The Colonel: Memories of a Wonderful Teacher

 In our frenetic, 24 hour news, hyperbola filled world the quest for the next big story to fill our newspapers, TV screens, social media platforms and, thus, our hearts and minds, is only nanoseconds away. In bygone days there was truth in the saying that today’s news is tomorrow’s fish and chip paper but today mobile phones, social media, online browsing and the instant gratification of the internet mean that we can satisfy our urge for continual titillation, stimulation and trepidation each and every waking minute. Whether it be packs of pit bull terriers, rampant rapists, parades of paedophiles, invasions of immigrants, mobs of Muslim  terrorists, streets full of stressed student snowflakes or  a pandemic threatening the population of the planet the reason and result is the same;  humanity constantly seeks the four horsemen of the apocalypse to sate its drug like desire for a fresh vertiginous high and to occupy its anxious and angst addled attention. For the past year plus it has been the ghoul like Pestilence, in the guise of the Covid pandemic, who has ridden rough shod through our manic media and our worst nightmares and wildest imaginings.

The synagogue where we sat taking in all that
Mr Parkin, the Colonel, had to offer. Our "classoom" was
at the rear of the synagogue on the extreme left of the
picture - we looked out through the two upstairs windows.

But as the media maelstrom rages and the destruction of society as we know it looms I find my mind wandering to another age, a life time ago when I first heard the word “pandemic”. Whenever I hear or read it even today, I do not initially imagine some dreadful plague spreading and laying waste to my family and friends but instead think of "the history man", or “the Colonel” as we callow teenagers secretly called him; a man who opened up a world for me and without any doubt changed my life.

He sat opposite me first one early summer evening in 1963 in a room above the United Hebrew Synagogue in Leamington Road Blackpool. When I left school I became a trainee draughtsman at a Preston engineering company but having obtained my ONC – the baseline qualification for my work – the small company for which I worked closed its Preston office and I was offered the opportunity of moving, with the company, to its head office in the midlands but at that time I was unsure about leaving my home town. I also knew that if I was to progress in that line of work I would need to get further qualifications – an HNC and then an AMIMech.E - and I wasn’t sure that this was where my future lay. The result was that, after much thought, I decided to follow another path – one that I had often considered – namely to go into teaching. So, I made enquiries and eventually found myself invited for an interview with a view to studying for A levels, in order to gain entrance to a teacher training college. That was why I sat above a synagogue in Blackpool that night – being interviewed for a place on the A level course at Blackpool Technical College and School of Art.

Blackpool “Tech” in the 1960s was a huge and highly respected establishment catering for a vast range of students and qualifications from technical/industrial to commercial, to fine art, to GCE and A level subjects and especially catering and hotel management – for which it was internationally acclaimed. Its many departments were spread throughout Blackpool and the A level “arts” subjects were based in what had once been the old Blackpool Grammar School on Raikes Parade. More or less adjacent was the Jewish synagogue on Leamington Road. The College rented two or three rooms above the Synagogue as private study rooms for the A level students and for administrative use by A level staff, and it was there where I sat that summer evening.

The “Colonel” was Alan Parkin who, as well as teaching A level history was in charge of A level studies. He was a quietly spoken, pleasant, middle aged man who I immediately took a liking to and at the end of the interview he offered me a place to study history, geography and economics. I had passed a geography O level at school and enjoyed all things historical but had not studied either history or economics before and so as I left to catch the bus back to Preston, Mr Parkin gave me reading lists for all three subjects with the advice that I should prepare as much as possible before starting in September.  It was the first of many good bits of advice that he gave – and I will be forever thankful for it. Many of the students, he explained, would be straight from school and would have studied these subjects before so I needed to put in a bit of work  if I was to keep up with them. When September came I discovered that he was right – several in the group had already passed A levels at their schools but were doing the course and exam again at Blackpool Tech. to get better grades in order to get into top universities.  I was very much the plodder but as I walked out of the synagogue that night clutching my reading lists it wasn’t anxiety I felt but a real buzz – it was something new to look forward to, a new start, perhaps a new life, and I couldn’t wait to get started.

That summer was one of the happiest of my life. I bought most of the books on the list and spent day after day at home, in the local park or most often in the town library reading and making notes, following Mr Parkin’s guidelines to the letter. Local authorities in those days awarded grants (remember them!) to students and I got a grant for books plus something towards my basic living costs and the payment of college fees. I also had some savings from my work as a draughtsman which helped but mostly I lived off the pockets and good will of my parents, a thing for which I will be forever grateful as they were not well off and my studying must have been at some considerable cost to their own lives and ambitions.

