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Concordia
Merchant Taylors’ School
ne of my earliest school
memories after joining MTS in 1983 was
somehow falling off ‘Rickety Bridge’
into the water during the Quarter. I
sheepishly arrived at our English lesson
looking like a drowned rat and Mr
Ritchie was most amused.
Our happy days in the Third Form gave
us a great platform for the rest of our
school lives and our form teacher Bruce
Ritchie played a major part in that. Like
others, whether ex-Third Formers, English
students or cricketers, I was very sad to
hear of his passing in 2012.
From our first days at school we were
always a very competitive bunch and
everything seemed to be a race or a
competition. We would sprint from the
fourth period of the day to the lesson just
before lunch to get a seat near the door
so we could race to the dining hall as
quickly as possible to avoid any queuing.
Bags were flung into the gaps between
sets of lockers and I’m sure that still
happens today.
Playing football with a tennis ball was
another time-honoured pastime. One
highlight of the first year was beating a
masters’ team at Quad Soccer with what
felt like hundreds of older boys cheering.
Our competitive spirits became more
focused on academia around the time of
exams. I remember our results for Latin
and other subjects being pinned up on the
classroom wall and many of us desperate
to see our own and others’ marks.
Languages were my strong point and
we benefited from some great teachers
such as messrs Corns, Drury, Lawson, Pye
and Woolley.
They were all happy years right up
until the Sixth Form when I remember
we used to have a weekly Monitors’
meeting on a Friday afternoon with Mr
Skipper in his office, drinking tea and
sharing school news.
My spectacles may be somewhat rose-
tinted but I’m also sure we actually used
to enjoy Saturday school, especially the
day after Durrants’ Discos when there was
always plenty of gossip to share.
I opted for football with David Green
instead of rugby during the Sixth Form,
and I played (and possibly scored) in the
first soccer match against another school.
Another highlight and eye-opening
experience was Phab Week in the Sixth
Form which I’m pleased to read is still
going strong.
After winning a place at Brasenose
College to read Classics, I thought it was
pretty much ‘job done’ and, possibly like
most students, didn’t spend any of the
next four years thinking about a career.
Life at Oxford didn’t follow much of
an academic timetable with only one or
two tutorials a week and lectures which
were optional. With hindsight I would
have benefited from a little more structure
though I didn’t envy my peers reading
subjects such as engineering who seemed
to have 9-5 timetables and then worked in
the evenings as well.
Post–university, sports journalism
appealed although I hadn’t turned my
hand to much of this at university. I
do recall working on a Hilles House
magazine at school, and I had been an
assistant editor of the Taylorian. If truth
be told this was motivated more by
UCCA (now UCAS) form points and the
opportunity to get our own room than
by journalistic passion. (Some of us had
also previously joined the Meteorological
Society purely as a means of getting our
own office and experiencing the thrill of
having our own kettle.)
After university I was lucky to get
the opportunity to do a fortnight’s work
experience at the Watford Observer
which really gave me the confidence that
journalism was the right path.
I then wrote to all the national
newspapers asking for work, and got
a call from The Independent at the end of
1994. I recently came across a
few ‘thanks but no thanks letters’ I’d
received from pretty much every other
national newspaper.
I managed to get a paid job at the Indy
almost immediately. It was a chaotic
environment as they had only just moved
from City Road to One Canada Square
in Canary Wharf, then a ghost town. The
editors wanted someone to photocopy
and circulate print-outs of news pages for
checking before they went to press.
This role gave me a fantastic
opportunity generally to make myself
useful. I remember one evening 20 years
ago explaining to the deputy editor (who
wasn’t really a football fan) the magnitude
of the Eric Cantona kung-fu kick story
moments after it had happened.
Linus Gregoriadis
(1983-1990) began
his career as a journalist, working for
a number of national newspapers
including The Independent, The Daily
Telegraph and The Daily Mirror. He
now works as Director of Research at
Econsultancy – a firm specialising in
digital marketing and e-commerce
Linus Gregoriadis
O