Memories of school life at Christ’s Hospital Horsham during The Second World War

Oliver Bevan (MaA 40-46) has kindly shared his memories of life at Christ’s Hospital during The Second World War, painting a picture of school days shaped by wartime and the unforgettable moment when VE Day finally arrived.

In the beginning

‘I first went to Housey in September 1940. The air raids had started some weeks before, and the main impact of that as far as we were concerned was that if the warning sirens sounded, we were got up from our beds and went down into the Tube where on the floor there were Kraft paper paillasses filled with straw to try and sleep on. After a term of this the junior dormitory beds were moved down there and we went straight down for a night’s sleep, while the senior boys moved their beds down to the level of the junior dormitory. I can’t remember how long this arrangement lasted, but it was not long and we returned to the dormitories.’

Food

‘The largest impact of the war on us at that time was probably that of food rationing. I don’t know what the food was like before the war, but it was not great during it.

Breakfast normally consisted of two slices of bread with a small pat of butter, or more often margarine, accompanied by other food. For example, half the school having hard boiled eggs, always tasting slightly bad. Or the accompaniment might be a bowl of thin porridge with a spoonful of marmalade or on other occasions a slice of fatty ham or even more occasionally a rasher of bacon. Sometimes, a piece of indescribable fish. All washed down by a bowl (no cups or mugs, you drank from a 6-inch diameter rimless soup bowl which custom dictated could only be held with one hand) of tea or coffee.

Lunches often consisted of Housey stew, pieces of meat and plenty of gristle floating in a murky broth. Occasionally it was corned beef stew, a more popular dish. 

I don’t remember much about the tea meal, except that we once again got two slices of bread and accompanying butter/margarine. It was later improved, as you will see below.

The best thing that we had was the bowls of milk from the schools’ own herd of Channel Island cows.

Introduced in April 1942, bread was the wartime National Loaf made from wholemeal flour with added vitamins, picked up from Prewetts, the Horsham bakers, and brought back in the school van. The loaves must have been chucked in, because so many of them were “L” shaped where edges had been pushed into sides. A common description of this loaf (not just at CH) was that it was “grey, mushy and unappetising“.

As well as items that were rationed by quantity, there was a system by which everyone was allocated so many “points” each month, which could be used to buy a variety of goods that were not directly rationed like tinned products (when they were available).

Around 1944 the Governors found that the lady superintendent, who controlled all the food purchases and thinking that she was being patriotic, was not using all the points she had available. As a result, she was told to use the points and a class of boys would spend an afternoon period opening tins for our tea. I remember an occasion when one boy plunged the cutter into a large tin of pilchards which had gone bad. After the resulting geyser had subsided, half a dozen boys had to go back to their houses, wash themselves and beg clean clothes from the matron.

The windows in the Dining Hall could not be blacked out like the windows in the House dayrooms, so the timing of our tea got earlier and earlier as autumn progressed. To compensate for this, buckets of soup were brought around to the Houses before the juniors went to bed. As a result, I have never been able to face celery soup again.

Until production was banned in April 1942 (because white flour was largely imported), it was sometimes possible after lunch to buy half a large white loaf from the Tuck shop. It would be completely eaten by the time I got back to the house.’

The other effects of the war

‘As more and more of the staff, both teaching and domestic, left to join the services or for war work, the boys took on more of the domestic duties, including washing up. While machines coped with cutlery and crockery, we had to clean all the cooking utensils ourselves. I remember the days when half the school had been given porridge and we had these large pots to scrape out, often with porridge burnt firmly inside.

In my House the monitors had a Primus stove and used to use it to cook themselves bits of something or other after the rest of the boys were in bed. I recall ‘vegetable’ sausages that we could buy in Horsham that started looking pink but gradually became green as they cooked. 

One Saturday evening we decided to have a house feast. We bought baking potatoes, made a crude oven out of a biscuit tin partially filled with sand and placed on the stove, cooked the potatoes and served them with pieces of fat from the breakfast ham, which we had asked the boys to bring back.

We were affected more directly by the war on several occasions. Periodically after Sunday evensong the Headmaster would read out the names of Old Blues who had given their lives in the war. There was one boy whom I had known in my house whose name was read out.’

Other memories

‘Other odd memories that I have include; the school had a place called ‘The Works’ near the station and the school dairy farm where at that time the school still generated its own electricity, using the 110-volt direct current generators that, I assume, were installed when the school was built. The Works was also the recipient of fat from the kitchens which was turned into some diabolical soap for us to use.

Another wartime government requirement was that, to conserve coal, baths should only contain 5 inches of water. Our baths had a black line painted on them below the taps. We were allowed one bath a week at bedtime. Occasionally the Housemaster would look in to see just how much water one had, I was caught and punished twice for infringing this rule.’

VE Day

‘Tuesday 8 May 1945 was VE Day, marking the end of the war in Europe. Like everywhere else in the country, we celebrated at Housey. Lessons were abandoned and we larked around. Several boys managed to get onto the roof of Big School, which gave the Headmaster much concern!

By the next day though, everything was back to normal and our lives continued in their often hungry way.’