LOCKDOWN meant different things for different people but for Warrington journalist David Skentelbery it gave him time to write the book he had been threatening to write for years.
“The No Hoper” tells the hilarious story of his rather unusual school days at an independent boarding school for boys at Knutsford.
David believes his parents chose to send him to Knutsford College because he was extremely shy as a youngster and they thought he would have an easier time there than at the local secondary school.
They didn’t realise they were sending him to a school that had been compared to Dotheboys Hall, the infamous boarding school described by Charles Dickens in Nicholas Nickleby.
His introduction to the school was to be thrown head first into a holly bush. He was ridiculed because of his unusual surname. He was driven to the verge of a nervous breakdown by a maths teacher.
And he lived in fear of a headmaster who used a riding crop to beat boys who misbehaved.
Knutsford College was described as a school for the sons of gentlemen. Its motto was “Hope is the anchor of Life” – which sounds pretty impressive until you learn that it was run by a man named Hope.
It closed in 1954 after a history of 27 years. David arrived when it was still in its pomp and was still there when it closed. He then embarked on a career in journalism, most of it in Warrington, where he founded Orbit News Ltd, publishers of Warrington-Worldwide.co.uk in 1968, now run by his son, Gary.
A number of well-known Warrington business figures, or their sons, also attended Knutsford College, including John White, of the long-running John White sports shop, Barry Cooper, who founded the coach business bearing his name, Peter Himsworth, whose family ran a jewellery business in the old Golden Square, David Bate, who ran a greengrocery business on Warrington Market for many years, Brian Bowe, whose father ran a men’s outfitters famous for its oft-repeated advert “Tom Bowe’s trousers down again” and Adam and Frank Lythgoe, of the Adam Lythgoe agricultural fertiliser business.
Were David’s parents right to consider their shy son a “No Hoper” and were they right to send him to Knutsford College?
David says: “If you had asked me that on the day I started there I would probably have been too terrified to answer. But, looking back, it was probably the best thing that could have happened to me.
“The school soon knocked the shyness out of me and I thoroughly enjoyed my school days. I have tried to tell the story in an amusing, ‘laugh-out-loud’ way.
“There are still quite few of my classmates around and you’ll be hard-pressed to find any who are not proud to be Old Boys of Knutsford College.”
Copies of the book can be bought via Amazon for £5.99 by CLICKING HERE
