We had a school song at my Northampton School, a minor-public/local‚authority cooperative sort of thing founded 400 years before -- which I know becoz the song began "When Thomas Chipsey made this school in 1542": he being a Northampton [centre of the shoemaking trade to this day: Northampton Town still locally nicknamed The Cobblers] shoemaker. I was there 1941-43.

I don't think the grammar school, Hendon County, to which I came back in 1943, had one [Drift alert!: My brilliant family left London at the beginning of the War; came back just in time for the Blitz; went away again, & got back just in time for the flying bombs & rockets, V1 & V2!]; tho it had a potentially distinguished VIth form my year, in which were the future Rabbi Lionel Blue, Radio 4 'Thought For The Day' stalwart, Frank Williams, future Vicar of Dad's Army (wot u might call ecumenical!), & Peter Maitlis, now Emeritus Prof of Organic Chemistry at Sheffield and father of the BBC newsreader Emily. Not bad, eh, for an ordinary local-authority grammar school?

...To carry the drift even further: a coincidence is that Frank played the lead in school play of our last year The Ghost Train, which had been written some years before by Arnold Ridley, who would later become a colleague-actor of his in Dad's Army. I played an amorous young newly-wed, I remember: a part I went for, tho not the best support role, coz it meant I got to repeatedly kiss the second prettiest girl in the VIth form; a consideration at that age innit...

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