Wednesday, December 21, 2011

The knockers of Stamford

During the summer, in the comments to my post about the legend that Stamford was a university town, I mentioned that students from Brasenose College, Oxford, had stolen an ancient door knocker (or knockers) from Stamford's Brazenose Street in 1890. They obviously believed the legend, though sadly it is not true.

Anyway, a reader tells me of an incident from the early 1970s.

In those days Stamford High School for Girls, I am reliably informed, was a horribly repressive environment, run by narrow-minded spinsters.

Some masters at the parallel boys' grammar school - chief among them Graham Johnstone, the school's director of music - invited these mistresses to an elaborate ceremony at which they were formally presented with a pair of knockers, replicas of the ones taken by Brasenose.

These were "received with gracious thanks and complete credulity".

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