Dot Wordsworth

School slang

issue 05 May 2012

‘Roaster — A green linnet, as this bird was most frequently roasted by the boys at the playroom fire.’ That item comes in a glossary at the back of The History of Sedgley Park School by F.C. Husenbeth, published in 1856. I stumbled across it when looking to see if the book had an index. (It didn’t.)

Sedgley Park, founded in 1767 and transformed in 1870 into Cotton College, now defunct, was not, I suppose, worse than most schools. Indeed Husenbeth, there from 1803 to 1814, aged seven to 18, looked back on it with affection. As we remember from Tom Brown’s Schooldays, boys enjoyed an enviable freedom to trap birds, light fires and buy supplementary rations. It was a freedom rather like that in the Fleet Prison, and the glossary reads a little like prison slang, concentrating on food, punishment and trickery.

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