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What do these have in common?

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Drake Raleigh Hawkins Nelson?

Yes they’re all seafaring heroes of Olde England. Fine upstanding Boys Own everpresents. The type of man to aspire to. Oh and also slave traders profiting from the death and misery of others and no strangers to sticking the flag where is doesn’t belong.

But if we give them a pass on the last bits … Nelson was more of an apologist … they were also the house names of my alma mata.

The current equivalent might be Farage Fox Lowe and Robinson and that wouldn’t do.

What were yours and has history been kind?

1

Comments

  1. At my primary school the houses were named after local roads and at my secondary local villages (I was in Woodcroft at the first and Burton at the second). I do have a vague memory of a primary school song, with lyrics by one of the teachers, which included examples of hard workers each house should aspire to emulate. One of them was ‘the Coolie in his paddy field’, which I doubt is still in the school repertoire.

  2. My prep school had Greeks, Romans, Persians and Medes – and qualities were ascribed to them accordingly – I was a Greek, and we were the best (of course) because we were taught about Archimedes and Pythagoras, So-crates and Diogenes – mathematicians, engineers and philosophers. The Romans were warlike jocks, the Persians were quite neutral, I recall, but the Medes were weeds. How silly these things seem now, 50 years later.
    Secondary school was Quaker, so fairly unassuming names – Grove, School, Field, Fryer and Reckitt – no colonial hangover there, I think.

    • Oh, I just remembered – the rooms in the boarding house I was in were also named – after Irish provinces for some reason – Ulster, Leinster Munster, Connacht,

      Plus the room for first years – 8 beds plus cupboards in about as much floor space as those took up, so probably not much more than 16 foot x 16 foot. It was called Horsebox…

      • Horrible rush of remembrance to the ghastly dormitories I slept in, 7 – 18. I can’t remember the system of collecting groups of boys together at prep school, something to do with names of hills. Then, at the “big school”, there were about 10 separate houses, which actually were the separate buildings where we “lived”. I was in School House, the oldest and most backward, in that such fripperies as studies for older boys had yet to feature, as they did at some of the more progressive houses. So it was dormitories, always dormitories. Vile. Within dormitories there was an informal break down into disparate groups: criers, wetters and wankers. At least we were spared buggers, but I dare say it happened. To think my parents gave up holidays and the like to buy me that start in life…….

  3. We had almost the same Rook instead of Hawkins (primary school). At Grammar school traditional Welsh counties Gwent, Powys, Dyfed and Gwynedd.

  5. Red, yellow, blue and green. Liberal Primary School in the 80s, think they had a sense of the issues. None of us ever questioned why the houses weren’t named after people.

    No house names (or indeed houses) at secondary school, although the mind boggles at who they’d have chosen, given the opportunity.

    Personally, I’m good with the colours. It’s not the heroes of empire we should move on from, it’s hero-worship in general. You can pick whichever shining paragons of the here and now you like, invariably half of them will later transpire to have been wrong’uns.

    • My early-80s secondary comp was the same, I think. Yellow, blue and green, I can’t remember the other one but probably red.

      I was in green. Summer term sports day was a nightmare – there is no worse combination than ginger hair, lime green shirt and lobster read skin (from the inevitable sunburn).

  6. At my primary school the houses were named after local rivers and were allocated the colours red, blue, green and yellow. To this day I always associate those colours in my mind in that order (in which they appeared on the school notice board), and with the rivers they represent.

    At my secondary school the houses were named after benefactors of the school. The same names are still used, so I guess they haven’t yet dredged up any murky pasts linked to them. Colours were also used.

    Coincidentally I was in the yellow house in both schools.

  7. Two of ours were the surnames of 18th century pupils who later became bishops. A third was the surname of a local family of nobs who had occupied a nearby stately home. The fourth was ‘School’ and was exclusively for the 15% or so of pupils who stayed in the school’s boarding house, and consequentially they often failed to fill a full team for some sporting events. The boarders were mostly the children of parents working overseas, often in the military.

  8. Grange House – Green & navy tie
    School House – Silver & navy tie
    York House – Yellow & navy tie
    Royal House – Red and navy tie
    Brent House – Blue & navy tie

    No idea why they were called those names, I was in Grange house.

  9. At primary school we had Campion, Owen, Payne and Southall. All named after catholic martyrs I believe. I can’t remember all the ones we had at secondary school, but they were along the same lines (More, Becket etc).

    I was in Southall, in case you wondered.

  10. Here is an outline of how the set-up appeared to me and my contemporaries in the 1988 intake to boarding school.

    Tudor – spotty science nerds
    Bayley – sporty science nerds.
    York – Wealthy scions of farming families
    Windsor – ‘alternative’ types: late 80s so lots of Morrissey posters and Smiths T-shirts on weekends (The sorting hat placed me in this house)
    Roslyn: Girls!
    Clarkson: Posh girls!!

