Radlett Prep

A Memory of Radlett.

I attended Radlett Prep between 1958 and 1965. It was located in a converted three floored Edwardian house on the corner of Hillside Avenue and Aldenham Grove, and has since been converted back to a private residence. Aldenham Grove was close to the nearby Aldenham Lodge mansion which was located at the top end of The Drive near what is now Lodge End. Aldenham Lodge had become a hotel which advertised all post-war mod cons including "...television, billiards, riding from our own stables, Swimming (club membership) and fully licensed Saturday Dinner Dances".  Radlett Prep held exciting summer swimming galas in their substantial outdoor pool. The whole edifice was sadly demolished in 1964, putting an end to those grand sun-drenched galas with its reward of small bags of plain crisps with tiny blue bags of salt. Radlett Prep's Edwardian House was built on land sold off by the owners of Aldenham Lodge in 1910 for development. Radlett Prep was owned and run by a Mr and Mrs Bishop who lived in a house opposite the school. They both wore black gowns and were fierce educators. I lived in Elstree and got the 353 bus back and forth. Some kids from Elstree were ferried by their parents; some participated in pooling and some not. We sometimes pooled with Jamie Diamond’s dad, who was a cool film stuntman. Radlett was definitely posher than Elstree. At the weekends, we often went to birthday parties at other kid's houses in Radlett. Many were in big old mansions or so they seemed, to someone like myself who was dead small, and spent most of his time in shorts and a blue cap with an embroidered ‘R’ on it, short for Radlett. Like the grounds of Radlett Prep itself, a lot of those big old houses have since been demolished to make way for several more smaller new ones. Pity.
The girls were taught in the nicer rooms in the main house. Kindergarten and Transition were in two appalling adjacent prefabs. The boy’s 1st and 5th forms were in a slightly more respectable building on the west side of a former tennis court (from a more gracious age) that had been converted into a crumbling playground.  2nd, 3rd and 4th form boys were in yet more appalling prefabs to the north of Kindergarten and Transition. There was a line of Lime trees to the north of the school, which gave off fluffy white stuff that used to float through open windows in summer. All the buildings were always freezing in winter. In the 'great freeze' of ’62 to ’63 there was snow and ice on the ground for four months. There was so much of it, that we dug playground tunnels through piles of the stuff. The food, served in a ground floor room in the main house, was completely and criminally ghastly. Semolina, cold dried fatty beef and gooseberries and brussels sprouts that were grown in the garden. I had two younger sisters in the girl’s part of the school. One of them has a school pic from about 1961, hanging today in her house in Barnes. Radlett Prep looks actually quite respectable in it – which I suppose it was really, although I don’t think that the standard of education was brilliant. I’ve since seen what a real prep school looks like – nothing like Radlett Prep. Proper prep schools have decent buildings and playing fields. All the classes were full and so I imagine that the Bishops were making money.  That’s hard to say; then or now. But there were lots of good things about the place. Geoff Pullen was a decent bloke. He’d written a novel and had a brother who’d invented some cunning military camouflage. Mr Grimes was (as his Dickensian name suggests), a miserable and unhappy man. He was the exact opposite of Mr Pullen. Miss Curtis and Miss McQuade were young and pretty. Even then, I remember fancying them. I won a load of cups for athletics one year, and they were dished out by the famous British movie star, Anna Neagle, whose niece, Rosalind Wilcox was also at the school. There were other film and telly people from Elstree there. My sisters, tell me that Simon Cowell and Stanley Kubrick’s daughters were also there, but I have absolutely no recollection of any of them. We were taken to watch Crackerjack with Lesley Crowther and Eammon Andrews being recorded at the BBCs’s Theatre in Shepherds Bush. It must have been during that bitter winter of ’62 – ’63, because the coach almost didn’t make it there, or back. There were lots of good friends there:  David Hooper, Mary Broad, Caroline West, Nigel Hall, Graham Burrell and Victor Crawford, who I had some contact with afterwards. And others like Michael Sharkey who I really liked and, sadly, never saw again. He died tragically young.  Life is fragile and precious.  This may all sound like a big whine. Perhaps it was just the lingering post war austerity and general gloominess that I didn’t like. On the plus side, at least we could play soccer and cricket.  When you get older you discover that not only did some kids in Britain have none of the things that we did, but that there were kids in the world who didn’t even have clean water or medicine, far less education. To the Bishop’s credit, they were hot on raising money to pay for this sort of stuff in India, which was on its recently-independent knees at the time. Never forgot that, nor the funereal morning assemblies that were held in yet another dead iffy prefab building, that doubled as both gymnasium and school hall. I was lucky. I went on to Haberdashers and then to a school in America. I’ve lived longer than my father and both my grandfathers. It's a better and more peaceful world. I had a fabulous education; no complaints. Fifties and sixties Radlett Prep was a slightly shaky but, nevertheless, formative part of it.