Memory Lane 26

September 2025. "The History Project" remembered by John Cannon

The back wall of the History Room – upstairs at the back overlooking the roof of the staff  room – was covered with one foot square, white, fibre, peg-board tiles. These tiles could take drawing pins easily and were, no doubt, installed in the enthusiastic, but mistaken, expectation that boys would put up History Projects: learned treatises on the Great Reform Act; works of art depicting the Wars of the Roses; or brass rubbings of St Nicholas.

In 1966/67 the History Room was the form room for Form 4b. The form teacher being the Head of History: Chris Everest. It was therefore his room. Form 4b were required to keep the room tidy, put chairs on desks to help the cleaners and not spoil its walls. I sat at the back. In idle moments, of which there were many, I would contemplate peg holes. In bored  moments, of which there were even more, I would pick at the edge of tiles. I found, with careful easing, a tile could be removed. It could also be put back without adhesive. Even a discerning observer, such as the Head of History, could not tell.

Adjoining tiles could be treated in the same way. The friction held patch of tiles grew. My idle and bored moments got transformed. I had a project. In quiet moments I slipped into the History Room. All the tiles from the floor to the height I could reach by standing on a desk, became self-supporting.

Chris Everest’s style of teaching was to walk around the History Room and lecture us on such topics as Pitt the Younger’s abolition of the Clerkship of the Pells. At the back of the room, he might pause his patrol and stare at the peg-board wall for inspiration. Not long 

after the completion of my project, on one of these pauses, something on the wall caught his eye. A bulge perhaps, a tile slightly out of alignment perhaps, a paper wedge perhaps. While still in full flight on the Corn Laws Chris Everest picked at what he saw. A tile fell, another tile fell and another and another....

Form 4b exclaimed at the white avalanche that Chris Everest had caused. No fingers were pointed at the boys and especially not at goody two shoes Cannon – homework monitor, future Prefect and top of the form who would not even dare to break the school rule: Boys must never stand on a desk.

John Cannon 1963 – 1970

(first published September 2025 in Newsletter 9)