Bradfield 1962

This picture was taken at Bradfield's annual Commemoration Day in 1962. By that time I was a House Prefect and, at 17, was taking A levels in Maths, Physics and Chemistry, and expecting to leave the school at the end of the summer term. With my mother and father are Richard, dressed to play in the school wind band, in which he played the trumpet, which is in the box at his feet, and my cousin Carolyn.

During the last few weeks of the summer term, with the A level exams over and no lessons, three of us, Guy Forster (above, right), Doug Goodall (below) and I, built coracles out of saplings and bedsheets painted with gloss paint. We left them at the school at the end of term, returning during the summer holidays....

....to take them out on the Thames, starting near Pangbourne and camping on the river bank. We quickly found that we couldn't control our coracles, that the only way of making progress was to raft up and drift downstream. We became quite the centre of attention for passing river craft but the journey came to an early end when Guy's boat sank.

It was a schoolboy adventure, it was damp but fun - except when we were attacked by a swan - and I thought no more about it until, at a wedding reception in Rhodesia in the late sixties, we met a couple who, in describing a holiday in England, mentioned how they had seen three idiots in home-made coracles on the Thames.

I didn't leave Bradfield that summer, as this early post on this blog explains. Instead, I remained for the Christmas term and then, early in January 1963, returned to Africa.