J SH 1948 - 1955
Memories of Wycliffe (1948-55)
My father (T H Angel) had been educated at Wycliffe and my brother (Robert StJ Angel) was in the Senior school having joined the school in Lampeter. When I first arrived at Ryeford Hall I was in Merton under Mr Household whose brother was the novelist Geoffrey Household (who wrote the classic thriller Rogue Male, well worth a re-read). I have very confused memories of life at Ryeford. There was the trapeze swing in the gym. Each Sunday we processed in a crocodile to the church service at King Stanley. There was the memorable cry of ‘Gangway’ from one of the maids Myfanwy as she carried trays of plum duff into the dining hall – she was inevitably known as ‘Gangway Myfanwy’. The Saturday night radio play was relayed to all the dormitories via the tannoy system. I took hot meals to an old retainer who lived in one of the houses by the canal. Hogey Carmichael’s song ‘There ain’t nobody here but us chickens’ was being incessantly played. I sneaked down to place pennies on the railway track so they were flattened by the steam trains on a couple of occasions. I got a badly cut hand after stealing Patrick Morgan’s sheath knife (no ban on carrying offensive weapons then) and in the subsequent wrestle he grabbed the handle while I held the blade! The result was a lot of blood, Ken Bird driving me to Stroud to get the cut stitched, and the following night I woke the whole school up screaming while having the most terrible nightmare. I also remember taking on the lead role in the school play at a day’s notice when the original actor was taken ill. Having to learn the lines and the stage positions. However, my acting prowess was never called upon again either in the junior school or later in the senior school, so it could not have been a memorable performance.
I moved to the Senior School in 1950, to School House where my brother was a prefect in his final year. Douglas Paine was housemaster – he had been a highly rated rugby player before he lost a leg during WII. The first terms in School house were challenging because to reach the dormitory we juniors had to pass through the dormitory of fifth formers who did not always take kindly to us passing through. I took to scouting, partly as an antidote to everyone else who joined the ATC – interestingly I think I gained more useful experience and skills as a scout than if I had joined the cadets. There were some memorable camping adventures in the Black Mountains, on the edge of the Quantocks where it rained continuously for three days, a cycling tour of North Devon during which I shared a tent with Gwyn Morgan, and finally a camping holiday in Switzerland when again we were washed out while camping by Lake Geneva. I finished up as an assistant cook and chief pan scrubber for the whole camp – invaluable techniques for my later national service adventures. Later, that trip we moved to a hostel above Martigny in the Alps where we had some spectacular hikes up through the mountains. In my final year there was a very memorable school trip to the Bernese Oberland.
Saturday evenings were often occupied with lectures. The most memorable of these was given by the theologian Canon C E Raven who described the relationship between religion and the natural world. I must admit that subsequently I have concentrated on the latter rather than the former. Some of the lectures were less inspiring for example we were treated to several travelogues by W A Sibley, the former Headmaster, who travelled the World visiting OWs and illustrated his talks with 200-300 lantern slides mainly featuring the OWs and their families. Later I took over the operation of the projector and shortened the lecture by missing out several of the slides. Another event which sticks in my memory was after the coronation the school was treated to yet another showing of the film of the coronation – we had all seen it a couple of times already. When the guards were marching to the ‘Soldiers of the Queen’ someone began to stamp their feet in time with the marching soldiers – soon the hall reverberated with stamping feet. Mr Wilden-Hart was so enraged by this insult to the Queen, he stopped the film and bellowed his condemnation of this behaviour and stormed out of the hall trying to slam the door behind him. Unfortunately, the door stuck, and the whole school exploded with laughter. Subsequently the whole school was punished – but how, I forget.
