More of Rod Weir's photographs...

Here are all the remaining photos from Rod's remarkable collection. They have so many recognisable faces, and if there are any gaps, then by all means send a message via the comments, and I'll update them!

Plunge bath and conservatory wing

Pond

Rose garden in winter

Swimming

Watching cricket

Wing leading to garden and plunge bath

Yard

Yard from the drive

Rod says he cannot recall these two; I reckon they could be Blatchley and Davis!

Big School (White on the right?)

Bourne and Boltjes

Bourne and Boltjes - again!

Bourne and Boltjes messing about...

Cricket pavilion!

Rod Weir's newly discovered photos...

Rod Weir, who was at HHS from 1959 - 1962, has contacted me several times from Australia, and sent a marvellous set of photographs containing images which are so familiar, and also, there are lots of familiar faces as well!


He's given me the OK to publish these, and I'll start with a few here, and add to the collection soon!

Back, l - r, Wigram, Barton, Dunlop, Battersby, Kidd, Everton-Jones, Unsure.

Front, l - r, White (?), Boltjes, Bourne, Bower (?), Satchell, Unsure.

(If anyone has names to go with the 'Unsures', by all means post me a response!)

Davey and Kidd, in the old sports changing room - the cellar!

Dunlop front, and Drummond behind.

Faraday, the little dorm over the gym.

Front lawn view.

Mr Hilder with Mr Morrish's old car behind.

(Of course, if anyone is not that keen on seeing themselves in all their former glory, I'll respect their wishes, but this collection really is a great archive, and of course, totally original and as yet, unseen!)

Council destruction of Hydneye House...

More by luck than actually knowing where the cutting below was hiding, I can now post the actual newspaper story about the final days of HHS.

Dated September 21st, 1974, the journalist with 'The Hastings and St Leonards Observer' writes with a surprising sympathy, the picture of the front elevation shows what a great building it really was, and the ceiling detail in the second pic, brings back memories as well!

Visit back in 2006...

Hydneye House 2006

Having a spare hour while a friend was visiting someone in the new hospital over the road, I took a quick peek at the ‘Old Place’ and by coincidence, had the trusty Boer War Amateur Foreign Journalists’ Bellows See-All Camera (with brass-bound yew tripod, magnesium flash and developing tent with accessories), with me!

Here are some of the pictures I took...

The main entrance opposite St Mary’s.

(This is the same pic as the last post, and was taken the same day. As pointed out then, the West Lodge was on this corner on the right of this picture, and I can hardly remember it - if at all...).

The next view from the West drive as you would have approached the school on your left is still recognisable. The Lebanon cedars are still as they were, without the pieces of paper in the bark, or about 200 small plastic planes perched high up in the foliage. (D’you remember those little things? We launched them with an elastic band and they swooped all over the place)! I sat on mine and broke it ...

The next view is a little to the left of the previous one. The tyre tracks follow roughly the drive in front of the main door. Caxton would be on your left, and Bob would be waiting on the steps to help you cart in your trunk at the beginning of term...

I think the tall tree in the distance was between the kitchens and Wren, behind where the footbridge used to be. The metal fence you can see is presumably to keep out the dirty mac brigade from the new school! I had the stout waxed jacket and green wellies, and actually looked a bit of a sad old nutter, so maybe the cameras were turned off for the day!

The Theatre!

This was built after GB and Gbess had been on holiday to Greece, and, with his usual bounding enthusiasm, he decided to re-create a place for us all to be Romans, Greeks, Heathens or Celts or whatever.

He told me much later, (when my wife and I visited him), whisky in hand and with a nodding wink, that the treasured millstone, which was originally set in the middle, had been safely removed to his new house in Ewhurst (a few miles from here). In the sixties, when we were all there, the stage was hardened earth. Now, it is a concrete slab and presumably, the audience in the front row have to have very short legs. The bullnose bricks are still there as you can see. These were similar to those which were used on the edges of the plunge bath, and saved the short-trousered juniors from sub-leg injury, and subsequent pleasurable visits to Matron.

When I found the theatre, it was a similar feeling to finding the latest tomb next to King Tut’s. Clearly, local kids had been there, but my instant recognition of the site, after several forays into serious undergrowth in all directions, made me whoop with joy! The site is well overgrown now, but when you compare it with the pictures taken in its heyday, then you realise that GB really meant to keep a testimony to his ideal world, and it all still stands to this day.

