Transcript Detail
| Transcript Title | Coxall, Ron (O2003.15) |
| Interviewee | Ron Coxall (RC) |
| Interviewer | Peter Ruffles (PR) |
| Date | 09/04/2003 |
| Transcriber by | Jane Page |
Transcript
Hertford Oral History Group
Recording No: O2003.15
Interviewee: Ron Coxall (RC)
Location: Conservative Room, County Hall, Hertford
Interviewer: Peter Ruffles (PR)
Date: 9th April 2003
Transcribed by: Jane Page
************** unclear recording
[discussion] untranscribed material
italics editor’s notes
PR: Good afternoon, this is Peter Ruffles, just in the Conservative room at County Hall, about to go into a meeting of the Crime and Disorder Panel, after which I shall be returning here to record some memories with Ron Coxall, a wrinkled, old retainer of County Hall.
Talking for a little bit to Ron Coxall.
RC: What've we got? None of it?
PR: let’s pretend we haven’t got any of it.
RC: Right.
PR: Gor blimey.
RC: I can't stay beyond half five, by the way, because I've got to get back, because my son's in Chorus Line.
PR: Oh, we'll do a bit , we'll do a bit. This is novel.
RC: Yes.
PR: Gosh, good job I liked…. Well, here I am talking to probably the best known face in Pegs Lane. Would you say that was true?
RC: Possibly.
PR: If you're a lamp post.
RC: Well, that's right, yes. I mean, I've been in Pegs Lane a long time, having been at the Hertford Grammar School since I started there in 1962. And then when I finished, after five years, I came over to County Hall. And applied for a job here, and was appointed to the highways department in 1967.
PR: I mean, did you, did they advise you to do that?
RC: No, not really, we didn't have much of a careers... They either said that you could stay on at school or go and get an office job was their general description, or their general advice. So, I thought, well, my dad said that getting a job at County Hall was a solid thing to do, so I wrote just to County Hall, Hertfordshire County Council, Dear Sir, have you got any jobs? I am leaving school. I have just taken my O levels. And they wrote back, and said, "yes we have, I think it was four or five jobs, which one would you want?" So I said "well, you know, I am interested in this one here, which was in the highways department". So I came in, along with my mother, who accompanied me, and…
PR: Did she come into the…?
RC: She came in and waited in the outside room , you know. You don't get that so much now, do you, with?
PR: Well, no.
RC: I think at last week's Chief Executive interviews, if they'd have brought their mother with them , it would have looked a bit bizarre, but that's what you did. She was, you know , concerned about me. And did the same to my brother. He went for a job down at Sovereign House, and she went with him. But, it's from a bygone era that people do that sort of thing. I can't imagine my daughter, she would feel unbelievably embarrassed if I accompanied her to a job interview, but things have moved on, haven't they?
PR: And who are you now, then, Ron? Let's just describe for our listeners.
RC: Well, I' m the Assistant County Secretary at County Hall. So, that means that I, along with three others assist Andrew Laycock , who is the County Secretary, in providing legal and committee services to the Council. My specialism, if it is such, is as head of member and committee services , so that's my role, to look after members of the council, and to clerk committees and my colleagues clerk them. I personally clerk the council meeting and also the audit committee and the standards committee.
PR: And expense claims.
RC: Yes, my main claim to fame amongst members probably is that I vet their expenses, and it's on my say so whether their travel expenses are paid. I also arrange for their other payments and make sure that they are generally looked after.It's not just about pay, but generally with their IT and their training. And I make sure, I don't do it myself, but I make sure that other people are looking after the needs of members, so that they can get on with doing what they're here for, which is to represent their constituents.
PR: And your biggest public fame comes from operating the famous red and white lights
RC: Absolutely, yes.
PR: What's all that about?
RC: Yes, well, the council standing orders say that members can only speak for five minutes maximum per speech. So we have this little contraption which I've had for about thirty years.
PR: Oh, I see.
RC: It's as old as that. It's been renovated by my colleague, Dave Roberts, who knows more about electrics than I do.
PR: It looks like something from a nineteen sixties school play.
RC: Yes, quite nice, it annoys the leader. He says we want something that's state of the art, so I said "well, why can't we have the odd thing that's state of the ark", which this is. And I'm not going to throw it away, unless he physically forces me to. I like it, it's got a bit of history to it. And so, basically what happens, when a member speaks, after four minutes I put the white light on, and then, after five minutes they get the red light. And then the chairman will allow them a little bit of latitude, but generally then the gavel goes and they have to sit down, so.
PR: Some push the limits, do they?
RC: They do, yes. We had one the other day, where one of the executive members, Iris Tarry, was trying to.
PR: Ah, the inimitable one.
RC: The inimitable Iris was trying to gain an extra couple of minutes by telling me to switch it off, but I don't react to that type of approach. I work to the chairman, so if the chairman tells me to switch it off, I switch it off, if not, it stays on until the member sits down.
PR: Tell us about my predecessor in the division I now represent, Bob Perrett's little adventure.
