Transcript Detail
| Transcript Title | Betts, Gerry (O1999.19) |
| Interviewee | Gerry Betts (GB) |
| Interviewer | Peter Ruffles (PR) |
| Date | 07/08/1999 |
| Transcriber by | Debbie Arnold |
Transcript
Hertford Oral History Group
Recording no: O1999.19
Interviewee: Gerry Betts (GB)
Date: 7th August 1999
Venue: Radlett
Interviewer: Peter Ruffles (PR)
Transcribed by: Debbie Arnold
************** = unclear recording
Italics = transcribers notes
[discussion] = untranscribed material
PR: I am in Radlett, our listeners will be surprised as nearly all our tapes are made in Hertford but I’ve come to the home of Gerry Betts, who also has another name which he will tell you about in a moment. Gerry was a pupil at Hertford Grammar School in years gone by and Gerry’s years gone by are probably longer than other peoples’ years gone by!
So we really want to talk to him about school but we will obviously ask him about his personal background which he’s just told me was from the Keysers Estate in Old Nazeing Road in Broxbourne which is probably interesting to me as a Broxbourne School teacher. I am now going to pause there and ask Gerry to give us a quick skim through life so far and then we will go back to the school days in particular. The date is Saturday 7th August about 10am.
Gerry can you give us a quick jump through your life and then we’ll go back to what you remember about the school days in particular, were you born in Broxbourne?
GB: No I was born in Cambridge, and my father was in the war but he caught Tuberculosis and he died in 1920 and my mother remarried, our next door neighbour actually, and we moved to Broxbourne in about 1923/4. In fact I kept my stepfather’s name. He was a good chap and while I was at the time of school I was known as Wild as a surname but when I joined the Territorials in 1939 I changed to my real name because that was on my birth certificate. So at school I was known as Wild and after the war I was known as Betts because that was my original proper name. A lot of the old rugby people know me as Betts. I did play for the Old Hertfordians in 1937/8 under the name of Wild so I changed over.
PR: Excellent, so I ought perhaps to say at this point, interrupting you, that I met you properly the other day at the 75th Anniversary celebrations of the Old Hertfordians Association at about 11.30 you rose to your feet in a dining hall crowded with Old Boys from all sorts of generations and you were the first speaker in a list of speakers, I think one was chosen from each decade, the President had gone on for 45 minutes, John Bennett, and the poor Head Boy who was the youngest and the last of the speakers I think it was midnight when he tried to command his audience, very hard. It was from that meeting I arranged to meet again.
So Gerry, we have you born, primary education in Nazeing, Broxbourne?
GB: The first school I went to was in Hoddesdon, it was in a temporary hut almost at the back of the main street and I used to walk quite often, my mother took me on the back of a bike to start with because it was quite a way, about two miles and thereafter we used to walk. I remember it quite well because the holly used to smell so lovely after the rain in one of the little walks that one went through. Where St Catherine’s was on that estate. After that when I was seven I went to a Preparatory School at Turnford where I was introduced to Latin as well as French so when I went to Hertford Grammar School on my tenth birthday exactly I had quite a good background before I started. I was also quite keen on boxing and cricket and actually I was one of those who boxed at Hertford Grammar School when it was still on. It was quite a support in those days. I also arranged for Hertford Grammar School to play Turnford School at cricket as I was quite keen, I remember I was got out first ball!
PR: So you were ten in 1928.
GB: Yes, 24th January 1928.
PR: So you’d arrived but not at the school we call Richard Hale School today, the 1930s buildings weren’t there, where did you go?
GB: We went to the old school which had got the two classrooms, East and West and the big hall and the rooms upstairs that we didn’t go to, we also had two rooms in Bailey Hall and also there was the Science block of course but we didn’t do much Science when you were aged ten. The masters were still there Tommy Blake, Poof Johnson, I remember him particularly as I spilt ink on his gown on the first day and he ‘poofed, poofed’ and said ‘you stupid boy’! I think that may have been the origin of that!
