This extract was one of a number of similar pieces that Holland wrote about his time at the Mathematical School in Rochester - I will meld the best bits into one coherent whole when I can. The illustration is related only by being a memory of familiar scenes from his childhood.
SCHOOL DAYS IN ROCHESTER
In 1920, I went to the local grammar school in Rochester. Actually it favoured mathematical subjects rather than grammatical as was reflected in its name - the Sir Joseph Williamson’s Mathematical School, Rochester. From the school windows you looked down towards the Medway a matter of a few hundred yards away. We could see all that was happening on the river - the shipping, the river landscape, barges (hundreds of them), ships, coasters, cement works, small quaysides etc. It was an interesting and lively landscape.
I joined the school half way up as it were, in the fifth form at the beginning of the school year, with another chap about my age, but a much more sophisticated person than I. He was a wonderful character. His name was Andy Webber. He and I were about 15. He had a rather curious background. He had gone to the dockyard school to be apprenticed in the dockyard, but then decided he wanted to teach in elementary schools, and since he was rather a bright boy, his application to transfer was received with some sympathy. Having been an apprentice and knocked around with a more worldly bunch of chaps, Andy was very much a man about town. He knew all the current stories that lads of 15 are not expected to know much about, at first hand any rate. He was a snappy dresser and when he went home to Gillingham, he forgot all about school, donned his hat, lit a cigarette, and went off to the pub to survey the local girls.
The most remarkable thing about him was that he had become a very good conjurer. He had all the necessary equipment, full tails, all the conjurer’s patter and the saucy talk while he did the tricks, which were surprisingly sophisticated. After a term or so there was a house concert, where he turned the whole thing round from an amateur exercise into a professional show. He and I, although we had absolutely nothing in common in our upbringing, got on well together and I think of him now with considerable affection and interest.
At the Mathematical School there was an art master who came in one day a week only, as he was headmaster of the Art College. If you were anything special, you were put in his care. His name was George Ward and he was a very gentle and kindly man, who took great interest in me and what I was doing. I was beginning to make drawings of the river front at Rochester, shipping and so on, which I was doing in line and wash and drawing with ink. He sent a number of my sketches to an annual exhibition which is held by the Royal Drawing Society in London. Apparently they made quite a sensation and I was awarded the President’s prize - the President’s Star - which was presented to me in London by HRH Princess Louise. It made quite a sensation in the school and the local paper. People, certainly members of staff at the school, started realising I had something of a flare for artwork. I was given lots of work to do for school posters for Gilbert and Sullivan performances and such like. The Headmaster, who was the least sympathetic man in the school as far as I was concerned, said at morning assembly “There is only one boy allowed to grow his hair long, and that is Holland, because he is an artist”.
Having passed the necessary general examinations, I went to the local Art School, which was just a short distance away from the Mathematical School.