I have just heard, via a mutual acquaintance, that John Harvey (BHCHS 1942-47) died on 28th July. He lived in Chingford.

If you click the link below, it will open a PDF that contains all the printed editions of OB News. It is a very large file, so you will need patience to view the whole file. I am also uncertain whether the file will enable a full search. But it should allow you to view all editions.

Click HERE for the file of printed editions.

For the digital editions, from January 2022 to January 2026 you will still need to visit our archive website HERE.

Jim Faulkner (BHCHS 1949-56) died on 21st August 2026. Jim had been an organiser of the legendary “49ers”. I have got the funeral details, and hope to publish an obituary in due course. Also, I have been advised that there will be a video of the funeral and I expect to be able to share this with anyone who would like to see it.

By David Pattrick (English, 1973-88)

To join the staff of BHCHS in 1973 as I did was in some ways to leap back in time – some of the older staff seemed to be not just from an earlier decade but from a previous century, and some of the younger to have been acquired like furniture, ready-aged. John was a shining exception. Foot-loose and all too evidently fancy-free, he bounced balletically into the staffroom as fresh at the end of a period as when he left, full not only of energy but also flamboyance and élan; I never sat in on one of his lessons, but walking past his room was to see classes transfixed at a virtuoso performance. There could be heard laughter: in some other classrooms, learning hurt. Ex-students reading this may not have realised that the curtain did not come down at the end of their lesson but was merely the prelude to a five-act extravaganza followed by the post-production party. His Woodford pied à terre was a social hub – for the only society that mattered, of course – even if its dimensions did not permit the swinging of a cat; not that one would have attempted this with his ferocious ginger tom, Fazzoletto (named not only for girth but, as in Verdi’s Otello, an instrument of doom). To be with John socially was to be amazed and similarly inebriated by his joie de vivre – he lit up a room when he entered: like Falstaff, not only witty in himself but the cause of wit in others. Actually, the comparison with Falstaff would have been more appropriate in his earlier years – his home displayed a birthday card with the legend “Billy Bunter loves Rita Hunter” – Miss Hunter an amply constituted Wagnerian soprano. By the time I met him, he had lost a lot of weight, fitting into 28 inch waist trousers; he cut out the comb-over, grew a moustache and, thanks to a pay rise for teachers and the magic of credit cards, his wardrobe, record collection and debt grew exponentially.

There was though something obsessional, almost manic about the maintenance of this façade and it did begin to take its toll. He always suffered from insomnia and had periodic bouts of depression – there were occasions when he simply walked out of school. In my production of Twelfth Night, for example, he was a marvellous Sir Andrew Aguecheek, but until the actual performance, I was in doubt whether he would take the stage. In the event, something – call it esprit de corps, or more likely rioja – got him through it. Sadly, a mooted staff production of Rattigan’s Harlequinade with him in a rôle that suited him perfectly (pure ham, darling) never materialised. He was happier in John Rippin’s musical arrangements for the optimistically named Buckhurst Sinfonia, where a prominent part in the percussion department satisfied all his leanings towards melodrama without taxing him beyond having to count up to four – something which, as John Rippin said, was beyond the musical abilities of the side-drumming Deputy Headmaster (allegedly a maths graduate).

It would be all too easy to classify John as a typical opera queen, but his response to music went much deeper and was a major factor in his life. In fact he almost did not become a teacher – he wrote to the head of Covent Garden begging a job of any kind there; Sir David Webster, for better or worse, interviewed him and talked him out of this. I remember him explaining to me how Tosca at a vital moment believes God will forgive her jealous outburst in church (and ultimately her murder of Baron Scarpia) because passion and pain are intimately intertwined. He knew by heart the Italian text for this opera and understood from the inside its sub-text. John never stuck to the predictable – hearing one beautiful aria by Dvorak, he went out and bought as many obscurely Slavonic operas as Barclaycard would let him. Obviously, we were fascinated by one entitled “The Devil and Kate”: we both thought Miss Coulson would win that battle, though, to be fair, she was particularly kind to the two of us she called “my boys”.  If you had asked me to guess which composers would never figure at his funeral, Sibelius and Handel would be high on the list, but there they were.

