Saint Dorothy

16 August, 2020. Written by Harry King

I arrived at the gates of the Grammar School in September, 1953. How odd it had been to have to travel on a bus to get to a school. I'd just always run to school, just around the corner.

Our house was on the Winton/Patricroft border, a couple of miles away, in rows of terraced houses and cobbled streets. To get to the bus stop, I had to trundle across "the croft", a cindery and desolate area of abandoned junk that adjoined our row of houses. Past the old underground bomb shelter I went, with memories of having to clamber into it with my parents when the sirens had sounded during the War years. This was an area ruled by the "Croft Gang", a collection of good-natured and bad-natured ruffians whose family situations had predestined them to never move far forward in life. The Croft Gang were not to be messed with, and as I scuttered across their territory I hoped no-one would see me, decked out in a green blazer, satchel and cap. Nobody from our neighborhood ever went to grammar school.

The intake of pupils was assigned to one of three classes, 1 North, 1 South, and 1 East. Some method of selection had been used funnel those most likely to succeed into 1N, and thereafter the selection tailed successively into 1S, and 1E. I was assigned to 1E. Our likely path of success or failure had already had already to a large extent been set, I suppose, though the naming of the classes to correspond with the points of the compass subtly hid that from our view.

This new world was so different to the primary school experience. The whole concept of having to do homework, and to take materials home for study, was a new one. In a house with one room downstairs and two bedrooms upstairs, there was never a place to study. We never had a single book in our house as I can recall. Somehow, in a way I now find hard to fathom, I made my way through the first year, and a "Trier's prize" was my reward.

The unseen deliberations of the teachers after that first year must have recognised at least a tiny sliver of ability in me. Was it, perhaps, enough to merit a promotion to 2B in the second year, one step higher than before ? (In the second year, the form names let you see more clearly what your academic pedigree was likely to be -- 2A, 2B, 2C, and a perfectly inexplicable 2R.) [It has later been explained to me that the R was thought to stand for "Remove" -- pupils whose birth months made them come to the school early or late.

There was an awkward impediment to my promotion, however. The great unwashed of lowly 1E had not been exposed to classes in Latin. Who could expect that the academic stragglers would ever have the slightest need for that ! . The higher forms were a different matter. The high flyers of the top form, and those marginal talents of the next form down, had done Latin right from the beginning. These were young talents whose cerebral inheritance from their Ellesmere Park ancestors might fit them for going to university, perhaps to read Cicero and Virgil in the original !

At that time in my young academic career an angel appeared. One Mrs. Dorothy Cannon. Mrs. Cannon was the form teacher for 2B, and must have heard of the plight of a lad from "Pattycroft". Mrs. Cannon happened to be the Latin teacher at the school, too. Though she and I had never met, she apparently took my predicament to heart. She offered to teach Latin to me during the summer holidays so that I could perhaps "catch up", and thus gain entry to the 2B stream. Of course, there was never a single word about payment or recompense of any kind.

Off I would walk, on certain days of the week of that summer, to her house on Albert Road. In those days it looked an impressive house, trees in the front garden, a driveway, a gabled roof, steps up to the front door. I half expected a butler with a silver tray to check my entrance. There was nothing the slightest pretentious about Mrs. Cannon, though. She was a bundle of energy, directing her rather rambunctious three teenage children to move more respectfully along the main corridor of the house as the timid lad from Pattycroft was shuffled into "the front room." (I'd never seen a "front room" before!) Though I later realised my memories were quite wrong, it all seemed to me like what I'd only read about in the novels describing Victorian sitting rooms and their decor.

"Amo, amas, amat, amamus, amatis, amant." So the days passed, a poor substitute, I thought at the time, for those days that could have been spent in rapture, kicking a tennis ball up and down the cobbled street in front of our house. The promotion went forward.

So where did all this end ? I did well enough to once again grab the "Trier's Prize" in 2B, finally moved up to the A stream in the third year, then struggled my way among much brighter minds, probably lifted by them in fact, and eventually into University. None of it would have been possible without the great kindness of Mrs. Cannon.

One of my great regrets in life was that I never conveyed properly to Mrs. Cannon what a remarkable impact she had on my life. It wasn't until decades later that I realized what a remarkable woman she was. Herself the product of a working class household next to the Patricroft Baths, she had gone to our school (then Eccles Secondary School) as a pupil in 1915, right amid WWI. From there, she went to Manchester University and got a First Class Honours degree (in Latin) before a teaching degree from Oxford. Marrying in the 1930's and raising a family during the WWII years, she didn't return to EGS until after the War.

In the 2000's I came across – perfectly by chance as a result of a shared interest in Eccles history – Dr. Roderick Cannon. He was Mrs. Cannon's eldest son, who was then a quite distinguished professor of Chemistry at the University of East Anglia (and a world authority on bagpipes!) Sadly, I found that Mrs. Cannon had by that time passed on. I did however have the great fortune of becoming a friend of Roderick, who has by now sadly passed on himself. At least then, I could recount my story through him and convey the great gratitude I felt towards his mum. Though my interactions with Latin lasted only a short time, since I went on to study the sciences, Dorothy Cannon had a profound effect on setting my course in life. I owe a great debt to her selflessness that I shall never forget.