40s and 50s Memories
executive as CEO or as CFO.
I am always aware of my good luck in having
the partner I have, who has shared most of my
travails in this remarkable company and now
puts up with me in my dotage. Furthermore I also
consider myself very fortunate to have worked
in a company that has allowed one to assume
the correct degree of fulfilling responsibility. I am
also grateful for the conviviality I have enjoyed
with a large number of Philips colleagues, many
of whom have become real friends.
Not surprisingly in a period covering 33 years
there are scores of photos of family, and posed
executives to bore the hind leg off a donkey.
Here are a few, though, to provide some "visual
audit" of what has been indicated above.
E. CHASE
King Alfred 1943
Eric Chase left King's during the Second World
War, in 1943. Academically, he describes
himself as being "less than average" but felt
that he made up for it on the playing field,
particularly hockey, and in the shooting range.
With some wartime memories of King's and
his life thereafter he writes:
I joined the Air Training Corps as soon as it was
formed and flew from Westonzoyland a number
of times. I also joined the local Home Guard and
was allocated a Browning machine gun. This
piece of equipment was a beast of a machine.
I remember marching with the local Home
Guard to a shooting range several miles away,
and our CO wanted us all to march at Somerset
Light Infantry pace. This was OK for the first
few miles, but soon the older men found life at
this pace impossible and it had to be reduced.
One night we had to man part of the main railway
line just outside Taunton. The only casualty was
one chap being hit in the back with something as
a train went past. When I met him after the war,
he said his life had been very difficult thereafter.
I played cricket for the school, and I remember
when we once came back from a match in
Weston-super-Mare, some bright spark said we needed a mirror in the Alfred Common
Room, and somehow I managed to borrow a
long one from the Great Western Railway. This
we managed to smuggle from the station to
the school! This item was much appreciated
by all until it was broken by some hard object.
Naughty!
Fire watching came round now and again.
The silence when we had all gone to bed was
unbelievable. I remember that Headmaster got
the whole school out of bed one night at about
eleven o'clock into shelters dug in the field below
Fort George. As we went in we saw and heard
that South Road, the road in front of the school,
was being machine-gunned by the enemy. This
was the only time the shelters were used in this
way, I think. However, in the sanatorium those
of us incarcerated inside once had to go down
into the cellars in the middle of the night due
to a possible raid. On another occasion, one
morning, without an air raid warning, a plane
dropped a bomb in the fields beyond the playing
fields. Apart from all of us being lifted a foot or
so from our beds, all was well.
When the Americans appeared, the first we
saw of them was the Headmaster being driven
around the fields in a jeep, with his formidable
bearing intact.
A few of us had started a chicken enterprise
using waste from the kitchens, and one day
the whole school was able to have an egg for
breakfast! A wonderful thing at a time when
feeding the school must have been a difficult
task. Dried cod came on the menu with its rank
smell, followed by whale steaks tasting of top
quality cod liver oil, to the groans of one and all.
When two girls came to school, it caused quite a
stir, which seems funny today, but then, it gave
life a new meaning! The younger masters by
now had been replaced by older retired chaps,
masters and professors.
On leaving King's in 1943 I went to Reading
University and took a degree in Agriculture. At
the same time, I was involved in the Berkshire
War Ag. Activity.
In 1947 I was engaged in a farming partnership,
and four years later I won a scholarship to view
farming in the USA.
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