At the end of the service Alan is kind enough to introduce me to the congregation and invites volunteers with memories of Francis to join me at the Harvest buffet. Over lemon drizzle cake and cup of builder’s tea I meet David Friend, who was one of the bearers at Francis’s funeral. He tells me that all the bearers had to be ‘yeomen of the parish. Yeoman, not a word you hear much these days.’ It’s not, and he looks like you would like a yeoman to look: big and hearty, ruddy and stout. Later, near Francis’s grave, he points to a field across the lane: ‘I’m the only person here who has worked that field with a horse and plough.’
Walking along the buffet to the Bakewell tart I meet John Conibear, who was one of the bell-ringers seen that funeral night. Francis was so famous it was on the BBC News. I ask how come. ‘When Sir Francis returned safely to Plymouth in ’67, bells were rung across the country. The BBC News filmed it here in Shirwell. The Nine O’Clock News. Richard Baker it was, the newsreader back then. Of course I was only a nipper.’ Then pointing to a Sunday-best-dressed woman near the tea urn, he says, ‘That’s who you want to talk to, she’s a proper Chichester.’
And that’s how I meet Francis’s great-niece Angela. Among many other snippets I learn about Francis’s brother, John. ‘Johnny married his best friend’s widowed mother. She was about thirty years older than him. Francis and Johnny never got on with each other. Francis wrote to Johnny when he was dying and said he would like to see John before he died. John said he was much too busy in the garden to see him. Very sad.’
But there was at least a term-time respite between the Ellerslie fire and the Shirwell frying pan: his five years, 1909–14, at a prep school, The Old Ride School. He remembered:
By the time I was transferred (from Ellerslie) to another preparatory school, The Old Ride, at Branksome, Bournemouth, I must have been a thorough savage, a rebel against everybody, including my parents.
But I loved The Old Ride. I liked the boys, I liked the masters and I liked the place itself with its strong pine smell, and the sandy soil covered with pine needles. Somehow, by the time I left, I became captain of the cricket XI, although really I was never much good at cricket; I was also captain of the school.
One of my friends was a junior at The Old Ride at that time. He told me recently that he had been entered in a swimming race, and that I said to him, ‘You have got to win – or else…’ and that he was so frightened that he went ahead and won. I expect I was still somewhat of a bully, and wonder if my experiences at Ellerslie were any excuse.
Like Ellerslie House, The Old Ride has disappeared with time. Thanks to help from Sarah Hustler at the Poole History Society, we know that the ownership and name of the school changed from The Old Ride School to The Old School to Oratory Preparatory School. In 1973 Oratory Preparatory School succumbed to the bulldozer and became the large detached houses around Oratory Gardens in the semi-exclusive Martello Park suburb of Poole. Francis’s ‘strong pine smell, and the sandy soil covered with pine needles’ remain but the houses in the suburb are hidden and shaded by the pine trees behind the ubiquitous boxwood evergreen hedges. From Sarah’s historic maps and plans we can make out where The Old Ride School and grounds were – and the new houses are – but it takes a good snoop on Google Earth to reveal the extent of the swimming pools and tennis courts sprawling round the bungalows in the old school grounds today.
The Old Ride School, happier days
One episode from Francis’s time at The Old Ride School will ring a bell with prep school boarders. It is notorious that school staff send pupils to bed long before they are ready to sleep in order that they, the teachers, might have a more extended evening. This was the rigorous regime known as ‘lights out’, after which no talking was allowed. In my penal colony one of the weird brothers Stow or Stowe would often wait outside and at the first whisper from the still-wide-awake boys would burst in and lay waste to any bottom to hand. As a result the boys would crawl into each other’s beds and under the sheets so as not to be overheard; later it would be to listen to Radio Luxemburg.11 If a master burst in he would have presumed he had just busted a Dionysian orgy. Luckily for us, it never happened; unluckily for Francis, it did:
Once our dormitory was caught after Lights Out with everybody visiting some other boy in his bed. There was the most frightful hullabaloo about this. We were told we were very lucky not to get the sack, and I believe that if we had not all been involved, we would have. No one mentioned the word ‘homosexuality’, and I would not have known what it meant if it had been mentioned. And as we used to visit every other bed in turn, I am quite sure that I must have known if any of the boys were interested in this vice. I don’t think any of them knew anything about it, and that we merely used to go and swop yarns, and the whole spice of the matter was that it was forbidden to talk after Lights Out.