RC: Yes, there's a good story with him, where he stood up and, in his usual way, because he being a sort of Welsh orator, he stood up and he said "right boy", he said "I've only got to speak for 30 seconds, 30 seconds that's all I need is 30 seconds". So I thought "right I'm going to get him", so I waited and, of course, Bob was in full flow after 30 seconds, had no intention, once he got on his feet to stop. So I put the red light on him, and the whole council came to a halt, and Bob Perrett stared at me and I stared at him, and the whole council stared around.
And all of a sudden, I just had a broad grin on my face, and he realised what he'd said about his 30 seconds, and he roared with laughter, and then the whole council erupted, and he eventually just finished off. And at the end of it, he came up and he said, " right boy, I really enjoyed that joke" he said, "well done", he said. Shook my hand, you know, and if you've ever shook hands with Bob Perrett, you'd remember it for a long time. He had a vice-like grip.
PR: I'm a Tory, so I wouldn't have had that opportunity
RC: No, that's right, but he was a nice man, and a delight to work with, and I always enjoyed. I've enjoyed working with hundreds of members down the years, and he would be one of many that I've had good relations with, and good humour with, so I think that's important with members . We take ourselves a bit too seriously up here, I think , and any humour we can inject, I think, is welcome.
PR: Yes I think that is.
RC: Mustn't be overdone , but you do. I've always approached things with a sense of humour, and that was a good example of where you use a bit of initiative to inject a bit of humour.
PR: Well, we'd better go back, and just trace things through. You weren't born in Buntingford itself, but in Bishop 's Stortford, Haymeads Hospital.
RC: That's right, yes.
PR: Because hospital births were the thing at the time for first children.
RC: They were, yes. For first children you didn't have a home (birth), but my brother was actually delivered at home.
PR: Oh was he?
RC: In 1954. But I wasn't. I was, along with, I think, five boys in my road or the next road were born within a fortnight of each other, which was rather curious.
PR: Yes, that's the…
RC: We do the count back, and wonder what happened the previous June, but we skate over that.
PR: You've never cracked that?
RC: No, I don't know what was going on there, quite .
PR: It's one of those unthinkable thoughts, isn't it?
RC: Well, it is really, yes, yes.
PR: And then you went to the, do you call it a town or a village, Buntingford?
RC: It's a town, yes, it's a town, but we only had one school, primary school, and one secondary school, and obviously you went there from five 'til you were eleven, if you passed the eleven plus, if you were a boy, you went to Hertford Grammar. If you were a girl, you went to Ware Grammar.If you failed, or you weren't deemed suitable to take the eleven plus, you were just consigned to go to Buntingford Secondary. And that really was a bit like being on the scrap heap, to be honest, unless you had the ability to overcome it and some children did. And my cousin would have been one, he miraculously managed to get one 0 level, which was the entire achievement.
PR: Score for the school.
RC: Score for the school that year, was one O level, and he got it. But eventually, he overcame that, and he got a job with ICL, and now lives abroad, and recently has been awarded the O.B.E. So, Roger Cranville his name, in fact, his cousin, Jeff Cranville.
PR: Jeff, I remember Jeff, from Hormead.
RC: Yes, absolutely, Little Hormead. And he, Jeff Cranville, was at the Grammar School with me, his was a year ahead of me, and his brother, Stephen Cranville was Head Boy at the Hertford Grammar, but Roger was Head Boy at Buntingford Secondary , but it was a rougher, tougher. I mean our school was tough enough I thought, the Grammar School, but Buntingford Secondary was a lot tougher than that. You didn't get a lot of advantages in being there, so I expect we were privileged in a sense to go off to the Grammar School.
PR: So you took your eleven plus at the school.
RC: Yes.
PR: Then it was a bus ride.
RC: That was it
PR: Not a train you were just telling me.
RC: No, yes it was a bus ride, 331 bus, and we all piled on the bus, and there were two buses used to go in the morning, a single decker and a double decker. And then when we came home in the evening, ten minutes past four, eleven minutes past four, there was a single decker and a double decker to take you back. We always caught the double decker. It was a bit infra dig to get the single decker for some reason, so we all caught the double decker.
PR: Followed the same route did it for the length of the journey?
RC: Yes it was always. We used to get in at five o'clock. I mean, you couldn't do it now, I mean, it would take you much longer than that.
PR: With the traffic.
RC: There were no by-passes or anything. So, we used to go through Ware, then out on the A10 to Wadesmill, High Cross, then you'd do a detour round Standon, Braughing. The single decker went a more direct route, so why we caught the double decker, I don't know. Just because it took longer, I think, you didn't want to get there, really.
PR: Yes, yes, and it gave the public, I suppose, an opportunity of being segregated from the top deck, the schoolboys.
RC: Yes, that's right, yes, I think anyone, but if you had the misfortune to live in Braughing and catch the bus, you always caught the bus with the schoolboys on it. And we often were reported to the headmaster for misdemeanors on the bus, although I didn't think we were actually that bad. We were quite a friendly bunch, and a bit noisy as boys are, but we weren't nasty, like the lot from Cuffley. We hated anyone from Cuffley.
