Do you remember the "Cecil Roberts' Travel Prize" ?
(from Margaret Astill)
It used to pop up every year at Speech Day, and I always used to wonder how people actually won it. Well, I still don't know, but after I left Nottingham I read some of Cecil Roberts' books and I can see how it all began.Most of the books are about different countries. My favourite is "the Growing Boy", which details his early life living in Wilford Grove and attending Mundella. He also tells us about our Founder, Anthony John Mundella.
When I last visited the central Public Library in Nottingham I found a room dedicated to Cecil Roberts. It's worth a visit.
The Growing Boy" by Cecil Roberts, published by Hodder & Stoughton Ltd 1967.
Cecil Roberts
(from Richard Brown)
Cecil Roberts visited the school in 1962 or 1963. He gave an interesting talk to the upper school in the (new) Main Hall. He was not particularly riveting or charismatic but was a nice guy with a lot of interesting tales to tell.
He spent his life travelling and writing. The writing paid for the travelling which he obviously loved, and he considered himself a fortunate person to be able to live his life that way. He told us of his adventures in Italy and a whole load of other places. But he had us spellbound (well, me anyway) when he told of hiking up the lower slopes of Everest with Sherpa Tensing before sunrise in order to see the dawn break over the Himalayas and Nepal.
The odd thing I remember, is that he was joined on this adventure by a couple of other people whom he had met at "the hotel". I don't remember him ever mentioning that he had a regular companion with him in any of the stories he told us. He may have been a solitary kind of person, or maybe he did not want to divulge too much about his lifestyle to an audience of grammar school students. Anyway, the next day I visited those atrocious outdoor lavatories adjacent to Colligate Road, and some comedian had scrawled high up on the bricks above the urinals: "Cecil Roberts pissed here".