No . 137
The Trusty Servant
A Very Different World
Paul King remembers No . 5 Kingsgate Street ( now , as Oakeshott ’ s , occupied by day girls ) in the years after the Second World War .
My father Francis King ( Co Ro , 35-69 ; Ho Do G , 51-65 ) came to Winchester from Manchester Grammar School in 1935 , to become the Div Don of Jun . Div , the higher being in the charge of John Poynton . Initially he lived at 68 Kingsgate Street , known as ‘ The Rough House ’ – at that time set aside for bachelor dons . Among those who shared it with him were Eric James ( Co Ro , 33-45 ), later Lord James of Rusholme , and Geoff Hodges ( Co Ro , 29-68 ), whose son Harley I , 51-56 ) was my greatest childhood friend , and with whom I am still in touch . Geoff Hodges married shortly after , and he and Evelyn and Harley lived at 9 College Street , the garden of which could be reached from the garden of No . 5 through wall gaps . The bachelor dons gave Geoff on his marriage a silver cigarette box , inscribed in my father ’ s Greek script with a quotation from the Odyssey ‘ A rough but good nurse of men ’.
In July 1938 my father married Barbara Bostock , a daughter of the then Master of St Cross , and they moved in to No . 5 Kingsgate Street . I was born in August of the following year , prematurely and by caesarean section , and my mother died a few days later . It was before the days of antibiotics . So , their shared tenure of No . 5 was brief . It had previously been occupied by Stuart McDowell ( Co Ro , 06-34 ) and his wife Hilda . He had been a science don , and had died , I believe , as a result of an experiment he was conducting . Hilda , who remained a close friend , moved over the road to Domum Lodge . She was a locally well-known water-colour artist .
The nicest room in No . 5 was the large room on the first floor which had a bay window looking out over the garden . The McDowells had used this as a drawing room . For us , it was ‘ The Playroom ’. I don ’ t know to which use my parents put it ; my only information from this period is derived from photographs , including one of my mother and a guest having lunch at a table on the patio outside the kitchen , with my father ’ s pyjamas on a line in the background , partly obscuring a very tatty shed . The table is adorned with a quart bottle of Whiteway ’ s Cider – a regular feature later , as I recall , of Sunday lunches . My other relic is a leather-bound ‘ Calling Book ’, with ‘ F & BK ’ in gilt lettering on the cover . In 1938 , ‘ calling ’ and ‘ calling cards ’ were clearly still de rigueur . Only a few pages were used , and my wife and I subsequently adopted it as a Visitors ’ Book .
My father married again in 1941 and was then called up into the RAF . For much of the war , my stepmother and I migrated to Woking . We returned to Winchester in 1944 or early 1945 , and my aunt and cousins then moved into ‘ The Rough House ’ – no longer occupied by bachelors , but still so named . My memories of No . 5 all date from after our return .
The Kings at 5 Kingsgate Street
Immediately after the war , I imagine that almost nothing had changed from 1939 in the way life was conducted . ‘ Calling ’ had lapsed , but it astonishes
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