Fifty Years Ago: Tuesday, 22nd June 1976
Sedbergh School, Cumbria. Age 14 years, 9 months.
I read a bit more of New Africa first thing in the morning. I seem to have been reading quite a lot about Africa recently. Geography was one of the subjects that interested me most, and anything to do with exploration, countries and maps tended to grab my attention.
I think these were the New Africa chapters in a textbook, dealing with newly independent African nations and how they were reshaping their economies and infrastructure after colonial rule. There were major dam projects, such as the Volta River Project, new roads, new industries and attempts to create independent economic networks rather than simply exporting raw materials along colonial trade routes. It was exactly the sort of thing that interested me: countries changing before your eyes.
German: in a different classroom today for some reason. We got our test papers back. I can’t remember how I did, which probably means it wasn’t especially good or especially bad.
Branston and Davis had both been given unsatisfactory work reports, but they seemed perfectly cheerful about it. They were still avoiding blocking. That was the important thing. At Sedbergh, “blocking” meant being detained to catch up with work or, perhaps, being gated and prevented from leaving the House. Whatever form it took, avoiding it was often more important than the actual report itself.
French: taken by Skull. We all had nicknames for masters, and this one had stuck for reasons I can no longer remember. I’d somehow ended up sitting in his chair before the lesson started. Whether I genuinely thought another teacher was taking the lesson or whether I was being mischievous and testing my luck is harder to say. Looking back, I fear the latter may have been the case.
Nothing much came of it.
We continued with Chapter 14 of Le Petit Nicolas. A book about a child in a primary school in France had little relevance to a fourteen-year-old at an English boarding school. I don’t recall finding it especially engaging. If they had given me Asterix the Gaul to read in French, I suspect I would have learned far more and enjoyed it too.
Geography: I finished my essay on the Nile.
Geography essays were usually among the more interesting bits of prep because they dealt with real places rather than abstract exercises. The Nile seemed impossibly distant from Cumbria, yet somehow more vivid than much of everyday school life. The essay was almost certainly about the Aswan Dam, which featured regularly in television documentaries at the time. It represented one of those grand engineering projects that fascinated people in the 1970s: controlling floods, generating electricity, and transforming agriculture, while also provoking arguments about environmental and cultural consequences.
Break.
Physics: I spent the lesson reading the Abbott textbook ‘Basic Physics’, which is the bible for Third to Fifth years and O’Levels.
Games: swimming.
That was the highlight of the day.
The pool itself was never much to look at. It sat tucked away between Powell House and the Rifle Range. I suspect it was originally an outdoor pool in the 1940s, enclosed a decade later. It was frequently cold because heating it properly was difficult or expensive. The heating problem was not fully resolved until 2014, nearly forty years later, and even today it remains only a four-lane, twenty-five-metre pool.
I swam the 100 metres freestyle in 69.4 seconds, setting a new school record.
Afterwards, I did the 50 metres in exactly 31.00 seconds, equalling the existing school record.
I was pleased with that.
The swims were not done in competition but as part of a training session and a time trial. Looking back, I am not entirely sure how I managed those times. Only a year earlier, I had spent six months out of the water after breaking my leg badly while skiing. Swimming training at Sedbergh was virtually non-existent. Other sports were prioritised. Rugby, cricket and athletics mattered. Swimming was something that happened on the margins.
Individual Medley was a different matter.
I was third behind Branston and Wood, about four seconds adrift. My butterfly was poor and cost me dearly. That seemed to be the recurring problem. Freestyle was becoming a strength, but butterfly remained stubbornly difficult.
The simple truth is that I had never really been taught butterfly. In fact, neither Mowden nor Sedbergh had anyone with meaningful swimming qualifications. Teaching was basic,c and coaching was effectively absent. Branston had attended a preparatory school with an indoor pool and year-round swimming. At Mowden, we had only an outdoor pool, used for a few weeks each June if the weather permitted.
Even so, being among the quickest swimmers in the school was beginning to feel normal rather than exceptional.
No great fuss was made about the records. The times were recorded and placed in a folder somewhere. That was about it.
Looking back fifty years later, this entry touches on a frustration that runs through much of my school experience. I had been a young swimmer with genuine potential. Mowden had offered me a scholarship, yet would not allow me to train regularly with the local swimming club. Sedbergh then required participation in other compulsory sports. The result was that I never properly pursued any of them. I missed opportunities in swimming, rugby, athletics, cricket and running alike.
Had my parents or I understood how inadequate the provision for competitive swimming was, I would never have attended the school.
Remarkably little has changed. Half a century later, swimming still barely registers in Sedbergh’s sporting culture. Asked what sports Old Sedberghians participate in, swimming does not even appear on the list.
What strikes me most, however, is how little emotion appears in the original diary. A new school record and an equalled school record are dispatched in a handful of words, as though they happened every day.
Perhaps that was simply my diary style. Perhaps it was modesty. Perhaps it was the school’s culture, where overt pride was discouraged. Or perhaps achievements only felt meaningful when somebody else noticed them.
The fourteen-year-old records the facts and moves on.
The sixty-four-year-old can see rather more in them.
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