In the event we were brought up for questioning one at a time for week after week, and finally all flogged.
The flogging continued apace at his next school, Marlborough College, where he was immured during the First World War years. Nowadays butter wouldn’t melt in its Marlburian mouth: like all twenty-first-century public schools it resembles more a co-educational holiday camp than the toughening-up school of Empire it once was.
First, there was the food:
The food, was terrible. We used to say that the roast meat was horseflesh; the reek of it turned one’s stomach. However, we felt half-starved, and would have eaten anything. This feeling of starvation was certainly due to vitamin deficiency. From one term to the next we never had any fresh fruit or uncooked salad, or vegetables. It was no wonder that we had a general outbreak of boils.
Then there was the cold:
Marlborough Downs are exceptionally cold. There was some heating in the form rooms, but none in the dormitories. The huge upper schoolroom, where 200 senior boys lived during the day when they weren’t in actual classes, had only two open fires. Only the biggest boys were allowed to warm themselves at these fires. I decided that the occasional periods of warm-up available during the day only made one suffer more, so I wore nothing but a cotton shirt under my coat, discarded my waistcoat, and slept under only a single sheet at night. I aimed to get used to the conditions like the Tierra del Fuegan natives of a century ago, except that I didn’t sleep inside a dead whale I was eating.
And then, of course, the constant beatings:
The usual punishment was a beating. Most of the discipline was in the hands of the senior boys. Their sole form of punishment was beating, and this was so copiously applied for any infringement of an extensive and complicated social code that it amounted to licensed bullying.
Upper School was ruled by four prefects, who sat in state at a table in front of the fire, the only source of warmth, known as Big Fire. One of them would carry notes round to the boys he was going to beat; this was during prep when we were all at our desks, and as soon as prep finished, all the 200 boys made a wild rush to encircle the prefect’s desk. The chairs were pushed away, the victim bent over the desk, and he was beaten as hard as the prefect could possibly manage by taking a running jump and using a very long cane.
All of this brings to mind John Betjeman’s verse autobiography, Summoned by Bells. Recalling his time at Marlborough five years after Francis, he wrote:
Upper School captains had the power to beat:
Maximum six strokes, usually three.
Swift after prep all raced towards ‘Big Fire’,
Giving the captain space to swing his cane:
‘One!’ they would shout and downward came the blow;
‘Two!’ rather louder; then, exultant, ‘Three!’
And some in ecstasy would bellow ‘Four!’?
Well, it’s a changed old world and that we know, but not much can have changed as much as Marlborough College. I am lucky enough to be shown around by the official school historian and ex-deputy headmaster, Terry Rogers, a very sprightly and thoroughly dapper 75 year-old. ‘Of course back in young Chiches
ter’s day it was all pretty Spartan, mostly because it was set up eighty years before him specifically for sons of the clergy. Like Francis himself. There wasn’t much in the way of fees and everything was cut to the bone, heating, food, all the things he complained about. But funnily enough the boys took a certain pride in being able to withstand the infamous toughness.’
‘Useful in war and empire’, I say. ‘And the endless beatings’.
‘Indeed. Look at these, the Beatings Books.’ Terry hands me some notebooks. Each term the four prefect/beaters had to keep records of whom they beat, with how many strokes, when they beat them and what for. There were about three or four a day, an average of three strokes a pop and the offences ranged from ‘Unflush Desk’ to ‘Whispering’ to ‘Unkempt Dress’ to the most frequent, the catch-all ‘Caught Out’. Caught Out at what history doesn’t reveal, Terry suspects geographical rather than excuserial misdemeanours. At the end of the term the Beatings Books were signed by all four prefects: one term ended with the triumphant, ‘203 Beatings. A Record!’.
