Radio-controlled gliders
Born in 1946 and lived in Kempston, near Bedford, until the age of five when the family moved to Cranfield, where my father was a technical engineer involved with the production of specialist airframe test equipment. At that time there were a number of ex-WW2 bombers parked around the airfield perimeter, in which we played, as well as an extensive collection of German prototype aircraft and rockets in one of the hangars. My main memories of Cranfield are impossibly long summers, bitterly cold winters and exploring the maze of man-sized underground ducts connecting all the buildings. Plus the rocket and jet-engine test bays. And witnessing the fatal crash of a Handley-Page Victor under payload tests. Once a year there was a model aircraft rally on the airfield attended by what seemed to be thousands of enthusiasts - and this gave me my love of model aircraft.
John & Dave circa 1963
Having successfully survived Cranfield Primary school I was lucky enough to gain a scholarship to Bedford Modern School, a direct-grant single-sex public school founded in the mid 1500s, at which my father had also been a pupil. Indeed, I still used some of his textbooks. BMS was like a cold shower in that within the first term I was moved from the top stream to the middle stream as I showed no aptitude for Latin; and it would seem no aptitude for anything truly academic. Flogging was an everyday occurrence and, on average, I was flogged once a term up to the end of the fifth form. I hated sport, and was a "conscientious objector" as regards the combined cadet force - I loved aircraft but did not want to dress up once a week in an uncomfortable uniform and parade around in clumping boots. Much of this changed when I moved on the the Sixth and realised that sport was, after all a great deal of fun, although I was too late to do much about it apart from gaining my House Colours for cross-country. But the best bit was the A-level Art course under a wonderful and enthusiastic teacher, Keith Duchars who was later to be head of Art at Kingswood School, Bath. I attempted three A-levels - Maths, Art and Engineering Drawing - failed the maths through lack of intellect but gained the School prizes for both Art and Engineering Drawing. During my time in the sixth it was of course the time of the Stones and the Beatles so I started down the long and tortuous road of not only learning guitar, but also building them. Under the influence of my Art master I decided that a career in teaching seemed "a good thing" but was unable to get in to my first-choice college after A-levels so spent a year as a student-teacher at Houghton Conquest Primary School - which provided the lever to entry to Westminster College, Oxford, in 1965.
Westminster College campus
The years at Westminster were very happy - I spent most of my time being totally self-indulgent, playing a great deal of sport and playing in what could be loosely described as a rock band. The main influence on the rest of my life came about as a complete accident; I had opted to do Art and PE as my two main courses but found the art most constricting until I chanced across the pottery which was part of the department and realised I could major in pottery. At the time the tutor was Delan Cookson - inspiring mainly because he got on with his own work and we acolytes were able to learn technique by osmosis. He was succeeded by George Owen Jones who got us involved with more adventurous approaches to working as well as understanding glaze analysis and technology. At the end of my second year I managed to talk my way in to a working pottery in the Cotswolds for the whole of the summer vac and it was there I put the theory into real practice, making production ware. This association continued thrugh my third year at weekends generating income as well as developing real skills. Indeed, before I left I had managed to source a wheel and a kiln which was installed in my father's workshop at home in Ampthill. When my time at Westminster was up I had a teaching certificate, the college Art Prize a wife and a workshop. The band carried on without me and the drummer, Alan Arkless, is still playing in Brittany. Practically all of my contemporaries went in to teaching, most of them ending up as Heads, but I was destined for a different future.
