11. The Colt House 1: Colin and Wendy Griffiths
Just a word about the Colt House. Throughout my Caldecott years I supposed that, given its proximity to the horse enclosure, the name had some sort of horsey connection – so many things at Caldecott did. I now find it was the work of W. H. Colt Son & Co., longstanding specialists in timber housing. It was built in two phases – an extension was added during my Junior Study years. This meant that the driveways around the Hatch were filled with dumpers carting the earth removed for the foundations. They went at a snail’s pace when passing the front of the house, where Miss Leila and Miss Dave were wont to sit, but gathered speed round the back and sometimes chased us across the Junior Study playground.
Mr. Griffiths has enjoyed generally bad press, so I will begin, perversely, by recalling his human side. An example of the power of music to soothe the savage breast. He was a convinced lover of classical music with a large collection of records. Sometimes he would let me into his flat to explore them. He was well into composers like Bruckner and Mahler who were only just becoming fashionable and were unrepresented in the Music Room record cabinet. In this period, Caldecott bought its first stereo record player and one palmy half-term day we went up to the library and, with the speakers spread exaggeratedly across the room, played record after record. One of them was Sibelius’s Second Symphony directed by Tauno Hannikainen, a conductor whose recordings of this composer are today highly prized by connoisseurs. I remember thrilling to the snow-capped brass at the climaxes, while Mr. Griffiths paced around the room exclaiming, “To me, this man IS Sibelius!” Since the other Colt House boys had little or no time for classical music, I imagine I was the only one who knew this human side of Mr. Griffiths. Even at his best, though, one sensed the iron fist. Dared I question any of his opinions? It was like sharing a room with a tiger in an unexpectedly good mood. For he was dictatorial to the extreme.
To be fair, he inherited a difficult situation. After the initial years under Simon Rodway, which ended more or less when I arrived at Caldecott, the Colt House came first under the care of Colin Edwards*. As I was a Senior Study boy in his day, I had few direct contacts, but one of these was a little disconcerting. The Senior Study playroom had a door with a grille at the top, enabling a tallish person to see into the room. I was in the playroom on my own. An instinct made me turn to the door and I realized somebody was outside, peering through the grille. I stood staring, trying to work out who it was. The voice of Mr. Edwards then boomed through the grille: “Have you got a guilty conscience?” “No”, I stammered. “You swung round when you heard me coming”, he said. He then went away. I thought it puzzling. I had not heard him coming. He wore rubber-soled shoes that allowed him to glide silently. How long had he been looking? What did he expect to see? Why not simply come in and ask me what I was doing? I spoke of this to a few of my contemporaries, who also thought it odd. It is surely natural to swing round if you realize someone is at the door. We nicknamed him “Slinky”.
When not slinking around on rubber-soled shoes, Mr. Edwards could have a fiery temper and his rages rose clearly to the Senior Study dormitories on the top floor. We enjoyed mimicking (strictly among ourselves) his voice yelling, “Don’t talk to me like that, boy! Who the hell do you think you are?” By the way, I should make it clear that this is a quite different person from Dick Edwardes, who had charge of the Colt House much later, after I had left. I met him a few times and I think I would have enjoyed being there with him.
After Colin Edwards came Mr. and Mrs. Turner, who made non-intervention their creed and might just as well not have been there. So Mr. Griffiths, loyally backed up by his wife, found a Colt House that was an unruly, untidy free-for-all. Several of the older boys were chain smokers, in spite of severe rules, and were not to be easily deprived of their weed. Mr. Griffiths himself had been a heavy smoker and, to do him credit, he kicked the habit to face the smokers with a clean slate. The pangs of withdrawal may have exacerbated his Heathcliff-like temperament. The upshot was that, when I moved up to the Colt House he had been there a couple of years and it all ran like a well-whipped piece of clockwork. Lights were turned out when not needed, toothbrushes were lined up in their mugs, doors that might create a draught were closed, gym shoes were not put away caked in mud and desks were neat and tidy. The worst of the chain smokers had been stripped of his P.P.U. and threatened with wearing short trousers within a few months of Mr. Griffiths’s arrival. Anyone who maintained the habit took great care not to be caught. It was not easy. Ex-smokers (as I found out myself some years later) have an incredibly developed sense of smell. “You’ve been smoking, I could smell it a mile off”. “I can smell cigarettes … Unsmoked cigarettes … Next time I’ll have you all turn your pockets out”.
Mr. Griffiths’s manner and mannerisms rose to their apogee during the camping week. It was not enough for him to tell us what to do. He had to imagine all the things we might do and issue dire threats against anyone who did them.
