Editorial: Back to the future
Call me odd, but I’ve always been fascinated by the notion of travelling through time. From The Time Machine and Doctor Who to Back to the Future and my current TV favourite Ashes to Ashes, the notion of strapping myself into a special chair with blinking lights and big luminous dials before catapulting myself hundreds of years into the past or deep into the future has an enduring appeal, even though I’m old enough to know better.
Of course, physicists have always scoffed at the idea of time travel. But with the help of a quick Internet search – who’d have imagined that was possible in the future? – I was surprised to learn that some remarkable advances in quantum gravity are reviving the theory and time travel has now become a hot topic for theoretical physicists. 
One stubborn problem with time travel, though, is that it’s riddled with paradoxes, such as the man with no parents. What happens when you go back in time and kill your parents before you are born? If your parents died before you were born, then how could you have been born to kill them in the first place?
As the legendary Colonel Pryke would have been quick to confirm, I am no theoretical physicist and such questions must remain unanswered here. But it does beg the question: what would I see if I went back to my St Albans School of the late sixties and early seventies, armed with the benefit of perfect hindsight?
Knowing my luck, I would materialise (if that’s what time travellers do) in the Orderly Room to witness Percy Pryke shaking his head in despair at my exam results and telling the young me that I wouldn’t be a theoretical physicist. All around him – and, I suspect, to his absolute mortification – would be a once-proud school with a crumbling Victorian infrastructure, caught in a political no man’s land and struggling to find its identity as the move towards a comprehensive education system gathered pace. The headmaster at the time, Frank Kilvington, was charged with the task of dragging the school into the present day. The formidable WT Marsh was obviously a tough act to follow, but times had changed and the school needed to change with it.
The recent series of contributions from the Berts – and in particular their recollections of the masters of the 1950s – has prompted a flurry of similar reminiscences, and I’m always fascinated to read how many of the staff from the 1940s and 1950s were still around in my time. There were undoubtedly tensions between this ancien regime and their younger colleagues, and if I’m being brutally honest, educational quality and results were suffering as a consequence.
Bear in mind that this was the end of the swinging sixties, a time of growing civil unrest as minorities – including the young – found their voice. This questioning of authority was difficult for the older generation of masters, accustomed to a rather more rigorous disciplinary regime, to cope with. With its pacifist and slightly leftist tendencies, for example, my school year nearly single-handedly destroyed the CCF, and only the re-introduction of conscription – accompanied by a small compromise from the school on hair length – saved the day. Subsequent headmasters – most notably Andrew Grant – have carried on Kilvington’s good work, and zooming back to the present day I’m delighted to read in the Headmaster’s Notes that the school and its CCF section are still going from strength to strength.
Elsewhere in this issue you’ll find the usual reports from the President, Membership Secretary and the OA Lodge, and a bumper crop of letters from our members. Once again, my thanks to everyone who has taken the trouble to write, and to all our regular contributors for their continued support.