New Guv's Test and Random Recollections

Gerald Wilson (M 1962) sent an email with some more memories of the New Guv's Test, as follows. Note his last paragraph about the memorial service at the National Memorial Arboretum on 7th May. If you can come then do be in touch with the Society. I'll write a note about it maybe tomorrow, but you can follow the tag on the bottom of this post to earlier posts about the NMA.

Gerald writes:

Your blog item on graces struck a chord.  I was asked to say grace for my wife's aunt's 90th birthday a couple of weeks ago.  I decided against the well remembered Latin grace from school and went for the more familiar English translation.  The Haileybury version was somewhat shorter than the one trotted out from memory by Sir Richard at the Foundress' Feast last week.

 

Looking back at the blog items about New Guv Tests I wonder whether beaks are "ticked" any more (a sort of diminutive Hitlergruess!)  Other questions I remember from the New Guvs test were on house colours, heads of houses, housemasters and beak's nicknames.  I remember Hiker (WG) Thompson, Blimp (BG Wennink), "Dick" Richards, "Pussy (EW) Williams, "Dangers" Daltry (pronounced with a hard G), "Bogue" Manning (apparently bogus was a favourite word), "Hanc" Nurden (Latin & Greek beak), Harry Hotplate (Hargreaves, chemistry beak), Herr Mueller (Mr Miller, who may have had a slight speech defect and sounded a bit German), RJ (for Mr Rhodes-James, also occasionally Rhodeo-Joe but not, I was told, in his house Melvill). 

The Boot?

 

Of course there was also the Boot for the Master, which was originally the nickname for Canon Bonhote.  Imogen Thomas's book records this as a corruption of his surname, though it was always said amongst the boys that it related to a predilection for corporal punishment.  The nickname was transferred to his successor Christopher Smith, who I experienced for 12 months.  Though a distant figure I remember him with affection and respect.  He knew the name of every single boy in the school and their parents.  My parents & I had met him once when I sat the scholarship at Haileybury in November 1961.  On entering Quad in September 1962 he instantly  greeted us by name.  When William Stewart became Master in 1963 he was known as "The Boot", though due to his loud voice and custom of addressing any boy within 50 yards (a stark contract to his predecessor's unassuming manner) "The Boot" was often transmuted into "The Boom". 

 

I wonder if you will be attending the Haileybury memorial service at the National Arboretum on 7th May.  I am about to put in a late booking.  I haven't been to the National Arboretum yet, but my first alma mater was St Christopher's School in Alrewas (long since closed, but the buildings were still there when I visited 10-15 years ago) so it seems an appropriate opportunity.

 

Master

The answer to yesterday's question was that there is only one Master - the rest are Beaks. Today however, there is one Master and the rest are Teachers. Beak is no longer used. I discovered this a couple of years ago when I used the term in a sermon and was quietly told afterwards by the chaplain that I was showing myself to be deeply out of touch at just the point at which I thought I was being relevant. Another example of the decline of slang in the modern school world about which I have blogged in the past.

Part of it may be that the staff is now, as is to be expected in a coeducational school, about half women, and maybe Beak seems a bit masculine. When we were in the process of appointing the new Master, there was some discussion in the interview panel about what Council would call the post should the successful candidate be a woman. It was pointed out that Cambridge Professor Sandra Dawson was until recently 'Master' of my other alma mater, Sidney Sussex, and that the name need not necessarily change.


Gerald Wilson, who gave me the question about Master(s) writes: "just after Christmas I reviewed a book on Amazon about the post-war aircraft industry.  Before doing so, I perused the other reviews and saw one from someone who recalled a lesson at school where everyone's attention was drawn from the "beak" droning on about Caesar's Gallic Wars to watch the latest fighter jet passing the window.  I e-mailed him to enquire whether by any chance he had been to Haileybury and it turned out he was in my house, Melvill, a year after I left."

Narbs

Did you have lots to eat over the holiday? I learnt a new Haileybury word for good food: Narbs. My spy in the Removes was unaware that it was not current thirty years ago. 

"Good narbs" is a good nosh. "Got any narbs?' asks whether you have any tuck (a word which is still current). 

Do you know when narbs was coined?

Network Aware Resource Broker

As to the etymology, there are various possibilities. 

NARB is an acronym for Night/Day Angle Rate Bombing System or for "Network aware resource broker." I am not sure what that mans but there is an explanation here, which I have not tried to fathom. Staying in the world of IT, Narbs is also a term meaning 'narrative bits,' units of information used to build a presence on a social network site. See here. There is someone with a twitter account who is @narbs.

Narb is also an online art catalogue for which you can get an app for your iphone. 

Care might be needed as narb seems to be a 'street word.' It has two definitions here - warning, one of them is a bit rude, and the singular (a narb) has nothing to do with food and cannot be defined on a family blog. 

None of this seems to have anything to do with food, and is all narb and not narbs. Help us out anyone?

Where is Bobs?

It was the end of term today and I have made the journey yet again up the A10. I was late because of the traffic. My spy in Lawrence told me about a bit of nomenclature I did not know. "I was waiting for you at Bobs."

