Southchurch Hall High School For Boys

A Memory of Southend-on-Sea.

We moved to Sandringham road in the early 60's I went to Southchurch Hall HS for boys. I remember the technical drawing class room was a portacabin to the left of the main gates, the woodwork classroom was at the bottom of the playground, and the metalwork class room was to the right of the playground. One very cold winter we had a slide, solid sheet ice, going down the playground straight into a brick wall, after school we used to slosh water down it so it could freeze overnight, we must have been mad. I can't remember any of the teachers names unfortunately, I do remember the photography and sailing clubs.
The girl all the boys fancied was Susan Smith, I wonder what happened to her?
At 16 the careers adviser came round and asked me what I wanted to do, I said a racing driver, so they enrolled me on a catering and hotel management course at the technical college. The only tutor I remember from there was a Mr Dillon who walked with a limp. I still have the main text recipe book from my time there.
I got my city and guilds and went on to my first job at the restaurant on the end of the pier, they stuck me in a small room preparing vegetables, I remember thinking " I've gone through all this training and they want me to peel spuds" I lasted a week!
I remember going out shrimping, with a friend of my fathers, I can still smell the diesel as he was filling up the boat tank from containers, that had been rowed out to the boat. The shrimps were cooked, as they were caught, in a large boiler which slopped boiling water out at every rock of the boat. I ate so many hot shrimps I was ill. At the end of the trip the boxes of cooked shrimps were brought ashore, in the dingy, and loaded into a little van in which the the floor had mostly rusted away and covered with a sheet of wood. Must have been before MOT's.