It was good but I was quite nervous because I had come quite a long way from Hoddesdon, well Broxbourne, I don’t know how I came the first time but I used to cycle from Keysers up on to the main road and park my bike in a little confectionery shop there and catch a bus. 310 to Hertford. [discussion] That came from Enfield or Waltham Cross, some boys were on it from Waltham Cross, Cheshunt, Wormley, I was picked up at Hoddesdon. I think the bus took about half an hour. So it was about 40/45 minutes to get to school and then a walk from the bottom then but it wasn’t so far to walk then. The buses were super, they were the open topped ones so you sat with a sort of tarpaulin thing around your neck which came off the seat in front. I remember Warboys where you could get those big gobstoppers before you departed.
PR: Now with regard to locations where was Warboys?
GB: Bull Plain, I’m pretty sure. There was another one in Fore Street as well. I remember going to Gravesons to get the uniform but that was a bit before. And Hertford I find now looks very nice, I think it has got quite a bit of charm to it, give it ten years ago it was bypassed and a bit tatty.
Transcribers Note: The Chocolate Box, Bull Plain
PR: Yes, things are improving I think in terms of coats of paint as much as anything. We ought to also say that the old school was in the churchyard, sort of, Churchfields they call it and just beyond. The buildings are called The Longmore Centre and after you left it was The Longmore School, a secondary school for Hertford children, your grammar school buildings. It is now used [I’m not sure how you’ll take this!] for very naughty and difficult children, the buildings that you once went to. They’re still in County Council education ownership. Our listeners will need to know these little things to make sure people can understand exactly what we’re talking about. The school was at one point in the middle of Minnie Fentimen’s mortuary at the end of Church Street in All Saints churchyard, when it was much younger.
GB: Yes, I remember the mortuary because we used to have a peep in there when we went backwards and forwards to Bailey Hall, I hadn’t thought of that for a few years!
PR: Yes, well the school used that building for a long time in its history and then the buildings you’ve just described. The East and West buildings, one would have been a good deal older than the other?
GB: I’m not sure about that. I’ve not been back to see them because we moved away.
PR: So Tommy Blake was there, he was Thomas A Blake, a chemistry master who taught me when I was at school.
GB: I quite liked it actually, I got a credit in Chemistry I quite enjoyed that, but as for Physics that was impossible I gave that up, I couldn’t master that one.
PR: You weren’t there for Clouting were you?
(Frank Clouting)
GB: Yes, yes, I was there for Clouting ..
PR: Oh! I thought he’d come a little later ..
GB: No, and James ..
PR: That’s only a name for me .. but Clouting taught me ..
GB: Yes, Clouting and Moxom. I went to Germany with the school after I left on a couple of occasions. A party which Moxom and, oh who was the other chap with the long flappy hair … took us and it was very good …. He did French
(Reginald Moxom)
PR: Taphouse? … Ray Vanner?
GB: Yes! Ray Vanner
PR: He didn’t have any hair when I knew him, that was a bad clue there Gerry! He actually went abroad did he?
GB: Yes, we went to the Rhineland in 1936 when the Germans had just taken a bit back from the French, there were all those Nazi type people, the brown shirts were around, that was quite interesting and we played football against the Germans. The next year we went to Munich, we went to Berchtesgaden and saw Hitler’s place, had a party. There are some chaps around now who I went with. I’ve got a photograph which is actually in the magazine.
PR: That was pretty advanced stuff wasn’t it for an ordinary state school, which it was? The contrast between the education you were receiving then, and most town’s peoples’ education was quite marked. Most people went to the secondary schools in Hertford. They certainly would never have met Latin and wouldn’t have travelled abroad probably ever in their lives. That gulf would’ve been greater then than it is now for children in schools.
GB: Yes, because we have twelve grandchildren between us from varying ages from 24 to 9 and the things they have on offer is marvellous. Quite automatic that you have all these options and all of them are in state schools, none in public schools.
PR: So, Boggy Marsh was your Head was he? Throughout all of your period or …
(William Marsh)
GB: Only for the first two years, really didn’t get to know him from the ages of 10-12, It was Bunt who was the Headmaster really, I never won a prize, at all, I came third once in Form three but that was managed by cheating I think!! I failed School Certificate first time, I got five with credits in the December which followed, that was when I was just 15 because I left school when I was 16, having had a ‘gap year’ in school which was super, it was just bossing other people about really in a bit of a leadership role in a way which was lovely. The others went on to, well there were only about 12 in the sixths, in the two sixth forms, they went on to take a Higher School Certificate which took two years and then a few of them, about 6 or 7, went on to university and that was it. (Thomas Bunt known as T.H.B.)
