I attended Barrow Hills between 1959 and 1963, during which time the Headmaster was Fr. Bede (Leo Bede Johnson).
I then attended St George’s College between 1963 and 1969. Barrow Hills was the feeder prep school (boarding) for St. Georges and practically every boy went there.
My very first recollection of Barrow Hills was being taken there during the Easter Holidays in 1959 to sit an entrance exam. I did this while seated at Matron’s desk, and I could hear Fr. Bede showing off the model train set which was then on the half-landing of the main staircase.
The normal boarding age range was 8 – 12, however there were some outliers. I started at age seven and three quarters (like a junior Adrian Mole), and I recall at least two thirteen year olds, one of them impressively already an uncle.
One result of my age was that after the first year I was always placed in sports teams with the year below me, and that continued right through St. George’s.
Actually, there was nothing much I did not enjoy at Barrow Hills (well, apart from the caning and the spinach). Conversely, I can’t think of anything I really enjoyed, except perhaps chapel choir. One simply was there and got on with it from day to day, not knowing anything else.
A great many distinct memories stay with me from my time there! It occurs to me that I could write a long essay on my time at Barrow Hills, while it is still fresh in my memory.
One major memory is of falling ill with, initially, a bad cold in February 1960. The dormitory master did not deal with this sensibly – for coughing a lot one night he sent me to “stand out” outside the Headmaster’s study in the middle of the night as a punishment. The next day, Matron put me in the infirmary and a couple of days later I landed up in hospital for an extended stay of at least six weeks suffering from nephritis, which is a serious kidney infection that can occur if a cold is not dealt with properly. Due to a long convalescence, I missed the remainder of the first year and did not return until September 1960.
What did a Barrow Hills education do for me? The short answer is that it prepared me for entrance to Public School (which is why these schools are called preparatory schools of course). In practice, nearly every boy went on to St. George’s. In any event the type of education, along with the general boarding environment, certainly set one apart from the hoi polloi. I don’t think there was much Latin or Catechism taught in the general run of state primary schools, and probably not much corporal punishment either. I was caned three times in my first term.
After science A-Levels at St. George’s, I undertook a four-year honours degree in electrical and electronic engineering at one of the new polytechnics just then being established. I subsequently qualified as a Chartered Engineer.
This was to prepare me for a career in industry as a professional engineer. Ironically, the early seventies saw the end of the post-war boom and the start of the long economic decline that resulted in the collapse of most of the country’s industrial base, and from 1990 I worked for myself, running a small company representing several Silicon Valley based software suppliers in the UK and Europe.