‘Now there are no punishments of any kind,’ Terry says rather wistfully. ‘It’s almost laughable. Detention, maybe, but that’s useless.’
‘And no cold?’ We had been talking about Betjeman and Terry read out:
It is the winter that remains with me,
Black as our college suits, as cold and thin.
Doom! Shivering doom! Clutching a leather grip
Containing things for the first night of term –
House slippers, sponge bag, pyjamas and Common Prayer.
Then Terry tells me this story about Francis’s first head boy in 1914. ‘The head boy was called Harold Roseveare, he was jeunesse dorée really – wealthy family, blond, wonderful at sports, a scholar, he’d got his place at Cambridge, a scholarship there. He left at the end of the summer term fully expecting to take up his place at Cambridge and a glittering life ahead. Except the war broke out and he found himself in the trenches. His last job here was to hand over to his successor, Sidney Woodruff. Roseveare was dead by the start of the autumn term two months later and there in the school magazine is his obituary, written by the new head boy, Sidney Woodruff. End of that term, December 1914, Sidney Woodruff in turn leaves Marlborough, and Francis would certainly have known him too, and is dead by the summer term with a posthumous VC. And not only Sidney Woodruff but later his two brothers, both Marlburian prefects, both of them killed. This was the fate of the prefects in the four war years Chichester was here. Born a year earlier and Chichester might well have gone the same way.’
A 1917 Marlborough house hockey team. Francis is top left
Terry has been kind enough to dig out some F.C. Chichester records before I arrive and after lunch we look at photographs of him aged seventeen and eighteen in the school rugby and hockey teams. We see a young man always at the edge of the rows and even then leaning away from the group, not exactly plump but not yet wiry as he was to become, defiant and hostile to the camera. In the notes written by the School Captain we find him described as: ‘A hard and keen worker in the scrum but somewhat disadvantaged in the matter of eyesight. He is not heavy enough at present but could be useful in the future.’ Then a year later: ‘He has more than justified last year’s expectations. He always goes extremely hard and although hindered by his bad eyesight goes through an enormous amount of work.’
In his autobiography fifty years later Francis reflected:
There was something mean and niggardly about our existence at Marlborough; we seemed to be mentally, morally and physically constipated. The whole emphasis was on what you must not do, and I consider that I am only now beginning to shake off the deeply-rooted inhibitions which had gripped me by the time I left.
One instance of the effect of this is that until recently I would shake with fear if I had to get up and speak to more than half a dozen people, because the terror of doing or saying anything which would not be approved of by a mob code was so rooted in me.
I looked round one day at the ten boys above me, most of who were far cleverer than I was, or could ever hope to be. I thought to myself, “What a knock-kneed, pigeon-breasted, anaemic, bespectacled, weedy crowd they are! There must be something wrong with this set-up. Real life is flowing past, and leaving me behind.” I told my housemaster that I was leaving at the end of term.
That was the last term of 1918, and the college caught the Spanish influenza epidemic. There were so many boys down with it that we were lying in rows on the floor of the sanatorium. I think most of us were pretty ill, but only a few died.
When I got home and told my father that I had left Marlborough, he was furious – justifiably so. I had treated him badly, and I do not know why I had not asked his permission to leave. Perhaps I wanted to be absolutely certain of leaving, and felt that he would not consent. I was due to go to the university and stay there until I was twenty-five, preparing for the Indian Civil Service. I felt that this was all wrong, and that I would not be living a proper life.
And so with his unhappy, hemmed-in childhood behind him, young F.C.C. set about leading his proper life. He emigrated to New Zealand.
