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Who in their right mind would want to miss the AGM? The annual general meeting – yes, I know it sounds dull – has in fact always been an opportunity to see who is running the club and to question them, and also to applaud them.

     The AGM is also an opportunity for a sit down! When you’ve been on your feet all day and you’re looking forward to an evening on your feet at a drinks party, it makes sense to take a seat for half an hour.

     And another pragmatic point: If you’re like me – not always punctual – then aiming for the start of the AGM guarantees not missing the start of the drinks.

     To some OHs, the annual general meeting is a mysterious rigmarole preceding the real event. For me, it’s always been a vigorous highspot among OH events, with suggestions being aired and policy discussed. You can have your say. (Keep it short though, please!)

     But this year the AGM is going to change, or so I gather. The club’s top brass apparently have in mind something less starchy, less formal. Less rhetoric and more entertainment, by the sound of it.

     I had an interesting email from our president Seb Warner, reminding me that we are lucky to still have a club. There is no longer a school to support it and he pointed out that this year Allhallows has been closed 25 years. So this year Seb wants the AGM to celebrate the club’s continued existence, he told me, adding: “It will be more of a club update, rather than a formal constitutional event.”

     Seb and his new mini-committee seem to be livening up the OH scene. I expect we’ll get more details of the new-look AGM on the website in weeks if not days. Until then, it’s a pre-drinks mystery.

     The AGM and drinks, at the Royal Automobile Club in London, will be on Thursday evening, November 16^th.

 

l Next website offering from monthly contributor George Hayter: 1st October.

For most of my five years at Allhallows I was discontent and sometimes I still wish I had gone to another school. 

    In my opinion the standard of teaching was low and most facilities below standard. 

    I was considered a bright pupil at prep school but by the time I left Allhallows my academic ranking had dropped. 

    Like everybody else in the 1965 intake to Venning, I was bullied, beaten, humiliated and discouraged. 

    And like Sir Francis Peek himself, I found parts of the actual location depressing, with its forbidding flint walls, its ghostly mansion and its dispiriting fog. 

    My housemaster wasn’t my type and, as an uncompetitive coward, I resented Saturday afternoons having to cheer others at play. 

    Allhallows was all boys until the first girls were introduced in my last year but oh dear I didn’t really get a look in. There were only six of them. 

    Too much of the teaching was boring and one master’s lessons were frightening, although Mr Blooman and Mr Christian were among staff who inspired me. 

    Some admirable OHs took a more positive view. They loved everything about Allhallows. Apparently they didn’t even notice the violence, the harsh conditions and the chaos. They thought the teaching was brilliant, they weren’t bullied and they didn’t even mind being beaten. They gloried in Rousdon’s isolation and they weren’t forced to watch the boring XV because they were in it. 

    These go-ahead people who shone in the examination hall and triumphed at sport are often to be heard at OH events. 

    And you might think that sceptics like me, who squandered their schooldays joking and sneering at swots and goody goodies, would be attracted to an OH gathering as they would be attracted to a minefield. 

    Yet I am an Allhallows doubter who is active in the club. And I’m not alone. Some of the most troublesome retrogrades you knew at school are these days regularly in the midst of happy chat at OH gatherings. Sports heroes and maths geniuses do not monopolise the attendance. Neither are prefects and heads of school the only ones there. There are loads of rogues like you and me. 

    The Allhallows grateful and ungrateful mix together better than the milk and powder in school custard. I should know. At school I was a cigarette-smoking wastrel who one year trampled his housemaster’s prized tomato plants, yet at OH events I have immensely enjoyed talking to the school’s former sporting and academic elite, not to mention swapping memories with former enforcers of school discipline. 

    Everybody is after a good time at club events. Come and have a good time with other old boys and girls this year, even if you’re among those of us who didn’t have much of a good time at Rousdon. 

Club events in 2023 include lunch, remembrance and drinks. 

Respectively in Sidmouth, Honiton and London. 

September 16th, October 28th and November 16th. Details: OH website. 

 

•  Next website offering by monthly contributor George Hayter: 1st September