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Happy days? Not for us all

What do Shropshire-educated celebrities remember of their school days? ROBERT BULLARD has been collating their memories of the county

School days can be among the most formative of our life. All of us have memories of our times there. Of particular teachers, hobbies and friends. So, what can Shropshire-educated celebrities still remember about their early-life experiences? (Shropshire Star – March 2005)

The household names of Michael Palin and John Peel say they endured similar pains while at Shrewsbury School. (Boys from there dominate those who replied to our requests for their experiences.)

Michael Palin remembers four happy years, although most of it involved, he wrote, “doing Latin unseens, cleaning prefects’ football boots (and) blistering my bum rowing up the Severn.”

Pains that were also experienced by John Peel, who once said, “They practically had to wake me up in the night to administer the required amount of beatings.”

But both also put their successful careers, in part at least, down to their housemasters.

John Peel’s housemaster encouraged him to do exactly as he wanted. And from the moment Peel heard Elvis Presley he knew he wanted “to play records on the radio to people who ought to share them.”

And the school’s reputation for elaborate practical jokes encouraged Michael Palin to see the funny side of things. Palin says his housemaster was “full of laughter and enabled us to cope with the awful food and waking up in winter with inches of snow on our bed.”

The former Deputy Prime Minister, Michael Heseltine is less complementary about his Shrewsbury days. “It is difficult know what went wrong”, he wrote in is autobiography, “it would have been hard for anyone to have left with a less impressive record than mine.”

Some ‘Old Salopians’ – the list includes famous comedians such as John Cleese, Willie Rushton and Richard Ingrams, and the former investigative journalist, Paul Foot – have said little about their experiences, but Palin isn’t the only one to remember the cold.

Cold

“We practically had to scrape the ice off our blankets in the morning”, said Rt Hon Lord Blaker (former Minister of State for the Armed Forces). “But after that sort of life one could bear hardship more readily.”

The celebrities had warmer memories of their leisure time, which they spent along the Severn, at cinemas and in the countryside.

“Bands used to play in the Quarry on Sundays”, says Air Marshall Sir Michael Simmons (one time ADC to The Queen). ”We used to go to The Empire cinema, in Mardol, and watch the films twice through.”

Others admit to being a little more rebellious. The actor Christopher Timothy says he spent his time hanging around the Milk Bar, playacting rock’n’roll and being Teddy Boys. “Well, a sort of rural, pale imitation.”

Above all however, and like most of us today, the celebrities associate their time in Shropshire with days spent enjoying the wonderful countryside.

And nowhere more so than the Long Mynd. This was a place where Sir Christopher Catherwood (former MEP for Cambridge and North Bedfordshire) hiked with his scout group to a valley that he still calls “the most beautiful in England”; a place that Lord Cuckney (former Chairman of Brooke Bond) marched over as part of his army training; and where the Midlands Today Newscaster, Nick Owen, can recall going for walks with his parents.

Others had less conventional memories of Shropshire – of geology, ghosts and golf.

“I was thought highly eccentric for wanting to spend Sunday afternoons bicycling out to find fossils and minerals in the old quarries of the Stiperstones or Wenlock Edge”, said the journalist and author Christopher Booker.

And ghostly experiences are still fresh in the mind of Colonel John Blashford-Snell, the Joint-founder (along with Price Charles) of Operation Raleigh. He says a vision of his grandmother made regular appearances in Onnibury, and he was once witness to ‘a wall of cold air’ at the church in Stanton Lacy, just where a Rector had been hung for murder.

Enthusiasm

Meanwhile the Marches-raised golfers, Ian Woosnam and Sandy Lyle, played some of their first golf against one another at Hawkstone.

Woosnam says he remembers Shropshire people as “always full of spirit and enthusiasm .. with a determination to achieve their goals.”

Goals that were also on the mind of the young Nick Owen, who recalls lying on his bed at night, looking out at the floodlights and longing to be on the terraces of the Gay Meadow.

“Shropshire will always hold a special place in my heart”, he told us. “And I ALWAYS feel a little lump in my throat when I return.”
 

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