Buckden - a Huntingdonshire Village

FRIENDLY INVASIONS 193 Sherwood House. The white building behind was Geering’s cafe in 1940. there was ample room for all the classes. The time-table was rather elastic at first, but by the end of October we were carrying on quite normally. The library and reference library were brought down and housed in specially made shelves.’ He noted that despite all the upheaval and the late start, the school’s exam results were, in the end, very good. Alan Cockburn: ‘The classroom that my form, IIIb, used at the start of each school day, like others was furnished with splintery benches and long deal trestle tables, their surfaces soon to be covered with inky doodles and loaded with ramparts of books which provided slight shelter from the gaze of the master in charge. In our room a defunct cooking range, a relic of the house’s palmier days, occupied a recess in the wall behind Mr Huxley, biology teacher and our form master.’ Alec Owen: ‘It was a squash! When the dentist came, Dr Draper was turned out of his study.’ Dr Draper Schoolmaster’s son F. W. M. Draper (1882-1968), was the headmaster of Tollington Boys School from 1922 to 1944. As a new pupil, Alec Owen had found him ‘very distant. He was a scholar and had many degrees from German and French Universities as I recall. He was old-fashioned and eschewed the use of a radio, although he would listen to Winston [Churchill]’s speeches. Definitely not the hands-on kind of headmaster one is used to nowadays. He took snuff and would do so while supervising a class while some master was absent. I respected him and was a little afraid of him.’ To Alan Cockburn, too, he was ‘an august, much respected figure’; but his abiding memory of his headmaster was of a robust sixty-year-old on the Diddington cricket ground, fielding at first slip in his Cambridge college cap, alert, hands at the ready for a catch, and still a good bat and off-break bowler. Dr Draper was a Londoner through and through, born and brought up in Hackney, but he was sensitive to the hardships that could result from the sudden descent of two hundred strangers on a small rural community. In particular, he thought that the official allowance paid for an evacuee, 8s. 6d. a week, was grossly insufficient for someone having to feed and house a growing boy. He accordingly invited the boys’ parents to contribute an extra five shillings a week ‘to which they instantly and willingly agreed’—a reminder that the school came from the affluent suburb of Muswell Hill. 1 Sherwood House This large High Street house, on the corner of York Yard, had been a hotel before the war. For much of the evacuation period, it was occupied by Dr Draper, his wife Ellen Maud, a shifting population of boys and, wrote David Rhodes, ‘its matron, Miss Pinkney, who rose at half past five every morning [in] summer to get breakfasts for farm workers, and it was she who had our dinners ready for us when we came home famished at night.’ 2 Both he and Alan Cockburn were billeted there for a time, a mixed blessing to judge by David’s ironic eulogy: ‘Sherwood House! Romantic name! Enchanting mansion! When Mr Churchill has become but a memory and Hitler has been entirely forgotten, the name of Sherwood House will still remain in our minds. How could we possibly forget it? When we are middle-aged business men [...] we shall recall the big and little washes, and the squeaky pump, and the rickety billiard table, and prep, and the colony of rabbits, and the ultra-modern latrine.’ It should, he proposed, be transported back to Tollington ‘brick by mouldering brick’ and re-erected on the school field. Its inmates were fed from the school allotment, an enterprise that had amused the locals at first but in time became quite productive, not least because ‘digging for victory’ on the allotment replaced lines and detention as the punishment for minor breaches of school discipline. 1 The Government apparently forbade the practice of supplementing the official allowance in this way, but the British don’t always do what their governments tell them, even in war-time. 2 The ‘farm workers’ were boys who spent their summer holidays in Buckden helping with the harvest—see below.