PR: The Cuffley train was, yes, yes.
RC: It was infamous. Anyone from Cuffley, we hated. I've still not got much time for anyone, if I hear they come from Cuffley, unfortunately. I'm very suspicious of Cuffleyites. And the Buntingford bus was generally reckoned to be a pretty tough group of people, and you didn't really mess with anyone from the Buntingford bus. If anyone on our bus was beaten up or attacked in the school, by anyone, usually from Cuffley, then vengeance would be visited upon them by other people on the bus. We had some tough, like a protection group, and if you were Buntingford, you were protected.
PR: Well, sociologically, they are very different communities aren’t they. Cuffley and Buntingford.
RC: They are, yes, different origins, but we stuck together, and it helped me greatly, being Jeff Cranville's cousin, because Jeff was an extremely popular boy.
PR: Wallace House, I think he was in…
RC: Yes, I think he was, yes, but he was good at sport, and he was, and stilI is, a very nice guy. And he's a teacher now, and he and his pals, amongst them Eric Riddle, who you probably know, Eric.
PR: Yes.
RC: And Tim Manser.
PR: They were both in Hale.
RC: Yes, that's right, Eric was, yes. I was in Hale House. But I still see them occasionally, because they meet up once a year for a cricket match, and they have all the old cronies from that era, Eric and Tim and a teacher called Dave Boatman. He turns up.
PR: Yes, from Sawbridgeworth when he was at school.
RC: Yes, and one or two others, a guy called Craddock.
PR: Oh, Stuart Craddock, yes.
RC: Yes, and a guy Mick Jackson, he also came from Hormead , and they turn up once a year, and play Hormead at cricket, because obviously that's where Jeff comes from.
PR: Oh, I did come out to that once, yes.
RC: So I usually go and I meet up with them again, and we're all a year older and a year…
PR: Watsons were there one year.
RC: Yes, Watson, yes, he turns up. Yes, it's always very good. But it helped me a lot being in it, and once or twice I was in danger of having my head shoved down the toilet, and they said, "don't do that, its Jeff Cranville's cousin". So, good old Jeff, he saved me many a thumping, because there was quite a lot of minor level bullying went on when I first started. In fact, our year was the first year that we wouldn't bully the year below us. The year above us were quite bullying types.
PR: Was that self-imposed rules, or was it the characteristics of the people?
RC: No, we just, I think we just decided it's just not us, you know. Our year was quite a good year. We had some tough kids in our year, but they weren't in the habit of going around beating up other people, just because they were younger than themselves. But you had to watch out for the year above you, and the year above that, as well, but, once you got above that, you know, people were a little bit above going and picking on eleven -year-olds , and if you were fourteen , you were felt to be a bit out of that sort of thing.
PR: So, you came across here, against the wishes of the school, or were they happy to say goodbye Ron?
RC: They were, I think.
PR: Well, they wouldn't have called you Ron, would they, you'd have been just Coxall.
RC: That's right, yes, I was Coxall. And I remember when I actually came to leave, which was in , would have been in June '67, I actually had a letter, if you needed to leave early, before the end of July, you had to have a letter from your parents. I had a letter from my mother, who wrote to the head, and said, "could you please let my son leave early" not that I knew what I was going to do, but I just thought well I'm, you know, they didn't want me to stay on because they couldn't afford for me to stay on into the sixth form. Really, it had cost them an arm and a leg for them to keep me at the grammar school anyway.
PR: Yes, we must talk about that in a mo, yes.
RC: With various things, so I had a letter, and knocked on the headmaster's door, and he beckoned me in, and he said, "Well, I'm sorry to see you go, Ferguson, you've been a good boy". "Well, I'm actually Coxall, not Ferguson." "Ah, right". So, the sole impact I'd made, unlike yourself, in all your years at the school, was that I still wasn't known to the head, he thought I was somebody else, after five years. But, he wished me well, and my school report said, "I was a good boy, who deserved to do well". So off I went, and as I said, applied for the job in County Hall, and with assistance from my mother got the job. But, a couple of days after I started the job, I bumped into the head, because in the meantime I'd taken seven O levels, and passed them all, which was almost unheard of for a boy in Five B. In Five B you might get one or two 0 levels or more likely end up being in prison or something. I mean, they were a pretty rough bunch, Five B.
PR: Strong.
RC: There were a handful of us that tried hard and genuinely were just there because we just fell short of what it took to be in Five A. I mean, we were not in Five X, or whatever, like the Right Reverend Richard Charteris and people like that, who become the Bishops of London.
PR: Express stream, that was.
