IAN McCULLOCH (G 65-70) has sent in these memories of Anthony Dearle and Geoffrey Lees:

“Ron Johnson was a history teacher when I was at St Bees, although he never taught me. He was also a friend of my parents and used to accompany Anthony Dearle on school choir trips to Birmingham.
We lived near Solihull and Anthony used to visit us from time-to-time, either on his motorbike or he would come down by train. Anthony was amazing. You may know that he had a prodigious memory for train timetables all over Britain.
 Watching the very rotund Mr. Dearle (I was about 11 or 12 at the time) arrive at our house by motorbike was quite an occasion. He would be dressed in a large, heavy, white/grey mackintosh, goggles, old fashioned crash helmet with a peak and long heavy motorcycle gloves that went more than half-way up to his elbows. He looked like a motorised Mr Pickwick!

My father, Malcolm McCulloch(G 35-39) was an OSB and used to run the Midlands Branch of the Society. Unfortunately he was also somewhat notorious for getting up to silly pranks on Old Boys’ Day, which used to be during the summer term. One year they painted ‘Tea with Hovis’ on the roof of the new assembly hall building after a no doubt long session at the Queens Hotel! Mr. Lees, the then fairly new headmaster, was apparently not amused! (Maybe someone knows who else went on the roof that night – any confessions?!). Mr Lees never really liked Old Boys’ Day. Nearly every year one or more old boys would get up to some kind of lark and it would be ‘reported’ by one of the Housemasters. I think it usually involved Mr Lees getting the culprit OSB’s into his study on Sunday and giving them a good ticking off. I suppose Mr Lees felt they were not setting a good example to the school and because it had been ‘reported’, he was reluctantly involved.”