“The farmer has lent us THIS field … THIS field, not the field over the other side of the fence, not the field the other side of the stream, and if I catch anyone …
“The loos, the lees, or whatever you call them … don’t just do it behind a tree, the loo tent is THERE” – fearsome grimace – “and I expect to find it clean and tidy … If you have to go in the night, don’t just crawl out and pee, go and do it in the proper place” – another fearsome grimace – “and don’t trip over the guy ropes as you go … if I find anyone doing it outside the tent, he’ll be cleaning the loos morning and evening for a month after we get back.”
It was an impressive performance. Gerald Moran opined that he had been “bloody funny” and proposed to tell him so. I was unconvinced. I agree that, if you wanted to make a parody of a pocket dictator throwing his weight about at a teenagers’ campsite, this is how you would do it, and you would be hard put to manage anything as funny as the real thing. But I think he meant it seriously.**
Miss Leila, James King has told us, had a maxim regarding staff and children: “Thou shalt not touch”. I shall come back to this and, as we have seen, it was widely disregarded, but apart from Miss Diana, few disregarded it so utterly as Mr. Griffiths. How did a hard-hitting, hair-pulling, army-style disciplinarian pass beneath her radar? Perhaps because, from the start, he had deviated her attention by other matters. He had been told, before taking the job, that Caldecott had a non-denominational chapel and that staff of other denominations were expected to go along with it. I do not know what message Mr. Griffiths got from the Bible, except about not sparing the rod, but he professed to be staunchly Church of England and, not finding the chapel services to his liking, pestered Miss Leila with demands that they should be changed. He did not move her, any more than Miss Potter had years before, but she was a good listener and had the humility to think about other people’s ideas. The result was that she talked religion to all and sundry for months and other things fell into second place.
I have not said anything so far about Mrs. Griffiths. She was very nice, and had the capacity to be firm by persuasion rather than bluster. If Mr. Griffiths had let her guide him, she might even have taught him how to do the job properly. His ideas about a woman’s place in the household were as Old Testament as his ideas about whacking children. He always referred to her simply as “the wife”. Once, we asked him if his wife had smoked. “No”, he said. “And I wouldn’t have married her if she did”. This from a man who, at the time of his marriage, was a 40-a-day smoker without any plans to give it up, sounded rather thick. He confessed to an ambition that his wife should be put in charge of one of the girls’ groups, so that he could get in there and lick the unruly creatures into shape. This never happened.
By the time I came to the Colt House, then, things went with a sullen routine and he had relaxed slightly. This was his last year and, once his departure was on the cards, he set about laying time bombs for the post-Griffiths era. A generalized disrespect for the evolving organizational setup appealed to our rebellious natures.
“Mr. King and I have completely different ideas. We couldn’t work together in the same department. I respect his ideas and he respects mine”. James King had just been appointed third Director***.
A little gentle undermining of his appointed successor was evidently in order. “I must say I was surprised when I heard it would be him”, he said, shaking his head sagely. “I don’t think Joe Marshall has any understanding of older teenage boys. I hope I’m wrong”. Another shake of the wise head.
Having failed to convince Miss Leila over the chapel services, he sowed a few seeds in our minds. His particular bête noire concerned the Lord’s Prayer, which was often sung in chapel. I do not remember now if it was sung only by the choir or whether we joined in. Nor do I remember how often it was spoken instead. Incidentally, I have no idea who composed the simple but effective musical setting used, and I forgot ever to ask Betty Rayment. Mr. Griffiths held that the Lord’s Prayer could only be meaningful if spoken by all of us together. That was the only way you could think about what you were saying. He had a point, except that anything repeated by rote, whether spoken or sung, risks becoming a senseless automatism. A problem to which organized religion has never found the answer.
Miss Leila’s general mastery of all things Caldecott was visibly faltering by now, but other members of staff loyally defended her. “I just couldn’t look at her”, said Mr. Griffiths after a Chapel service in which she had lost her way several times, provoking our ungallant giggles. He was unaware that “the wife” had just told us stiffly “you’ve none of you got anything to be proud of”. After a session of reading in Miss Leila’s sitting room in which a group of us had been particularly obstreperous, Miss Leila sent for Mr. Griffiths and complained bitterly about our behaviour. What had happened was that Miss Leila was reading us a novel, I think by H. E. Bates, and several times stopped in her tracks. The boy sitting next to her, Holden Blackford, saw that she was leaving bits out and said so.
Later in the evening, Mr. Griffiths, lolling on one of the beds in the dormitory while its rightful occupant shivered in his pyjamas, told us all about it. He managed a fair imitation of Miss Leila’s tone.
