The Old Bordenian Association

Denis Jarrett, a long standing OBA member and former editor of the Maroon, has provided an original menu from the 1954 Annual Dinner and an associated article from the 1972 Maroon, concerning the demise of the location of that dinner – the Bull Hotel restaurant.

 ALAS, POOR YORICK (from Maroon 1972)

“Where be your gibes now?  Your songs?  Your flashes of merriment that were wont to set the table on a roar?”

Yorick, of course, was a fully paid-up member of the Old Bordenian Association, and well might you contemplate the wine list which he and many others like him thumbed through annually in the hope that the white-coated Watson would see you, hear you, and sometimes remember to serve you.

Well might you ponder and mourn such desolation.  For here was established the annual reunion dinner presided over in turn by William Murdock, Arthur Claydon, and George Hardy.  Annual dinners in the school dining hall are nothing new – George Hardy saw in the first of our post-war dinners there, and what an occasion that was!

Bull restaurant - now Roman Square

But it is at the Bull, somewhere among that rubble and debris, that Yorick lies buried with the applause, the crepe-paper Association colours, and those damned seagulls circling eternally the foam-flecked rocks in their huge gilt frame behind the main table.

Seagulls or not, how I long for a taste, once again, of that tomato soup in the days before Heinz had learned to count up to fifty-seven.  How I savour another cut of that roast beef, which had not been processed, pre-packed, and reheated, served with a searing portion of that genuine horseradish sauce which scoured your nostrils like sandpaper.  And when the vegetables came late – as they always did – there was the ever attendant head waiter Kirby, in tails, quietly assuaging with hotel Hilton grandeur until you felt that, for you, delay was a personal service.

Those were the days when the after-dinner speech, like good vintage port, mattered, and when heckling was looked on disdainfully rather than encouraged.  There was time then for a vote of thanks to the Press, and time too for their response; a time when local journalists actually attended and reported the proceedings, and took care to see that initials were right, let alone their shorthand.  Those were the days of Dawkins and Taylor, and of raconteurs like Tempany, and of Old Bordenians like Yorick.

They were also the days of Sarah the receptionist; the long-legged, tall and enigmatic Sarah, who nested with a telephone in a little glass and wood panelled partition in a corner of the dining room.  Sarah never did learn to speak quietly, ever, and you had to accept Sarah as you did the less articulate seagulls.

Then there was Gladys who watched us pack her tiny Tudor Bar to capacity, a struggling mass of elbows and liquid reunion.  Gladys it was who indicated when young Yorick had had enough (or too much) and Gladys it was who kept an eagle eye on her son-in-law, Gerald.

Lay down the wine list and leave poor Yorick to his dusty dreams.  There is among that tumbled rubble too much of us.  And when the rafters fell with a crash and the dust rose in choking clouds, had you listened, you might just have heard the last toast of ‘The School’ and, briefly, seen visionary, fleeting figures whom once we knew and loved.

EDITOR (of the Maroon at the time, Denis Jarrett)

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