John was born in December 1926, went to the Foundling Hospital in Redhill in 1932 and moved with the school to Berkhamsted in 1935. Upon leaving the school, John joined a military band and then the army. John has a large family of his own, and lives in Essex.
Discipline was very, very hard, but again over the years you got used to it and it was accepted, you thought everybody else was doing the same thing in every other school. So there was nothing really odd about it … bad behaviour, really bad behaviour was the cane across the backside. For minor misbehaving was was strokes on the hand, but sometimes you'd take three on that hand, and three on that so you got six [laughs] and it really, they really did hurt, and it was certainly an inducement not to offend again.
