Bell baxter lives section I former Pupils Contents

Andrea Goldie

Brenda E A Goodall

Morag Goodall

Rosemary Goodall

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Lindsay Goodwin

David Robertson McGregor Gordon

David trained as a mechanical engineer and draughtsman at Tullis Russell & Co Ltd, Papermakers, Markinch, and became their Planned Maintenance Engineer.

He was appointed an Elder in Freuchie Parish Church in 1962 and became Session Clerk in 1983. He was a Trustee of Lumsden Memorial Hall in Freuchie since 1969, and became Chairman of Trustees in 1986. He was appointed Justice of the Peace for North East Fife in 1971 and appointed to sit on the Bench in District Court in 1982.

He played cricket for Freuchie Cricket Club, acting as Match Secretary for

Married, he had two sons, Peter and David, both of whom attended Bell-Baxter.

Margaret Gordon (qv) is his sister.

Elinor Gordon

George Gordon

Many Bell Baxter FPs will have had the pleasure of meeting Muriel Dymock, either as a teacher or perhaps for the first time at a reunion. She deserves great credit and our sincerest thanks for so assiduously producing the Newsletter over the years - always a treat to receive - and also for her steadfast loyalty to both the FP Association and to reunions. At one of these, an FP may well have offered to contribute something for her as I did no less than fourteen years ago. I am at last constrained to do so on account of two requests for information, one in each of Issues 22 and 40.

The latter contained a photograph of a dramatic group with the caption:- ‘1951 School Play (names, please)’. The cast members in fact were: -

Back row - L. to R. Harry (Pat) Melville from Balmullo (farmer and first-class rugby player), Douglas Erskine from Cupar, Ian Rodger (in drag!) from Carslogie Road, Cupar (a house near to that of Miss Batchelor – i.e. Annie Bash!)

Front row- L. to R. Myself (George Gordon) from Markinch, Rae McCallum from Cupar Muir, Maureen Noble from Cupar, Tommy Beaton from Auchtermuchty. Producer - Miss Reynard.

The play was put on at an evening competition in St Andrews Town Hall. I think we won.

It is intriguing to think that if, in that year of 1951, an individual of the same age as I had introduced nostalgic musings about events 61 years previously as I do here, that person would have been referring to 1890, a year after the School's foundation!

On reflection, apart from Rugby and Hockey, the Gym display, the Debating Society, and the end-of-session School Concert, that play along with some others were most of the extramural activities I can recall. Certainly occasional visits were made to BBC Scottish Orchestra concerts and a regular trip to Dundee to hear Professor Erwin Finlay Freundlich give a very high-powered lecture. There were the summer holiday Camp Schools and occasional overseas trips.

Of course the late 1940s and early 1950s were clearly still the very frugal post-war years which we simply had to accept. Some clothes still bore the 'Utility Mark' and food was still rationed. I vividly remember the intense excitement when Olive Spoad nipped down in a morning interval to R S McColl's in the Crossgate, proudly bringing back the very first ‘off the ration’ sweets!

The School's extramural activities of that era or lack of them contrast very strikingly with the present day’s wide spectrum, regularly recorded in the Newsletters.

For example, in the most recent edition, Number 41, as many as four whole pages are taken up with a positive cornucopia of imaginative activities, facilities and successes, followed by two full pages describing similar brilliant sporting attainments.

One very notable such achievement among many, many others must be the fairly recent winning by the rugby First Fifteen of the Bell Lawrie Schools Rugby Cup, open to all Scottish schools in the course of which a number of noted fee-paying schools with long rugby playing traditions were defeated.

By contrast, in the 1950s, our first fifteen only played against Strathallan School's second fifteen among others. The advent of the enlightened and talented PE teachers Jock Blair and Bunty Berwick clearly oversaw, in the later fifties, the dawning of today's sporting excellence. Furthermore, to Google 'Bell Baxter' is both interesting and rewarding. Contemporary HMIE reports show BB outcomes for such things as Fourth, Fifth and Sixth Year exam results, Staying-on rates and Leaver Destinations to be equal to those of any other schools, both in Fife and in the whole of Scotland and better than most - very impressive indeed. One enigmatic result is the strikingly lower than average rate of Free School Meals Taken - shades of queuing for mince and peas followed by rhubarb and custard in the sex- segregated 'Prefab' Dining huts, then down to Chic Robertson's for a Hot Orange!

All the School's contemporary successes and high morale, envied and admired far and wide, are perhaps epitomised in the Flash Dance episode now a legendary oart of history thanks in no small way to Facebook and to the enthusiasm and actual physical participation by none other than Rector Philip Black. I doubt if it would have been approved of by the aforementioned Annie Bash or even Daddy Liddell, best remembered for the stinging clips on the ear he doled out - and that in an art class too! Nevertheless he did introduce Art Appreciation into the curriculum.

