge” and he turned up. He had dawdled and he was fine. But gosh, talk about shortening your life.
Miss B We had a Duke of Edinburgh assessor who worked at Winchester College. He had been a colonel. He said, a barrister who was parent used to say, the parents were lovely if you took the children on these trips. But if there is a problem and they meet you in court, you will know about it. We couldn’t do trips to Norway now because you’d have to do a reckie before you went.
TJ You took kids to Norway?
Miss B Yeah, for a month. It was in 1979, 1980 and 1987. Both Dave Ditcham and I were Fellows of the Royal Geographical Society and that used to irk Barry (Boggild, a Geography teacher).
Mr K I tell you something… Norway… this is where we could have a spat. One of the reasons I established the Battlefields trips was because nobody ever invited me to go to Norway or Poland. Which were things they did. I thought I want to have a bit of this getting out and about. I will set something up.
Miss B It was John Jones who set it up originally.
Mr K The Norway thing was very good.
Miss B Phillip Andrew used to let us have two weeks off in term time if we gave two weeks of our summer holiday. We used to camp at 3,000 feet in the middle of…. We took 30 kids at a time. We used to pack all the food in day bags.
TJ Kids remember the trips.
Miss B I now administer grant giving thing for the Young Explorer’s Trust. There’s about one school that does expeditions. Most are bought in. Even they are not doing what you and I would call an expedition and what the money was left for.
Mr K The whole programme of visits that we used to do, you had the space and time. Phillip not just allowed you, he encouraged you.
Miss B He never turned you down.
Mr K He probably said yes too much. At one stage, we had three Battlefields trips a year going out. We had a real programme. We had a Somme trip for the young ones. Normandy for Year 9s, that’s the third years and Ypres for Year 11. Nowadays, people would go absolutely catatonic about that – “Good God how am I going to do my syllabus.” I get that now when everybody is driven by league tables and exam results determine whether you’re seen as a good school or not. People remember the Battlefields trips.
Troy Jenkinson 