“.. and she said to me, ‘that Holden Blackford – ooh! he is a cheeky boy! – he said I was leaving bits out.’
“And I said to her, ‘And did you leave bits out?’
“And she said, ‘well, it had … it had something about a … a b-bosom in it”.
At next week’s reading, Miss Leila told us she would read it unexpurgated. “But I don’t want to hear any sniggering”.
Holden certainly was, according to your viewpoint, cheeky or infectiously exuberant. “English Language” was his strongest point at school and he delighted in picking up grammar mistakes in staff. I am not sure if he dared to challenge Mr. Griffiths on these grounds but Mr. Marshall was a frequent butt. A pseudo-professorial explanation would follow with the inevitable conclusion, accompanied by a characteristic bob of the head, “and you have therefore made a grammatical error”. But his most memorable phrase was when I handed him a tomato. He fingered it thoughtfully and pronounced, “Nice, firm, round and juicy. That’s how I like tits”.
Back to Mr. Griffiths. A particularly effective time-bomb was his contention that we should not just accept things because we were told to. “Always ask for a logical reason. You always have the right to a logical reason”. We hurled this at Miss Leila’s increasingly mystical head the following term, while the combined forces of Miss Leila, Miss Dave, Mr. King and Mr. Marshall did their best to make us see that, for some things, there just was no logical answer. “That was another of Mr. Griffiths’s ideas, I suppose”, said Mr. King.
More generally, he exhorted us, almost in the tone of dying wishes, to keep doors closed when they should be, to turn lights off when not needed, and to keep everything neat and tidy. “When Miss Dave shows someone round Caldecott, she takes them here because she knows this is the only part of the house where she needn’t be in fear and trembling as to what she might find”. This sounds reasonable, but the underlying malice can be grasped if we bear in mind that his appointed successor, Joe Marshall, was known to be lackadaisical over these things.
A very well planned time bomb was Peter Banks. Mr. Griffiths had enrolled the Colt House in some sort of federation of local boys’ clubs. The result was that we got a few sports fixtures – and frequent visits from Peter Banks, who led the federation. I found him perfectly friendly. You expect boys’ club leaders to have a hearty-sporty encouraging tone and he had all of that. Mr. Griffiths also knew that Mr. Marshall and Peter Banks had had a common work experience in their earlier days in Liverpool and, for reasons unknown, hated each other’s guts. How amusing, therefore, that Mr. Marshall should arrive to find a year’s subscription ready paid. “A very nice young man, Peter Banks”, he remarked morosely to no one in particular after one of Peter’s visits. The subscription was not renewed.
Miss Leila did not easily open up on members of staff, past or present, but after we had continually pressed her on the subject, she offered an illuminating comment. “Mr. Griffiths did a lot of good, but he also did a lot of harm, because he always thought he was right, and people who always think they are right always do a lot of harm”.
* He arrived in September 1963 and left in July 1964 (information from Gerald Moran).
** Thinking back, I must have had two camps with Mr. Griffiths, logically in 1966 and 1967, since I remember one in a fairly open field somewhere in Sussex and another, I suppose in the New Forest, in a clearing in the woods with a stream running nearby. The speech referred to graced the first.
*** Anointed but not yet appointed. Some speculation is inevitable in the absence of written records, but the chronology revolves around a staff meeting at which a vote of confidence in the Directors (Miss Leila, Miss Dave and, implicitly, Mr. King whose appointment was expected) was narrowly defeated. Mr. King has recalled this (in “Reflections on 31 Years”) as in 1969, not long before Miss Leila’s death, but the meeting was convened by Mr. Griffiths, who hoped to block Mr. King’s appointment and propose himself as Director. In the wake of the attempted putsch, Miss Leila said he had to go, but allowed him to remain till the end of the term to give a semblance that he was leaving for better pastures at his own volition. Mr. Griffiths left at the end of the autumn 1967 term, so the meeting was earlier that same term. The path was now clear for Mr. King’s appointment as a Co-Director. He himself recalled in 2012 (Pett Interview) that he “took over” from Miss Leila in 1967, but the process was more gradual. With Mr. King a Co-Director from late 1968, Miss Leila’s succession was formally ensured. After her partial stepping-back and subsequent death in 1969, the Co-Directors were Miss Dave and Mr. King. In the same interview, Mr. King states that he reorganized the Community in family groups immediately but again, it was more gradual. I was not directly involved since the Colt House, for logistical reasons, remained a senior boys’ unit, but I recall this as in my last year, so from the 1970-71 Academic Year.