4. Outside (Front)

Eltham Green photographed from the
Queenscroft Road Entrance, 2014

The view as you enter EGS from Queenscroft Road is gracious and elegant. Tall trees and lawns screen the glass and pebble dash facade of the main building. A gentle descending path leads towards a terrace and the main, ground floor entrance (the rear grounds are accessed through the lower ground floor). In my time, ponds with lilies and wildlife softened the stonework and added a visual focus, especially for teachers looking down from the staffroom balcony on the first floor.

The Ponds before EGS opened in 1956 (LMA)

The ponds are highlighted in this photograph (right) taken in 1956. At some point the ponds were filled in. They are not visible in the 1988 photograph of the terrace below. I used to arrive early in the morning, perhaps about 8.30 a.m. and would gather around the ponds with other children. We would study the water boat men skimming the surface but were careful not to stumble down the steps. Sometimes pupils did fall in, or were pushed. 

The Terrace photographed in 1988. The

ponds have been filled in.

Drama Hall photographed in 2014,
right of picture.

The Drama Hall, a purpose-built little theatre, is connected to the main building by a linking concrete canopy (see below) that leads to a colonnaded area beneath the teaching block. This opens to the front terrace (see above). In our youth we were told the school was asked to choose between a swimming pool and a drama space and decided on the latter because the Eltham baths were so near at hand. On the whole, we were pleased with the choice and I have the fondest memories of the productions I saw there, from Toad of Toad Hall to Dido and Aeneas and Ring Around the Moon.

Falling Leaves, photographed in
2014

On the terrace facing wall of the Drama Hall there is a sculpture called 'Falling Leaves', perhaps linked to the school's oak tree and acorn motif (see below). This has weathered badly over the last half century and no attempt has been made to repair the crumbling structure. The iron framework is exposed and rusting (see left).

Falling Leaves, photographed in 1970
(LMA)

As the school is to be demolished, it must not seem worthwhile to make good the neglect. The sculpture's decay foreshadows the bulldozer.

I shall say more about drama later on, but for now I must remember only the time when the school taught me to smoke. I was playing a prosperous business man (a seriously minor part) in Ibsen's Peer Gynt. We were asked to smoke Castella cigars on stage to signify our lordly wealth. We enjoyed this so much that we rehearsed by the colonnade, exhaling large clouds of smoke in the name of art. It was some years before I stopped taking cigars at smart dinners.

Viewed from the field, (see above) Eltham Green looked splendid, and still does because the orientation  hides the extensive building work now under way on the Middle Park Avenue side. You'd never suspect that in the 1970s the paved area below the classroom block (on the left of the picture, above) was known as Bomb Alley. Peter Dawson, celebrated by the Daily Express as Britain's 'toughest headmaster' and admired as the scourge of Boy George, the most famous EGS student, entitled his boastful memoirs The Road from Bomb Alley.  This glamorised his exploits with gown, cane and binoculars (used to identify miscreants).   

Our secondary years coincided with the dawn of mass motoring, so when we left school in the evenings via Queenscroft Road our eyes were inevitably drawn towards cars driven by our teachers. Some younger members of staff seemed glamorous to us and their vehicles gave glimpses of private selves and worlds beyond our experience and purse.  I was fascinated by and perhaps desired a French assistant who rode a bicycle with a tiny engine. Her allure and elegance as she crested the drive and turned into Queenscroft Road on her aptly named Velo Solex is suggested by a much later image of Brigitte Bardot (above, left).

My family never owned a motor car or towed a caravan, and showed few signs of wishing to do so. This must have heightened my longing for the style and freedom embodied in teachers' cars. Brian Crowdy (Languages) and his wife Valerie (née English, History)

drove a Volkswagen camper van (see similar model right) that has since become a classic. I marvelled at the idea of a mobile home, and fell in love with Volkswagen as the epitome of graceful engineering. When I finally bought my own camper van in 2005 I remembered the Crowdys as pathfinders to an itinerant, prosperous and modern way of life. Unfortunately I was too old and discovered that sharing a four foot double bed in a tin box in the middle of a field was not quite what I had imagined. I'm sure it was brilliant 50 years ago.

John Eyers, our Religious Education teacher, drove a Morris Countryman and would often give a cheery wave as he passed. In the sixth form, a number of us would join him for  regular Sunday evening drives to London. Dr Martyn Lloyd Jones, a famous Evangelical, would preach for an hour and then retire to a room where he would receive members of the congregation. This link is to Joan Bakewell's interview with him in 1970.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-vbydx95tVQ


As a firm atheist, I was not remotely persuaded by his marvellous knowledge and talk, but he gave his time freely and we would return to Eltham in the Countryman, debating what we had heard and thought.