RC: That's right, yes, that's right. All the real resources in the school were concentrated on you in the X stream, but in the B stream you were, you were still well above what you would have been, how you would have been treated in Buntingford Secondary, but you weren't given the top teachers and you weren't given the best attention. In fact, the only people given any attention were if you were any good at sport. And, in fact, there was a guy in our class, called Bill Langley, who wasn't really very academic, but his father was a football writer with, I think, the News of the World, Mike Langley. But Bill was a really good runner, so he was really kept on, I think, because he was a good runner, and gradually the penny began to drop, but I don 't think he did particularly well academically. But he's now a writer with the Telegraph.
PR: Oh, is he?
RC: And you see his name, William Langley, he calls himself.
PR: Yes.
RC: But it’s Bill.
PR: I had an e-mail from his father on that machine over there, this week.
RC: Oh, right, oh right, yes, he's still, yes. And, I mean, I always read his articles with interest, and he's a good writer, really good writer, but he couldn't write, he couldn't have written like that when we were at, well none of us could, at the Grammar School, but he had no pretensions to.
PR: No, and the potential wasn't spotted by…
RC: That's right, but it shows you, you see, if they had have, but he was consigned, "oh he's a Five B guy", you know, and that's it. But because he was a good runner, a bit like my cousin, Jeff, he was good at rugby and cricket, so that they tolerated you. But, if you're like me, and I like watching sport, but I've never been any good at playing it. I can't run. The only time I tried to cheat at cross-country, I used to plod round with the fat boys at the back, as Stephen Fry would say, with their Latin books at the back. I used to be out the back with them, not with Latin books, but just because I couldn't keep up. So, the one time I tried to cheat, I cut across country, you were there with a clip-board, and a group of us were all made to go back and run round the rest of the course. Then run round the top field about five times, so that taught me a lesson, never try and cheat.
PR: Ah.
RC: It was the only time I ever did it, and you were there. It was when you were, I think when you came back as, you'd come back from teacher training.
PR: Trainee teacher or something, yes.
RC: But, of course, being a former boy at the school, you knew all the places where people did the short cuts, so we should have known if you were around, not to have tried it on. I'm sure you don't remember me being in that, because, as I say, I was a fairly anonymous person at school. Anyway, the upshot of that was, the head, having got all these O levels, he bumped into me in the subway, two days after I'd started work, and said, "ah, Coxall, how are you, old chap", you know, "I hear you got seven O levels, would you like to come back? " and "we'd welcome you back into the sixth form". But, of course, by then, I'd effectively burnt my boats, and my parents wanted me to earn money to contribute to the household expenses, so that was that, so.
PR: What about the school expense years? I mean, you've alluded to the general costs I mean , your family and lots of other families where bright boys were suddenly given a leg up educationally, beyond what their parents had had, it must have been quite a struggle.
RC: That's right, I mean, my father wasn't well educated. He was only educated at Anstey Primary School. He never went to a secondary school, and nor did my mother, she was Hormead School. I think my dad left when he was thirteen and got a job at the grocer's shop in Buntingford where he stayed for the rest of his life. So, he actually retired when he was sixty-five. I think he'd done fifty-two years, apart from his war service, all with the same place, and my mum left.
PR: That was Moss's that became International.
RC: Yes, Moss's that became International, that became Gateway, that became Somerfield. He always worked in the same place, as I say, apart from five years in the army. My mother was the same, she went into domestic service in Hormead when she was fourteen, so she would have left, and that was the entire sum of their education.
So, to have someone like myself, who was, you know, I wouldn't say I was that clever, but I was bright and I was obviously going to pass the eleven plus. It was a big thing in our family. For someone to go to the Grammar School. But, at the time when I went, 1962, my dad only earned £6.00 a week, and they had to spend everything they had on educating me and buying all the stuff that you needed to be at the Grammar School. You needed a blazer with a special, the school badge on it. You needed a cap, which I was mentioning to you earlier.
PR: Yes.
RC: The older boys used to get the caps when you were on the bus, and they'd scrunch them up, the peak, and put them under the seats of the bus. And, so, by the time you got back to Buntingford, the cap was all wobbly, the peak was all wobbly.
PR: Yes, that peak seemed to be about 25% of the whole hat.
RC: It was, yes, it was enormous, it was like one half of a bill of a duck-billed platypus.
PR: Yes.
RC: It was a great big peak, and of course, you weren't allowed to have anything, as far as the teachers were concerned, apart from a perfect sharp peak. So, if they saw you with one of these wobbly peaks, you were in trouble, so you had to do your best to hide your cap.
PR: But nothing much was provided by the school, apart from textbooks.
RC: Oh, that's right, yes, you didn't, my mum and dad had to pay for all the school uniform, and you needed special PE kit, which had your house on it as well. I was Hale House, so you needed a green, had a green trim.
PR: Yes, I remember, to the neck.
RC: And also you had to have a blue shirt, a rugby shirt, a white rugby shirt, white shorts, blue shorts, PE shorts and probably lots of other things as well.
PR: Well, cricket, summer and winter.