  13. Bennett, Glegg and Hollowell. All former head teachers apparently. I am sure they were all fine upstanding citizens. I was in Hollowell; we saw ourselves as the radical Left Bank thinkers who were into their music and arts unlike the sports and academic lot in the other houses. Rather like the Afterword in fact. As I recall we never won anything and looking at the school website I see they are firmly in last position (or bronze medal as we liked to think of it) this year.

  14. Junior school: Livingstone, (green) St George (red) , Jubilee (Blue), Sunflower (yellow).
    No houses at secondary school. I suspect someone several decades before thought they encouraged homosexuality or something. I hated secondary school.

  15. I’m completely lost. These are the threads when I think to myself “What on earth are those crazy Brits talking about?”
    I have no idea what you mean when you say “house” in this context. It doesn’t seem to just be about buildings, as pupils seem to “belong to a house” (??) but not necessarily in a boarding school sense.
    No; I’m lost! Would anyone care to enlighten a confused Swede? 🙂

    • It does derive from Boarding House originally. It’s essentially the unit of pastoral care in public (fee paying) and private (also fee paying) schools.

      As well as pastoral care, they also provide the basis for, eg, intra school sports competition, music competition.

      if you’re actually interested, there’s a very good The Rest Is History episode on these things

        • We don’t do school sport in Sweden, we let the parents drive their kids to different teams after school…
          In Sweden, it’s all about which class you’re in, which is A, B or C, that you’re randomly assigned to as you start, and stay in until you leave (unless you move to another school). So you begin first grade and get assigned to a class and a teacher, for me it was 1C, and when I (finally) left I was in 9C. Other than PE, music, woodwork and sewing classes, you have the same teacher in all subjects until you get to 7th grade. But you still don’t share lessons with pupils from the other two classes except (possibly) for the extra subject of your choice (art, more languages).
          No competitions, no school teams. There’s choir, if you like singing (and is chosen), which is the only other time during the lower grades when you get to know the kids in the other two classes.

    • I just gave pupils at my school a group for registration before heading off to separate subject classes. The secondary was an 8 form of entry comp so each year (there was no sixth form) had Burton A, Burton B and so on for the other 3 ‘houses’. Unlike others here no Hogwarts-type qualities were associated with each house, nor was there any sense of membership or loyalty. It was just for admin.

    • Have you read any of the Harry Potter books, Locust? It’s the same thing as Gryffindor, Slytherin, Hufflepuff and Ravenclaw, except there’s no sorting hat (although looking at how posh some of these schools are, it wouldn’t surprise me).

  16. At prep, it was Hilary/Scott/Shackelton.

    At secondary, they were all eminent Guildfordians. I was in Powell.
    At the other secondary, they were all Old Norvicensians or Heads, with the exception of the Boarding House. I was in Parker.

  18. My primary school houses were Rowen, Beech, Sycamore and Oak. As a tiny Ent I was designated Rowen. It seemed to involve nothing more than being forced to wear the house colours on school sports days. The sad aping of Public School bollocks didn’t survive into my secondary schooling but if it had I would postulate that the houses may well have been Soul, Rock, Folk & Prog. I’d have been the house captain of Prog to my eternal shame.

  19. They didn’t have a house system at my primary school. Or at my junior secondary.
    But at the senior secondary, it was all about the sport – I can’t remember the house system having much relevance apart from that. I suspect there was a house points system ( ie, points removed for being caught skinning up behind the PE block, etc) but I don’t really remember – I involved myself as little as possible (I wasn’t sporty).

    Names were Auldhouse (a village); Balgray (seems to be a reservoir?); Capelrig (an old local Manor House); and Duncarnock (a volcanic plug with a ruined castle on top) – I googled all of these, I had no idea at the time.
    Duncarnock was yellow and I was allocated to them – I can’t remember the other colour associations. Although I was a science/maths type, I hung out with the arty types and hippies and listened to Gong, Man, etc – I was not a poster boy for the house system!

  20. Merton, Eland, Coates, Mitford.

    All named after local areas, except Coates. That would be Sir Richard Coates. A benefactor, I suppose, who set up at least one school in the area in the dim distant. Though not the one that commemorated him with a House name.

    I was in Merton. All surname based. All with surnames beginning A to E – Merton. Surnames beginning F to L – Eland. And so on.

    We were the best.

