Duncan Melville LINKLATER

Custos Rotulorum

BORN	10 April 1948, York
FATHER	Nelson Valdemar LINKLATER (1918-1997)
MOTHER	Margaret Lilian née BOISSARD (1916-2003)
MARRIED	24 May 1974 Sally Elizabeth SIMMONDS in East Hagbourne
CHILDREN	Jessica Polly Jorun LINKLATER 19 April 1975 Magnus Christopher Toby LINKLATER 22 July 1976

Born in York. Although I was there, I remember little of it. My earliest memories are from Nottingham where we lived opposite Wollaton Park till about 1952 when we moved to ‘Long Waters’ Dorney, near Windsor and thence to 102 King's Road, Windsor in 1955. I first went to school in Dorney, at the village school where, on my first day, I got off to a flying start by being sick on my desk. Thereafter things did not get much better, but I did carry off an art prize for my ‘Sun Flower’, (just the one) when about five or six years old (pastel on brown wrapping paper, now believed lost). The prize was half a crown (or 2/6d to the uninitiated), riches beyond the dreams of avarice ca. 1954 and invested almost immediately in lemonade and a choc ice.

About a year later I graduated from the village school to Haileybury and Imperial Service College (usually just “Haileybury” or “the I.S.C.”) where I was soundly thrashed by the headmaster, a benign old codger known as Sidney B. who had had the pleasure of attending to the hind quarters of my father when he, in his turn, had been at the I.S.C. in the 1930s, and when Sidney B. was then a very young house master. For my first two or three years at Haileybury I was a day boy, or “daybug” as the school slang labelled all such; thereafter I boarded. Being a boarder meant that “the cane” was administered at bed time after one had changed into pyjamas and front of whatever ‘bed-fellows’ inhabited the same dormitory. The minute the beating was over, the onlookers, being interested and knowledgeable spectators, some of them recipients of similar ‘correction’, insisted one lowered one's pyjama trousers in order for them to assess the marksmanship and ferocity of delivery and indeed to communicate vital information to the recipient as to the spacing and accuracy of ‘stripes’, as well as general description of colouration of the affected buttocks and the presence or otherwise of any blood - not a usual occurrence. The mood, having been sombre before, was elevated and bordering on the hysterical afterwards.

Time outside the classroom was much preferred to that inside. I learned more under the bedclothes than sat at a desk. 'Twas thus. By dint of great thrift, when 10 or 11 years old, I managed to save enough pocket-money to buy my first transistor radio, whose main selling-point, as far as the shop assistant was concerned, was that it came in a “genuine pigskin case.” It also had a single earpiece which made listening after lights-out in dorm possible without attracting further disciplinary measures from Sidney B. One night I chanced upon the weekly broadcast of Arthur Schnabel playing Beethoven. I was hooked. At the time I knew nothing of Schnabel or Beethoven, but since then that has changed. At Haileybury we played rugger in the Autumn and Spring terms. I don't remember there being any football. I made it to the 1st XV and got my colours eventually, which were promptly snatched back for some misdemeanour before being re-awarded to me. There was more of the same at Pangbourne Nautical College.

I aspired to go to sea, preferring the merchant service which, in those days, had notably more females on board than the Royal Navy. Pangbourne Nautical College was selected as the best place to hone my scholastic attainments, especially as I had sunk from 1st or 2nd in Latin under the able tutelage at Haileybury of a man called Ansell, who also encouraged my interest in classical music, to near bottom under the withering sarcasm of a loathsome man called D. A. Blundell, or ‘DAB’ as he was known, and then of an even more disreputable old soak called O'Hara, known as ‘The Buzzard’ for his reputed acuity of vision, seemingly unimpaired by the prodigious quantities of alcohol he consumed and of which he reeked at all times of the day. Rugger was only played in the winter term at Pangbourne. In spring term the choice was between hockey or rowing. I headed for the water. The rest of my time at Pangbourne was not entirely wasted. According to my reports, I entered the school in the Michaelmas Term of 1961 a stripling of 5 ft 4½” weighing a mere 7 stone 3 lbs with a puny chest measurement of 30” (normal) and 32” (expanded). By the Summer Term of 1966 I had blossomed to a height of 5 ft 11½”, weighed 11 stone 5 lbs and had a chest measurement of 35” (normal) and a massive 38” (expanded). I am convinced that by the end of my final term, had they bothered to measure us again, I would have notched up the extra ½ inch in height to attain the full two yards. Henceforth, when asked, I always stated my height as six foot. Surely I was right?

And I'm not the boy wearing a cap. What was wasted at Pangbourne was my eyesight, ruined, I felt at the time, as a result of reading by torch-light under the bedclothes. As perfect eyesight was a pre-requisite for the Merchant Navy, my ‘career’ received an early setback from which it never really recovered. Captaincy was what I aspired to; slumming it as a bursar or engineer, the only options then open to the bespectacled, would of course have been beneath contempt. In spite of my need of specs, vanity dictated they remained in a drawer. The blurred hieroglyphics that appeared on the blackboard requiring scrutiny were deciphered with the aid of a small hole bored in my wooden ruler with the compass supplied presumably for the purpose, and through which I peered surreptitiously for enlightenment. Leading the charge of those responsible for damaging my eyesight was Rider Haggard; ’She‘ was the first book I read from cover to cover and it was followed rapidly by ‘King Solomon's Mines’, ‘Allan Quatermain’, ‘Nada the Lily’ and several others. My eyes being thus opened I progressed to writers such as Eric Ambler, Sax Rohmer (Arthur Henry Ward), Seamark (Austin J. Small), Edgar Wallace, all of whom I consumed under the bedclothes. Whatever the actual cause of my myopia, my pioneering use of pinhole optics soon proved ineffectual and what was written on the blackboard became as much of a blur as the remainder of my time at school. As short sight prevented me from attaining what I perceived as prestigious rank in the merchant navy, and left open only those jobs where one actually had to graft or get one's hands dirty rather than ponce around in gold braid ordering malefactors to walk the plank, in spite of having no ship from which to jump, I jumped and became a landlubber. I built this website.