RC: Cricket gear, yes, you'd have cricket gear. Somehow they managed to get them, but I know for a fact that my dad spent every penny he'd got, sending me and buying this stuff. And l mean every penny he'd got, he had nothing left, he had no savings, eventually. My daughter goes to Durham, and that costs us an arm and a leg, to send her there, and my son goes to Freeman College, and, you know that costs us a lot of money, as well, but it doesn't leave us with nothing, whereas, with my parents, it left them with nothing and they applied for assistance with the school uniform, and were told that he earned too much, you know, which when you think someone's earning £6.00 a week, I mean, what job could you conceivably have had that would have been lower paid?
I think there was one boy who came from Buckland, and his dad was a roadman, a County Council roadman, and he got some assistance with his son's school uniform, as far as we'd heard. But then, you'd come to school, and you know, and you'd find other kids were being dropped off by people in Bentleys, not many, but some were. So you were coming into a world that really was strange.
PR: Yes, certainly, that kind of person would be likely to have a qualifying son for the Grammar School, wouldn't they?
RC: Yes, that's right, absolutely, yes.
PR: Topped up by the rest of us.
RC: Yes.
PR: And that led us, you said, to short trousers.
RC: Yes, that's right, yes, yes, my mum and dad were very law abiding people. And my dad 's sadly deceased, but my mum still is, she's a very, very law abiding person. And in those days, you know, you took everything as gospel. And they went to a parents' evening, the first parents' evening, and the headmaster gave his usual address, and said that, in his view, the wearing of short trousers, as he would have said, is compulsory for boys up to the age of, it was fourteen, or fifteen even. As I think you mentioned, it was up to the remove year, and my mum and dad took this absolutely to heart, so l had to wear short trousers. Even in the bitter winter of 1962 into '63, when we didn't actually attend school much, because you couldn't get in from the far flung outpost of Buntingford, because the bus didn't tum up. So, we were non-attenders at school, legitimately, because there was no way we could get there. We tried various alternatives, going on the train, but we aborted that at Standon, and managed somehow, I think we actually…
PR: You might have got a train back.
RC: We got a train back, yes, I can remember that, l think we did, yes.
PR: If the one you were on got through.
RC: Yes, we just waited on Standon station and a train came eventually, and we got back. My mum wasn't very happy when l turned up about eleven o'clock. Having, she thought, I'd at last, gone to school, to find that myself and a few of us led principally by the legendary Ray Saunders, who was not the headmaster 's favorite student. And in fact, he expelled him in the end.
PR: Oh, did he?
RC: Yes, he was one who got expelled for putting... There was a teacher, called Mr Chapman, who was a geography teacher, we used to call peanut.
PR: Peanut, six foot tall, head so small, peanut.
RC: Yes, that's right, yes, that's right, and he used to be known as peanut. And they hammered six-inch nails into his car tyres, and, which, l mean, a joke 's a joke, but I mean, that went beyond. But Ray could never quite see where the joke ended He was, and still is, a great guy, and wouldn't do anybody any harm whatsoever. But he just, there was how far he could push "the old man", as he called him. That was it, he pushed him too far, and he and one or two others were expelled.
PR: What was the age gap between you and Saunders ?
RC: Ray would have been, l was eleven, he would have been fifteen, sixteen, but he failed all his O levels, and they said, "we don 't want you in the sixth form", and eventually, I think. I may be doing him an injustice. It may not have been him who nailed the geography teacher's tyres.
PR: Yes, yes .
RC: But it was the sort of thing.
PR: Yes, that sort of thing happened.
RC: It was the sort that a group of them did, and there was a group of them were expelled. He may not have done that.
PR: There were plenty of examples of.
RC: I don't want to be on record as saying he did that, but I would be on record as saying he was a good guy.
PR: The offence occurred, and there would have been groups of people who could easily.
RC: Yes, a group of people, yes. It was a bit like Casablanca, you round up the usual suspects, and Ray would have been in the usual suspects. In fact, he always said he went for tea and whackies, he used to call it, with Mr Jack. That's what he used to call it, I didn't, because he didn't even know who I was.
PR: So, yes, you interest me, the relationships there were between the younger boys and the older ones, and the prefects in particular, you mention prefects’ detentions..
RC: Yes, detention, yes, and there were some prefects' detentions that were feared, and some really couldn't be bothered, and if you got in their detention apparently. It was mentioning to you earlier, I only ever got in one detention, which was a case of mistaken identity of a prefect, and I appealed to the headmaster, and he said no, I'd got to serve the detention. And I was in the detention of a guy called Lane, who made me do ridiculous mathematical things for a couple of hours, like you had to multiply two times one, and then two times two, and then I think it was two times two times two, and you had to do this up until you'd done it to the nth often. And then you'd do three times three, three times three times three, until you 'd done that ten times. What on earth point there was in that, I don't know.
PR: No.
RC: But that was his idea of, and he just sat there until you'd done it.
PR: I can remember being in very, very long detentions, and it was always, in my memory, in Room A, the first one on the back corridor.
RC: That's right, yes.
PR: And the prefects had a rota, it was so-and-so 's turn this week.
RC:Yes.
PR: After you'd had three of some other kind of punishment.
