The title will mean little to the staff of today, only one of whom (Carolyn Nicholls) knew it as a Common Room, and she only for one term. But for me and for many others our professional home is no more. Since 1984 the staff have had a new base and, as today 44% of the 114 members are female, the prefix “Masters’” is a thing of the past.
Many readers will not need reminding of the hut on the left of the road to the North Field, the last of the huts that flanked that road in earlier years. The original Common Room was, we think, on the short corridor that leads to Hall near the North entrance. The huts started to be erected in 1916, and the masters moved to theirs by 1920 (there is a reference to bricks being put under the floor to support the weight of the billiard table!). There were no more than 20 masters then.
In 1984 the new Common Room was opened and the hut has, for most of the time since, been the Tuck Shop, known as “Gatley’s”. The photo shows the tent-like tops which cover the sitting-out area, where the old garden was. I recall playing weekly doubles on the adjacent tennis court with David Emms, Vivian Cox and Peter Carroll, but the court is long since gone.
I was based in the hut for 17 of my 29 teaching years. Teaching then was less intense, and the Common Room bar played a larger part in the scheme of things! Perhaps I shouldn’t mention that a certain Charles Kelly, who poured larger gins than anyone in my memory, once found that his bar bill exceeded his salary and he had to pay the School at the end of the month! In the sixties Arthur Germany was our quite exceptional Steward, totally one of the old school. His successor, Luigi, was much loved by all.
Apart from the bar, the Common Room had a small foyer, a dining room where bachelors had breakfast and dinner, a small TV room and a sitting room which contained a full-size billiard table until increasing numbers led to its removal. As there was little demand for tables before the halcyon days of snooker, we had to pay to have the table taken away!
David Emms’s appointment in the late ’60s of the first female teacher, Danuta Lesko (Polish, ex-prima donna Poznan Opera, taught Russian), did not go down well with the older members. The Common Room before then had been like the Long Room at Lord’s and the clubhouse at Muirfield: if a wife wanted to speak to her husband she had to knock on the door and converse in the porch! In Danuta’s case she was allowed in, but it was made clear to her at the Common Room Dinner that she would not be welcome in the bar. She defiantly remained at her table seat after others had moved on there; a few who felt embarrassed paid her visits to assuage their consciences.
Colleagues of yesteryear have provided more memories. Jared Armstrong (1953-67) writes: “At an OC Dinner the Second Master, Thomas Tucker, reminded the assembly that the existing CR hut was a ‘bum edifice’ and something should be done about it.” Doing something about it took 24 years! Jared recalls Derek Bourgeois introducing barrels of King and Barnes bitter, and also the smell of freshly baked bread “to fortify us before evening school”.
Pat Hannon (1954-63) found when he started that 20 of the staff of 28 were unmarried, so a large number enjoyed breakfasts, dinners and Sunday lunches together in the Common Room. “We were just coming out of rationing. For me, at any rate, the food was well above the standard I was used to.”
David Bird (1961-72) remembers Thomas Tucker taking sherry every Saturday morning on a horse outside the MCR at about 10 am, served on a silver tray by Arthur Germany, and the same Tucker in goal in MCR hockey matches wearing a pork pie hat and shouting “Take him out!” David adds, “At meetings of the MCR committee we drank WOTH. Wine on the house”, and recalls being “interviewed for a geography job by Laurie Tanner, sitting on the fender by a roaring fire in the billiard room”.
More reminiscences will be added when the full article, with more illustration, will appear in The Old Cranleighan.
Mike Payne (MCR, 1967-1996)