The aria he loved that spoke to and of him most eloquently came from Strauss’s Arabella: Aber der Richtige. Glorious music: she sings of the man who is the right one – “he will stand before me, all at once, his eyes on me, mine on him, and no more doubting will remain, no more asking, and I shall be happy and obedient as a child.” John dreamed of this happening to him. But Arabella also sings, in the prelude to this aria: “A man may quickly mean much to me, but suddenly he means no longer anything.” And this was closer to John’s actual experience, running the risk of queer-bashing, of arrest and, at the end of the 1970s, the threat of Aids. Sadly, as far as I know, he had no enduring loving partnership in his life. In fact, any friend whose emotional proximity became uncomfortable he would quite ruthlessly cut out of his life. Several at his funeral who had been his closest friends at one time, who (like me) had loved him, had stories of the hurt this rejection entailed. He had a gift for inspiring affection, but not, arguably, one for reciprocity.

I had only intermittent touch with him after he left BH: I never knew whether his subsequent placement at a North Essex unit for pupils excluded from mainstream education was his choice or a peculiarly cruel effect of the ironically named “carousel” for distribution of jobs after the school closure. At any rate, it gave him a fund of stories about the “penal colony” as he called it.  And yet, in a way, being relieved of responsibility to do anything other than survive to the end of the day rather suited him. He often told me that his ideal job would be as a “trolley dolly” at Tesco; when he left Brentwood School to go to Norfolk, long before he might have been expected to retire, this was a step in the direction of such release.

I have played the organ at enough funerals to know that when all the personal qualities of the deceased have been adumbrated, the question is left, what did this life achieve, what did it amount to? I can say that the years I was close friends with John at BH were quite wonderful. Knowing him changed me as a person; I still throw in phrases that were part of his lexicon: “May these be the worst of our days” as a toast; “Shitbags” as a swearword, or “sacs de merde” when in France; “We need to sacrifice some more virgins” when the weather turns beastly. There are pieces of music I cannot listen to without thinking of him, imagining him there; arias revisited with sadness after his death. And yet, that time came to an end. I believe though that his years at BH were, like those of Miss Jean Brodie, his prime; lucky those ex-students reading this who had him as a teacher or form tutor. He was – excuse the clichéd pun – a class act.

I cannot close this without a tantalising postscript. Throughout his time at BH, John, like Kenneth Williams (whom in many other ways he resembled) kept a diary – obsessively, a page of A4 every day. He was a gifted writer (and lively correspondent) as well as raconteur; I imagine these diaries give a far better picture of his life and the life of the school at that time than any increasingly vague memories of such as myself. As in the famous cartoon of his beloved Jane Austen, perhaps they may be deemed fit for publication “when all the effing and blinding are taken out”.

Vince Mulholland (BHCHS 1977-83), possibly our only international cricketer, is currently in Canada as part of the Over 60s England touring side competing against many other cricketing nations.

You can dip into the programme HERE. Turn to page 15 for Vince’s profile.

Vince took a wicket for England in their first match, against Scotland on 10th August. England won the match by 9 wickets. Their second match is against West Indies, just getting underway now. So if you are quick, you may see Vince in action because all the matches are being live streamed HERE.

Several year groups are now starting to take a table at our Annual Dinner at Theydon Bois Golf Club on Tuesday 6th October. This year we are returning to the traditional sit down meal and an innovation this time is a choice of menu! Don’t miss out. Why not contact your mates and join us.

Click HERE to navigate to the Dinner details and booking form.

As always you are welcome to use me to communicate your interest in reconnecting with people from your year group whose contact details you may not have.

Here is a summary of bookings by year group so far (year group is start year)

I had a very welcome call this afternoon from Roy Hart, who may possibly be the last remaining pupil from 1938, our school’s first year. Roy phoned to thank me for sending him my spare copy of the 1943 school magazine. We had a wonderfully lively conversation in which he remembered many of his peers and also the teachers.

Roy tells me he is still looking after himself and still driving, just 16 months away from reaching his century. He has been trying to learn the trumpet for several years and now, with the help of an online tutor, he feels he is making some progress.

What a fine example for the rest of us.

Here is a photo taken at the start of the school cross country race in 1942. Roy is third from the left.

We are sorry to hear that Graham Reinelt died on 27th July. He was a pupil at BHCHS from 1959-1966.

A report from the BHCHS Alumni Survey — Jon Whittle and Nick Allum · August 2026

The survey asked two simple questions: your father’s occupation when you started at BHCHS, and your own main occupation in adult life. Some 984 of you answered both — enough to trace class movement across two generations. In sociologists’ shorthand there are three broad classes: professional and managerial work (the ‘salariat’), intermediate occupations (clerical, sales and service), and manual working-class jobs.