RC: But your own detentions were legendary. You look always quizzically at me when I say that, but you were always, if you were in Ruffles ' detention it was always apparently, I wasn't in one I'm glad to say, because they were always very, very long. You'd keep people in until about three o'clock in the morning , or something, but they were always reckoned to be quite good fun, because you would actually tum up with various goodies from the Castle Stores, which sadly made way for the by-pass, and you'd come in armed with ginger beer, cream soda or lemonade or whatever it was, plus crisps and stuff. I don't know whether yours was like that every time, but…
PR: I can't remember it, but it's consistent with what I would have followed throughout later teaching. The punishment is the time in the detention.
RC: That's right, but not to make it unpleasant.
PR: No, then I guess you can soften it a bit. l remember other prefects doing something I thought was really bad. They pinned a sheet of paper with drawing pins onto the master 's desk, and then drew a line on the floor, a certain number of inches away, and the punishment was to write on that sheet, A4 or foolscap in those days, from top to bottom, without resting your elbow.
RC: Oh, right.
PR: On the table, and without moving your feet obviously back from or over that white line. Until you got an excruciating pain in your back and your arm and everywhere else, which I think.
RC: That's awful. l mean, we were kept in by certain teachers, and I was mentioning one to you, I didn't like him, the guy, the art teacher, Oscar Chapman.
PR: Oscar Chapman, yes.
RC: His favourite trick was, you'd be in there, and there'd be thirty of you, or so in the class , and he would say, "right, if you're all quiet for one minute, you can go home". And of course, you'd start, and someone would go "he, he". "Right, start again", and then in the end, you would get to the point where people were almost at each others' throats, at half past five, you know, having been there since four o'clock, and you'd be absolutely quiet, and he'd say "I heard a noise, start again". And you'd say, "oh, sir", you know, there was no noise , he said, "I heard a noise, start again", and of course, he invented noises because he wanted to keep you in, and he wanted to give you this mental torture.
PR: That's right, psychopathic.
RC: And in the end, you'd get to, I'd get to like, you know, because the bus went at ten to six, and there was only one more bus I think after that, and it was no joke when you'd got about two hours’ homework and you'd got to get back an hour on the bus. One time we were kept in, there was another psychopath, called Sharp, who was a geography teacher.
PR: And PE.
RC: And PE, yes. And he, I remember to this day, because I was a non-swimmer, I was one of these people who was a non-swimmer, and we used to have PE. We had a lovely man who was a PE teacher who was also our form teacher, called Rex Porter, who was the English pole-vault champion, ever such a nice man. And he used to take sympathy with you for not being able to swim, because if you come from Buntingford, you couldn’t 't get to a swimming pool, you suddenly, you get to the Grammar School, you 're plunged into. You know, I'm four foot nine and you're plunged into three foot six of ice-cold water on a May morning, not surprised you can't swim.
But this guy, Sharp, his idea was to slipper you if you couldn't swim. So, I remember vividly being bent over, I mean, the bottom half of you being frozen solid for about forty-eight hours after you'd been plunged in the swimming pool, and being slippered for not being able to swim, so. And we were kept in by him, as well, and he had a particularly sort of nasty way of setting you tasks. I remember we had to draw all the continents of the world, from memory, and if they didn't. You 'd hand them to him, like you'd draw Africa, and Asia, and Europe and Australia and you'd hand them to him, "no, do it again", and you'd say "but, how could I possibly remember it?" He'd said, "I want them accurately drawn ". And you'd be there, and I was there until half past six, almost in tears, trying to draw Africa and Asia from memory. I still couldn't, I mean, you know roughly the shape, don't you?
PR: Yes.
RC: But you couldn't do it, and it was just his way of being sadistic and in the end, I remember going home almost in tears, had no food or anything. Ten to seven catching a bus, and mum and dad were pretty furious, you know, get home, because I'd said, you know, "we're being kept in after school". So you had the odd sadist, and you had...
PR: But parents wouldn't protest in the way they would today.
RC: I wouldn't allow it now, not mine. I wouldn't allow it. I wouldn't allow it. I wouldn't allow my… My children can swim, thankfully. I still can't swim, because of that. It's a deep psychological thing, but to be slippered by a teacher with a plimsoll, for not being able to swim, I mean, is cruel.
PR: Yes .
RC: But, I mean, that's what used to happen.
PR: So, things have changed at the Grammar School, over the road, apart from the fact that it's now called the Richard Hale School.
RC: Yes , that's right, yes.
PR: And things have changed over here.
RC: They certainly have.
PR: And what would you say about the sort of camaraderie of the staff here, the corporate spirit, is that as it was, still?
RC: I would say so, yes. I mean, the great thing about working here has always been the people that you work with, the colleagues you work with, and people at all levels, in all departments, and also members, you know. We all get on well, and there has always been a camaraderie. I wouldn't say when I first started, that it was quite what it is now, I think you can't imagine the situation in those days, where you would have got people at a low level, I still don't consider myself to be that senior, but I suppose I am fairly senior, calling each other by Christian names.
