The Queen and I

Steve Brazier

Do you remember Miss Fenton ? She taught English and ran the junior debating society (“Do address the Chair ! ”). She wasn’t there long and left at the end of my second year in 1960. Losing her was a blow – she was young, vibrant and condoned our enthusiasm for the anarchy of Mad Magazine. The compensation was a return to Mr Steel for English the next year. He didn’t have her youth or her figure but what a wonderful bloke, what a teacher. Like her he instilled self-confidence and made me feel a little special. He was the only teacher who called boys by their first as well as their second name. He complimented me on the horror stories I was reading because they were by Edgar Allen Poe. As far as I knew, Poe was just another pulp fiction writer. I’d borrowed it from my brother because of the screaming black cat on the cover.

I was reminded of Miss Fenton and my early political awakening by a reference in a recent WMGSOPA newsletter to the incident of the bubble car in the boy’s toilets.

The story begins for me in 1960. Miss Fenton had left by Prince Andrew’s birth in September so I guess the debate she had devised for us was about the Queen’s third pregnancy. As Mr. Douel recalled when I met him again briefly many years later, I was the class atheist, ever ready to voice an opinion in his sixth-form RE debates. But in 2A, I was in a brief religious phase and was flexing my socialist and republican muscles, inherited from my mother, who was a local Councillor at the time. To me, the Queen having yet another child was a further burden on the tax-payer and a bad example in an over-populated world. I like to think that I persuaded the rest of the class to cast a vote of censure.

Hardly surprising then that two years later when the Headmaster announced that the Queen was to visit Wolverhampton, I expressed my reservations. The whole school was to spend the morning trooping dutifully up to Molineux and cheering patriotically like rent-a-crowd. I really didn’t expect to be given the morning off by refusing to go but I think the powers-that-be failed to appreciate my political stance and assumed that to be my motivation. I was pleased that a number of other pupils similarly objected. There were about fifteen of us. But while the school tolerated our refusal to go, we were to be incarcerated in Room 3 for the duration and supervised by a teacher all morning as if in detention. I later learned that Mr Douel had been a conscientious objector in the Second World War : clearly he sympathised with our protest but felt that society would not understand if we were rewarded with the morning off.

As it turned out, confinement in Room 3 wasn’t bad at all, we were left unsupervised for most of the time. We had a bit of a laugh: not least in watching the strange fancy-dress parade along Newhampton Road from the classroom window. Everyone was done up to the nines to meet the Queen. The flashy cavalry dress uniforms with yellow or red-striped drainpipe trousers were particularly impressive.

At break-time we were allowed into the playground and it was then that some of the lads targeted the domestic science teacher’s bubble car. The boys’ toilets had double-leaf doors directly onto the playground and it was the work of moments for eight or ten youths to lift and carry it inside and closed the doors. I don’t know when it was found or how it was extracted. But the next morning we were all in trouble and the culprits called upon to do the decent thing. There was some sort of punishment but it can’t have been too dire because I’ve forgotten it. Another sign of the school’s liberality.

We were set free at lunchtime and like the rest of the school, had the afternoon off. As I walked home along Tettenhall Road, the Queen’s car drove past sedately and, as rent-a-crowd did not stretch that far, I had an uninterrupted view from about twenty feet away. I had the impression of a profile much like the one on the stamps but with a more pronounced nose. She did not look my way.

At home, my Mother eventually returned from the Civic Reception. She was full of it, thrilled to have been introduced to the Queen (“How gracious !”. Never again did she have a bad word to say about the woman. Try as I might, I could never get her to admit that until that day, she had been a staunch anti-monarchist. To be fair, she did maintain a life-long intolerance of the Queen Mother, so it was ironic when she insisted we attend my (optional) graduation ceremony in 1968 only to find that the Queen Mother was the University’s Chancellor. Unlike her daughter a few years before, she gave me a regal nod as she conferred my degree.

And the Queen ? Well, of course, she went on to have Prince Edward in March 1964 but by then I had moved on to weightier issues in the senior debating society. Vicky Lyons and I were opposing the motion that “The Beatles should be crushed”. I can’t remember if we won that one.

 

Steve Brazier (1958-65)

Footnote The Royal Visit to Wolverhampton took place on 24th May 1962. If you can add to or correct my memory of the events of the day. please write to the Editor.

Published WMGS OPA Newsletter 2010/11