15 February 2025
By Thomas Wigley
George Pocock built brilliant boats and in his home town of Eton where he lived as a boy, we honoured him last Autumn by erecting a blue plaque on the George Inn (“George Pocock: Local Boy Made Good”). A short, free-to-view film of that memorable event is available HERE.
It turns out that he was a skilled young scholar too and is celebrated at Eton Porny School which he attended as a boy.
Eton Porny Church of England First School is just 400 metres from the George Inn on the High Street where the Pocock family lived in 1901. Unlike its scholarly and world-famous neighbour Eton College which, at that time, employed George’s father Aaron to build a fleet of rowing boats for the Boys, Eton Porny is, and always has been, a Free School.
George recalls school life in his memoirs;
“Dad moved over to Eton, and then we went to Eton School, not the big so-called public school (*), I would have you know, because the tuition fee at that Eton public school would be more than my Dad was earning in a year. It was absolutely beyond us, even if we had had the so-called pedigree to be able to enrol.
“The schoolmaster at our Eton School was a Mr. Baker, a fine old gentleman. He was very adept with the concertina and in our morning hymn he would always accompany it with his concertina. About three times a week we would have a scripture lesson as the first lesson of the morning and the curate of the town used to come and conduct this lesson.”
(*) A ‘Public School’ in Britain is a fee-paying school.
In their book Ready All!, Newell and Erickson write that this is where George could recite a popular but risqué ditty which goes;
There was a young lady of Eton,
A figure with plenty of meat on.
Marry me Mac and find on my back,
A place to warm your cold feet on.
Since the blue plaque buzz subsided, an eagle-eyed parent recently spotted an honour board at the school bearing the name “G. Y. POCOCK”. So, on a Baltic 21st January 2025 I set off for Eton, eager to investigate.
Sure enough, high up in the school hall is a hand-painted Honour Board which celebrates 12-year-old George as one of two boys awarded “Porny Scholar” in 1903. Girls’ achievements were similarly celebrated on separate boards
On my way out, I asked, on the off chance, if the school has held onto its old admission Registers. Ten minutes later I was rummaging through boxes of them and found entries for George, his brother Dick, and sister Kathleen.
George Pocock’s name is recorded in the 1904 Register.
Later, we find Dick and George recorded (image, bottom right).
Serendipitously, 123 years almost to the day since George’s sister, Kathleen (number 109), enrolled at the school on 20th January 1902, I found her entry in the school Admissions Register. Born on 15th January 1895 she would have been seven years old. Kathleen was living on Eton High Street (at The George, we know) and her father’s name (we know) was ‘Aaron’.
Although the Register ink is badly smudged, we can see that Kathleen was withdrawn from the school on, it appears to me, 13th May 1910 by which time she would have been fifteen years old and at the end of her schooling.
In his memoirs, George says;
“…on graduation at 14 years of age, you were encouraged to study and were presented with two books: one, the Bible and Church of England Prayer Book combined, the other, a volume of the Works of William Shakespeare. We were admonished to inwardly digest them, and that was all the literature you would need. I avidly studied both books, but also collected and read many others.”
It is interesting that Kathleen’s entry is the only one on the page with a specific date of ‘Withdrawal’; other pupils have just the year recorded. Does the date indicate when the Pocock family moved following Aaron’s dismissal by Eton College? We know from the 1911 Census that the Pococks (sans Dick and George) were living at number 9 Brandville Road in West Drayton, about eight miles East of Eton.
The current Eton Porny School was built in 1863 and is a Grade-2 Listed Building. The former Fire Station, identifiable by the wide doors (image right), was later annexed for the school. It is 300 yards from the original school built in what are now numbers 29a and 29b High Street. The original school classrooms were, for a long time, used as an Ex-servicemen’s club. The school is named after Antoine Pyron du Martre born in Normandy in 1731. He became a French Master at Eton College and Anglicised his name to Mark Anthony Porny. When he died, his bequest funded the building of the school which opened on 26th April 1813.
Fast forward from 1903 to 1936 when George has seen the US Men’s Eight win gold at the Berlin Olympics in a boat which he built. He and his wife Frances visit his old stamping ground Eton on their way back home to the US because he “so wanted Al [Ulbrickson] and Frances to see Windsor Castle and Eton College and the boathouses”.
George recalls his time at Eton Porny School and how his name got onto the Honour Board.
“Frances and I left the boathouse and strolled down High Street, Eton, to the College, with me showing her the points of interest … the local Eton School where we received our formal education. I had won a scholarship at this school for a money prize, and the name of the winner each year was emblazoned on a board on the end wall. We went in the school and saw my name. I remember as a kid when that board first hung on the wall with my (!) name on it, how proud I was.”
Scholarly words from George are an appropriate conclusion;
“… most ex-oarsmen will tell you they learned more fundamentally important lessons in the racing shell than in the classroom”.