Alan Gater 1964 to 1969

After leaving St Mary’s (in 1969) I trained as a commercial artist. After a year on very low pay I left and drifted through a plethora of temporary office or manual type jobs and briefly, having realised I was not likely to be a successful rock star, tried my hand as an impresario booking local bands for gigs at Beckenham Town Hall. Luckily, a friend with an entrepreneurial streak got me involved in a series of his reasonably lucrative but short-lived ventures before I went bankrupt.  In my early twenties, another friend of mine, who was a computer programmer, told me he thought I would be great at programming, so I took a short course in Cobol, ICL Plan and IBM BAL. I managed to get a job with a small software house on the recommendation of one of the tutors and that was the start of my true vocational career.  Even though I have since held many senior management posts with large companies like Oracle and Capita, secretly, when I get the chance, I still code.

When I think about St Mary’s it is with regret. I have several children who have enjoyed their schools and schooling and continued happily and successfully through university. My first wife was a secondary teacher and I was a guest ‘business person’ at a few classes in her school. The layout of the class was not military but informal, the students seemed relaxed but reasonably enthusiastic, the scope of the discussion was led by the students and questions were polite but probing. It was great. If only I could have gone to such a school.

But I don’t want to give the impression that my school years were horrible. They were great years.  I breezed through them in a slightly anarchistic fashion, taking my punishments as and when (probably with an odd sense of pride at times) doing much as I liked. I wasn't a vandal, disrupter or hooligan, just a non-conformer. I had good times at school, made good friends and must have learned some stuff - it could have just so easily been much, much better.