Scotch College

New Scotch history is with publisher

New Scotch history is with the publisher

The author of the new Scotch history, Dr Jim Mitchell, played an early Santa Claus by delivering his manuscript to the publisher, Allen & Unwin, just a few days before Christmas last year. The publisher's editor has suggested only minor changes, so all is going very well.

Between the time of writing this article and Great Scot's publication, Jim and Scotch will have approved the design of some sample pages and the cover of the book, and read the first page proofs. So now we've got some hard physical proof that we really are going to have a book for Sir Zelman Cowen and Sir Ninian Stephen to co-launch for us on October 10.

We've also got to the stage where you should order your copy if you haven't already done so, to ensure that you get one and that you get it at the concessional pre-publication price. This is going to be a great history - but it's not just an historian's history. Every one of the lucky few who have read the manuscript are amazed at what a fascinating read it is and how very readable it is for the whole Scotch family. It will undoubtedly be in high demand when people start reading and talking about it, so order now to ensure you don't miss out. You can use the order form on the loose page flier enclosed with this edition of Great Scot.

Meanwhile, just to whet your appetite, here's an extract from a short section on desks.

'School and boy intersect at the desk, not just in the learning process but in a war of physical attrition. Furniture for boys has to be sturdy. Boys rise to this challenge. Scotch was always buying new desks.

To spare the desks, Littlejohn set up a board in the gym with a space for each boy to carve his name, but by the 1940s the desks were stained and scarred, and smelt of stale wood. These old cast-iron frame desks were replaced by new tubular steel tables and chairs, which appeared in the 1960s in the Junior School and in the New Geography Room. The school put this off for as long as it could in the 1950s and 1960s by having the carpenters make wooden desks. 'The type is old-fashioned somewhat in design but opportunities for the boys to dismantle them during class have been reduced.' Even so, boys of the 1960s sat at old dilapidated desks so deeply engraved with the names of past pupils that they were hard to write on.

Single and double desks came in and out of fashion. Littlejohn favoured single desks. Perhaps they put each boy more on his own resources? In 1946 two-boy desks were used to seat three boys when the class was large. Later wooden desks were single and could be used 'as foot propelled dodgem cars (c.f. Fred Flintstone), with satisfying thunking noises whenever an impact occurred. The most furniture induced decibels I recall was when 3 or 4 of these desks were stacked vertically in a classroom then toppled.'