The recent centenary of the First Word War Battle of the Somme raised a ghost for me, the ghost of former CBHS teacher, Harry S. Baverstock. During my School years (48-53), Bav was at the end of a 33-year career on the School staff. 

He had begun teaching in 1920 in the old school on Worcester St. and had transferred with the school to Straven Road, where he designed the layout of the grounds. None of this is what I, nor I imagine other members of my high school generation, remember him for. Bav seemed to me a living embodiment of the tragic history of the first half of the Twentieth Century. As a 20-year-old NZ infantryman, he had fought in the appalling Battle of the Somme, and it was either there or during the subsequent carnage at Passchendaele that he was severely wounded. In our classes, he sometimes alluded to the horrors of war, and it was clear he had suffered deeply during the Second World War as deaths of former students and teachers were reported daily in morning assembly. His war injury was as much to his soul as to his body.

In some ways it seemed the world had stopped for Bav in his youth. It was as though he still lived in the Edwardian era, with his butterfly collar, narrow tie and old-fashioned suits in a dark green fabric. A very small man with round rimless spectacles, he looked like a sad old owl. I studied Latin with him for three years and was amongst his least talented students in that subject. Bav could never understand the contrast between my competence with homework assignments and my abject failure in class tests. He did not know that I was able to cajole my older sister, a brilliant student of languages, to “help” me with the homework. In School Certificate Latin I gained the wretched mark of 23%, 13% of this undoubtedly coming from the “antiquities” (classical history) segment of the exam.

In his memoir Singing Historian, Ned Bohan, my best mate in school, wrote of our Latin class: “We were the despair of diminutive Harry Baverstock. Old ‘Bav,’ gentle, polite, artistic, almost always permanently depressed, was lumbered with us as our form master for three years.” Without question, Bav was the gentlest and kindest of our teachers. During one of his classes, he asked me to explain why some of us had been giggling. My fellow gigglers hissed at me not to explain, so I said: “I have been told to shut up.” Bav misheard me and thought I was telling him to shut up, so he sent me off to another classroom to get a cane. When I returned with it, I explained to him what I had really said. He was hugely relieved and apologised to me for his misunderstanding!

Bav retired in 1952 and lived on into his late eighties.