PR: Yes.
RC: It was very much, you had that respect, I suppose, or there was an expectation that you would call people "Sir", or certainly "Mr", you never, and even people that you worked with, you wouldn't call them necessarily by their Christian name. But it was strange that the Clerk of the Council, when I first started, was Neville Moon, and the deputy Clerk called him "Clerk", he wouldn't call them "Neville", or he might do, behind closed doors.
PR: Yes, yes.
RC: Never in public.
End side one
Side 2
PR: But, the names, actually using Christian names, has actually made a real difference in the way people view each other.
RC: I think it has, yes, and certainly with members, there may have been a situation where the Clerk or then the Chief Executive, when we had the first Chief Executive who was Peter Boyce, would have had a close relationship with members and they would have been on Christian name terms. But, certainly no one below that would ever have called a member by their Christian name. I mean, I've known you for years anyway and, you know, we call each other by Christian names.
PR: Yes.
RC: But, I would now, all members I would call by their Christian name, and they would call me Ron, but in those days you would have been either "Mr" or "Sir" or, and they would have called you "Mr Coxall" you would not have been, you know. One or two you got to know.
PR: Yes, yes.
RC: There were a couple of famous members who liked to call you by your Christian name, and after a long period, you felt you could call them by their Christian name.
PR: Yes, yes. What about the professional day as it were, how would your, I know, obviously, you've gone up a ladder, and so your work's changed in that sense, but what about the rhythms of professional life, I mean, is your day, well, is the day? It's a job to do this, isn't it, because you've gone up, but when you knock of work at the end of the day is it any different now to earlier years?
RC: Only in that it takes you four times longer to get home, because of the traffic, but there were fixed times for starting work, and in fact in those days, when I first started, you either started at quarter to nine or nine, and you knocked off at six minutes past five , or five twenty-one, and I think there was another time, which was five thirty-six, so you could.
PR: Was that to regulate the flow down the hill?
RC: Yes, it was, yes. Ln fact I was probably one of the first people who actually managed to get a concession to start at half past eight and then finish at six minutes past five. Otherwise it was quarter to nine until twenty-one minutes past five, or you started at nine and you finished at five thirty-six. The reason being if you add all that up, it would add up to your working week.
PR: Ah, yes, yes.
RC: We actually had people sitting watching the clock go round to five thirty-five to five thirty-six before they would go out the door, unbelievably. I mean, now we have flexitime, and everything's a lot more flexible and friendly than it was. We were always friendly, but it tended to be amongst your own group and your own peer group, and people weren't unfriendly towards you from higher up, but there was an expectation that you would have the rich man in his castle poor man at his gate, type of thing.
PR: When did you get off the old 331 bus and get independent travel, was that a big moment?
RC: It was, yes, and I first bought a car in 1971, something like that '72. I saved up and had some driving lessons and had a car, and then, obviously, gave you a lot more freedom.
PR: Yes, but the working practices here still, regimentation at this end.
RC: Yes, there was regimentation, it was a very regimented thing. We used to have to open the post. We had post teams, in those days, you didn't. Now we have a post room where all the post for County Hall comes in. In those days. our department, Clerk's department, used to have squads of people. And, for one week in four, you were on post-opening duty. So, you had to open all of County Hall 's post, and you would be down in the post-room until, you know, ten, half past ten, opening all the post, and paying in all the money. All the money that came in, I used to, used to have to be one of the people who paid it all in: cheques and cash. Cash used to come in, in envelopes, very trusting. I'm an honest person, because I come from an honest family, and l wouldn't pocket money, but you could have just pocketed it. I mean, you used to get ten pound notes, twenty pound notes, coming in, people paying for their home helps or whatever, and we used to have to put the cash to one side, and then pay it all in, and tally it all up, and reconcile it. So that was a job the Clerk's department used to do.
PR: With reforms in local government, not the most recent changes, but earlier years like the '74 stuff, the rural districts and urban district councils, are the relationships about the same now, would you say, between County and the next tier?
RC: Probably about the same. I think probably, we've had our moments over the years, of working with districts. Some districts have always been easier to work with than others, but pre '74, as you rightly say, there were an awful lot of them, I mean, what on earth they were all doing. You had Braughing rural and, you know, and Sawbridgeworth, and all sort of weird little places used to have little councils. They'd have the full ceremony of the...
PR: And responsibilities.
RC: Responsibility and you know, each would have a clerk, each would have a treasurer, and so '74 was a good thing to create the districts. But, obviously with the creation of those bigger districts the relationships, the potential for differences with the districts increased, I think, and we've had, always had difficult relations with some authorities. 1 think probably in the last ten years, that's improved a lot. And I think Brian Briscoe, particularly, the Chief Exec, he made a lot of effort towards smoothing things over with the districts. And Bill Ogley, our current chief, who's about to go, he's made lots of effort, I think, to smoothing it over, so I wouldn't say that relations with districts have been a big thing in the last ten years.
PR: Yes.