Having taken a few snaps, I had to seal my exuberance and recall my ordeal in front of all you lot! My act on the theatre’s opening day was to recite the story of John Gilpin. (My Dad had a book of the immortal tale of this man’s trek to The Bell at Edmonton…)! Roger Emett was the horse, and, sadly, I cannot recall who else was in the play. (R.H.J.V. Kyrke?)

Now, here, in front of you all, I have to admit that I stood on the same spot, forty-five years older and very much greyer, and only just managed the first verse…

“John Gilpin was a Citizen, of credit and renown,
The trade band captain eke was he, of famous London town”.

Lumps in throats Boys – only the magpies heard me…


The next picture has the pond on your left, and would have been taken from the path by the fives court, looking west. The picture after is all you can see of the pond now, taken from roughly the same spot.

This next pic looks back along the front of the old building to the west. The yard would be on the right. The drive is in the far distance. We would have started to run Silvester from the middle of this one! Two minutes of slippery, muddy hell! (In my case more like half an hour...)!

The next view is all that is left of the area where we had the plunge bath, so is pretty innocuous. There are still a few mounds here and there, and the two Cypressus trees were at the end of a small avenue, which stretched to the west towards the theatre, to the left of this pic. I found very little to mark the spot where I was supposed to learn to swim. I was useless at diving too. Bert Boltjes could dive from one end to another without surfacing, and I expect you guys could as well!

Now, can anyone ever remember an air raid shelter in Silvester? I don’t ever recall one there but check this out! It sits nearly at the top of the drive on the left, and we would have run round it on the Speed Merchant attempts. The vent hole is still there, and presumably everything has been sealed up inside. I hope so…!

So, my friends, nostalgia still crops up from time to time. I wanted to find some of the tree labels, but they’ve gone. There are a few of the dark grey paving bricks, which could cut your knees to ribbons during yard football near the theatre.

I used to be able to see my home on the far ridge seven miles away to the north, at Broad Oak, Brede, from the rear boundary, . Commander Campbell once lent me his Navy telescope, and I could even see right in the windows, which may have been a bit nerve-racking for my Mum and Dad! It was quite strange looking back again after all this time, as we all moved from there in 1972, when Zia and I got married, although we lived in Hastings for a couple of years!

I once went back just before the old house was demolished, and there were still recognisable things around, like the prefect’s red ink signature board, and loads of old books. The building was vandalised terribly, and was pulled down soon afterwards.

Bill Mozley, who sadly died some years ago of cancer, had an ironmonger’s shop in our village, and we often swapped stories about the old place! He said that Mrs B had told him that having to give up the place nearly killed GB, as I suppose it was an almighty shock, seeing that he only learned of the Compulsory Purchase Order from a journalist, ringing him up for a comment on a piece in the local paper published that day.

The Council were scandalous at all that - I have a cutting somewhere, and will try and scan it for all to see.

Swimming pool/Plunge-bath...

Richard Walker mentioned the swimming pool recently, and as this project was started about the end of 1958, he would have missed it all happening!

In an earlier post, there are some pics of the completed plunge-bath, but this excerpt from the 1959 magazine gives the whole story.

One memory I do have, is of P.R.D.Davidson getting a special mention one evening, for carrying a hundred or so bricks round from the front to the back. They were the ‘bullnosed’ edging bricks, to save the inevitable leg injury, scarring for life etc etc…!

I remember there was only a garden hose connected to a tap near The Garden Room, and as this was filling the pool so very slowly, it took several days! I think we were allowed to use the pool when it was half-full, and of course there had to be a Grand Opening, with – I think – Bert Boltjes doing a perfect dive and swimming a length or two

When the form rotas were being announced, to arrange lists of who would be swimming at any particular time, it was inevitable that someone (M.S.Patterson) would ask GB at prayers, “When do we collect our swimming trunks…”? And it was a very valid question too!

GB ‘gently’ mentioned that we would all be swimming naked; it was done like that at many other schools, etc etc, and nobody really batted an eyelid, or anything else for that matter…!

The chlorine in the water did pong a bit, and as there was only a cement and sand rendered finish internally, it was always looked dark and uninviting, but I did learn to swim there though - not very well (I was never as good as Bert B., or Tim Bosher and Co.), but it was a start! We had to do four lengths to qualify swimming and diving in the deep end. (One length was a quarter-length of the big pool in the White Rock Baths in Hastings, where we all used to go in a coach).

I went back there in the early 1970s, when the whole place was nearly derelict. The pool was totally wrecked, and full of all sorts of rubbish and debris. Most of the bull-nosed edging bricks had been stolen, or chucked in as well. That occasion was the last visit I made, although there are a few other things to mention on another future post.