PR: I had a gap year in much the same way in school, much later ..
GB: It was very enjoyable, I wasn’t even Captain of Croft House, Eric Norris was, because he was a bit senior. I was friendly with him and also Freddy Lacey, he was my great pal and we did quite a few things together. They went on to Cambridge, I didn’t, and Freddy Lacey was killed in 1941. I last met him actually, the day before he went overseas, happened to be in the square at Hertford overlooking the war memorial. I had letters from him from Eritrea because I went overseas in the Indian Army and he was with Indian troops, we had a bit of a liaison, then letters failed to come. And I had friends who were actually in Serenace and they wrote and said no that was it, he was with Rodney Peel, he was older than me, he was the Croft House Captain when I first went I think. It was Marsh who introduced the House system, and Rodney Peel was the first one for it.
PR: Yes, Peel’s name is on the honours boards in the dining hall once or twice.
I was a bit startled Joan Norris, Eric Norris’s sister thinks we are related, my family and hers somewhere back in the day. She made a recording, I didn’t make that recording someone else went to talk to her and she came up with this rather startling detail! Anyway, I must try to find out exactly where, in cousins many times removed I guess, anyway that was interesting.
So there would have been quite a small staff ..
GB: 12, 14 maybe
PR: Yes that sort of number. Were you aware of the building works going on?
GB: Yes! Because we used to play some games I think on the top field, when the works were going on. Because we had to go somewhere to play games, they weren’t very vivid but I think it was there. We had to spend quite a lot of time taking the stones off the upper pitch because they levelled it, there were great big fatigue parties that I’d call it, picking up the stones so we could play on it. And I can remember when the pavilion was made too. We produced money for the pavilion but more we had to collect money for the swimming bathe but that was a bit later because I wasn’t there when it actually happened and opened.
PR: The top field was built up with the town’s refuse, with soil on top and then the stones. An artificial slope presumably taking the line of Pegs Lane.
So in due course you transferred to what must have been a very, very impressive school.
GB: Yes, it was. It didn’t seem to have any effect on you, really. I don’t remember the new school as it is now, but one thing I was quite interested in was the ATC, which was very popular in one way, people were quite keen on that, and it was very smart and very good. The drill competition which was very well fought was quite a thing, as part of the activities of the school. With that, I remember one of the white gloves ceremony, it must have been 1934, something like that, when the person who makes the speech went on about we’re going to have a war sometime and all these boys here are going to be involved in it and that didn’t go down very well with parents but it was pretty prophetic in a way.
PR: Yes, that must have been in 1930/31 …
GB: Yes, it must have been quite early as I left in 1934. The rather sad fact something like six of our form of 30 were killed quite early on, mainly Air Force people. And on the memorial list I suppose I know about a third, if not more, who I actually knew reasonably well. And I remember actually meeting John Abbey in Peshawar just before he went off to Burma, he didn’t come back. Another interesting fact was when I went to India in 1941 we got off the boat at Bombay and I went to a unit actually in Poona (now Pune). We arrived there in the middle of the night and the first person I met was Dick Pocket who used to live [discussion] in Briscoe Road, I’ve seen him once since at an old boys dinner.
PR: Well, let’s stick with people because they’re always interesting. What about the Turnbulls, were either of the Turnbull brothers your contemporaries? One would have been older than you, I think, Phillip. Do you remember Anthony Turnbull?
GB: Not really, not particularly. Rumbles I knew, because after I left school we used to play [discussion] cards together. I used to play quite a bit with Eric Norris, Rumble, John Murray and Freddy Lacey, they were all school friends at that time. But anyway, carry on with other names ..
PR: Hipgrave and people like that ..
GB: Hipgrave was older than me, he was quite prominent in Crofts Sports things, he was also a Chartered Surveyor, which I was too.
PR: I remember your house, you mentioned Croft, it was quite significant was it in your life?
GB: We were never very good, we never won the Cock House, that was always Cooper as far as I remember and it was before Hale House came into operation.
PR: Yes I was Hale House, Hale Captain later, Taphouse was my House Master, in my day Tommy Blake was the Croft House Master.
GB: Yes he was. But Taphouse, I didn’t get on with Latin, so I didn’t really get on with him!
PR: Fred Harvey of course …
GB: Oh yes Fred Harvey.
