Old School (John Baillie looks back at his days at St Lawrence College)

 John Baillie, an old friend from St Lawrence College, sent me this essay looking back at his school days. I asked him if I could post it on my blog, and he replied, 'Post away'. You will enjoy his writing. Tom Hawksley

OLD SCHOOL

Old school cinema was an early, and remains, an enduring personal passion, as much for it’s clunky delivery as for the product. The projectionist, scaling up from my father’s super-8, would hand engage the magic acetate to a background hum of subdued anticipation that stilled at the call of ‘lights’. We were plunged into darkness for a nanosecond, an expectant sensory-deprived birth canal, before the burst of bright white light on the big screen and the simultaneous whirring and clacking of the projector’s sprockets and reels. We grew up in a time when cinema was theatre.

Old schools are as much constructed from memories as from bricks and mortar, and which last the longer depends on the human lifespan (and any relevant intergenerational family legacies) and the durability of building materials. Or a sudden cataclysmic event can wipe the whole record, put a full stop to future histories, draw a line under the collective memory bank, and reduce bricks to dust.

My old school, tucked quietly away in a south coast backwater, suffered such a tsunami in the spring of ‘26. A little shy of its 150^th anniversary the majestic red brick buildings, with adjacent acres of green grounds , fell ignomiously into bankruptcy. A salient reminder that what seems solid can melt into air. My father’s name will soon be bulldozed off the house honours board.

For myself the intersection of personal story, schooling, and cinema has to be Lindsay Anderson’s 1968 award winning ‘If’, which claimed the Palme D’or at Cannes just two years prior to my entry, aged thirteen, to the Senior School after 5 years at the adjacent Prep (junior school). In many aspects a typical small scale, minor Public School, St Lawrence mirrored many of the satirised elements of Anderson’s film including religion, deference to authority, militarism, keeping a ‘stiff upper lip’, and outright absurdity. I suspect, however, that in one feature the school stood out from its contemporaries. Due to the passion and idiosyncrasy of one teacher we were gifted an eye-opening and mind broadening film club. We watched French New Wave (Lelouch’s ‘Un Homme et une Femme’), Third World Cinema in Satjt Ray’s ‘Pather Panchali’, and Hollywood classics such as Hitchcock’s ‘Psycho’, and Kubrick’s ‘Dr Strangelove’.

We were not shown ‘If’. Despite which Anderson’s riff on Kipling-esque values still achieved mythic status in the common rooms, dormitories, and smoking dens. This elevation of the unseen to icon status was surprisingly common. Kubrick himself withdrew ‘Clockwork Orange’ from circulation but that didn’t stop us donning Doc Marten’s and headgear in imitation of Malcolm McDowell and his droogs. I listened to the soundtrack of ‘Cabaret’ years before I saw the actual film. Ditto, I sang along to Steppenwolf’s ‘Born to be Wild’ for years before I caught ‘Easy Rider’. The Zeitgeist was so powerful it penetrated the school walls, ignited our imaginations and enthused our conversations.

We talked endlessly, discussing anything and everything ... as well as nothing of consequence, usually to an accompanying cigarette, or ten. More often than not we just shot the breeze, chilled, and talked nonsense (including a lot of nonsense about girls). But often books, films and music would hold the floor, with politics and ‘the meaning of life’ topping the agenda in later years. I’m aware that I’m probably overplaying the ‘bohemian intellectual chic’ a tad, after all we were not at the Sorbonne, nor on the Left Bank cadging Gitanes from Satre and De Beauvoir, but just silly kids sharing Players’ No.7 in the communal toilets.

The school’s establishment values and ethos were battling strong headwinds in the modernising western society outside its walls. The anti-Vietnam war protests and Civil Rights movement in America, the Troubles in Northern Ireland, the student protests of 1968 were all harbingers of discord and potential change – as a rule the establishment, by definition, does not like change. But the young, and admittedly sometimes naive, often do. The ‘counter-culture’ that sprung up in parallel to the challenging times found willing ears and minds among our generation. Our study-rooms were festooned with anti-war and Jimi Hendrix posters, reeked of joss sticks and patchouli, rocked to the sounds of The Who’s ‘My Generation’, to The Stones’ ‘Street Fighting Man’, to Bob Dylan and David Bowie.

The school clung on to ancient rites of passage like ‘tick off’ – an institutionalised humiliation and initiation process conducted by house prefects. After two weeks’ grace in which new boys had to learn school lore, slang, nomenclature and geography, they were then tested individually by a group of prefects. The ‘fag’, as first years were known, entered a darkened study, was groped on his way to the centre of the room, made to stand in a waste bin while a desklamp was shone in his face. In the course of the test he was shouted at, insulted, sworn at and generally humiliated. Following graduation from tick-off, the fag performed basic chores for a year, such as delivering milk to senior boys’ studies in the early morning.

On promotion to the prefecture in my fourth year at Senior School, my first act was to ban ‘tick-off’.

Daily chapel services, weekly full church service, weekly square-bashing in the Combined Cadet Force, weekly speeches by the House Master, periodic sermons at Assembly from the Head Master failed to make the institution remotely relevant to the rapidly changing world outside. Many pupils, maybe most, had no issue with this, but for me personally I found the place absurd.

I can recall very few ‘life lessons’ learned in the classroom or via the more general educational environment. I did derive benefit from some of the extra-curricular activities such as contributing to debates, but nothing to compare with the tidal wave of multi-sensory influences washing over us via TV, contemporary music, books, world events, counter cultural responses, theatre and, of course, films.

I was an autodidact when it came to literature; I had read most of Steinbeck by the age of 14, a lot of Orwell and Graham Greene, a smattering of Dostoevsky and Solzhenitsyn, some Austen, some Lawrence soon followed. Complete autodidact is not strictly true in that I enjoyed reading what others read including Tolkein and one-offs like ‘Zen and the Art of Motor-Cycle Maintenance ‘. These literary forays were extracurricular, I had no direction in reading material from the school whatsoever, apart from O Level set texts (two books?). My own curiosity and my peers were my guides and my teachers.

I found the books I read to be entertaining and informative but it was the films that I consumed during those school years that grabbed me emotionally and left me feeling enlightened. It was ‘The Graduate’ that taught the younger generation to take our own path, ‘Cabaret’ taught me not only history, politics and empathy but also a lesson in how art can reflect life, even with distorted mirrors. ‘Oh What a Lovely War’ brought home the insanity of WW1, the brutal crassness of the British class system, with a closing shot that still haunts me. ‘One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest’ taught the importance of being free in your mind as well as physically free.

So we arrive at the final reel. I believe my personal views and values of egalitarianism, the importance of being free and thinking freely, and empathy for fellow humans were forged during my St Lawrence years, not from the curriculum but from the books and films consumed and the countless conversations about them with my school friends. My peers were my teachers.

I feel saddened that my school, and long term home, has closed, that the theatre has gone dark, that our conversations will no longer have physical walls to echo around. But the show must go on. We keep calm and carry on. Keep a stiff upper lip. Because, after all ... we are, inescapably, old school.

John Bailey. August 2026.