Antony Looks Back... On Infamy
OP Antony Vickery, who is now based in the States, had a brief, but colourful spell at the College in 1970, here he looks back on that time..
When the Franciscans announced that they were closing the boarding school I was attending in Buckinghamshire, my parents sent me to Princethorpe, and when I arrived (in, I believe, 1970) I discovered to my delight that several other boys I knew well from the Franciscan school had also signed up.
I was a conscientious student and did well at first, even being appointed a trainee prefect or assistant prefect or whatever it was and being permitted to wear a stripe (gold? red?) on the sleeve of my blazer.
Then came the fall. I and two other boys, all three of us imports from the Franciscans, got into mischief that resulted in us being expelled (I think the term they used was “asked to leave”). Although our sins were many and included hot-wiring the car the school used for driver training and driving it and the lawn mower tractor around the playing fields in the middle of the night, eating comestibles we'd stolen from the tuck shop, I believe that rather in the manner of Watergate, it wasn’t the crime that did us in, it was the cover-up we attempted after being discovered (by Matron, of all people).
I ended up at St. John’s College in Southsea where I once again discovered several boys I’d known at the Franciscan school. It all ended happily. I covered myself with glory at St. John’s, even becoming a prefect again (instead of armbands we wore a special tie), and left in 1973 for university.
Some Princethorpe memories:
- The secret panel in the church
- Army Cadet Force drill in the school yard and shooting .303s at Bisley
- The beastliness of compulsory rugby
- Opening up the trapdoors in the upper floors of the church tower and jumping through them onto a stack of unused mattresses placed on the ground floor
- The tiny door at the back of the study hall that opened onto a spiral staircase
In 1978 I moved to New York to work as a computer programmer, and somewhat to my surprise, what I’d originally planned as a two- or three-year stint has turned into a lifetime. I became an American citizen in 2001 and live near Philadelphia, Pennsylvania with my wife Susan and our ten-year-old twins Alexander and Emma.
I travel to England often, and when I’m there it’s my habit to visit my old schools and the houses my family lived in (there are a lot of the latter as my father was an officer in the British Army and we moved often). On one such visit to Princethorpe, some twenty-odd years after I’d been sent packing, I entered the school and was taking in the display cabinets in the cloisters on my way to the church when I was approached by a gentleman - I can’t recall whether he was a brother or a lay teacher - who politely and very correctly asked me who I was. I explained that I was an old boy of the school and that nobody had answered the door. It was only when I mentioned my name that he interrupted: “And you were expelled, weren’t you?”
If not fame exactly, perhaps infamy!
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