I must say I enjoyed school, although I didn’t win any prizes I was all right, I kept up well with the sort of average lot and it wasn’t a bind.
PR: You got more sports presumably as time went on did you?
GB: I used to play in the Colts Cricket for the first two years and I was in the Second, never the First, and Rugby, I would’ve got into the Rugby Firsts but I broke a collar bone before the last term so that didn’t happen. I never could run, I used to hate those Cross Countries, I used to come about 52nd out of 104 you know!
PR: So respectable but not good!
GB: Aww, terrible that was, I never won any races, no! But I was quite keen and I like competition.
PR: Who was running the cadet force at the time?
GB: Captain Holton, then Fred Harvey and Sergeant Major Inman.
I remember we went on a couple of ATC camps, one was Tweezle Down and I thought it was super really, I was always impressed by the bands of some of the public schools and I always felt we were a bit inferior as we didn’t have a band that could play. But they were good occasions and I remember coming back from those absolutely wacked out! Slept for ages when we arrived back. I also remember, something that stuck in my mind, you could get slices of melon for thr’pence. I didn’t drink beer in those days, or even thought of it.
(Albert “Guns” Holton)
PR: So the school was really being modelled on public school lines.
GB: Yes, yes it was.
PR: With inspirations and whatever but you noticed a touch of the inferiors, I think the core did actually get a band later.
GB: They may even have had one then but it didn’t go to band competitions. It was the time they used to have the Aldershot Tattoo every year and my parents used to go, I never went actually, they didn’t go because of me, it was the kind of thing that happened in those days.
PR: We talked to Sergeant Major’s Inman’s widow when she was 101, a few years ago, I think she was 102 when she died. She was well known in Hertford of course because she had been a Hertford girl. She was able to tell me about memories of walking around in the Folly area of Hertford when she was a five year old, at the end of Bull Plain there was a housing development there, so her memories were 95 years old! She could describe the wallpaper in one or two houses, or thought she could! But her husband was quite a figure in the school wasn’t he?
GB: Oh yes! He was a good disciplinarian, if he thought anything was going wrong or a bit of misbehaviour he was on to it.
PR: Yet he was the Caretaker.
GB: Yes. We used to go to Port Vale to do art in some lady’s house, that was in the very early times
PR: Presumably this was before you moved up to, when the facilities weren’t as ..
GB: I don’t think we did art, oh we did art there with Sid Palmer and I still can’t cut a piece of wood straight, as far as I was concerned I was a complete failure on that lark, couldn’t do woodwork.
PR: Do you blame Sid for that?
GB: No, it’s quite extraordinary because one side of my family are all carpenters, still are in Suffolk, and both my boys are marvellous handiwork people and I haven’t got a clue!
PR: Curious you should say that because I wondered how much I wanted to blame Sid at all because one Great Uncle was a Foreman at Ginns and they were all very practical on one side of the family but I cut my toast this morning on a bread board at home that I made under Sid Palmer, it’s shaped like a distorted coffin lid, it’s a bit rough!
GB: I didn’t even enjoy it, it just wasn’t my style of things ..
PR: I really wanted it to be right, I even remember going for extra time after school that he would supervise, Ray Vanner was in the woodwork shops down on the other side of the school as you face it, having a coffee or something and they were both laughing at my efforts! In a nice way but I remember not being encouraged by that attitude to my attempts. He was a good chap, I got on very well with him well as a friend. He moved once from the Ware Road end of town to Hertingfordbury village, they were having a bungalow built, I went out to help him clear the garden getting briar stocks out with him at weekends, so we got on perfectly well but I was never any good at the thing he was trying to teach me! But better at other things.
So your journey was always by bus was it?
GB: Nope. We had a period by train, we went by train for quite a while. There was quite a lot of larking about and actually on one occasion, not on our train, but one of the boys had his head out when it hit a bridge! I can’t remember his name now but I remember that was quite a nasty thing.
PR: Was that a fatality?
GB: No it wasn’t actually.
We also had alternative methods of buses, a private company as well we sometimes went on but it varied between each term. But I did use to go on a bike, I think I mentioned this earlier, which I quite enjoyed because you could get down to Hartham when you were doing the swimming thing, rather than having to rush down madly, this was from the new school, you had to get down to Hartham have a swim and get back in a period. Well that was a hell of a sweat!