But I'm not so sure that the rector of our time, the very enlightened Dr Dunlop, wouldn't have smiled approvingly. Besides having an LRAM for singing, a boxing Blue from Glasgow University and a PhD based on Virgil, for whose Aeneid Book 2 he was the author of the annotated text book we used for the Highers, he was a nifty and elegant ballroom dancer.

One very mild reservation I have about my time at BB was the rather indifferent teaching of music - no four-part singing and thus no training in choral sight reading.

The School Concert generally consisted of a diet of perhaps a G&S chorus, Cherry Ripe, the Road to Mandalay and so on, invariably in unison. No instrumental instruction was available, no school orchestra that I can remember and no indigenous jazz. Perhaps the two music teachers of the time were war weary or was it simply that times were hard. Also there seemed to be little solo instrument playing or solo singing at school events apart from the very few lucky pupils of that era who would disappear up to Miss Cape's piano instruction eyrie (Granny Cape), such as Moose Hood and Sandy Scott. Gus Hood, for example, a fine tenor, from Gilliesfaulds Fruit Farm, was never asked as far as I know to display his gift at any school event. Likewise, I had no idea that the aforementioned Maureen Noble was such a talented musician despite being a classmate. I was very saddened to learn of her death in the last Newsletter. Much other talent must have lain untapped.

Before attending BB from 1948 as a pupil (? school student), I had first encountered the School some years previously at an end-of-session concert, held in those days in the Regal Cinema situated up South Union street opposite the school and near (Sir) Bobby Reid's then home. I feel sure Cherry Ripe and the Road to Mandalay or the like were on the menu! I clearly remember my eldest brother Peter pointing out a Robert Davidson (later the Very Reverend Professor Davidson, Moderator of the General Assembly) and a Scott Hutchison (‘Big Hutch’) as two of the 'big men' of the time as well as among others, a Tom Glass. He was a very talented and prolific contributor to the School Magazine of the day.

As the fine obituary for The Reverend Dr Scott Hutchison in Issue 41 noted, his ability to overcome adversity was inspirational, having endured permanent total motor paralysis from the waist down due to Polio, contracted during a widespread epidemic just after leaving school. A very talented sportsman and an excellent pianist, again with his gift unrevealed, he was a Wormit minister's son who at one time had two younger brothers at the school, nicknamed ‘Middle Hutch’ and ‘Wee Hutch’ the latter being Ian Elliot Hutchison who died in office as boy captain and remembered eponymously to this day in a School trophy. My wife is a cousin of theirs.

In a contiguous box at Venice's La Fenice Opera House in the mid-eighties before it was burnt down and rebuilt, I detected a Scots voice. Between acts in Rossini's La Cenerentola, swinging round past the intervening gilt gargoyles, I engaged the owner of the voice in conversation. ‘From where in Scotland do you come?’ 'Kettlebridge!’ We traded our mutual admiration for the School and its memorable teachers over the Venetian heads below. The Scotsman turned out to be Tom Glass. After a First Class honours degree in English at Edinburgh University he had gone into industry, but by then was based in Venice. Herewith, therefore, the answer to the second question, raised in Edition 22. ‘Whatever happened to Tom Glass?’

All five members of my own family were fortunate enough to have attended BB, there being at least one of us there in the two decades between 1944 and 1963. Two sisters were girl captains. Four of us still meet together regularly, one sister Anne having died tragically young aged 27. Despite the above minor reservations about music and extramural activities, we never fail to recall at some point the very excellent, well taught, broadly based and totally free education we were all fortunate to have received at Bell Baxter. Amongst us, we can still quote sonnets by Shakespeare, Wordsworth and Keats in full (Willie Lindsay), the Laws of Ohm and Boyle and Archimedes Principle, (Dr Robertson, Mr Seath and Major Sutherland), Pythagoras' Theorem (Doc Inglis), the first page of Book 2 of the Aeneid in Latin (Miss (‘Bandy’'!) Wood and Tom Howie) and we can all still speak useful French (Tommy Muir and Annie Bash)! Robert Leishman, with his quintessential Post Impressionist appearance, was a very fine modem Scottish artist of the day and a memorable teacher, as was Sandy Ad. whose recent death sadly seems to somehow signify the end of an era.

We were likewise saddened to learn from Mr Black that the old Westport building which functioned as the school till 1963 is no longer required as it stands for any useful purpose and that it is presently being demolished. Remembering the highly successful 1989 Centenary Reunion, would it ever be possible for a reunion to be arranged for all those who attended school in that old Westport Road building, the youngest of whom would now be around 60 years of age? Would Miss Dymock and some of the well-recognised Fife-based eager beavers from those days ever give consideration to this idea?!

All the foregoing could be looked upon as a sort of nostalgic super Tweet. I earnestly hope that when Willie Lindsay studies his celestial ‘Twitter’ in that Parnassus beyond the clouds, he will find my spelling, grammar and syntax somewhat more acceptable than that of today's Texters and Tweeters!