A.O.S.A. 2008 ANNUAL REPORT

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Harry Snalam,
President Elect 2008-09

My first memory of Harry Snalam was in C Dorm wash room on our first evening at Ayton where John Fothergill, Tony Browne, Harry and I were getting ready for bed. We must have been making rather a lot of noise, for the Master on Duty, Bernard ‘Spig’ Coates, I believe, put us on 'silence’ until we had finished our ablutions. After he had left the room, one of our contemporaries, with a longer time at school than us, whispered… “This is your introduction to Quakerism, for those of you who have had no experience of Quakers, you will find they seem to like quite a lot of silence”. It is likely the advice came from one of Messrs. Alderson, Siddle, Sweet, Adam, Dennis, or Tiffany, all of whom were at Ayton before us but still in C Dorm when we arrived.

Harry was born in Lytham near Blackpool, his father, Walter, a talented amateur magician, came to Ayton twice during Harry’s time there and entertained both staff and scholars with his wonderful magic shows.

During his primary school years Harry contracted a form of rheumatic fever which resulted in his missing many months of school. Walter and Monica, Harry's parents, employed a private tutor to help him catch up with his schoolwork prior to Ayton. Ayton was chosen because a cousin of Harry's had a friend, one of the Tulips I believe, whose son was there at that time.

For Harry, Ayton’s highlights included the freedom of being able to go out to the village, and for the country walks on Wednesdays, Saturdays & Sundays.

According to Tony Browne…. “ Harry’s interests lay in making models, radios, and exploring the surrounding countryside - preferably the bits that were ‘out of bounds’! He was a prime mover in a group that brought the two aircraft drop tanks down, via the beck, from Barking Dog Farm and converted them into canoes. There was also a degree of experimentation with things that went ‘bang’, which prompted the duo of Stanley Jones and Clifford Morgan to recite the following lines at a Pop:

Harry Snalam cleaned his gun and, bang, he shot Miss Nicholson, “Coo”, said Harry, “ain’t that good. It does just what they said it would.”

Harry, Dave Tiffany, and Clive Olbery
displaying their catches.

In academic subjects Harry claims he supported the class from the bottom up with Science, Woodwork and Scripture as his favourite subjects, in that order. He also claims to have got into lots of scrapes and knew the Headmaster’s study well from his early days at Ayton……
Dick Dennis has many memories of their time at School that would bear out Harry’s claim to have spent a lot of time in the study of JSC… Of wanderings around Cook’s - and a potentially physically unhealthy curiosity in the mines, then open and unprotected, which involved cooking bangers and beans underground. Being introduced to rock-face mountaineering on the Crag (with Harry on the top tied to the clothes-line that acted as the mountaineers’ ropes, - just as well he was, otherwise Dick would not be writing this.) Harry’s explorations into a variety of pyrotechnics and lethal explosive substances (the hole in the exterior of the Boys’ Schoolroom wall was not made by mice!) Research into scaled down ballistics and the discovery that copper tubing is not the best material for gun barrels, the two of them were very lucky on that occasion that the copper tubing in question went into the ground and not upwards, otherwise…! No door lock in and around the school defeated Harry’s metal working expertise - and on go the memories.

Dick’s most enduring memory is of their experiments into and subsequent proof that they could convert iron ore (mountains of the stuff - literally - all over the place) into real iron. Dick, at the time, had an extensive den under the beck riverbank at Easby, ideal for setting up a mini-furnace. It took weeks for Harry to prepare sufficient charcoal, and a furnace with a self-feeding hopper, plus a primitive water-driven windmill to direct air to the furnace. After a few disappointments came the day when the experiment was successful; sifting through the furnace rubble with a magnet produced the tiniest piece of iron ore. That was brilliant!

Harry used to travel to and from Ayton by train, as most of us did in those days. At the beginning of each term he would go from Lytham to Preston where he was joined by Clive Olbery. On to Manchester where Dick Dennis and Derek Barnes got on the train, then, to York and Ayton via Middlesbrough. By the time they reached Middlesbrough the group had reached about thirty.

After leaving Ayton Harry spent a year farming at Ballam in Lancashire. He must have made his mark during this year because the farmer was so impressed he sent his son (Richard Taylor) to Ayton. Harry spent a further year at Winmarleigh Agricultural College where he obtained a Diploma in Agriculture. During the next twelve years he worked on various farms in Lancashire and Yorkshire with a view, eventually, to owning his own farm. It proved an impossibility, unfortunately, owing to the rising costs of agricultural land. During this period Harry’s main hobby was learning to fly at Blackpool Airport. As he could only afford 30 minutes of lessons per week, it took him two years to obtain his private pilot’s licence.

In 1965 whilst working back in the Fylde he met his future wife Susan. They were married in 1966, Bill Coates was their best man and Derek Barnes and Mike Nichols were groomsmen. In October 1966, four weeks after the wedding, Harry and Susan emigrated to Canada. They were met at Vancouver Airport by Dave Tiffany and family. Their first home in Canada was at Prince George, 500 miles north of Vancouver, near to the Tiffany’s. Harry says, the first snow fell on November 5th and they didn’t see the ground again until the following May!

Harry’s first job in Canada was in the construction industry, not pleasant with the searing heat and mosquitoes in summer and minus 30c below in winter.

Harry and Jenny Summerfield
attempt to decipher the next winner
in the raffle on the Saturday
evening of the 2007 Reunion.

During this time Harry and Susan purchased a 1952 Luscombe light aircraft on floats (which they still own and Harry still flies and which, for a long time, was in bits in their back yard.) In it they have flown many miles over the bush and landed on large lakes to fish and to hunt moose.
In 1969 Harry came down to the Vancouver region to obtain his commercial flying licence. Dick tells me…"Harry was what is known as a Bush Pilot, carting people and things back and forth into and out of the wild, and in winter, very cold north. He gave this up in the end as so many of his Bush Pilot friends and colleagues were being either killed or injured in flying accidents (getting lost and running out of fuel was the favourite.) Harry thought it was only a matter of time before he became a statistic, and took up a ground occupation with piloting confined to recreation.”…Susan followed a few months later, and they have lived on the coast for the past 37 years, where their three sons, Martin (37), Robert (35) and Andrew (20) were born and where the climate is much less harsh. After trying to get into flying full time, which proved very costly and time consuming, Harry worked for a steel fabrication firm for twelve years before starting his own business, which he still owns and operates.

Around 1984/85 Harry received a letter from Arthur Grainge, during the time when he and Gill Jackson were trying to locate their contemporaries, with a view to meeting up at Ayton for a reunion. Harry says that Susan assumed the letter was junk mail and very nearly ‘binned’ it; fortunately she did not - for the rest is history. Harry and Susan visited Arthur and his family in Ottawa and then Harry started to attend regular reunions in Ayton. Despite the distance involved, Harry has not missed many reunions since 1988. Susan worked for an airline for many years and could obtain cheap tickets, flying is almost second nature to them. They still live in Richmond, just outside Vancouver, in a geodesic dome which they built themselves while living on site in a mobile home. Over the years Harry and Susan have been visited by Derek Barnes, Peter Wake, Tony & Beryl Browne, Dick and Freda Dennis, Clive and Greer Olbery, and most recently Pat (Scaife) and Quinto Frosini, all of whom were holidaying in the beautiful Canadian Province of British Columbia.

Louis Trotter (1947-52),
with a little bit of help from:
Tony Browne (1947-53), Dick Dennis (1944-52)
and Gill Jackson (Hinds 1950-55)

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