Turner, a successful London merchant whose country estate was in the village of Kirkleatham in Cleveland and who achieved the distinction of being Lord Mayor of London at the time of the Great Fire in 1666, had founded a grammar school at the nearby seaside town of Redcar and, although the school took his name, it was as often referred to as Coatham School, Coatham being the rather toffee-nosed end of Redcar itself.


The Old School Tie A


I went there as a scholarship boy from one of the down-market local elementary schools, Westdyke, at the usual age of 11. That was in 1924, and I was there until 1931, when I was 18.


Coatham has for years now been a comprehensive school, suffering the fate of so many good, bad and indifferent grammar schools. It had been, in my day, one of the good ones – in many ways – with a record of academic achievement which was quite remarkable. This was due in the main to our quite remarkable headmaster. The Rev. H. D. Littler was an MA of Oxford and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, whatever that may have meant. He was a sometime Scholar of Rossall College, the public school on the Lancashire coast, and then a Scholar of Jesus College at his University. He was young, just in his early thirties when I first encountered him, ambitious and above all exceedingly opinionated and narrow-minded in a way which perhaps contributed to a single-purpose to achieve success for his school. It may have been his faults which produced outstanding academic results, and under him this local grammar school of 440 boys, of whom 60 were boarders, turned out a stream of university entrants who got themselves particularly to Littler’s old University and old College. When I eventually went up to Jesus myself I found I was the ninth Old Coathamian to be in residence at one and the same time. That was an unusual record for any grammar school in the country. This success was due to a combination of good, if narrow teaching and a great deal of strict discipline. Harold Littler ran the School as if he were a third world dictator. His personal views and attitudes were the only ones we were taught. During my seven years at Coatham, although we were on the edge of one of Europe’s mightiest industrial areas which embraced the great steel plants of Dorman Long and Cargo Fleet as well as the vast spread of the chemical works of ICI and the shipbuilding of the River Tees, industry was evidently a dirty word and we were given no appreciation of its importance to the district and to ourselves. Many of us came from families who earned their living in those industries and Littler must have known that many of his pupils were destined to earn theirs in those same industries. But interest in industry got no-one to


10


ctually, mine was not the sort of school whose Old Boys’ tie would have been recognised more than a couple of miles from its gates. One Sir William


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