Figure 1 shows what happened as a river flowing from fathers to sons. Our fathers were a mixed lot: of the 984, 414 held professional or managerial jobs, 354 intermediate, and 216 manual. Their sons were not mixed at all: 806 — 82 per cent — ended in the salariat. Nearly half of us finished above our fathers; most of the rest stood still, usually for want of anywhere higher; about one in twenty moved down. How unusual is that? In national surveys of the same generations, roughly one in six working-class sons reached the salariat. Among the working-class sons answering our survey, seventy-three in a hundred did. ‘First of my family to reach a grammar school,’ one wrote. ‘Both parents had to leave school at 14.’

Within that story sits a stranger one. For boys who started in the fifteen earliest year cohorts in the survey, 1945–59, a father’s class made almost no difference at all: a bricklayer’s son or a banker’s son, the chance of a professional or managerial career was much the same among us: about 85 per cent — though a grouping this broad may hide finer differences. Two engines drove this. The first was the eleven-plus: by the time a boy first walked down Roding Lane, the sorting was done and home advantage largely spent at the gate. The second was the times. Half the working-class boys in our sample from that era left before the sixth form — far more than from professional homes — yet it mattered far less than it later would: three in four of those leavers reached professional careers anyway, recruited at sixteen by banks, insurance offices and the civil service. ‘Careers advice was… bank, insurance, preferably stay on for further education,’ one early leaver recalls. The earliest numbers deserve holding lightly: our oldest respondents are by definition the long-lived, and fortune in health and fortune in careers may travel together.

It did not last. Figure 2 traces each group’s chances across the school’s life, and from the late 1960s the lines pull apart. Among our respondents, boys from professional homes went on reaching the salariat — professional and managerial work — at around nine in ten right to the end of the selective era; for boys from manual working-class homes the figure slips to around 64 per cent for the 1966–75 intakes and — on small late-year numbers — 53 per cent for 1976–80. Beyond that the survey runs out of road: the 1981–89 intakes give us just 67 of you, schooling interrupted by the closure itself, so about the comprehensive years we say nothing. Two changes lie behind this widening gap. The sixteen-year-old’s route closed: the handful of working-class boys in our 1970s intakes who left early rarely reached the salariat; the qualification had become the ticket. And staying on was itself tilted by class: the post-war gap in sixth-form entry among our respondents had closed almost completely in the 1960s, then reopened in the 1970s, just when it mattered most. For those who cleared every hurdle, the reward could still be spectacular: ‘The school was for me a real social mobility enabler. I was … the first person in our family to go to university, and the brilliant history teaching enabled me to win a scholarship.’

Is this proof the school levelled the field? Honesty requires a harder answer. The eleven-plus chose boys of similar academic promise, so like was compared with like from the first morning; what became of the boys sent to the secondary modern lies outside our survey altogether; and the men who join an old boys’ association and fill in its questionnaire sixty years on are unlikely to be those the years treated worst, so our percentages are best read as generous. National research that followed everyone born in one week of 1958 — grammar and secondary-modern pupils alike — finds the selective system gave the country no overall mobility advantage. Nor was the escalator frictionless for those riding it. One respondent remembers his parents being told by the headmaster, at a parents’ evening, that he ‘could forget a career in law or medicine because we were “working class”. This was not ill-intended by him. It was the reality of that era.’ He built an export career anyway — but through a landscape where class was never invisible: merely, for a while, less decisive.

What our survey describes, then, is not a school that abolished class but a machine inside which, for a generation, a boy’s origins mattered astonishingly little. It rested on two vanished institutions: an examination at ten or eleven that did the sorting, and a labour market that took a sixteen-year-old into a career on the strength of his school’s name. Both went before the school did. Whether their passing was progress or loss will divide our respondents as it divides the country. The last word goes to a man who counted himself a working-class boy: ‘Not great being a working class boy at the school. Set me up for life though, so thank you!’

Analysis covers the 984 respondents (of 1,109 completed questionnaires) reporting both occupations, classed on the Goldthorpe scheme. All figures are from the survey except those explicitly described as national (Goldthorpe and Mills’s general-population studies; Boliver and Swift’s birth-cohort analysis). Shaded bands in Figure 2 are 95 per cent confidence intervals; the closure-interrupted 1981–89 intakes are omitted. Quotes are respondents’ own words, lightly edited for spelling and punctuation, omissions marked by ellipses.

We used Claude (Anthropic) to assist in drafting and debugging the R code for data cleaning and statistical analysis, and to copy-edit the text. All code and outputs were checked by the authors, who take full responsibility for the results and their interpretation.

