A report from the BHCHS Alumni Survey — Jon Whittle and Nick Allum · August 2026

The survey asked two simple questions: your father’s occupation when you started at BHCHS, and your own main occupation in adult life. Some 984 of you answered both — enough to trace class movement across two generations. In sociologists’ shorthand there are three broad classes: professional and managerial work (the ‘salariat’), intermediate occupations (clerical, sales and service), and manual working-class jobs.

Figure 1 shows what happened as a river flowing from fathers to sons. Our fathers were a mixed lot: of the 984, 414 held professional or managerial jobs, 354 intermediate, and 216 manual. Their sons were not mixed at all: 806 — 82 per cent — ended in the salariat. Nearly half of us finished above our fathers; most of the rest stood still, usually for want of anywhere higher; about one in twenty moved down. How unusual is that? In national surveys of the same generations, roughly one in six working-class sons reached the salariat. Among the working-class sons answering our survey, seventy-three in a hundred did. ‘First of my family to reach a grammar school,’ one wrote. ‘Both parents had to leave school at 14.’

Within that story sits a stranger one. For boys who started in the fifteen earliest year cohorts in the survey, 1945–59, a father’s class made almost no difference at all: a bricklayer’s son or a banker’s son, the chance of a professional or managerial career was much the same among us: about 85 per cent — though a grouping this broad may hide finer differences. Two engines drove this. The first was the eleven-plus: by the time a boy first walked down Roding Lane, the sorting was done and home advantage largely spent at the gate. The second was the times. Half the working-class boys in our sample from that era left before the sixth form — far more than from professional homes — yet it mattered far less than it later would: three in four of those leavers reached professional careers anyway, recruited at sixteen by banks, insurance offices and the civil service. ‘Careers advice was… bank, insurance, preferably stay on for further education,’ one early leaver recalls. The earliest numbers deserve holding lightly: our oldest respondents are by definition the long-lived, and fortune in health and fortune in careers may travel together.

It did not last. Figure 2 traces each group’s chances across the school’s life, and from the late 1960s the lines pull apart. Among our respondents, boys from professional homes went on reaching the salariat — professional and managerial work — at around nine in ten right to the end of the selective era; for boys from manual working-class homes the figure slips to around 64 per cent for the 1966–75 intakes and — on small late-year numbers — 53 per cent for 1976–80. Beyond that the survey runs out of road: the 1981–89 intakes give us just 67 of you, schooling interrupted by the closure itself, so about the comprehensive years we say nothing. Two changes lie behind this widening gap. The sixteen-year-old’s route closed: the handful of working-class boys in our 1970s intakes who left early rarely reached the salariat; the qualification had become the ticket. And staying on was itself tilted by class: the post-war gap in sixth-form entry among our respondents had closed almost completely in the 1960s, then reopened in the 1970s, just when it mattered most. For those who cleared every hurdle, the reward could still be spectacular: ‘The school was for me a real social mobility enabler. I was … the first person in our family to go to university, and the brilliant history teaching enabled me to win a scholarship.’

Is this proof the school levelled the field? Honesty requires a harder answer. The eleven-plus chose boys of similar academic promise, so like was compared with like from the first morning; what became of the boys sent to the secondary modern lies outside our survey altogether; and the men who join an old boys’ association and fill in its questionnaire sixty years on are unlikely to be those the years treated worst, so our percentages are best read as generous. National research that followed everyone born in one week of 1958 — grammar and secondary-modern pupils alike — finds the selective system gave the country no overall mobility advantage. Nor was the escalator frictionless for those riding it. One respondent remembers his parents being told by the headmaster, at a parents’ evening, that he ‘could forget a career in law or medicine because we were “working class”. This was not ill-intended by him. It was the reality of that era.’ He built an export career anyway — but through a landscape where class was never invisible: merely, for a while, less decisive.

