Editorial: Happy Days

Up School, the next day. The first Latin Prayers of term and of the new Head Master's career. Tales abound of the bedlam of John Rae's last assembly and of how twenty thousand loo rolls were unfurled in a bizarre schoolboy version of a sword of honour as he departed. The new Head Master has a deep patrician voice that - while it becomes easy and rewarding to parody - masters the proceedings. When he announces the appointment of a member of staff to a new position, some of the children given an ironic cheer. He has a knack of fixing his eyes somewhere in the middle distance, but there is tempered steel here, and the audience is disconcerted and relapses into silence.

The Elizabethan was different too. It was edited by Richard Jacobs, a cerebral young English teacher who had coincidentally been a pupil of the Head Master's at Charterhouse, and the two held each other in evident regard and affection. His Elizabethan was literate and highly political, full of left wing polemics which, even now, read well. Reviews of marches, art house movies and meetings which betray the troubled conscience of the rich. In the artless way which all school magazines possess, high flown (and sometimes high falutin') rhetoric rubbed shoulders with jokey, unintelligible reports of football tours and - thank God some things have changed - the audited accounts of The Elizabethan Club.

The urge to say the place was much the same needs to be damped down. It was perceptibly different. There were a few more boarders, but about eighty fewer day pupils. No Hakluyt's, no Purcell's, no Milne's. The latter was, on the ground floor, shared between the School Society and the Development Office over which Neil Mackay presided, with bonhomie and a permanant invitation to 'pop in for a whisky'. Next door, as now, was Ashburnham, famous in those faraway days for housing some very naughty boys and girls. Even now, the chosen dŽcor of the House could be termed minimalist; in those days, one was just happy if the walls held up for 24 hours. In the Music Competition that term, they taunted their audience with a reedy and appropriately apathetic performance of We Don't Need No Education.

Yard looked, superficially, much the same. Instead of Hakluyt's were two History rooms. The one on the ground floor housed a rather headachy mural of Dr Peter Southern, ersthwhile Head of History, and David Cook, who was still very much in residence. Always idiosyncratic in teaching style and indifferent to the reactions of passers by, David Cook in full flow reverberated all across Yard. The present writer taught his first ever lesson at Westminster in that room and remembers it as - without a shadow of doubt - the most disgustingly unkempt classroom over which it has ever been his duty to preside. Much the same went for the pupils too.

Liddell's with 80 pupils, exactly half of them boarders, spilled out all over the place: its studies abutted the Adrian Boult Music Centre, the Chapter Office, the top of what would soon become Hakluyt's. Gerry Ashton was then its competent and popular Housemaster, and Tutors included Gavin Griffiths and Robin Aizlewood, pin up to every girl Russianist.

Singleton's : still home to the Registrar and Bursar, in those days Messrs Livingstone- Smith and Fox; Adrian Boult Music Centre: just the same - light switches still in the wrong places.

Ashburnham House, then home to most of the non-Science teaching in school: the ground floor has since been radically tidied and transformed into superior classrooms and a committee room. The main staircase is still frighteningly overcrowded, but somehow manages (just) to sustain the mill of humanity that thunders up and down it. The first floor rooms (Stack, Brock Library and the handsome reception rooms) had only recently been refurbished in 1986 and have maintained a timeless grace and pleasure. One floor up, Economics and Maths now have hegemony in an area in which all non-Science subjects used to crowd for space. Walls and partitions have gone up and down, BBC Computers have been replaced by Apples and then, in enormous profusion, by PCs and many miles of cable, but that's about it. A wonderful Art Studio, just the kind that style magazines love to photograph, dominated the entire top floor with its big picture windows overlooking Yard. Nowadays, there are three English classrooms there which is jolly nice, but not quite the same.

Burlington Arch: the office on the left presently houses the Director of Studies, but nobody seems to remember what went on there twelve years ago. Happily, begowned First and Second Election boys still doff a mortar board to staff as they walk up the steps to Latin Prayers. School, with the exception of the vast Cockerell canvasses at the south end (opinions vary on this), and some rather hi-tech lighting and sound enhancements, feels exactly the same. Room 37, the classroom at the far end, has been subtly upgraded with some smart book cases and new flooring and has delightfully idiosynractic views over College Green. The Busby Library and John Sargeaunt rooms seem identical.

Over to College. Opposite the entrance to what is now a Music Classroom was an Expeditions Store which was a curiously prime site for a gross of anoraks and sleeping bags, presided over with great severity by Cedric Harben. Wren's corridor, give or take a few repaints, looks exactly the same. In those days before Dean Bradley Street had been converted, the mezzanine hosted almost continual Upper School teaching. The present writer remembers (and has his old mark books to prove it) sets of sixteen and seventeen packed into those dim, low ceilinged little rooms - an infallible recipe for tension in an audience both pungent and restless, especially on Saturday mornings.

Above lay College, exotic territory indeed, with a pretty strong sense of its own importance. The first Scholar I encountered was the son of a University Vice-Chancellor and had the idiom and control of language of one who expected, at any moment, to step into his father's shoes. His Housemaster, whose unvarying expostulation 'For Christ's sakes, man' could be heard at any corner of the School, day or night, (though probably not from wherever he was officially supposed to be), struck a reassuringly earthy note.

