BRIGG GRAMMAR SCHOOL TEACHER PLANNED TO TAKE HIS VIOLIN TO WAR

Cliff Turner, 91, now living in New Zealand, continued his memories of growing up in Brigg. Today he remembers some of the teachers at Brigg Grammar School.


Geography was the province of Mr Gregory, the only teacher at Brigg Grammar School not in possession of a university degree. His nick-name was Prague; the story was that one day a pupil pronounced "Prague" to rhyme with "vague" and Gregory was reputed to have roared "Not Prague, boy, Praaarg!"
I did not like G W Cabourne, the art master. Our first lesson with him was devoted to telling the scholarship boys how lucky we were to be at Brigg Grammar School and that we how we must conduct ourselves accordingly.
John Rhodes, a Brigg scholarship boy, started at the school in 1941, a few months after I had left. In 2007 he published a book “A Yeller-Belly Boyhood”. In the book he made it clear that he shared my opinion.
My first chemistry teacher was Mr Dodd. In the first term we did not have full-scale exams but tests. Mr Dodd gave back our marked papers in reverse order of the number of marks obtained; when he had only one left he said "And this is the boss of you all" and handed me my answer sheet. During the war I was returning from leave when I was in the Navy and found myself standing next to him in the corridor of a crowded railway train. He was then a major in the Royal Army Ordnance Corps but was quite happy to talk to a lowly naval rating.
Mr Dodd was replaced by a man called Butters. Next came Yorkshireman Mr John Bradley. One thing I learned from him was that the stability of metallic compounds is inversely proportional to the specific gravity of the metal involved. Potassium and sodium are very light metals and compounds of those metals are so stable that the metals were not isolated until Humphry Davy did it by using electrolysis early in the 19th century. By contrast, compounds of mercury are so unstable that a little heat from a Bunsen burner will liberate liquid mercury from its ores; gold, an even heavier metal, can be found in the earth in its elemental form.
Mr Bradley made frequent mention of the Swedish chemist Jöns Jakob Berzelius, whose name is pronounced as Bertselius. This became Mr Bradley's nickname which soon became abbreviated to Bert. 
Bert never married; he lived on Bigby Road with his mother and sister and could be seen walking to school, hands deep in his pockets and trousers at half-mast. During one bitter winter he was never seen in an overcoat until he appeared in one on the first day of the thaw. 
Bert played the violin and became choir master and organist in succession to Dr Rowbottom but by that time I was no longer in the choir. At about the end of 1940 he was conscripted into the air force as an officer in the educational field; I remember him telling me that he intended taking his violin with him.

MORE MEMORIES TO COME FROM CLIFF ON BRIGG BLOG