What our survey describes, then, is not a school that abolished class but a machine inside which, for a generation, a boy’s origins mattered astonishingly little. It rested on two vanished institutions: an examination at ten or eleven that did the sorting, and a labour market that took a sixteen-year-old into a career on the strength of his school’s name. Both went before the school did. Whether their passing was progress or loss will divide our respondents as it divides the country. The last word goes to a man who counted himself a working-class boy: ‘Not great being a working class boy at the school. Set me up for life though, so thank you!’

Analysis covers the 984 respondents (of 1,109 completed questionnaires) reporting both occupations, classed on the Goldthorpe scheme. All figures are from the survey except those explicitly described as national (Goldthorpe and Mills’s general-population studies; Boliver and Swift’s birth-cohort analysis). Shaded bands in Figure 2 are 95 per cent confidence intervals; the closure-interrupted 1981–89 intakes are omitted. Quotes are respondents’ own words, lightly edited for spelling and punctuation, omissions marked by ellipses.

We used Claude (Anthropic) to assist in drafting and debugging the R code for data cleaning and statistical analysis, and to copy-edit the text. All code and outputs were checked by the authors, who take full responsibility for the results and their interpretation.

We never held a popularity poll for BHCHS staff. If we had, the name John Loveridge would have appeared very close to the top. By the time he arrived at the school, in 1967, my failure in O Level Geography was a fresh and painful memory. But my sixth form contemporaries spoke highly of this teacher, who could have passed as one of us had he worn school uniform. They raved about his unconventional, enthusiastic, and totally fresh approach. Little did they know that just 22 years later he would be one of a small group of staff who remained loyal to the school while it went through its agonising demise.

John Loveridge was born in Nuneaton on 21^st June 1945 and spent his first 12 years in the market town of Bedworth. The middle of three children, he had an older sister and a younger brother. At around the time John began his secondary education, the family moved to a small village in Leicestershire. John attended Dixie Grammar School in Market Bosworth From early childhood he had displayed an affinity with nature. On his father’s side, there were gypsy roots going back through the generations. It is from this strong connection with the land that his love for geography, geology and meteorology began.

 

At Dixie Grammar, as well as excelling at his studies he also developed a great interest and skill in tennis. As he neared the end of his time at school, there was even a possibility that he might have been coached towards becoming a professional tennis player. But his father simply said there weren’t the funds for both university and tennis lessons, and so John made the decision to stick with his studies and read Geography at London University.

It was after his university days where John really came to terms with being gay and exploring what that meant in terms of his identity. The significant change in the law, occurring just a few weeks before John’s first term at BHCHS, made little difference to the entrenched attitudes of the time. But John met a group of friends, and they became known as the Tuesday Group, for the decades to come for where they developed true friendship like a family one that saw them through their working days in London and retirement in Norfolk.

Leading school trips had always been an expectation for geography staff, and John’s contribution was immediate and typically enthusiastic. But before long, his interest and breadth of knowledge in music and drama began to make its mark in other areas of life at BHCHS. Giving a talk to the Sixth Form Music Society in his first year, the secretary noted that John made some frank “confessions of an opera maniac.” A couple of years later, he joined other staff on the BHCHS stage in The Drunkard, only the second staff play in the school’s history. His performance as a downtrodden hero was highly commended.

The following year, again in the company of his colleagues, he took part in a performance of Mozart’s Toy Symphony at a school concert. The staff were provided with a set of obscure instruments, and the audience were so impressed with John’s playing of the nightingale they demanded a solo encore.

A very unusual event happened in 1972 and it was remembered in a Facebook post 50 years later by David Richards (BHCHS 1969-76). Click HERE to view the item. The visit of 3X was mentioned in the Roding magazine that year. The demise of the school magazine severely curtailed our archives of music and drama in later years but we are lucky to have a set of photos from Twelfth Night, performed in 1980.

The closure of the school magazine in 1973 pales into insignificance compared with the greater tragedy that ended with the destruction of our school 16 years later. John was among the teachers who chose to stay at Roding Lane through all those uncertain times in the hope that the school would survive and eventually thrive. He was not alone in struggling with the changes. By the time Hugh Colgate retired, and the closure of BHCHS had become an open secret, John was only 40 years old. An age when most professionals might have expected opportunities for further career development. But the shambolic reorganisation had left an indelible mark on John, and he took early retirement when the school finally closed. John was among the group of staff who managed a toast to BHCHS.

