Schooldays

Whilst at Honiton House

 MY FIRST school was a small place by the name of Honiton House that no longer exists and my second was Holy Trinity Junior in Margate and the building is now a block of flats.   I then 'graduated' to King Ethelbert's in Westgate-on-sea which was known as a 'secondary modern'. Now it is a highly regarded comprehensive school its progress due, in some part, to my departure.

I seem to remember my schooldays with vivid clarity, well most of the time anyway. There were good times and bad and I was not a terribly well behaved pupil receiving 'corporal ' punishment on at least two occasions. I was not academic and preferred practical lessons and was generally better at lessons that I enjoyed most such as English, technical drawing and science although the latter suffered as a result of my poor mathematics. I disliked and was poor at history which was presented badly I thought (by a Welshman) and nowadays this subject is shown in a far more interesting light. One memorable incident was being presented with a prize for mathematics by a very stern Mr Tuppen. I had been re-streamed after poor progress and left his 'A' class and was put down to the 'B'. Relative to the others in this stream I was a hot potato and received my prize from the very person who had put me down. I just felt a bit smug about it and he was clearly a little put out. He was a RSM in the Territorial Army and it showed.

For some reason I still have all my school reports and yes I will show them to you below together with a  letter  from the Headmaster at Holy Trinity to my mum.

The best thing about school are the long summer holidays when you are not actually there and these were inevitably spent helping out at my parent's guest house. I would wait at table and pocket the tips since there were no other staff to share them with. My mum did it all and was a powerhouse considering her small size. She would cook 3 meals a day for up to 20 guests, many of them families who would wait until my chores were done then take me down to the beach at the bottom of the road with them.  I spent so much time in the sun that I became quite blonde. I've always thought it strange that the weather was hot and sunny every day and it never seemed to rain.

My father was a bus conductor for a while and I would run down the road to meet his Number 51 bus and give him his sandwiches then wait with him whilst he ate his lunch at the end of the route in Palm Bay while I played with the ticket machine.   When my brother was born in 1956 I became quite busy with looking after him to enable the business to function. I would devise all sorts of activities to keep him occupied and one of these involved dragging him around the garden in a laundry box.  Many of the things I did to him are probably illegal now or would certainly not be permitted under health and safety laws but none of this seemed to have had any lasting effects on him although he may beg to differ.

Since I was not overenthusiastic about sport, my father had the great idea in that if I cycled to school from home and back (almost 10 miles round trip) he would pay me the bus fare to do with what I wished. This was a great incentive. I could be lazy and get the bus or active and get the money. This unwittingly sowed the seeds of capitalism, not something my father endorsed as he was more of a lefty but he did believe that everyone should work hard and reap the benefits.

My time at school was not completely wasted after I discovered a printing club in a back room of the art department at King Ethelberts. Joining this club was to lay the foundation for what I got up to later and more about where that journey took me can be found on the printing page of this site. 

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Who am I ?

For several weeks whilst at Holy Trinity Junior school and at the age of 11, nobody was sure what my name was. I mean, I knew but nobody believed me. Every time I told them I was Tony they wrote down Anthony or sometimes Antony but never Tony and to complicate matters, there was another lad in the same small school whose name was Antony Withers. He was older and taller than me and anyway, had red hair so we didn't get mixed up but it was only after writing to my mum that they discovered that I was telling the truth all the time.  Twelve days later, my brother Alan was born.  No such problems for him. Or is it Allan?

My teachers didn't appreciate the fact that I wanted to be left-handed either, forcing me to write with my right but I persisted and won the day resulting in handwriting that even a doctor would find difficult to decipher due to my left arm dragging across the wet ink from my dip-in pen nib. If I had kept some examples of these masterpieces they would be worth a fortune.