Alpha and proud of it!

John ‘Buck’ Hennessy and Mick O’Hara. Best mates since the day one of St Mary’s. Both ‘58 joiners, both proudly Irish and both Alphas!

Two of the most enthusiastic supporters of the whole ‘bus’ project have been lifelong friends John ‘Buck’ Hennessy and Mick O’Hara who started at St Mary’s in 1958 and left in 1963. They have been fulsome in the praise of the book for which I am very grateful. However, Buck has (politely) taken me to task over my assertion that, in the early days of the Grammar School, the members of A Form were intellectually superior to their Alpha counterparts.

Being a proud Alpha-ite, Buck wrote recently:

I join with Mick in his recent comments regarding your excellent ‘We did our Homework on the Bus.’ I dip into this frequently and realise how much pleasure it has given to so many of us old boys,

I would take issue with a couple of comments since though.
One, it seems that somebody - no doubt an ‘A’ - is trying to cast aspersions on the intelligence of those of us who are very proud ‘Alpha’s'
I remember the day my results arrived by post following the 11+. It was one of the very few days that my lovely, long suffering Mum was pleased with me!
She pounced on the envelope and took it into the small room we grandly called ‘The Lounge’ to open it. I think she actually screamed with delight when she saw that I had passed and was being offered a Grammar School place.
There was a longish list of schools available including the one she had her heart set on St. Mary’s Grammar School Sidcup!!!

For those children not making the Grammar grade at that time there were schools designated Technical Schools and for those unfortunate enough not to achieve this level there were the Secondary Modern schools.

Anybody offered a place at St Mary’s had to achieve the Grammar School standard.

It is true that the school was divided into the A’s who normally came from the more well to do families and the Alpha’s who normally lived further away from Sidcup in the less desirable areas like Dartford, Erith and Gravesend.
The Marists also seemed to split the intake into the more ‘sensitive’ children who ended up in the A’s and the ‘rougher’ kids who tended to be in the Alpha’s. No prize for guessing which section Mr O’Hara and Joined.
The Alpha’s were also far superior, given their more ‘outgoing’ nature at sport whilst the A’s for the most part were interested in things like Chess and flower arranging.
As you have remarked previously Mugsy was very adept at trawling the primary schools to identify boys of a more sporty nature so maybe that was the reason.

On our first day we first years were left in the playground together with our short trousers when all the other pupils had been sent off to their classes.
There was then a process which did not involve a sorting hat, voiced by dear old Leslie Phillips, but a reading of two lists voiced by Yorky - in less tender tones - dividing the 1958 intake into two groups of some 32/3 boys each.
One was designated 1A and the other as 1Alpha (as i am sure you are aware the first letter of the Greek Alphabet a far superior designation than the Roman ABC) Yorky went to great lengths - possibly to avoid any Irish mothers wielding umbrellas arriving at the gates - to reiterate that there was no academic difference in the two but the division was purely for practical purposes as 60+ boys could not be accommodated in the classrooms!

Although I now have difficulty in remembering what I did this morning I can recall with perfect clarity that September morning in 1958 when Mick O’Hara’s eyes me mine across a crowded playground.

Thanks for Buck’s insight into this surprisingly contentious issue. Next the great man gives me his thoughts on rugby at St Mary’s in the early 60s.