From: Dickins, David <D.W.Dickins@liverpool.ac.uk>
Sent: 04 July 2018 10:00
To: CHSB90@oldcicestrians.co.uk
Subject: Old Boy emergence
Dear Chi Hi,
Having just sent an email of congratulation to an American friend, prompted by today’s news announcement about the copy of the Declaration which has turned up in CHICHESTER
I looked on the web to confirm the authenticity of “Cicesstrian” and found your/our website.
I was at school 1947-1953, leaving with an Open Exhibition to Queen Mary, London to read Zoology, having enjoyed almost every lesson and experience at school.
At that time, we had a small Biology Sixth form separate from the larger Science group, though most of my fellow pupils included Physics with Chemistry, Botany, and Zoology since they were headed for medicine. I didn’t – I was being selected for academic biology I guess, though I loved Physics.
Several of us got scholarships – David Whale for medicine at Bristol, Balding for Biology at Cambridge, and everyone got to university.
I would love to know what happened to my companion on the school train from Bognor, Robin Davies, in the Science sixth, who got a Maths scholarship to Merton. Splendid chap.
I kept in touch after leaving school (since my parents had moved away) only with Gordon Childs who went on to do chemistry – he and I went with our girlfriends to Florence in 1954, though I’ve not seen him since – and with Tony Coleman who entertained me and a friend at the American Hospital in Paris where he went after graduation: that would have been in about 1958, by which time I was taking a second B.Sc. in Psychology at Birkbeck (in the evenings, teaching at a comprehensive school by day). My subsequent academic career in Liverpool can be read about on my university website, and I am still doing experiments on humans at 82, an incurable academic.
Both my sons have gone the same way, elder a prof in psychology in London and younger a lecturer in very sophisticated molecular genomics in Nottingham.
Two grandchildren by the former have only recently arrived – 2 and 4. My wife is a retired geography teacher, who herself spawned scholars to Oxford (and elsewhere!), and we enjoy living on Wirral.
Please let me know if any of the people I have mentioned are contactable, or any others of similar vintage.
Thanks to the school and its fine array of inspirational teachers at that time which is a tradition I trust continues unabated, despite politicians’ poor grasp of education, both practical and philosophical.
Dr David W. Dickins
Honorary Senior Research Fellow, School of Psychology
University of Liverpool, Eleanor Rathbone Building
Bedford Street South, Liverpool L69 7ZA, U.K.
https://www.liverpool.ac.uk/psychology-health-and-society/staff/david-dickins/