Entering Grant's in 1986, with its long tradition of rigid independence, was a bit daunting. The new Housemaster, Chris Clarke, seemed to bring light and space, creating a Housemaster's flat at the top of Number 2, overlooking Yard, and the old ground and first floor rooms were now made into light airy recreation rooms and studies for the younger children. Grant's had the air of a House in which morale was palpably rising each day, but also the distinction of containing some of the untidiest children in Westminster at any point during the last twelve years, even if many of them heralded from College or Dryden's.

Rigaud's red-brick garishness amidst the Georgian classicism of Numbers 2 and 3 Little Dean's Yard set it apart. Its pupils, or at least a quota of them, seemed appreciably different too: they answered to bells, stood up for a procession of Housemaster and Tutors filing into the subterranean dining hall at lunchtime, and had a curious House language of their own (including the distressing refrain Ipsu Razu etc). But there was a powerful fifth column, too: you had only to go downstairs into the German classroom in the basement overlooking Yard, presided over by Richard Stokes and Ian Huish, to wallow among peeling walls, damp, piles of marking, concert details, litter and - absolutely inevitably - scores of copies of Gefunden.

To get to Busby's involved, as it still does, walking past Common Room. What are now ground floor studies was a newly converted Maths classroom: from the Common Room one could see into this pokey little room and watch the then Housemaster cover acres of whiteboard in minutes at a time with his red and green board markers. It looked very busy in there and the Housemaster was someone who, whether expounding on integral calculus or merely reminding people that perhaps they might like to begin their prep, had the reputation of finding discipline not a great problem.

Those who were 18 years old in 1986 are only 30 now; too early, really, for many to have achieved eminence. The world into which we sent them has changed, not least in terms of the volatility of the job market. Some have come to have, even if only locally or ephemerally, their moment of fame. Lynda Stuart had faced the paparazzi, (well, the Daily Telegraph anyway) for being the first ever female Captain of the School. Future directors and performers were even now limbering up: Paddy Dickie was preparing to direct Ben Walden in a staggeringly good production of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Joe Cornish and Adam Buxton, now anchoring a zany show on Channel Four, were busy writing, directing and improvising. Louis Theroux, he of BBC2's Weird Weekends, was a bright, approachable and hard-working historian.

Teachers remember their pupils usually for how they were then, not for what became of them. In a 1986 Upper Shell O Level History set, three boys sat just in front of the teacher's desk. One - a steady, modest, quite delightful high flyer - opted to become a Maths teacher in a Surrey comprehensive. The second - something of a handful - became a fashionable portrait painter. The third was the youngest son of the Duke and Duchess of Kent. One of the keenest pleasures of that term was witnessing the late Stewart Murray, supervising a punishment run of ten laps of Green for some infraction, bellowing out: 'Get a move on, Windsor. Lift those knees up.' Oh, happy days.

Smaller than now (about 60 full time members), the Common Room was not lacking large personalites. So many now gone: Aizlewood, Ashton, Bland, Booth, Cook, Custance, Davies, Evans, Field, French, Harben, Hepburne-Scott, Hobson, Hugill, Huish, Jacobs, Livingstone- Smith, Miller, Muffett, Murray, Pratt, Stebbens, Stuart, Williams (both Mark and Mike) - an impressive litany to the inevitably diminishing numbers here who knew them: most kindly, several tricky, but nearly all united in their love for the sheer drama of the place.

The Almanacks for the two Election Terms 1986 and 1998, placed alongside each other, give a flavour of the passage of time, albeit in muted shades. On Saturday 26 April 1986, J A Cogan's XI played R W Gilson's XI, and the next week there was tennis against Tonbridge, where a First, Second and Colts VI were all put up. There were House cricket matches at the end of the month. Exeat kicked off after a Lower School House Handball competition and that was also the closing date for Summer Camp applications. Liddell's produced Bugsy Malone, the Movie Society met on 5 June and the very next day O Levels began. But examination candidates - both O and A Level - were not allowed on study leave until Friday 13 June. Term proper ended on Friday 11 July.

In 1986 Mrs Thatcher was Prime Minister, Maradonna the most feared footballer in the world, and a large number of Westminster pupils called themselves Goths: strictly monochrome clothes, pointy black shoes, the tightest black trousers the authorities would permit them, and a lot of black and white make-up. While the theme of continuity is attractive and not misplaced, Westminster is a subtly different school, all the same.

At the Election Dinner in 1986 the final lines of the Proemium were intoned:

....Up School's the same, and Yard to shouts abounds,

The term is o'er and hallowed be these grounds,

And lo! the board with glass and wine stands crown'd,

Goodwill is all; may happy days be found.

Happy days indeed. The Elizabethan salutes all leavers - for every parting is a sorrow - and salutes David Summerscale as a gracious and generous Head Master. It welcomes Tristram Jones-Parry, who has a powerful pedigree of devoted and capable service to Westminster. The Chinese prayer - May You Live in Interesting Times - looks certain to be fulfilled.