  21. Have we done this before?
    At my school they were Bentley (yellow), Cave (green), Freestone (blue) & Saville (red). The latter 3 were founders of the school and Bentley was a former pupil who became a renowned mathematician, with a statue in Oxford (near to the Radcliffe Camera, named after another former pupil – aah, Chris Camera; I remember him well).

  23. No house system at my primary school. My secondary school was founded in the mid-1800s by the church and our house names were the names of dioceses with which the school had historical connections – Lichfield, York, Chester and Manchester. My memory is hazy but I think the houses were only used for annual sporting competitions so if you weren’t very good at sport you could get through your school career without needing to know which house you were in. I think the results of those competitions contributed to a table – so that we were competing for some sort of championship – but it was all rather low key.

    • I’m sure ours were only used for three annual sporting events – the annual ‘Sports Day’ of athletics, swimming races held close to Christmas, and a cross-country running event also held in winter.

  24. School houses were only a thing for the annual sports day. Until the sixventies (as Chartmusic would put it) Australia was in many ways Little Britain, and as an ideal example, the four school houses in a dry, dusty, suburban South Australian school were Glamis, Balmoral, Windsor and Sandringham – went well with the framed photo of QEII (circa 1954) that hung in every classroom.

    (By time I got there they’d changed ’em to the names of four local historical figures)

  25. The school I last worked at still uses the house system so I’ve checked what they have competitions in.

    This competition provides the opportunity to engage in the extra-curricular life of the school at a level which is accessible to all students through a wide range of sporting events including swimming, football, hockey, rugby, netball, rounders, cricket and athletics or through contests in drama, music, spelling, debating, chess and the maths challenge. The positives accrued by students throughout the school year are also added up by house affiliation to contribute to the competition.

  26. Keith, Dun,Melvin and Byron. I was in Byron. The poet was at our school for a couple of years before swanning off to Cambridge or Oxford or wherever. I, of course, decided I too was going to be a poet. That didn’t quite work out so I decided I was going to play the guitar and harmonica and write songs that would change the world. That too didn’t quite work out so I decided to make a career out of selling tin cans.
    I’m currently on holiday in Sicily where Lord Byron wrote some poems. Small world, eh?

    • Last time I went punting – my BIL was over with his ladyfriend, and I had a free punt hire voucher I’d won in a raffle – I saw a tin can floating in the river Cam at Byron’s pool. ‘Tis a small world indeed.

        • I’ve never been. Is it (like Sardinia) very distinct from mainland Italy, with its own flag more commonly displayed than the Italian one?
          Matteo Salvini (Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Infrastructure and Transport) is seemingly obsessed with having a bridge built connecting it to the mainland. It’s going to be the world’s longest suspension bridge if it ever gets built.

        • Worked in Catania for a while. I bought a guide book before going and it was described as “the most degraded city in Europe”. It certainly had the worst drivers. Food was good though and other places in Sicily that I visited were wonderful

          • I’m very used to the driving in Italy, it’s normal for me. On the very rare occasions I’ve driven in England I find it so easy in comparison. People give way! Tailgating is frowned upon! I’ve heard Italians dispute their reputation as bad drivers saying “we’re great drivers – no other country’s drivers could cope with the madness on the roads here as well as we do!”.

            • In Catania there were often 2 lane roads with about 5 cars all trying to drive side by side. I was also in taxis that went through red lights at 100km/hr

  27. At Cannon Lane Primary School in Pinner, the houses were Elgar, Shakespeare, Turner and Masefield.

    The names meant nothing to me at the time. But they’ve aged quite well except for Masefield.

    At my secondary school, the houses were named after local areas if I remember correctly.

    I can understand your confusion, @Locust.

    Another enormous difference was that every school day started with Assembly. The whole school gathered in the hall for announcements and a speech by the headmaster followed by a short religious service.

    This is a completely unknown concept here in Sweden. The only day that the whole school gathers together is the last day of the summer term.

    On one such occasion at Björkhagen School, the teachers sung Alice Cooper’s School’s Out. That was hilarious.

    • No Assembly, but I’m old enough to have started each school day with the whole class gathered around the classroom pump organ (yes! every classroom had one!) singing a hymn or two – unheard of in today’s secular Sweden, I’m happy to say.

      My teacher was both clever and lazy, so she made it a “treat” for her favourite pupils to work the pump while she was playing. I always disturbed the order during the singing, so I never have to do it.
      The reason why I disturbed the order was that I couldn’t help laughing out loud every time we sang the teacher’s favourite hymn (“Morgon ibland fjällen”) and got to the very big jump from a low note to a very high one, because all of the kids sang different high notes, just taking a shot at something very, very high, but never hitting the right one. The sound of all of those high notes in squeaky kids voices broke me every time!

