The Hallifordian - 2016-2017

98 Memories of Colin Squire, former Hallifordian. Have you driven past a Squires Garden Cen- tre? Did you know that Colin Squire, director of Squires, is a Governor of Halliford? You probably don’t know that Colin was a boy at Halliford, about seventy years ago. Colin was born in Twickenham in 1936. His family lived in Twickenham and he went to school at the Bishop Perrin Church of England Primary School. His father worked in a nursery (the sort that looks after vegetables, not children) and the family moved to Sunbury in summer 1945. Colin can re- member celebrating VJ day in late 1945, when Japan was defeated and the Second World War ended. In 1947 he joined Halliford School in the first form. In those days year 7 was the first form, year 8 was the second form and so on. (If you can subtract 6 in a reliable way then you can work this out. And as a bonus you will finally understand why the boys and girls in year 12 are still in the sixth form.) Colin Squire joined Halliford School in 1947 In 1947 there was only one class in each year, and the whole school only had about two hundred pupils. In the 1950s the school owned all the land between Wadham Close and Manygates Lane, and also owned the big old houses on the other side of Wadham Close. Mr Maxwell Morris was the owner of the school, and he decided who the Headmaster should be. He chose . . . himself! There were boys boarding at the school then. Some of them lived in Halliford House, and some of the lived in the houses in Wadham Close. There were four ‘houses’ (the ancestors of Desborough, Greville, Russell and Wadham) but they were named after trees: Oak, Ash, Yew and Elm. But most of the pupils were day-boys and trav- elled in to school from home each morning. Colin cycled down from Sunbury, wearing his new school uniform blazer, grey trousers and school cap. At the bottom of the high street, opposite the roundabout and the War Memorial, was a huge hollow oak tree, big enough to hold five boys playing hide-and seek, and there was a lot less traffic. Colin remembered punishment at Halliford could be dished out with the cane… There were few buildings on the school site, no Baker Building, no Music Centre, no Sports Hall. The original stable block for the House had been turned into garages, and later into classrooms, which explains why the rooms over there were la- belled G1, G2, G3 etc. Only G3 and G4 now sur- vive as the rest of the block was demolished when the Theatre was built. There was a single science lab upstairs in G3, but there were Bunsen burners at the cutting edge of 1940s technology and not much else. Most of the teaching took place in rickety wooden huts which had probably belonged to the army during the First World War. PE took place in a larger wooden gymnasi- um, roughly where the PE office is now. In the lob- by at the entrance you can see a photograph of boys using this room for PE in the 1950s. The school played Rugby in the first two terms, some football,