I have written so much about my school days at CCHS and my childhood in my parents’ farm in Dedham. My parents, I remind the reader, did not have a car, and so most of my early journeys were either on foot, horseback, bicycle, pony and trap, or by an infrequent bus service and, sometimes, by steam train. My knowledge of buses was enhanced by my daily travel to and from CCHS by Beeston’s School Bus, with its regular driver, Banger. And what an experience that was!
In contrast to a breakdown in the horse power which drove a pony and trap, the failure or malfunction of the bus could not be remedied by offering a juicy carrot, a piece of apple or a lump of sugar. But the school bus had other compensations. Amongst the passengers from CCHS, CRGS, the Boys High School, Endsleigh and St Mary’s School and the additional encumbrances of hockey sticks, satchels, tennis rackets, violin cases and football boots, friendships were forged, some of which lasted for life, and even a few flirtations were followed by marriage. Miss King, the CCHS headmistress at that time, would have been horrified that school blazers were discarded, summer panama hats were squashed and homework was far from individually completed but had multiple authors! ​​
Personal Transport Over the Years
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Joan Gurney (Appleton), 1939-1957
All that primitive and nostalgic travel changed for me in the early 1950s after I had left school and when my father acquired a Daimler (left). I was just finishing university and teacher training college, but even though I had been exercising my brain for 4 years, the mechanics under the bonnet of this new beast were totally beyond me, but I did manage to pass my driving test very quickly and was allowed to drive the Daimler regularly.
And so began the story of the cars in my life. It proved to be almost as interesting as the saga of the ponies in my life, but the former did need feeding with petrol regularly.
One day, in a quiet country road the Daimler broke down, and whilst I was frantically deciding what to do about it, a young man in an ancient Morris 8 (right) stopped and asked if he could help. He lifted the bonnet and tied up something with a piece of string. It worked. I thanked him and we went our separate ways. Five
years later I married him! Throughout our married life and my sequence of second hand unreliable cars my husband, Gerald, always ended the frequently told story of our first meeting with ”And I have been tying up her cars with string ever since”.
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​This brings me back to my time at CCHS. In the last years of the 1940s and the first year of the 1950s, a very small group of girls who wanted to study chemistry exchanged with a small group of CRGS boys who wanted to study biology. Neither school, at the time, had the correct facilities to satisfy these needs and so I went to the boys’ school for 2 sessions per week. This was considered a very innovative scheme by Miss King who was allowing girls to enter the domain of the Grammar School boys. It was perhaps, in the corridors of CRGS that I might have seen, but not met, my future husband, and also, our paths might have been crossed at a local tennis club.
The two cars, Daimler and Morris 8, continued to be used by us before and then after our marriage. The Daimler’s most outstanding story was one of ice skating. During the 1940s and 1950s when winters seemed to be more severe and prolonged and heavy frosts allowed the ice to stay on water for weeks, and the water meadows at Flatford were always deliberately flooded to provide skating (left), often by moonlight. The water was shallow, and the ice thick and very safe – except near the edges, where
Gerald fell through on a moonlight night. I need not relate the story of the journey home by car, wet clothing, hypothermic, warm blanket, spectators and subsequent humour!
II had many other adventures in the Daimler – driving down the Champs Elysées in Paris and getting stuck in circulation around the Place de la Concorde; and nearly missing the two wooden planks which were thrown in front of the car at the last moment as I negotiated a ferry to the West Isles in Scotland (right).
The Morris 8 also had it days in the limelight. Not only did I have to get out and push it uphill when we went on a trip to Cornwall, but I also had to repair its canvas hood when it was chewed by a wild pony on Exmoor. It also provided considerable amusement to the villagers at Gt Bromley when we had a Great Dane. The dog had a fascination for the car, and whenever she was let out into the garden, she would immediately clamber into the car and sit in the driving seat with her paws on the steering wheel and always refused to be moved (left). In our country lane she was only seen by passing walkers and cyclists, but the
story was soon exaggerated into “the couple who own a dog which drives a car around their drive”.
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By 1960 I had been teaching full time for 5 years and I then decided to move from Harwich County High School to the Gilberd Technical School in Colchester which was then based on North Hill in the building which had previously been the Senior part of CCHS (now the Sixth Form College), and I was revelling in the fact that, once again, I was back in a building which I had loved as a schoolgirl - but perhaps not quite so much as I had loved Grey Friars, the Junior part of CCHS.
I was still driving the Daimler in the early 1960s when I started my new post at the Gilberd Technical School. One day it ran out of water in the back streets of Colchester near Trinity Church, which was still open to traffic, with steam rising from the bonnet. I stopped in a “No Waiting” area, ran into nearby Cramphorns hardware shop where, at that time, I was a well-known customer, and asked for a jug of water. On returning outside again I saw a young policeman standing with his back to me, looking at my car and writing in his notebook. “Oh dear”, I thought. He turned round suddenly, and as he faced me I realised that, as an ex-pupil of Harwich County High School, I had taught him a few years earlier. “Will you be waiting there long, Miss?” he gasped. Needless to say, I escaped a fine.