My school career was almost blighted when I took ‘O’ levels at the age of 15 – passing in all subjects including Latin, However, theses passes did not count because I was under 16. Latin O-level was a necessary qualification for Oxbridge entrance, so I re-sat the examination the next year and failed! Having to keep up Latin which I disliked intensely while starting A- levels turned out to be quite a challenge. At the third attempt I scraped a pass. My ambition was to become a biologist, unfortunately Mr Seebohm the biology master was taken ill, and there was no one to replace him, so the subjects my A-levels became maths, physics and chemistry. The headmaster George Loosley taught maths and I had no problem reaching the required standard. Colin Arthur, I found an inspirational teacher of chemistry – I remember his demonstration of the thermite reaction. The laboratory assistant used the wrong iron oxide in setting up the demonstration and when the magnesium strip was lit the set up exploded, showering us with burning chemicals. On another occasion Peter Kolker and I decided to try and make a small amount of nitrogen tri-iodide – we left the mixture in a watch glass to dry on a window ledge of the new science block only to find when we returned the watch glass had gone, but so had the windowpane. Another explosive event, but nothing like as serious, was when I tried to ferment some alcohol in my desk in a syrup tin. The pressure built up in the tin and in the middle of a class the lid blew off. The master taking the class was Mr ‘prune’ Bevan who fortunately for me, thought a window in the next classroom had been broken and went to investigate. The classroom was in one of the huts the military had put up when they occupied the school during WWII. The only heating was a coke stove in the middle of the classroom, when the weather got really cold the windows had to be kept open because of the fumes from the stove so one side was too hot and the other too cold.
We were encouraged to volunteer to work on a couple of building projects – one was the painting of the newly built pavilion; the second was preliminary work on re-building the chapel under the supervision of Mr Parrot. In doing so I acquired some ‘transferable skills’ but also learnt the limitations to my personal building skills. A more painful lesson was finding that crushing the tip of a little finger was an effective way of fainting.
I enjoyed the sport. Initially I played rugger for the 2nd XV. After one particularly frustrating away match in Bath which we had somehow managed to lose, despite being the dominant side – I was so depressed that when Colin Hiley offered me a cigarette in the bus back, I accepted. I was at the back of the bus so did not expect the smoke would reach the nose of Mr Johnstone who was sitting at the front. The punishments were that I lost my colours, but worst of all was being ruled out of the next match. It earned me the nickname of Smokey, but more beneficially I never smoked again. My favourite sport was swimming and eventually I became captain of swimming and for a time held the school’s backstroke record. But two things kept me from achieving my full potential – the coldness of the open-air pool, but worst of all was the tragic drowning of my housemaster’s delightful young son Howie in the pool.
After leaving school I was called up for national service – in the Royal Pioneer Corps. Basic training was a rude shock. At Horsley Hall near Wrexham. I shared a billet with 30 other recruits. I found I was one of only seven who could read and write! As a result, I was soon inveigled into writing letters home to wives (one of the 18 year-olds already had two children!). When asking what they wanted to say to their wives I found myself resorting to D.H. Lawrence style language to hide my personal embarrassment. After six weeks of (very) basic training I passed the WOSB selection board to go to office-cadet training at Eaton Hall, but while waiting for to attend, I and several others spent five weeks of hell at the Wrexham base being ‘trained’ by NCO’s who had failed the selection board and vented their frustration on us. Thirteen weeks of officer cadet training were almost as stressful. The infamous RSM Lynch had a dog that loved rifles – literally. On parade it became a ‘Catch 22’ situation – if you moved you put on a charge, if you did not move to dislodge the dog you were charged for having a dirty rifle. There were many adventures but the passing out celebrations were quite crazy. In the entrance hall to the main building there stood a bronze statue of a naked Adonis. On the final night had two holes drilled in it – one on the top of the head, the other on the tip of its manhood. It was then filled with water and was still peeing when we left.