Given what seems the inexorable decline of Haileybury slang I was quite pleased to hear that new words are developing after all.

Where is Bobs? Scroll down for the answer.

Not sure whether Bobs should have an apostrophe… 

Bobs "Back of Big School."

Toko

The internet is full of message boards on which weird and wonderful knowledge is shared. This is not new. A very odd nineteenth century journal which you can read here for free on line, and which is still published is called "Notes and Queries." Learned men send in questions and answers for what seems simple enjoyment of the odd and and quizzical. Its 1895 edition mentions a Haileybury slang word of which I had never heard before. On Page 14 the question is posed by Edward Belben (C 1884) who seems to be replying to an earlier comment by one M R Lloyd. On Page 98 it is answered.

" Toko " was a very general slang word at Haileybury ten years ago, and is probably so still. M R. LLOYD need not have gone back " at least sixty years " to find its use among the vulgar, including schoolboys." Why " including " ? It may be general in other public schools. Can any of your correspondents record it ? 

The correspondence is picked up with the explanation as follows:

In D. C. T.'s note on this subject a most amusing blunder is made in deriving toko from Gr. TOKOS. The word is really the imperative of the Hindi word tokna, to hammer; and to " give toko to " means to give a sound hammering or drubing to. The word was no doubt brought to England from the East by our soldiers and sailors who had 
served there. MELANCTHON MADVIG. 

It is unsurprising that a Haileybury slang word should be derived from Hindi. The signature on this entry shows that the business of odd pseudonyms for message boards is by no means something that came in with the internnet. 

Maths in Education or When does 6 = 13?

Just back from a meeting of the Education Committee of the Haileybury Council. Educationalists from other places and working in both a Haileybury and a wider context illustrate perfectly the point I made a day or two ago about the decline of slang and local names for things. We can't just use the Haileybury terminology if we wish to be understood and to be able to use information from the wider world of education.

As many will know school years are now counted from one to twelve. The first year with a number is the first year of compulsory education, so Nursery (the year children are 3) and Reception (when they turn 4) are followed by Year 1, Year 2 and so on.

For Haileybury this means that in the Education Committee we have to be able to count, and we do maths in a very special way. In the rest of the world Removes are Year 9. This means that the Fifth is in fact 11 and that Six therefore equals 13.

QED

Translation

"All striders must be checked" is American English for

"You must leave your push chair at the desk"

ie don't push your child's pram round the place but check it in.

Translation Please

Translate from American into English:

"All striders must be checked." [Answer tomorrow.]

Words words words Hamlet 2:2

There has been a correspondence in the papers about slang and bad English and I caught the discussion getting into Any Answers on the wireless in the car on the way to collect boys from school on Saturday. Haileybury slang seems to change all the time. The Grubber is still current. The San is now officially the "Health Centre" but generally called the San among the young. Chits are still given by San and Bookroom. But groize is no longer served in the dining hall. I am told that word for butter was current only in some Houses anyway. We used to 'keep chips' at the door of DC or dormitory - other schools called that 'keeping cave' - meaning a lookout. Oips, as I have noted before is now defunct. But what of other words?

The great compiler of English slang was Eric Partridge. His Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English has recently been updated. I am the happy owner of a little book by Morris Marples called University Slang. I have never been able to find the companion volume of Public School Slang, but maybe Amazon - which has taken so much of the fun out of scouring second hand bookshops - will help. I was sure that University Slang had a mention of Haileybury but I cannot find it now. Marples, writing in 1950 notes that transport and communications mean that 'the days when schools, colleges and universities could develop a peculiar speech almost in isolation' were coming to an end. But he is no less right to observe that any group will develop their 'own distinctive vocabularies… tending to hold the group together and by emphasizing its individuality.'

So - what words do you use? And can you work out my translation test?

(h)oips

Greek is now very strong at Haileybury - last year we had something extraordinary like a third of all A Level Greek entries in the country. But how many members of the Haileybury community now remember (h)oips? It's Greek, and I can't work out how to get Blogger to let me type in Greek letters (answers in the comments please)*. It was the name for the junior pitch on XX Acre, now buried somewhere under the Sports Hall I suppose.

I had forgotten the name until I  came across it while leafing through RL Ashcroft's Random Recollections of Haileybury (more about that extraordinary volume another time). It is one of those bits of school slang which used to form a separate kind of language but have now largely passed into desuetude. (Words like groize and terms such as New Guv'nor also seem to have gone now.) I'm not now sure, but I think it was pronounced without the breathing - oips, not hoips.

The derivation of (h)oips was (h)oi polloi - the many -  and so you were not part of the elite, the few, the XV or the XXX, but one of the many, playing on the junior pitch. There is an explanation - which makes reference to the Haileybury usage here.
Strange in a way that in our egalitarian days the first team should still have on Terrace its dedicated pitch with its special name but the poor old (h)oi polloi just play any old where.


Update
Carole Gandon, Head of Classics, writes to correct my hyperbole - to have a third of the entries we would need the whole VI to take Greek but, she says: we do more than keep our end up Greek wise and our numbers would compare favourably with most, other than the Classical powerhouses of the likes of Winchester.