And so September came. An early morning bus to Blackpool each day meant that I was always sitting above the synagogue before eight working at my latest essay, or reading up on some piece of history or economics or geography; it wouldn’t be untrue to say I was in heaven! The work was hard but every evening as I sat on the Preston bound bus I felt that an exciting door had been opened for me.

 For the next two years, as our history teacher and the man in charge of A levels, Alan Parkin was our guide, mentor and assessor. I can still see him today standing in front of our motley group of would be teenage historians in his tweed jacket and grey trousers with knife edge creases – his demeanour unapologetically professional and very correct. His blue striped regimental tie, shining brown leather shoes, quiet voice and precise spoken English gave him an old fashioned authority and marked him out as someone to respect. Each lunchtime, as we brash teenagers sipped our coffee in sea front coffee bars, the juke box blasting out the Beatles, the Stones, Roy Orbison or Cilla Black it wasn’t long before the colonel featured in our conversations. It was Les Levett who had first coined the nickname “the Colonel” and it stuck; it made complete sense. Mr Parkin’s clipped speech, upright stance, short cropped hair,  dead straight parting and grey pencil moustache gave him a military bearing and encouraged us all in the belief that he was an ex-officer - a conclusion that proved correct when he told us of his war time experiences in Germany when we studied the rise of Hitler.

 Alan Parkin – both visually and in the way he taught had “presence”. He did not praise often or easily but praised well when it was merited. We quietly mocked his clipped speech and his outward formality but we all respected him hugely both for what he gave us and how he gave it. He didn’t set out to impress but even to us rebellious sixties teenagers he did. He had high expectations of himself and the way he presented to the world and made it clear that he had high expectations of us – referring to us always as “ladies and gentlemen”, as Mr Beale, Miss Hudson, Mr Levett or Miss Williams. Above all he gave time and was ever aware of individual students – asking, as he passed us in a corridor how things were going, how had we found a particular essay or piece of reading, could he help with any applications for college or university – and like all good teachers he made you feel good and the best, even when you knew that you weren’t. Ask a question in lesson and he could make it sound as if you had asked the most important question in the world when really you were just showing your own dismal ignorance. And it is here where I come back to “pandemic”!

 As, one day, we studied the origins of the First World War, the Colonel, upright, soldier like, chalk in his hand was briskly explaining to us the many interwoven causes of that terrible conflict. We sat scribbling notes in our files – me hoping that I would be able to make sense of them later on the homeward bound bus that night! As I scribbled, Mr Parkin began to talk of the 19^th century pan-Slavic and pan-Germanic movements and my pen  stopped in mid-scribble. Hesitantly I put up my hand to ask what he meant – feeling that I must be the only one in the room that didn’t understand (I wasn’t!). The colonel stopped and without speaking wrote on the blackboard:”pan-Slavic, pan-Germanic, pandemonium, pantheon, pandemic, panarchy, panacea, pancratic, panistocracy......” and so the list went on and on. “Mr Beale”, he asked “what do you notice about all the words” – the answer being obvious. He then asked if anyone knew what any of the words meant. There was a  sound of pocket dictionaries being hurriedly dug out of bags and flicked through. Eventually a couple of hands went up and without actually telling us,  pied piper like, he brought us to the point where we came to understand that the prefix “pan” meant “all”. Slowly, but surely, the Colonel prodded our wits, put two and two together, so that we gradually came to understand these linked words: a utopian government where all rule equally; all the German speaking peoples; a cure for all; a temple for all the gods; a row of all the demons let loose; the rule of all..............and of course, pandemic: a disease across all the world.

When the time came, in 1964, for me to apply for teacher training college he supplied me with prospectuses and suggested that I apply to Nottingham as my first choice. The history man was not wrong and the rest, as they say, is history – my history.  Without his support and guidance I would not have left the Hebrew Synagogue two years later clutching my three scraped through A levels. Without them and the Colonel I would not be sitting here in Nottinghamshire today. In my own classroom career I often found myself thinking of the Colonel: his mannerisms his military bearing, the respect he gave his students, the way he presented himself each and every day. I never forgot the green ink that he used in his fountain pen (he would have no truck with ball points!) to mark our work, explaining that green ink was much less intimidating and more respectful to a hard working student than “aggressive” red ink. Years later this became government advice to teachers and I shook my head as I read this “new idea” from the DfEE. The Colonel had been ahead of his time! Alan Parkin was what we would call today a role model. He was one of those people that one remembers for what they were and that is why now, almost 60 year later, when I read each day of the pandemic threatening to sweep the world I think back to that lesson so long ago when the Colonel opened another door for me.  And that seems a much more important and worthy than the latest hyperbolic, apocalyptic media soundbite.