Great Scot December 2019 Great Scot 158_December_ONLINE | Page 17

It is cause for special celebration when
the School Captains of 1935 and 2019 meet
for a chat on stage in Memorial Hall – as they
did during Assembly on 16 October – and
even more so when one of them this year
celebrates his 104th birthday, and is our
oldest living Old Boy.
Not only has Bill Morgan (’34) reached this
remarkable milestone – faculties intact, and
as eloquent as ever – but his list of leadership
positions while a student, as recounted by
Principal Tom Batty to the boys in Assembly,
still reads as impressively as ever:
‘In his years at Scotch, he played in the
1st XVIII. He was Captain of Boats. He was
Captain of Rugby. He was Captain of Morrison
House. He was a boy during Dr William
Littlejohn’s period as Principal of our School,
and, in his final year, in 1935, he was the first
School Captain appointed by Dr Littlejohn’s
successor, Mr Colin Gilray.’
The task of interviewing a predecessor
84 years his senior was a relatively
straightforward exercise for the current School
Captain, Nick Marks (’18), for if there’s one
thing Bill knows how to do, it’s engage and
entertain an audience with his razor-sharp was sold in Sweden, the first portable
radio was developed in America, and King
Tutankhamun’s burial chamber was opened
by Howard Carter.
In response to questions posed to him by
Nick Marks, here are some of his responses:
‘How do you put in a few words all that
you want to say. My memories of Dr Littlejohn
go way back to the time when I was in the
Prep School.
‘We used to see Old Bill, as we called him,
wandering down from the Hill, past what used
to be the groundsman’s residence and is now
part of the hospital, I think, and the former
Music School, down there calling, “Paper!
Paper! Paper!” We little nippers would run
around collecting all the papers, and Old Bill
would put them in a heap, set fire to them,
then go on to the next stop.’
While Littlejohn, according to Bill, might
have become ‘somewhat of a grandfather
figure’ for the boys, it was not so for all: ‘I think
he was feared more by the masters than he
was by the boys, because he would wander
around the school, particularly in the lower
forms, and he would wander into a classroom
and just stand inside the door and listen for a had the “privilege” of caning boys. We would
have somebody report for a misconduct,
we would have a prefects’ meeting, and we
would decide on his punishment. Every boy
had the right to appeal to the headmaster,
and on several occasions, I took boys to
Gilray. He would listen to both sides, send the
boy outside, and say, “Morgan, I think you
should go back and just hear this boy again.
Be careful.”’
Bill noted that early in Gilray’s tenure, he
‘virtually transformed the whole teaching
staff in Senior School. At that time education
was beginning to change from an emphasis
on languages, humanities to science and
mathematics. And he was at the beginning
of, what I saw as, a transformation in the
educational approach of the School.’
Nick Marks asked of Bill, ‘If you had the
chance to go back and talk to yourself in your
time at Scotch, what might you say to that
little boy?’
Bill admits that for much of his schooling,
‘I had no idea what I wanted to be, or what I
wanted to do.’
Now though, ‘I perhaps look back on
and see the way the masters of the School
mind and his facility for language.
As Nick Marks noted, ‘before I could even
get in my first question, he beat me to it and
said that hearing the boys sing the hymn
brought him such happiness, but, he warned,
he hoped that they were not just singing the
words, but actually meant what they said’.
As the present cohort of Senior School
boys discovered, Bill is in a unique position to
be able to provide a rare, personal insight into
two formative Scotch Principals. His memory
of Scotch spans an astonishing 10 decades,
for he commenced at Scotch in 1923. To
put this into a historical context, this was the
year the world’s first domestic refrigerator few moments, and then say, “Excuse me, sir,”
and he’d take over the lesson. Anything from
Latin, physics, science, mathematics – he’d
just take over, and when he’d finished, he’d
just walk out of the room as if nothing had
happened.’
Of Littlejohn, ‘Memories just crowd in of
a man who just loved his school, and loved
everybody in it.’
Bill had ‘the privilege of only really
knowing Colin Gilray for about 18 months at
close quarters’, and regarded him as ‘quiet,
unassuming, and very judiciously kind’.
‘It’s different now, but in those days …
the Captain of the School and Vice Captain encouraged us to complete something, even
at school. “You’ve got abilities. Use them
here. Don’t wait until you’ve left school to
start doing things. Start doing that here.” And
the masters encouraged us, just not to pass
examinations, not to do this or that, but to be
yourself. Find out who you are, what you want
to be. But find something in life that makes
meaning to what you’re doing.’
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