Cranbrook muck-up days.
Trouble a-brewing at Bellevue Hill.
Yes, that bloke (anon) went to my school, a few years behind me. One rarely knows boys in lower years but he probably knew of me as I was such a visible trouble-maker. My brother Richard, ten years younger, even heard second-hand stories about me although I left the school 4 years before he started!
The headmaster apparently used my stunts as the ‘anecdotes’ for a talk many years later about how one could invoke maximum havoc without causing permanent harm or damage to property, something which must have been sub-conscious in my case.
Three years in a row I was involved in muck-up-day things … we locked a telephone in the school grand piano, causing it to ring in the middle of the headmaster’s speech. Only the music master Mr Charlie Colman had the key ... which I had ‘borrowed’ for keyboard practice a few hours earlier (which rather pointed the finger at me!). You can guess the rest. The next year we rigged up a bubble machine high in the stage rafters of the War Memorial Hall. It was only marginally funny as the wind was blowing the wrong way for maximum effect.
The final year we intercepted the cable which carried the electric current to the school bells and connected it to a carrier frequency relay controlled by a transmitter built into a soap box which fitted neatly into my school coat pocket. The school had out-grown the War Memorial Hall by then and the final assembly was held on the lawns in front of Rawson House. All through the head master’s speech I rang the bells at appropriate and extremely irritating times - just when he was about to open his mouth again after the previous interruption, for example.
Despite moon walks and other signs of technology, the reality of a remote controlled device in 1971 was still quite beyond most people’s imagination. Thus, since I was present in the assembly, they knew I could not be ringing the bells.
Unfortunately, the aerial was up my left sleeve and I had to raise my arm to about shoulder height before the thing would work, initially to cut their feeder and next to connect our own 18 volt supply. We had set up our transformer and radio receiver in the lighting gallery of the War Memorial Hall high above Dangar Oval and below room 15 of the Perkins Building in plumb real estate overlooking Rose Bay and (what was) the flying boat base. The main part of the school including the boarders’ dining room faced northwest towards Fort Denison, Mosman and Kirribilli. The Opera House and Warringah Expressway were still under construction at the time.
Back to the bells: the biology teacher (and senior master) Mr Dan Massey had noticed my odd semaphore signals and assumed I was giving instructions to someone else watching on. It took another six hours of carillon havoc before I was cornered in the Mansfield Library. Mr Massey said with his booming Yorkshire brogue: “OK Byrne, just hand it over … or are we going to have to strip search you?” He was a bit slow, but it dawned on him eventually that a transmitter was the only solution in the circumstances. Peter Vogel from Maroubra was my partner in crime. His father had joined the other European Jewish refugees on the famous MS Dunera. He made the hardware while I “wore” it (and took the rap). I was told that the pink plastic soap box stayed in the headmaster’s desk for many years afterwards as a ‘principal prop’.
Written by Andrew Byrne (left Cranbrook in 1971)
