Life with Mister Potts

Mister Potts was my maths teacher, geography teacher and form teacher, which added up to lot of nervous hours in the classroom of a man whose mood changed like the weather. When he was good, he was extremely good; as he was on the morning he introduced us to Kate, our form prefect. Mister Potts smiled as he told us Kate was there to help us find our way around the school. ‘If there’s anything you need to know, just ask Kate,’ he said, to which Kate smiled a TV hostess type smile. Together they looked a picture of delight; such a nice man; and what a pleasant girl.

In a relaxed mood Mister Potts opened the window by his desk, overlooking The Lines. ‘How far do you think it is to the ground from this window ledge?’ he asked. When nobody volunteered an answer, we were encouraged to make a guess. Being clueless, I played safe and went for forty feet, an answer midway between other wild guesses. The correct answer was revealed when Mister Potts took a tape measure from his desk and dangled it out of the window. ‘Sixteen feet!’ he announced. ‘Sixteen feet!’ he repeated with a smile.

Titter titter.

The charm offensive continued with a demonstration in backing our exercise books with wallpaper. In a matter of days almost everyone had followed his recommendation, and the results were impressive.

‘Did anyone see ‘Meet the Wife?’ last night?’ Mister Potts asked. With a chuckle he recounted a scene from the television comedy starring Thora Hird and Freddie Frinton.

Most of us had, and how we laughed at Mister Potts’s retelling. Then he went on to give us the latest news on Francis Chichester, who at that time was stuck in the middle of an ocean on a round the world yacht trip. Though I didn’t share Mister Potts’s enthusiasm for the exploits of Francis Chichester, at least I understood. But when Mister Potts spoke with assumption of the pleasures of driving around in the car at weekends and visiting delightful places in the Sussex countryside, he lost me, as he did when he held up his passport to quote its ‘without let or hindrance’ wording when speaking of foreign travel. To someone from the Twydall Estate, such things were as familiar as life on Mars.

For all his jollity there was a volatile side to Mister Potts, a side that kept us on edge. Few dared to whisper in his class, not even when he disappeared into the storeroom behind his desk to slip on his gleaming white overall, which he wore to keep the chalk dust off his suit. A man of immaculate appearance, Mister Potts set his standards high and demanded the same of his pupils. While an incorrect answer was tolerated, sloppy work was not and he was quick to jump on anybody who fell short of his expectations. Everything had to be neat, tidy and precise; from our names in the bottom left hand corner of a sheet of paper, to the day and date in the bottom right. In his classroom he was God, and his power was absolute.

Mister Potts’s methods worked. My presentation of cloud formations, on an A2 sized sheet of paper, surpassed anything I’d done in junior school and I looked upon it with pride. Diagrams were carefully drawn with lettering, in capitals, neatly spaced between perfectly straight pencil lines.

Days later; morning break. As 1A1 left the classroom, Charlie Titheridge, Peter Burtenshaw, me and other dawdlers were shuffling past the huge drawers at the side of the room when we spotted a big pile of papers - our cloud formations, no less, and they’d been marked. As Mister Potts appeared to have gone (he'd actually slipped into the storeroom behind his desk, momentarily, to discard his overall) we were tempted to have a quick peep at our marks. We'd no sooner started rummaging through the papers when an outraged voice exploded behind us.

‘How dare you rifle through people’s work!’ 

Mister Potts lashed out, cracking each of us around the head as he dragged us away and then bundled us out of the classroom. I can’t speak for the others, but I came very close to pissing myself in fright.

As head of the lower school (first and second years) Mister Potts was responsible for discipline and punishment. Any kid sent to him was in big trouble as a typical hearing was short, one sided and full of vitriol. Everyone knew what was coming, even before Mister Potts stepped into his storeroom for the cane, which he applied ruthlessly. Though disturbing to witness, I told myself the offender was only getting what he deserved. Probably. Moving on immediately to a lesson in another classroom helped banish the misery of witnessing it, but if our lesson should happen to be Maths or Geography in our own classroom, with a still highly charged Mister Potts, then a dark cloud hung over us for the entire wretched period.

Then one day it was the turn of Kate, our form prefect. In front of the entire class Mister Potts bawled her out. Though she was clearly distressed, he did not relent. Not until he’d finished snarling and barking at her, and left her in floods of tears. What she’d done wrong was unclear but I suspected it was very little. It all seemed so cruel and unnecessary. Whatever our form prefect had done, she didn’t deserve to be humiliated like that. Nobody did.

Leave her alone you bully

From thereon life with Mister Potts was all about survival. I’d say yes sir and no sir. I’d work hard. And I’d laugh politely at his poxy jokes. But would that be enough to keep me out of trouble? 

Left to right: half of Diane Jarrett, Mister Potts, Vicki Crook, Susan Johnson

Front kneeling/sitting:  Lindsay Hawkes, Diane Clark, Deborah Byerley