The Staff Room

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Let's have a bit more gossip from the "Masters and Mistresses"!

Staff Stories
As all good stories, these may have grown in the telling

In the early days when Denny Howells was head of PE the first graffito appeared in the boys' toilet by the gym. Denny discovered it on a Monday morning; there had been a home match on the Saturday.
The scrawl read "Spike is an illegitimate bastard."
Denny duly reported it to the Head, and opined that the culprit was probably one of the visiting team. On hearing that the visitors were from a sec. mod., McGuinness disagreed, saying that for one thing there was no spelling mistake, and for another, two words had been used where one would do. It therefore had to be an Augustinian.

What caused us all to fall apart was His admonition to the ladies to "Spread yourselves out among the men, my dears!" He did not see the funny side of that at all.

The Mons. had two ways of entering the staff room. He would come in through the inner door, adjacent to his office; pretend to look at the class photographs as we all fell silent; go out the way he had come in; and then, suddenly, reappear through the outer door opening on to the corridor to see if he could catch us talking about him. Incidentally, looking at the photographs, he would often say - I don't think with sexual intent - "Oh those boys, so delicious. I could eat them." I doubt if he would say that if he was alive today.

Our final staff meetings consisted of large chunks of Dante in Italian typed out by Vera Warren after Monsignor had intoned passages from "The Divine Comedy" into the dictaphone. The school business took ten minutes at the end, after a further discourse on the "Beatific Vision".

Back in the days when bike lamps were powered by a dynamo attached to the wheel, Charles Kelvin was apparently pulled up by the police for riding without lights.  After much indignation and argument, it was allegedly discovered that CK indeed did have a dynamo in correct working order but was not generating sufficient power to light the lamp!!!

English lesson with MacSweeny (1970 or thereabouts), hot day and up until now quite dull. Michael Murphy (yes, he who later went on to star in TOTF), was seated at the back of the class and, for reasons clearly better left unsaid, had brought a clothes peg into school with him which he proceeded to place on his nose in order to make various snorting noises (hey don't ask me to explain, I'm just recounting what happened). The Big Mac spots this and in his most withering and world weary tone says 'Murphy, please come to the front of the class and give us all a demonstration of what 6 million years of evolution have done for the human race' and so up Michael went ....  
I have never in all the subsequent years used any quotations from Robert Frost or Walter de la Mere or anything else that we were taught in English Lit., but that quote from the big Mac, I've used to good effect on several occasions