PR: Was a period 40 minutes then?
GB: Yes, yes, so I would go on a bike quite often. We used to hang on the back of buses or lorries, you could put your hand on it and get a jolly good ride that way. It only took half an hour from home, it was quicker than doing the bus trip.
PR: Hertford Heath way presumably?
GB: Yes, it would vary, sometimes from Hertford Heath and sometimes from the Amwell Crossroads and turn left, Gallows Hill, that way, that was quite fun that. And I did that when I went to Ginn & Sons later, I’d quite often go by bike, that was ok. Prompt me on something else.
PR: There are endless prompts! But we ought to move on to a little bit more of your life, although the school was the central thing which we’ve done pretty well. So after school you went to work at Richard Ginns & Sons ..
GB: Yes for three months, I was going to do Quantity Surveying but the Institute said you’ve got to be in a proper firm, you can’t do it through a builder. So I then got a chance of going to, not as an Article Clerk, but going from five bob a week to a firm in London, which meant I got a base, but I swapped over from Quantity Surveying to Valuation Surveying, Quantity Surveying was too detailed you needed to know how many bricks there were and so many bits of wood and I never got it right! Whereas Valuation Surveying is a matter of opinion!
So I swapped over and stayed with this firm for a couple of years, I did my course by correspondence in those days and I did College Estate Management and there I did win a prize in the end for Valuations, I took the first part in the first year the second part in the second year and the final after two years so I passed all my exams by the time I was 21, and was elected in October that year to be a Chartered Surveyor. I had in mind when I when I left school that I was going to do these exams and get them over with and I did but the trouble was it was 1939 when I took the finals and that was it of course by that time I joined the Territorials and I was called up but at least I’d done it all so I didn’t officially need to do anything when I came back, except to refresh. I had seven years in the army on that. But working in the evenings doing a correspondence course it wasn’t too much of a bind, in a way.
PR: And were you based then still in Old Nazeing Road?
GB: Yup. My parents moved in 1939 because my grandmother died in ’38 and left a certain amount of money so my parents decided to move and they went to Harpenden where I was when the war started, although I wasn’t because I was called up just before they moved.
I became a Christian when I was quite young, I was 15 or 16 which was due to a cousin of mine who was at Cambridge and I went on a holiday thing that was a Christian orientated thing which took me off on that. I was interested in the Youth Club at Broxbourne which I was part of and went to various youth things and youth holidays and eventually became a Lay Reader, that was quite later and I’ve been a Lay Reader for forty years now. I do take church services, I took a funeral the other day of my daughter’s father in law up in Sheffield. I have been quite a committed Christian for many years, it’s been quite a part of my attitude to life really. That started when I left school in Hertford, I had taken one or two books, we didn’t have to hand them all in, and I remember that I felt constrained at one time and did in fact write to the Headmaster and sent the books back, which may seem a bit holier than thou but it was a thing I did.
PR: Yes, moved to do.
GB: Yes, so when I left school I joined Upper Clapton Rugby Club with people like Dick Crook and the Lees in the early days and then we came back and joined the Old Hertfordians Rugby Club for the 1938/39 season. 1945 when I came back I put an advert in the Herts Mercury saying anyone interested in reforming the rugby club come and join the meeting I’ve set up at the King William IV in Hoddesdon and we’ll see what we can do. And twelve people came, I think it was, and we had two pound and eight and four pence or something like that left in the kitty and we re-started the Old Boys rugby club.
PR: Gosh, I didn’t know, so you were instrumental in the kick off of the ..
GB: Yes, well one of them anyway ..
PR: …. what was going to be a very big and important part of the sporting social life of the area.
GB: We moved to here, Radlett, not this house, in 1951 when my job changed and it was better to be here, so we left Hoddesdon although going back a bit, when I got married in 1947/8 we eventually bought a house in Brocket Road which in due course we sold to A B Lovett when we moved over here, yes he bought the house .. We had two children there and had a third one here. My wife died in 1981, Muriel’s died a couple of years before, and we both knew families here and we married about a year later. We have five children each and twelve grandchildren spread around the place!
PR: I was on the Old Hertfordian’s Committee as Head Boy I think, I don’t know if it was an automatic thing, with Cherub Lovett and Tubby Platt, was he …
GB: Yes he was of my ilk
PR: Is he still alive?
