21/09/2019 – NTHS&Tech OSA

On 21 August 2019 I swam the English Channel in 15 hours, 38 minutes covering 59 kilometres. The shortest distance between England and France is 30 kilometres, but strong tides and currents mean it is impossible to swim it in a straight line. The average time is around 13 hours, Continue Reading

Myths and Legends

A Confession

My first contact with the school was in 1942 when the Junior Technical School was in Bathurst Street and I was a student studying Chemistry at University. Our laboratory was on the second floor immediately above the broad driveway on which the school assemblies were held. The boys were tightly packed into the limited space available and we looked down upon them, as it were, from a great height. We used to sprinkle them with a fine spray of water blown from apparatus called wash bottles. They would look up at us in frustrated desperation. They could do nothing about it. They were too crowded to be able to move aside and, under the discipline of the school, unable to create a disturbance. They were sitting ducks. The university students very unfairly took advantage of the situation. But if looks could kill, we would have been consigned to everlasting perdition.

Twenty-four years later I re-appeared on the scene as Headmaster. It is remarkable how greatly perspectives can change in twenty-four years.

Des Mahoney

Do you have a story for Myths and Legends? Click here to send it in.