I joined a company at a Royal Engineers depot near Stratford-upon-Avon and found the local vicar had been a padre at Wycliffe. After several months the company was moved to a tented camp on Salisbury Plain where it rained incessantly while we waited to embark on a troop ship to participate in Anthony Eden’s ill-fated invasion of Port Said. Soon after arriving I was put in charge of a night shift of 100 men who had to unload stores, petrol and ammunition from barges – the Egyptians had had quite ‘unreasonably’ blocked the entrance of the canal with an assortment of scuttle ships, so all the equipment had to be off-loaded into the barges out in the Mediterranean. On the second night after a midnight break, I was rousing the men to get back to work when I was shot in the leg and was carted off to a casualty clearing station. In the morning my major visited and informed it could not have been one of the men who had shot me, because when inspected their rifles too dirty to have been fired – and I had been derelict in my duty in not inspecting them. Later I heard that when the company was on parade on the dockside, French troops in Port Fuad on the other side of the canal had opened fire on them – so much for the Entente Cordial!
After National Service I spent three years reading natural science at Magdalene College Cambridge (thanks to eventually getting my Latin 0-level), finishing up specialising in zoology, as I had always wanted. After my final year I participated in an expedition spending 13 weeks camping out in tropical rain forest In British Guiana (now Guyana). On my return I took up a post of a demonstrator in the Zoology Department at Bristol doing research for a PhD on water fleas. I got involved in the newly formed diving club, members of which had the ambition to run an expedition. Given my experience of expeditions I was asked to be leader. While I accepted taking on the role of scientific leader, I considered myself too much of a diving novice to take on the responsibility of full leadership. We chose to go to Norway. It was there that I got to know the expedition’s cook Heather who 55 years ago became my wife. She had taught me the basics of diving before we left Bristol, and after the expedition did a MSc working up the results of the expedition. When we got back to Bristol the Professor called me in. Seeing as I was a ‘peripatetic’ sort of person’ would I like to participate in an international oceanographic expedition to the Indian Ocean. Although my Wycliffe education had failed to teach me the meaning of the word peripatetic, I knew this was a wonderful opportunity not to be missed. I sailed on RRS Discovery in May 1963 as a Royal Society John Murray travelling student and spent the next 16 months on and around the western Indian Ocean. I spent three months at the Fisheries laboratory in Zanzibar – where I experienced the revolution, became a refugee and experience the subsequent army mutinies. When things had quietened down, I worked in the Serengeti for several weeks helping the leader of our Guiana expedition Murray Watson who was researching the Wildebeests migrations in the Serengeti, before re-joining the ship in Aden for a further ten months at sea.
When I eventually got back to Bristol I got married, I set out to finalise my PhD research. However, such things are never simple – but when I opened the door to my Laboratory, which had not ben unlocked for 16 months, it was like entering a padded cell. The laboratory was in a flat roofed out-building, one of the other research students working on the parasites of ducks kept an experimental flock in a pen on the roof. One night several months previously the pen had flooded, and unbeknownst to everyone a liquid ‘slurry’ had cascaded down the walls of my laboratory. A 10-20cm thick layer of mould coated everything in the room – my books, notes, microscope, aquaria, etc. It took me three days to clean it all up, but I could not establish fresh cultures of my experimental animals, because they immediately refilled with new growths of mould, clogging the animals so they died. It was a disaster and I could not carry out any of new experiments needed to finish the project. I wrote a thesis on what I had achieved knowing it was doomed to failure. Fortune then smiled on me I was offered a post at the National Institute of Oceanography which had run the Indian Ocean Expedition. So, for the next 32 years I became a full-time biological oceanographer. Eventually I became head of the Department, participated in 31 research cruises (seven as principal scientist), edited a scientific journal for 25 years, spent two years as vice-President of the British Ecological Society, and became a world authority on the taxonomy of poorly known group – the planktonic ostracods. At the age of sixty the rule was I had to retire, but afterwards I had a succession of contracts – for example looking into the impact of disposing carbon dioxide in deep ocean and writing a report on the ecological health of the North Atlantic, and I maintained my interest in taxonomy through a position of research associate at the Natural History Museum and with a series of project with a Polish colleague. In the past couple of years, I have given up the taxonomic work – cataract eye operations resulted in the necessary microscope work becoming impossible – so I have now occupied my time with working with a group to develop a local Biodiversity Action Plan for our local town.