Thanks to his ongoing friendship with Ruth Prior (English 1975-82) he received an unexpected opportunity, in 1991, to return to teaching. Ruth had moved to Brentwood School and needed to take some time off recovering from surgery. Knowing that John’s vast knowledge extended to literature, she suggested to the Head that he should be considered as an English supply teacher covering her absence. Then, after her return, he successfully applied for a permanent position to teach geography. The resumption of his original career was short lived, and he retired permanently in 1995.

One benefit from his return to teaching was meeting Sheila Edwards, another member of staff at Brentwood. Sheila became a close friend, and often a travelling companion, for the remainder of his life. She gave a warm and moving eulogy at John’s funeral, and we are grateful to her for allowing us to share it HERE.

After leaving Brentwood, he moved to Norfolk to care for his elderly mother. Then following her death, he resumed travelling. For the final decade of his life, John was able to spend time exploring and enjoying many far-flung areas of the world.

Here are some additional resources that you may wish to explore:

Tributes/memories from some of John’s former BHCHS pupils.

When Geography Met Opera: an article originally written by John for a BHCHS student magazine in 1977.

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to the following: Ross Loveridge, John’s nephew for contributing to this and supplying many fine photos, Sheila Edwards for allowing us to publish her eulogy, Ruth Prior for sharing her memories of John, and David Richards for some great ideas for additional material.

By Simon Thorpe (BHCHS 1973-80)

This September, two 1973 Old Bucks will perform together in a new band, FUZZ KITCHEN – more than 50 years after they first formed a group while at BHCHS.

The music and songs – written by Simon – are in the style of ‘The Canterbury Scene’ of the 1970s

FUZZ KITCHEN will be playing at the Lexington, 96-98 Pentonville Rd, London N1 9JB on Monday 21st September

https://buytickets.at/hatfieldandthehealth/2205913

and at The Piper, 1 Norman Rd, St Leonard’s on Sea TN37 6NH on Thursday 24th September

https://buytickets.at/hatfieldandthehealth/2206018

The music that grabbed me at first as a schoolboy, after outgrowing the teenybop of bands like Slade and The Sweet – was the prog rock of Yes, Genesis, King Crimson and others. Sharing a love for music seems to help some school kids find their tribe, and I certainly found mine with two other boys in my class, Nick Allum and Jurgen Hobbs. We introduced each other to lots of bands of that time, and as I’m sure school kids still do, went to each others’ houses to hang out, annoy our mums, play our guitars and listen to all kinds of music.

Exploring further some of the musicians in those bands, along with recommendations from older boys, Nick and I gradually began to discover music of the so-called Canterbury Scene – bands like Gong, Soft Machine, Caravan, and lesser-known ones like Hatfield & the North, Gilgamesh, Egg, Camel and National Health. Only a handful of the musicians actually came from the Canterbury area in Kent, but these bands, and others like Henry Cow and Slapp Happy, became loosely associated together because of a particularly quirky combination of rock, jazz, pop, contemporary classical, Weill/Brecht-style theatricality, witty lyrics, electronic experimentation and outright avant-garde free improvisation. It was somehow very English, but often with the involvement of many European and American influences – and musicians. It could only have happened in the 1970s –  an incredibly diverse and creative time in popular music.

Anyone who has read the excellent novel The Rotters’ Club by Jonathan Coe will have read about the protagonist Ben’s love for Hatfield & the North’s music (the book is named after the Hatfields’ second album). The novel describes Ben’s life as a schoolboy in surroundings which seem to me very much like BHCH transported to the West Midlands.

Hatfield & the North had a style of music unlike anyone else, with beautiful melodies, the unique sounds and chord voicings of keyboardist Dave Stewart (NOT he of the Eurythmics in the 80s), guitarist Phil Miller, drummer Pip Pyle (both from just up the road in Sawbridgeworth, and sadly no longer with us) and the velvety vocals of Richard Sinclair delivering witty, often risqué or poignant lyrics in a rather deadpan, tongue-in-cheek manner.