GB: No he died. He was Treasurer for ages.
PR: He was a bit pernickety on the details. We couldn’t stray very far from what Tubby said. His sister Dorothy Platt, well Dorothy Austin, has also made a tape so you’re entering into some quite illustrious company here, with Joan Norris and Dorothy Austin!
GB: When we first came here I was on the Committee of the Rugby Club, I was team secretary immediately after the war when t was setting it up and I used to continue to go back from here, Radlett, to Committee meetings, I used to go once a week! I used to go through Cuffley way quite often because we had it in Broxbourne, that continued on for quite a while.
PR: People like George Scarborough-Taylor and Arthur Bacon ..
GB: Well I became a Surveyor, when was it, in 37/38 time and you had to do a certain survey of a twenty acre area with fields and hills and things for part of the examination. Don Lee helped me with that and when I passed the thing, later on I was the one who helped George Scarborough-Taylor do his. Because he is a Chartered Surveyor, followed the next one on as a sequence of Chartered Surveyors ..
PR: Yes. There is a Surveyor / Builder type of tone to much of the OH isn’t there?
GB: Seems to be yes ..
PR: With the Crooks and Arthur Bacon had his own company for a while as well as property in the town.
GB: He did well didn’t he? I remember talking about a house he was converting over in Hatfield some time, I’ve known him for ages. Charlie Burgess was the one other person I meant to mention, he was on the trips, so was Arthur Bacon I think, when we went to Germany.
PR: Yes, I’m amazed by that, I just assumed that those things came in the late 50s or 60s but you were doing them in the 30s …
GB: And Ian Kennedy I was friendly with ..
PR: Well, I’m now teaching his grandsons, I taught his son John, his widow lives just across the road from school. The school is built on the Wormley Broxbourne boundary where the New River crosses so there’s been a long link there with the Kennedys ..
GB: A bit of a shock when he died ..
PR: Yes, yes he appeared perfectly fit.
So your church, I could see a spire as I drove towards you and that’s been your base since you’ve been here has it?
GB: Yes, it has. It’s doing really well, we have 160 children in the Sunday School at the moment. We have Alpha Courses, you may not know about those, and we get new people in each week. The PCC which I’m not on now, I was on it for forty odd years actually, anyway the PCC has now decided its going to re-build the church hall and the estimated cost is one million which we got a bit upset about of course. Radlett is an area of a lot of people who are fairly high flyers, they have children who go to school and things, but there is money around. It is a good place to stay, when I retired in ’81 we decided to stay on having a bit of a thought about moving away but so many people stay on here, I belong to Probus, do you know anything about Probus? There’s eighty odd people on that and there’s a woman’s Probus as well, so a lot goes on for the social life here so people stay.
PR: So, the Alpha courses are introducing people into the congregation?
GB: They are, they’re changing peoples’ lives, we belong to a house group which followed on from an Alpha group because we couldn’t leave it, we formed a bond amongst twelve people that we didn’t want to give up so we meet once a fortnight. We’re studying one of the Gospels at the moment, it forms a bond of Christian people who are seeking to do the same sort of thing and its good. Radlett has a large Jewish influx of people, there are now two synagogues, so the proportion of Christians if you like have become in an age when the Christian population tends to decrease here it seems to be the other way around.
PR: Yes, it is at St Andrews, you remember All Saints in Hertford which is a friendly rival but St Andrews, my church, has been running Alpha courses for some while, this is the second phase, and I think we’re finding they’re having a similar effect, the church is very busy ..
GB: We’ve been going about three years now, doing three a year but this year we’re only doing two. It’s interesting we went through pretty much the whole of the congregation, except a very few who didn’t take part but now last year there’s been people who are completely outside and people from all walks of life so it has made a lot of difference.
PR: We’ve come to the end of our tape now ..
GB: Yes, we can have a cup of tea now!
It’s interesting, talking about St Andrews, when I was at school early on I used to go to peoples’ houses for lunch and I went to a boy who lived opposite St Andrews school, Blackford.
Peter Ruffles Note: Blackford, St Andrew Street, opposite the church, then 6 North Road. Spaniel in Mrs B’s basket between the handle bars
PR: Oh yes, he lived in North Crescent when I knew them ..
End of recording