Derby School - the Sixties Revisited
Uploader: lindosland
Original upload date: Wed, 26 Sep 2012 00:00:00 GMT
Archive date: Mon, 06 Dec 2021 01:18:59 GMT
A nostalgic look back at Derby School with some humorous but affectionate re-enactments of famous masters 'Alf' Rhodes, 'Rock' Allitt, 'Jack' Richards, 'Neddy' Nubold and 'Les' Bradley by Dave Goodw
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in (and yes, that's Kundt's Tube - look it up on Wikipedia if you've forgotten how the speed of sound is measured)! DO PLEASE LEAVE COMMENTS HERE! Quite a lot of (favourable) feedback has reached me via Facebook and friends, but it would be nice to get some 'likes' here!
Derby School was a boys-only Grammar school founded in the 12th century, which occupied the ornate St Helens House Pickford building from 1865 until 1966 (with a break during WW2) when the building was declared unsafe and left to deteriorate while a new co-educational Derby School was started in a new building, with new ways, and mostly new teachers.
To us, and doubtless many others who attended schools like Derby School (in 1960-65), in what we are now told were the 'swinging sixties', feelings about our time there are mixed, yet they are intense with an awareness that this place changed our lives. State schools like this one clung on to aspects of the old public school ethos, with terms like 'big school' and 'praeposter'. Corporal punishment and bullying went unquestioned, Latin was taught, and complete isolation from the opposite sex was taken for granted, in a general air of austerity and coldness; it was, after all, only fifteen years since the end of World War 2, though that fact certainly escaped me at the time.
We though, lived on the cusp of changing times; we had failed our eleven plus, but been given a second chance on passing the thirteen plus examination. Though not welcomed by the Headmaster, some of us found our lives changed forever by a few teachers with real passion for science in what was the age of Harold Wilson's "white heat of technology". We came from a secondary modern school (Rykneld) that emphasised wood and metalwork, with no qualifying examinations, to the challenge of passing 'O' and 'A' levels in just five years' of study. Most of us went on to University, Goodwin to study dentistry, while I studied electronics, leading to successful careers.
Technical Stuff:
Had I known where this was going I might have taken two cameras, one with a wider lens, and a tripod and Steadicam; but then I might not have captured such spontaneous and natural reactions, as we went from room to room seeing familiar sights again for the first time after almost half a century!
Shot on a Panasonic GH2 with Voigtlander Nokton 25mm f/0.95 lens using manual focus aperture and shutter speed, and a Lindos Minisonic camera-top stereo microphone with preamp and camera interface. The latter, though not always giving the separation of voice and surrounding noise that a shotgun or lapel mic could have achieved, does produce a much less coloured sound along with a wonderful stereo reproduction of the reverberant acoustics in each room, free from the characteristic chesty and slightly muffled sound of a lapel mic.