Back to Nick and me – in the 2020 lockdowns, we started recording, just for fun, some cover versions of music by Hatfield & the North and National Health (our favourite bands from that scene), along with keyboard player Eric Baumgartner, an old friend of Nick’s from his studies at Berkelee College of Music in the USA. We had such a great time recreating their music, we decided to play live. With me singing and playing bass, and Nick on drums, we recruited my great friends and musical colleagues Mark Ridout and Karen Sharp (on guitar and woodwind respectively) and played some gigs in 2022 and 2023 under the name Hatfield and the Health. The fans really enjoyed it and asked us if we had original music too, so I set about writing some music and songs in that style. We also invited Gabriel Keen to play keyboards with us. The result is the album, FUZZ KITCHEN, due for release in September, in time for our mini-tour.

For more about Fuzz Kitchen, visit their website: https://www.fuzzkitchen.com/

I must apologise to David and his merry men from YOS 72. I have managed to sit on this item since February this year. That was when they met in London

Thanks to Stephen Robinson (1977) for sending us this from the recent annual reunion of YOS 77 (plus partners), held in Stephen’s garden. The group includes several ex-Loughton CHS pupils, who are named along with the Old Bucks in the caption (from left to right).

I heard this morning from Steve Hyam (BHCHS 1956-63) that his younger brother Pat died on 21st July. Steve writes….

He was found in the morning by his wife still in his favourite armchair and with his dog at his feet, a nice peaceful way to go, Liver failure.  Patrick was a Quantity Surveyor, initially for W & C French the local Buckhurst Hill contractor, working at the then new Harlow Hospital, then various other large sites before going to the Middle East, Jordan, South Africa and Australia where he eventually took Australian Citizenship and married Pamela an Australian.  Working in Sydney area, when retired they took on a B&B in Ross – central Tasmania.

I am grateful to Stephen Robinson (1977), who is Leader of Chelmsford City Council and has been an active councillor for more than 30 years, for sending this video in which tribute is paid to Gerard McEwen, a highly respected councillor who died in May 2026 at the age of 96.

It was down to Stephen to make the connection with BHCHS, pointing out that Councillor McEwen was the father of Nick McEwen (1976). Nick, of course, played a fundamental role in the revival of the OBA when we began tracing former pupils and staff in 1999. He was there right at the start, even before becoming our first webmaster.

Click HERE for a reminder of Nick’s important first contribution, as recorded in our first edition.

The memorabilia I have accumulated over the past quarter century includes more than 40 duplicate copies of our school magazine. The “Roding” suffered a premature death 16 years before the same fate befell the school. We told the story of the magazine in the May 2009 edition of OB News (see page 26).

If you would like to own a copy please contact me. I have spare copies from most years between 1943 and 1973. No charge, but I would appreciate a contribution towards postage.

Is it something to do with our scorching summer? I keep hearing about reunions happening. Robert Wilson (1966) told me about an unconventional idea he and his mates enjoyed recently….

Robert writes…..

I last emailed you in 2023 after Nigel Salter, Robert Hunter, Adrian Ayley and I had met together for the first time in over 20 years – when you told us that GGSK was about to close. 

We met again last month to mark what, in a few months, will be the 60th anniversary of our induction in the playground standing before another new boy, HAC, who I remember addressing us on the steps outside the hall on a sunny morning in September 1966.

Since 2023 Adrian, who has spent the last 40 years living and working in France, has acquired a new 74′ narrow boat which he berths at Droitwich in the West Midlands. We took up his offer of a few days together on the boat, ‘Llygoden Yr Afon’.

We made a good start to bookings for our Annual Dinner on Tuesday 6th October. Here is a summary of bookings by year group so far (year group is start year)

Click HERE to navigate to the Dinner details and booking form.

As always you are welcome to use me to communicate your interest in reconnecting with people from your year group whose contact details you may not have.