Mike Coley (Ch 57-64) recalls King's being his home
King's School, Worcester – my home
King's School, Worcester is now a co-educational day school. This is in stark contrast to the situation when I arrived just over 50 years ago.
In 1957 there were about 250 boarders at King's, divided into four senior boarding houses, School, Castle, Hostel and Choir, and the junior boarding house, St Alban's. It's only in recent years that Ihave discovered that this had been the case for only a short time, as any history of the school in the immediate post war years will show. After moving from place to place in my life I have concluded that we usually assume when we arrive at a new place that what we find is the way things have always been, because for us that is the case. But it may well be a wrong assumption.
The 1950s were the time of the last vestiges of empire, and I was part of that. By the time Icame to King's, on 25 September 1957 at the age of 11, I had lived half my life in England; the other half had been spent in Germany and Singapore, as my father was a serving RAF officer. When I arrived at King's my parents and two younger brothers were about to set off on the family's latest journey, to Hong Kong, where they had been posted for three years.
It might now seem cruel to condemn an 11 year old to seeing his family only once in three years, but that was not uncommon at the time. As it happened, at about that time the British Government changed the rules from once in three years to once a year, so I was able to visit Hong Kong twice in those first three years, in July 1958 and April 1959, as my father was retiring from the RAF so the scheduled three years were cut short to two.
After returning to live in England for just over a year my parents returned to Hong Kong in early 1961, my father having failed to secure a suitable government job in London and deciding to use his RAF experience to return to the area where as a serving officer he had been in command, to the position of deputy head as a civilian. But the financial situation, the allowance that allowed him to keep his sons in boarding school in England, was unchanged so I continued on at King's unaware of the means by which I could stay. My brother John, who started at Malvern Link School and subsequently came to King's, was in a similar situation, as was the then youngest, Stephen, who followed John to Malvern Link for just over a year.
The point of all this is that from 1957 to 1964 I was effectively homeless. As I wrote in my history of my time at King's, when another boy asked me early on where my home was, I answered "here". This was before Ihad been to Hong Kong and so I had no picture in my mind of what was theoretically my home.
In the two other holidays each year I went to relatives, who were more or less willing to take me. For the first two years I went to my father's mother's house in Northfield, Birmingham, just up the Bristol Road, and after John arrived we separated at first then later went to my grandfather's home near Oswestry.
Half terms, especially in the summer term, demonstrated my situation, and that of perhaps 20 others. While most boarders returned home for a few days, those of us who had no homes to go to we were moved for two or three nights to a single dormitory in one of the boarding houses – the one I remember most vividly being School House. I have no idea why this was deemed necessary; presumably an assessed need for discipline was behind the decision.
So for seven formative years the place I identified with most was King's School, Worcester: it was effectively my home. I assume I was not the only one, but personal situations such as this weren't the stuff of the boys' day to day conversation. In fact I became so imbued in my day to day routine that I forgot to wish my brother happy birthday when he was another boy in the house. He reminded me later, with some acrimony, but it wasn't deliberate neglect, just a product of my routine.
When I visited England in 2002 and 2010, for among other things the Choir House reunion organised by Brian Smith and the relatively unsuccessful 1964 reunion in 2010, I contacted a number of my Choir House contemporaries. Sadly, their response was uniformly negative. Many of them felt they hadn't done well out of the school, though strangely most of them seemed to be coping quite adequately, as the song goes "as doctors and lawyers and such". To their questions as to why I would attend a reunion I had to explain to all of them what I'm saying now; the school was my home and despite my appalling final exam results it I have always believed it served me very well.
Finally, the school I returned to in 2002 and 2010, particularly the changes to Choir House, was a very different place from the one I left in 1964, except for one thing. The spirit of the place lives on though the current staff and pupils, the OVs, and the heritage. The buildings illustrate that heritage but with the possible exception of College Hall they are not that heritage; that is imbued by the people who have gone before and those that are at the school now.
(2011)