  28. Sarfend ‘igh School for Boys…

    Tuscany – red, sine labore nihil,  ’nothing without effort’
    Troy – blue, fortiter et recte,  ’boldly and rightly’
    Sparta – yellow, non sibi sed domo,  ’not for self, for house’
    Athens – purple, nulli secundus,  ’second to none’

    Have the school song, while we’re at it. The sort of thing Molesworth would have turned his nose up at, but the tune was magnificently Elgarian. I can still remember every note.

    When our ship shall leave the river bank,
    Its timbers brave the main,
    Our port shall gleam through mists of time,
    And beckon back again,
    Then each adventurer shall feel,
    As onward strains the eager keel,
    From the School beside the church and sea
    The speeding wind of memory,
    ~
    And some shall picture pounding ball
    On turf of sodden field,
    And some the fight on fiery pitch
    When grit refused to yield;
    And some shall think of desk and pen,
    And organ-voices heard again,
    And laughter ringing merrily
    Adown the aisles of memory.
    ~
    And a cry shall wake the sleeping years,
    A shout “shoot hard for goal!”
    The strain of the race shall steal the breath,
    The thrill shall seize the soul.
    And the voice of one shall sound to all
    As it sounded oft through crowded Hall,
    And then the least of us shall be
    The nobler for the memory.
    ~
    Here make we then, as old time men,
    The pledge our souls demands:
    To build as they, the best we may
    The house not built with hands.
    So, one with Future and with Past,
    Our work in School shall live and last,
    And through the centuries to be
    Our School shall grow in memory.

    • Just asked a friend who was at school in Sarfend but it turns out not at your school.

      The last school I worked at had Nil Sine Labore as its school motto.

      Our old school song with an emphasis on the s at the end of resonamus held for a long time.

      Concinamus, O sodales Eja! quid silemus? Nobile canticum Dulce melos Domum. Dulce Domum resonemus Domum, dulce domum, dulce domum, dulce domum, dulce domum resonemus!
      Concinamus ad penates! Vox et audiatur: Phosphore! Quid jubar, Segnius emicans, Gaudia nostra moratur? Domum, dulce domum, dulce domum, dulce domum, dulce domum resonemus!

  29. The houses at my school were ( Robert) Clive, Talbot ( Earls of Shrewsbury), Langland ( Piers Plowman) and Jemmet ( former headmaster).

    The school no longer exists and I see that it’s successor is instead using the surnames of famous mountaineers, having presumably decided against using the surnames of people with some local connection. So sadly no Ball, Pym, Hunter,Owen and Bough, all of whom either went to school or were born in the town.

  30. St Anselm’s College, Birkenhead.
    Ours were Grange, Manor, Outwood and Park – all to do with names around the local area.
    Outwood, which I was part of, was for some reason always the top house in intra-school competitions.
    Given we were all randomly allocated at the start of the first year (unless you had an elder sibling who had attended the school, in which case you went into the same house) it’s hard to explain why.

  31. No Houses at my primary, as far as I remember.
    At my secondary (local Boys Grammar School) the 6 houses were

    Bushey (Blue) – after the nearby town of that name
    Cassio (Black) after the nearby estate of the Earls of Essex, now parkland
    Fuller (Purple) after Dame Elizabeth Fuller who in 1704 founded the free school it evolved from
    Groves (Red) after Ron Groves. Who he? No idea.
    New (Yellow) after moving site and expanding in 1912
    Platt (Orange) after the Platt Foundation, with which the original free school amalgamated in 1881.

    I was in Fuller.

    There are now an additional two houses

    Rée (White) after former headmaster and WW2 hero Harry Rée*, who was in charge for the first year I was there
    Turner (Green) after another former headmaster, Keith Turner, who was in charge for my remaining years there.

    No particular “House” bullshit occurred apart from the annual sports day stuff in my day, but nowadays it seems they have a House Points system where they compete for the annual House Cup. The points accrued by each house are converted to cash for charity (2p per point) each year.
    On average each house raises about £400.

    *An interesting character https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_R%C3%A9e

  32. Wanstead County High School – Romans, Vikings, Saxons and Celts.

    The winning house each year was named ‘cock house’….no sniggering at the back please.

  33. The secondary school I went to was a comprehensive, but started as a grammar. It still had houses, named after three of the local streams/rivers which feed into the Thames. Evenlode, Glyme and Windrush. Red, blue and green respectively. Heavy on the rugby and cross-country runs.

  34. Outer London comprehensive that had started as a Tudor grammar school in Stepney among the guild of Coopers, so Gibson, Coborn and Guild, named after historic headteachers and patrons. Mostly used for sport , although strictly rugby, cricket, athletics, not football.. A sickly Proustian child, I survived it.

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