Concordia
Merchant Taylors’ School
Class notes
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AnOMT remembers:
Taylors’ inWartime
I was at Merchant Taylors’ from September 1943 until December 1946,
a period when the height of the blitz on London was over but the V1 and V2,
(Doodlebug [Flying Bomb] and Rocket) bombardments were just beginning.
The school had moved out of London
in 1933, but to me all the buildings still
looked new and the trees lining the drive
from the main gates were still relatively
young. All the boys either walked to
school from their trains at the wooden
platformed Moor Park station or cycled
from home, as I did from my home at
Northwood, which was just across Sandy
Lodge golf course. The course itself had
been abandoned for the duration of the
war and was unkempt with long grass on
which sheep grazed and at the highest
point of which was located a sandbagged
Home Guard observation post with its
corrugated iron roof.
The 400 boys no longer had to wear
their pre-war uniform, of which I was
only aware of the summer boater no
longer being compulsory. Because of
clothes rationing, grey wool suits and
school caps were our uniform, summer
and winter. All the fit masters under the
age of 39 had been called up and were
replaced by older sta« and relatively
inexperienced young men and women,
some of whom had a little diculty in
keeping order. Another wartime change
was the disappearance of the waitresses
in the dining hall and we had to take
it in turns to serve the tables where we
sat. More to the point was the standard
of rationed food, which was mainly
reasonable in the circumstances, but
desserts were often semolina and tapioca
puddings, which did not go down too
well with the boys. In my last year when I
was a boarder in The Manor of the Rose,
we had a rota for doing the washing up
after meals and on one occasion when
food was very short we only had a slice of
marmite toast for supper. At least there
was no obesity in those years. However
the Lun did a roaring trade at breaks
with cups of tea and superb cheese
rolls or Madeira cake, so I do not ever
remember feeling really hungry.
The school scout group still
ran throughout the war and treks
through the Chilterns were a pleasant
day out. The speciality was to find
“Hogspitbottom”, which we never did.
I have only just recently found it on an
O.S. map. The greatest contrast to today
is that there was so little trac on the
roads, you could ramble down nearly
all the lanes without seeing a motor
vehicle for often over half an hour, even
on main roads. If you did see one, it was
often an army vehicle: tracked vehicles
being an exciting sight, even though
they were destroying the road surfacing.
After the war a massive programme
of road resurfacing took place using
imported American surfacing machines,
another exciting sight for a nascent civil
engineer. Scout camp was another great
activity, although this may have been
when the war had just ended. It took
place at Chenies on the banks of the,
then, perfectly clear and abundant waters
of the river Chess.
One day, as we were walking down
the drive from the Manor to school, we
saw overhead large numbers of planes
heading in a southerly direction. A
mixture of bombers and fighters, they
had three large white stripes painted
fore and aft on each wing and vertically
on the fuselage. We had heard on the 8
o’clock news that morning that reports
had come in that there was naval activity
in the mouth of the River Seine in
France. But no more details than that.
The date was June 6th 1944, D-day. As
news became more definite throughout
the day of the troop landings in
Normandy, we realised that the invasion
was underway and that maybe this was
at last something that could bring an end
to the war. Around this time, German
prisoners of war began doing farm work,
harvesting root crops, in the fields to the
east of the school and one or two of us
tried out our rudimentary German on
them. They seemed to understand us, but
we found it dicult to understand them,
possibly because they were speaking in a
dialect rather than High German.
One year later the war in Europe
did indeed end and we must have
been given a holiday, as I went up to
central London with a friend to see
the thousands of people celebrating in
Trafalgar Square. In due course the older
masters retired as those on active service
returned home. It came as a breath of
fresh air as younger men took over and
