Fnurban #19: If Books Could Talk

 Real life -  albeit some pleasant stuff related to birthdays  -  has been getting in the way of hobbies recently, hence my second attempt at 'Kirchendorf'/Cheriton has not been played yet. But in the meantime an interesting little bookshop find came up.  I happened to be in Muswell Hill, London,  looked in at the Oxfam bookshop there, and chanced upon this :

 

 

Professor Sir Charles Oman's 1929 Studies in the Napoleonic Wars - a set of essays on various aspects of the period. Presumably not particularly rare or collectable but it looked interesting, and a nice old-looking edition in reasonable condition - so I paid the princely sum of £3 and took it home. 

On closer insprection, the volume  turned out to be a first edition from 1929, and there was a small label stuck to the inside of the cover, presumably denoting a former owner :  'Mr. L.K.J. Cooke,  Pembroke College, Oxford'.

 

Well, that was intriguing - I wonder who he was?  Not so many years ago, that would be the end of the story - but now we have the world wide web, and search engines...

With just a few minutes searching, I came up with a couple of interesting documents : first the King Edward's School Chronicle of June 1972.  It seems King Edward's was a prominent boys' Grammar School in Birmingham, and the  'Chronicle' looks to be the school magazine. It records the retirement of Mr.  L.K.J. Cooke after a splendid 28 years on the school staff, since 1944, and it confirms He was educated at Emmanuel School and Pembroke College, Oxford , where he took a second class honours degree in modern history in 1934.   Bingo!  We have our man.  

There follows a nice little sketch of the personality of the man ( the 'L' was for Leslie ). It states that  he was very much a military figure, always immaculately dressed and groomed in the style of an army officer wearing " civvies."  He also commanded the school's C.C.F. ( Combined Cadet Force )  contingent, and was awarded the OBE for his services. Indeed, later in the magazine there appears an article on the history of the school's C.C.F, the author signing themself 'L.K.J.C.'   He clearly had a  head for business, and for his 'retirement' he had bought a preparatory school in Brentwood, which he would presumably have planned to run himself.  I assume that if he gained his degree in 1934, he would have been born around 1913, and by 1972 be aged about 60.   Presumably long gone now, of course - or he'd be 110 by now! 

If anyone fancies to read the whole article - or indeed the whole magazine, and be transported back to the doings of an English Grammar School 50 years ago, it is here.   I have not read it all myself, so I can't guarantee that the content will meet what might be called 'current attitudes and values'. The past is, indeed, another country.. 

And there's more - a further search turned up a personal memoir website by one Robert Darlaston, who was a pupil at King Edward's school in the 1950s, and has written  ( in about 2009 ) quite a long entry on his time there, 1951-1959, and a postscript relating a visit to the school 50 years on. Of course his time there coincided with that of 'LKJC' , and there are indeed some mentions of our man: Our form master in Shell ‘C’ was Mr L.K.J. Cooke, a kindly man with a velvet toned voice and a leisurely speech delivery.   In consequence, unkind schoolboys had nicknamed him “Slimy”, but he was an expert at easing new boys into school life.  There's a short passage and photo concerning the C.C.F. - but it's the RAF section and their attmempts to fly a glider, which do not seem to to have involved LKJC. But there is one final lovely nugget of pure gold - a detail from the 1959 school photograph :

 

This picture evokes some fond memories,for those of us who took part in similar exercises - I still have a copy of an  equivalent picture from 1977, marking the centenary, no less, of my school ( a much less grand institution than King Edward's, I should say ), and I'm sure everyone knew the story that it should be possible to appear twice in the picture, by standing at one end and then running around the back to the other end, as the panoramic camera swivelled on its tripod. Whether that was actually possible, and if so whether anyone achieved it without also achieving a spell in detention,  I don't know.    

The caption states that LKJC is 3rd from right among the masters, so I think we have him :

 

He looks a decent chap, doesn't he? Not a tyrant, I hope, and clearly a man with an abiding interest in  matters military. It occurs that as a student at Oxford in the early 1930s, he may even have attended lectures by Sir Charles  Oman, who was the pre-eminent military historian of the day, and had been a professor of Modern History at Oxford since 1905 - though he was also the MP for the University of Oxford constituency from 1919 to 1935, which may have limited his academic work. All the same, it's nice to imagine the possible link. 

This has been a thoroughly pleasant and interesting little diversion, and a great  example of the ability  of the internet to allow us to waste time, albeit  in a pleasurable  and rewarding way. Now I just have to read the book, and learn about Oman's ideas on 'British Line vs French Column' ( later de-bunked by wargaming's own Paddy Griffith, I am told? ),  and as I do so, I can try to picture its first reader, back in 1930s Oxford - I wonder what he would make of me?  And I wonder how it came to be in Oxfam, Muswell Hill, on a winter's afternoon  nearly 90 years later ? That's another story, presumably - if only books could talk. 

Next time, I hope to finally give an account of '2nd Kirchendorf' and my impressions of the Twilight of the Divine Right rules - until then, keep well, everyone.