the career of David Irving The From the draft memoirs of David Irving
In the May 1955 mock election organised by Brentwood School, David Irving stood as the Labour Party candidate, and did about as well as could be expected on a socialist hustings in a public school. Schooldays WHENEVER any particularly crass behaviour occurred, fingers inevitably pointed at me. Somebody tipped a pound of potassium permanganate into the school’s swimming pool just before the swimming regatta, turning it bright magenta, and it had to be emptied.
I was not to blame, but inevitably I was the one called in to assist the Headmaster with his inquiries. My own mischief-making, in retrospect, was more of the nature of the amusing prank than anything malicious.
I took a delight in Meccano, the metal construction kit that was one of Britain’s finest inventions; I subscribed monthly to the Meccano Magazine , and it became the first magazine to publish my name in print, on a reader’s letter from me; later I frequented Brentwood’s local Meccano shop — and not entirely without coincidence, as it was staffed by a singularly pretty sixteen-year-old whose name I have clean forgotten, but whose delicious teenage innocence and round, Madonna-like features
were sufficient to lure me in again and again to buy the occasional cog-wheel or fishplate, far in excess of my modest constructional requirements; but who bore I now realise a striking resemblance to the girl I married ten years later. She was no doubt indirectly the reason for my most ambitious Meccano project at that time. I constructed a mechanical model of our French teacher, Monsieur Jacottet , who was unfortunately the butt of all the pupils he ever taught.
In the British public school, as Jerome K Jerome wrote, the French teacher “would seem to be chosen not so much as an instructor as an amuser of youth. He is always a comic figure. No Frenchman of a dignified figure,” added Jerome, never one to leave a point unlaboured, “would be engaged for any English school.”* * Three Men on the Bummel , 1900.
My mechanical model of Monsieur Jacottet, seated in gown and pince nez spectacles at his desk, required a large number of esoteric Meccano components, and Madonna was, I hope, quite impressed. The machine stood about sixteen inches high; on top I had mounted a working model of “Jacko’s” head, sculpted in wood, with cotton wool hair and a mouth that opened and shut, mimicking his own jaw movements.
The black cotton gown I stitched concealed the clockwork motor, cogs, levers, cams, and wormgears that whirred inside the model. With its right hand the model banged an opened fountain pen furiously on the desk, while the left rose and twisted to adjust the pince-nez. This model was hidden on a shelf behind the short-sighted French teacher.
Half an hour into his lesson, one string would pull a towel off the model, and a second string would operate the clockwork mechanism to set the mechanical Jacottet pince-nez adjusting and pen-thumping, while the real Monsieur Jacottet looked baffled at. Many evenings and weekends had gone into constructing the fiendish Jacottet device, and I was not pleased when authority pounced, and confiscated it.
I also completed a model of teacher “Damme” Nichols — its right arm would chop up and down in his characteristic mannerism, but it awaited the insertion of the clockwork motor that currently powered Jacottet, so it never performed in class, escaped confiscation, and I still have it somewhere now. July 23, 1955: Monsieur Jacottet’s last lesson to the Upper Sixth Arts at Brentwood School before retiring. Click on the model on the shelf for an enlargement.
For Monsieur Jacottet’s last lesson, I had laid on a spectacular financial venture to raise funds: one of the four light-bulbs mysteriously descended and levitated on an invisible thread; the three others had been replaced by 1,000-watt Photoflood lamps. On the far wall facing this tormented Frenchman a herd of pink elephants crafted out of paper and strung together on a cord mysteriously appeared from behind a cupboard and plodded up the back wall.
The entire lesson was recorded on tape — the school had just purchased one of the first Soundmirrors ever made, and the headmaster had innocently loaned it to me — and photographed, it being my intention to market the photographs in the coming term. The Jacottet machine had in retrospect one design flaw: once turned on, it could not be stopped.
The photos show him looking baffled at the hoots of laughter erupting all about him, peering myopically up at the dazzling Photoflood, and holding a top hat which had materialised on his desk. After a night spent clandestinely in the school darkroom — that illicit pass-key again — I sold perhaps 200 prints of the event around the school.
As the ringleader I was no doubt once again whacked for this outrage, but schoolmasters in later years told me that my model “Jacko” was kept in the Senior Common Room and switched on for visitors. It was, after all, the Frenchman’s final year, the French have never been loved so much as mocked at in England, and everybody was in a spirit of jollity. When the ‘A’ level results came, unfortunately, almost the entire class had failed French.
In later years I sometimes wonder whether other schoolboys got up to the same kind of mischief, and when, and for that matter why we did it. David Irving’s Photos hi-res (1.5 MB) images of the Jacottet event and an enlargement of the model The above item is reproduced without editing other than typographical Register your name and address to go on the Mailing List to receive or to hear when and where he will next speak near you