We never held a popularity poll for BHCHS staff. If we had, the name John Loveridge would have appeared very close to the top. By the time he arrived at the school, in 1967, my failure in O Level Geography was a fresh and painful memory. But my sixth form contemporaries spoke highly of this teacher, who could have passed as one of us had he worn school uniform. They raved about his unconventional, enthusiastic, and totally fresh approach. Little did they know that just 22 years later he would be one of a small group of staff who remained loyal to the school while it went through its agonising demise.

John Loveridge was born in Nuneaton on 21^st June 1945 and spent his first 12 years in the market town of Bedworth. The middle of three children, he had an older sister and a younger brother. At around the time John began his secondary education, the family moved to a small village in Leicestershire. John attended Dixie Grammar School in Market Bosworth From early childhood he had displayed an affinity with nature. On his father’s side, there were gypsy roots going back through the generations. It is from this strong connection with the land that his love for geography, geology and meteorology began.

 

At Dixie Grammar, as well as excelling at his studies he also developed a great interest and skill in tennis. As he neared the end of his time at school, there was even a possibility that he might have been coached towards becoming a professional tennis player. But his father simply said there weren’t the funds for both university and tennis lessons, and so John made the decision to stick with his studies and read Geography at London University.

It was after his university days where John really came to terms with being gay and exploring what that meant in terms of his identity. The significant change in the law, occurring just a few weeks before John’s first term at BHCHS, made little difference to the entrenched attitudes of the time. But John met a group of friends, and they became known as the Tuesday Group, for the decades to come for where they developed true friendship like a family one that saw them through their working days in London and retirement in Norfolk.

Leading school trips had always been an expectation for geography staff, and John’s contribution was immediate and typically enthusiastic. But before long, his interest and breadth of knowledge in music and drama began to make its mark in other areas of life at BHCHS. Giving a talk to the Sixth Form Music Society in his first year, the secretary noted that John made some frank “confessions of an opera maniac.” A couple of years later, he joined other staff on the BHCHS stage in The Drunkard, only the second staff play in the school’s history. His performance as a downtrodden hero was highly commended.

The following year, again in the company of his colleagues, he took part in a performance of Mozart’s Toy Symphony at a school concert. The staff were provided with a set of obscure instruments, and the audience were so impressed with John’s playing of the nightingale they demanded a solo encore.

A very unusual event happened in 1972 and it was remembered in a Facebook post 50 years later by David Richards (BHCHS 1969-76). Click HERE to view the item. The visit of 3X was mentioned in the Roding magazine that year. The demise of the school magazine severely curtailed our archives of music and drama in later years but we are lucky to have a set of photos from Twelfth Night, performed in 1980.

The closure of the school magazine in 1973 pales into insignificance compared with the greater tragedy that ended with the destruction of our school 16 years later. John was among the teachers who chose to stay at Roding Lane through all those uncertain times in the hope that the school would survive and eventually thrive. He was not alone in struggling with the changes. By the time Hugh Colgate retired, and the closure of BHCHS had become an open secret, John was only 40 years old. An age when most professionals might have expected opportunities for further career development. But the shambolic reorganisation had left an indelible mark on John, and he took early retirement when the school finally closed. John was among the group of staff who managed a toast to BHCHS.

Thanks to his ongoing friendship with Ruth Prior (English 1975-82) he received an unexpected opportunity, in 1991, to return to teaching. Ruth had moved to Brentwood School and needed to take some time off recovering from surgery. Knowing that John’s vast knowledge extended to literature, she suggested to the Head that he should be considered as an English supply teacher covering her absence. Then, after her return, he successfully applied for a permanent position to teach geography. The resumption of his original career was short lived, and he retired permanently in 1995.

One benefit from his return to teaching was meeting Sheila Edwards, another member of staff at Brentwood. Sheila became a close friend, and often a travelling companion, for the remainder of his life. She gave a warm and moving eulogy at John’s funeral, and we are grateful to her for allowing us to share it HERE.

After leaving Brentwood, he moved to Norfolk to care for his elderly mother. Then following her death, he resumed travelling. For the final decade of his life, John was able to spend time exploring and enjoying many far-flung areas of the world.

Here are some additional resources that you may wish to explore:

Tributes/memories from some of John’s former BHCHS pupils.

When Geography Met Opera: an article originally written by John for a BHCHS student magazine in 1977.

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to the following: Ross Loveridge, John’s nephew for contributing to this and supplying many fine photos, Sheila Edwards for allowing us to publish her eulogy, Ruth Prior for sharing her memories of John, and David Richards for some great ideas for additional material.