NOTES:
8. A British English expression: not to be acknowledged in any way.
9. The restoration of the English monarchy after the Civil War in 1660.
10. The Most Distinguished Order of St Michael and St George (Companion)
11. The only radio station to play pop music in the 1950s and early ’60s, using a powerful offshore transmitter on 208AM to get round the BBC’s monopoly on broadcasting and disapproval of popular culture.
I like trees too, so we got cracking.
CHAPTER 3
Making Hay
IT’S EASY TO SEE WHY FRANCIS NEEDED to make the break from England. The First World War and his Marlborough years had ended at the same time; for Francis, Marlborough had seemed like his own world war. The military career option, which his Chichester connections could readily have arranged, was clearly out of the question for the institutionally averse Francis. The clergy career choice was the last one on earth he wanted after his religiously maniacal upbringing. Staying in Devon didn’t appeal either; his was a poor branch of the county-wide Chichester clan, without land, title or reputation. In any case, his was a free spirit that couldn’t take any more hemming in. He began making plans to spread his wings and seek his fortune. Australia seemed the natural choice – wide open with opportunities, the other side of the world from Shirwell, yet still home in an Empire sense.
One day out pheasant shooting at Youlston he met a sergeant in the New Zealand Army back home on leave. Francis told him of his plans to emigrate to Australia; the sergeant, Ned Holmes, recommended New Zealand instead. Francis was won over by having at least one person he knew there in the shape of Ned, whereas in Australia he knew no-one. He now turned his energies into securing a working or steerage passage to New Zealand.
In 1919 all Francis had to sell the world was his body – and the type of can-do attitude that young men of Empire seeking their fortune carried with them. He left England with £10 in gold sovereigns from his father in his pocket and he determined not to return until he had turned that into £20,000, about £900,000 in buying power today. In that, as we shall see, he succeeded – at least in property and on paper.
And so he set his body and spirit to work. Over the next two and a half years he worked his passage in the boiler room of a steamer to New Zealand, shovelled shit on a farm near Wellington, got sacked from there and sheered and herded sheep on the farm next door, reaped and sowed on yet another farm, crossed over to the South Island to become a lumberjack, mined for coal, fossicked for gold – and hired himself out to pretty much every opportunity that came up in between.
His decision to change from manual to mental labour came after an all-night drinking session in a mining camp miles from anywhere on the South Island. All around him were men who made good money and spent it all on bad whisky. Through the haze of his hangover h
e ‘looked at one of my comrades who was dead drunk, and said to myself, “My God! That’s me in twenty years’ time”. I depended entirely on what I could earn, and although this mining was well paid I could not save. There was the constant drinking for one thing, and sometimes five gambling schools would be in full swing at the same time. I decided that I must make a break.’
His first thought was to be the opposite of a manual labourer, a writer of fine fiction. He fancied himself as ‘a mixture of Conrad, Kipling and Somerset Maugham’. He bought a book on ‘How to Write a Masterpiece’, or similar. But it was no good; as he himself admitted, ‘I knew nothing of life and nothing of writing’.
He headed back to the North Island and met a man who knew a man who wanted someone to sell subscriptions door-to-door for the local rag, the Weekly Press, in Wellington. They reneged on his commission, so he quit – but he had learned a useful lesson: he could sell. Next he found a job selling a book-keeping system, the Farmers Register, to farmers. He soon reckoned on two sales out of every five visits, so in order to increase the visits he bought a motorcycle, which ‘had a clutch but no gearbox, and could be started only by running it along the road’.
We are now in the spring of 1923. Francis, known by now as ‘Chich’, was twenty-two and had been in New Zealand for two years. And he wasn’t doing too badly on his way to that sought-after fortune. He traded in the motorcycle for an old five-seater open-topped Ford Model T, bought a bicycle and some camping gear and set off to sell the Farmers Register to North Island’s farmers. He had a polished routine. He would arrive in a new area in the Ford, make camp in the middle of his target farms and then set off on the bike to make the sales. He figured out rightly that the farmers would be more sympathetic to a poor salesman on a bicycle than a middling one in a car.
Never Fear Page 4