AfterI moved to Gt Bromley the Daimler became less and less available, and I was more reliant on my husband’s Morris 8, and so I searched around for a second-hand car which we would jointly own and would fulfil a variety of purposes, and eventually found a pale blue Morris Traveller with its exposed natural wooden features on the outside (right). It was the best, most versatile car I have ever owned, and I wish I had one today. Its
capacious space in the rear with the back seats folded down and the adjoining double doors, which opened outwards, allowed bales of straw and hay, furniture, grass cutters, animals (including sheep, geese, ducks, dogs and children who had missed the school bus) to be transported with ease. But these were not the only things that it was carrying secretly all the time!
I must digress here because I had another accomplishment inherited from my schooldays at CCHS. I have always loved the physical process of handwriting since the early days of ‘dip in the ink’ pens in the Preparatory Department. In the later stages of the Upper School we were allowed to use a fountain pen as we neared the Sixth Form in the late 1940s, but it still used real ink and, and far as I remember, an ’ink monitor’ was still appointed to refurbish the ceramic ink wells. A new fashion ballpoint pen invented by Mr Biro in 1945 was forbidden for use at CCHS, but I began to hear about a capsule pen called the Parker 51 which used real ink and appeared in 1941. As soon as I left school, I had to have one. Fortunately my husband-to-be shared this same passion, and so we each had one but with different coloured barrels (left). Even today I hand write everything, and where possible with a real ink pen or a fibre-tipped one.
In the early days of our ownership of the Morris Traveller, my husband, Gerald, lost or mislaid his Parker 51. I declined to lend him my treasured one, in case that was also lost. We searched everywhere, but to no avail. My mother came to spend the day and offered to look in the Morris Traveller. She came back with two Parker 51s, having felt down the back to the car seats. Gerald looked at them and said, “I’ve only lost one, and neither of those is mine!” He eventually found his original Parker 51 and we secretly thanked any previous owners of our car for their unfortunate loss and ended up with four early Parker 51s! Now quite valuable.
In the late 1960s/early 1970s I changed my Morris Traveller for a pale blue Triumph Herald Convertible (right). The seats were low-slung, and it was very sporty and impressive, particularly when driven on an open-topped summer outing. It was the envy of the village and people fell in love with it – especially the village shop keeper who kept begging me to take him for a ride in it. “One day, Ron, one day,” I always said. This dialogue went on for months, if not years, and one day I visited the village shop and found his wife in great distress because Ron had cut his
hand quite badly on the bacon slicer, and she did not know what to do. “Get in,” I said to him indicating my Triumph outside. “I’ll take you for your ride.” I drove as quickly as I could to Colchester Hospital Casualty Department, pressurising his wound with one hand as I drove. His hand was stitched, but he never asked me for a ride again!
I had the Triumph for many years. It was another favourite of mine, but eventually we found a Vauxhall Dormobile (left) now that we had a son and liked camping holidays. We wondered at the folly of the compiler of a waterside notice at one campsite which read, “The mill pond is 20 feet deep. Children should be accompanied by an adult.” No health and safety regulations in those days! In addition to family use, the Dormobile became a regular transport of 5th form boys from CRGS to Wimbledon during the summer Championships and we never lost any in the crowds!
In 1974, after a break from classroom teaching, I joined the staff (later to become Senior Tutor) at Grey Friars Adult Education Centre, also later to change its name to Colchester Adult Community College. I stayed for 30 years, and during that time had several red Austin Maxi* cars (right). Returning to Grey Friars was yet another return to the memories of my early schooldays there – the nature study lessons, the enjoyment of the beautiful building itself and, of course, the ghost on the top floor and the
fearsome headmistress, Miss King. One story which I have related many times before will always be associated with one of my Austin Maxis, and the gratitude I felt towards my early education and for the knowledge it gave me of toxic plants and the understanding of the French language.
*I always knew these cars as Maxis but it has been suggested that perhaps they were Maestros!
One afternoon, when I was going to my car which was parked by the pedestrian gateway into Castle Road, I saw two French boys gathering yew berries (left) from the early autumn trees. They were chattering away in French, and I could pick out the word ’mangez’ repeated often. I knew immediately that they were going to eat them. Gathering together my French knowledge very quickly, I shouted to them, “Non, non, non. Ne mangez pas.” They looked at me with surprise, and one said in broken English, “They make you sick?” “No,” I replied, “They make you dead.” They threw down the berries and fled; I had saved two lives. I got into my Maxi and drove home, thankful for the knowledge implanted in my school days at that beautiful building, Grey Friars.
My final car was a Vauxhall Agila (left), yet another car with an extensive adjustable space behind the front seats which were higher than most other cars, and gave an excellent view of the road. I did not have any spectacular adventures in this car, but it did seem to have a tendency to attract long-tailed field mice which are plentiful in my garden and garage. Children, in particular, could not understand why chocolate bars and fresh fruit, if left overnight in the car, would mysteriously disappear by morning – but then a mouse’s nest was found under a seat and the story was out!
And so we come to the end of my tale of cars. There are many more but some examples of “double entendre” incidents in Ronnie Barker style would not fit in the ‘slightly amusing but not shockable' story line favoured by Miss King. What a shame that all these cars went for scrap metal when they had so many stories to tell of teaching, schools, social history, wildlife, humour and so much more. But I hope that I have not repeated tales which I have told any times before.