Published: 13/09/2007 00:00

C.S. Kipping - a debt owed

TONY Pointon, Emeritus Professor of Physics, University of Portsmouth, recalls in the following paragraphs a school master from the Black Country who he held in the highest esteem:

"While going through some back numbers of the Black country Bugle - we are quite civilised down here in Portsmouth - I came across an article from 29th March 2001 about the Headmaster of the Wednesbury Boys' High School, Mr. Kipping, by an old boy who somehow seemed to have lived in a world different from the one I experienced when I was there at the same time he was.

For example, he said that Mr. Kipping, who was a good chess-player, liked playing the boys many at a time because he liked beating them. Yet I remember him announcing proudly at one morning assembly that a second year boy, whose name escapes me, had beaten him the afternoon before, and earning himself a shilling in the process.

Rather than go into an argument, your readers might find it much more interesting to learn about the real character behind the fierce exterior of man, descended from a grandfather (W.H. Perkin) who was a nineteenth century millionaire at the age of thirty-six. Mr. Kipping would not have disgraced a Victorian schoolboy novel.

One wet lunch-time a group of us who were supposed to be studying in the school hall put up some indoor stumps and played cricket. Our look-out shouted "The Boss", as Mr. Kipping was called (behind his back). He looked into the hall to find us all studying hard and left. About twenty seconds later, he put his head round the door, pointed across the hall and said "You might have hidden the bowler's stump as well", and withdrew, leaving us looking at each other very sheepishly.

Even more potentially disastrous was when the fee-paying boys in form 2B (elite scholarship boys being in 2A) balanced a book on the partly closed door to catch one of their number who had gone to the loo. Getting a little excited, they attracted Mr. Kipping's attention (they were near his study) and he strode in to silence them, only to receive a blow on the shoulder from the book. The class hurriedly apologised but he ordered them into detention next afternoon. As he turned, he nearly bumped into the boy who was the intended victim. Mr. Kipping hesitated, turned round and said "Didn't realise it was not for me. Cancel the detention".

Because it was wartime when I went to Wednesbury, we were urged to bring money to school to buy war-savings (though Mr. Kipping felt "my boys" as he would call use should not be used in that way). When a boy clever at cartoons put a poster on the main notice-board of Kitchener (doing his "Your country needs you" bit) but with Mr. Kipping's fierce face, with his finger pointing straight out, and with a bubble saying "You boy! The secretary needs your savings", we all held our breath when he saw it.

It was not signed, but the handiwork was unmistakable. Mr. Kipping snorted and instructed a prefect to send "X" to his study. "X" told us all he said to him was: Give you a shilling for that horrible thing on the board when you take it down. (A shilling then was about £2 then - and a month's pocket money for some of us).

During the war, when there were no groundsmen and nothing to buy; he kept the sports facilities going himself (including four football pitches, a cricket square and two tennis courts). He cut the grass, mended goal posts, and if we boys sometimes had to muck-in it was with a will. He had bought himself a second-hand lathe and set up a workshop for turning cricket stumps and "new" handles for cricket bats, and he let us scholarship boys, who didn't have much money, turn up our own chess sets with lathe, rasp, file and chisel. (Today, he would not be allowed, but we got through unscathed, while it was he who boasted the missing end of one of his thumbs).

He had made a rotating cricket-scoreboard, the envy of other schools, and he had had a pavilion erected (I suspect with his own money). That was the scene of a real shock for us all. The sixth-formers had started a 'school" in the central-heating cokehole playing pontoon, the card game in which you canot 'stick' under 16. The leader of the "pontoon school" was the captain of Cricket, Russell (I think). Well, one Wednesday afternoon, with the whole school there, we were playing our greatest rivals, Walsall Grammar. At a critical point, Russell started off well with a rapid fifteen, when their bowler pinned him down for two overs. Everything was tense when, between the overs, "The Boss", grim faced, strode out to the top of the pavilion steps. Everybody went silent. Then that stentorian voice rang out: "Come on Russell. You know you can't stick on fifteen". And everyone knew that he knew what was going on in the coke hole.

I could go on, but I will finish with one very personal memory of this gruff exterior that appears to have taken in some people but never my classmates. Going into the fourth form, there was a choice between dropping Physics and dropping German, the subject Mr. Kipping taught. I was second in the class in German and 19th in Physics, as I never bothered with descriptive homework in order to work on subjects that needed it. So it was decided by the school that I should drop Physics. My mother, 5 feet 2 inches to Mr. Kipping's 6 feet 3 inches, a working class Labour Councillor to his upper class, went to sort things out. All he said to me afterwards was "Good mother you've got there, Pointon". And I did Physics. And he gave me, and everyone else who wanted it, a wonderful reference to get into University".