RC: But we've had odd times, when we've had local government reorganisation visited upon us, some of the districts rather fancied themselves becoming unitary authorities, and perhaps had a go at trying to do that. And you got legendary people, such as Brian Hall, who's the Stevenage Council, he's the leader of Stevenage Council, and he's always set his stall out, you know, a Stevenage man. And Stevenage obviously being a Labour authority, when you have a Tory controlled county, you're inevitably going to have a locking of horns occasionally.
PR: Yes, yes.
RC: But you respect them for what they are trying to do, and their elected to do their job. And, you know, we always get on very well with our col leagues in the districts. I never have a day's problem with I've got lots of friends in the districts round the county and in other districts and other counties neighbouring. I think there's a camaraderie, if you like, amongst member and committee staff, that transcends.
PR: Well, as a newcomer, yes, I just see an excellent working relationship between groups, which in a way surprises me, because it hasn't always been like that at district council.
RC: No, no, I mean, certainly there is definitely a Hertfordshire way of doing things, there is no doubt about that, there is a Hertfordshire way. And I think all members from all groups, I mean, you have your spats in the council chamber, but I think there's a mutual respect amongst members. And I think there's a mutual respect for members by the officers, and l think there's a mutual respect of the officers by the members.
PR: I think so.
RC: And it works at all levels, and it always has done. And we've had one or two petulant people, mostly on the members' side, who've tried to impose their will on the council down the years, but ultimately, you know, they 'll be ground down, you know. They either work the Hertfordshire way or they don't survive very long, and I think that’s good. I think we've…
PR: I've certainly seen that in the dining hall really, when members are together, and in committee, when officers and members are together, cross party.
RC: That's right, yes, and I think my own job is to look after members, and I think “well, if I'm being moaned at proportionately by Conservatives, Labour and Lib-Dems, then I'm probably doing my job properly".
PR: Yes, yes .
RC: I think if I'm being moaned at constantly by the Conservatives, saying that I'm favouring the Labour group or the Lib-Dems, which I don't, then you'd think "well, perhaps I've got the balance a bit wrong". But I think if you've got it right you get moaned at, hopefully, I don't get moaned at that much anyway, but you.
PR: Well, I have to say that, I mean, your name here is synonymous with fair play, honesty.
RC: Absolutely, well, I hope so, yes, because I've always tried to be fair. I mean, clearly there are some members you get on better with than others. Some you don't come across them much, they don't want to engage you very much. But I always pride myself in being fair to all members and to all groups. And, you know, I know occasionally the leader, Robert Ellis will accuse me of favouring the Liberal Democrats for example, but, sometimes I do stick up for the Liberal Democrats, because I think well, you know, why shouldn't, if I think someone's being unfairly treated.
But it was the same, you know, when the Administration was in charge, which was the Labour and Liberal Democrats, and I'd say, "well, I don't think you're being fair to the Tories". I take each situation and try and, you know, be fair and impartial, and I'm not partial towards any group, or any individual member. Some members I have a long-standing friendship with, particularly I would say, the former Chairman of the Council and former leader, Iris Tarry.
PR: Yes.
RC: We're very good friends, but I wouldn't do anything to favour Iris over any other member, but I respect her immensely, as I do the current leader, I respect him hugely, but I don't favour him over, moreover, the leader of the opposition, because it's not in my interests to do it, and I wouldn't want to. I get on well with everybody, and always have done.
PR: Well that's a good place for us to finish.
RC: All right.
PR: We haven 't mentioned Barbara. We haven't mentioned quite a few. I mean, we could well come back and just tick off a few more bits.
RC: I mean, there's lots more, lots more interesting stories from County Hall
PR: Well we ought to book.
RC: That I've got to tell you, so I mean, I'm more than happy to carry on. There's lots of anecdotes about members.
PR: We could just take half an hour. I mean, I'm quite interested in the listed building and the constraints that makes, and the ethos and the reputation of the County Council as well.
RC: Yes, that's right. There's a lot of stories about the previous chief executives, particularly Peter Boyce, I've got stories about him, and previous chairmen, funny stories about some of the previous chairmen.
PR: We'll do the sequel, as soon as you give me a, look in your book, when you're not hotting up for another big meeting.
RC: Yes.
PR: Well, we can easily, well we want to do that.
RC: Yes, we can do that. We can fix another time, yes.
PR: Thank you very much for your time, I've kept you a bit longer than I should.
RC: I've got to go. My son's in the Freeman College musical, tonight at half seven, so I've got to get home, traffic permitting.
PR: Face the A10
RC: Get home, have a quick tea, and get off and make it look as if I'm fascinated with all the performances.
PR: Well, you will be.
RC: Oh, I'll be proud of him, whatever happens.
PR: Yes, yes.
RC: O.K.
PR: Well, very interesting echo. I've just played a little bit of that tape back, and find l suppose it is the bit I was just mentioning: the listed building and the high ceilings. And although this room is fairly heavily furnished, there's also a lot of wall from which things can resonate, but that was a good chat with Ron.
Tape ends