From "The Salopian" Issue Number 139
BASIC YEAR LIVES ON !
Martin Hansen
Photographs taken by Mark Twells
It has been quite some time since Basic Year featured upon the pages of The Salopian. With the passing of Michael Hall, who for many an Old Salopian was Basic Year, readers could be forgiven for thinking that it no longer exists. I am happy to report that this is not the case. "The Basic Year in Mountaineering", as we now call it, lives on, albeit in an evolved form.
I joined the common room at Shrewsbury in September 1988 in what was, in retrospect, Michael and Basic Year's heyday. I can still remember meeting Michael for the first time. I arrived at the school for an interview to determine my suitability to teach mathematics. Immediately, I was commanded to step into PER 65, an antique looking Landrover, and was driven across the school site at a steady 5 mph. Michael (whilst repeatedly abrasively clearing his throat) spent more time beeping the Landrover's horn and waving cheerily at each passing boy, than looking at the road. Fortunately, most boys seemed to know that the Landrover was not a vehicle with which to play "chicken".
When I joined the Basic Year staff team, the activity was compulsory for all boys in their fourth form year. As a unifying shared experience it was one of the best: battling across ranges of hills in poor visibility, camping in rivers of mud, and walking through midge infested forests. Old boys often retell, with fondness, character-forming incidents that happened to them on Basic Year. Jumping into the icy cold lake half way up Cadair Idris; running at full pelt into a barbed wire fence on a dark winter's evening exercise; a night spent in a tent that the wind was doing its upmost to make airborne. Those were the days !
But times change. The words "Health & Safety" cast a shadow over Basic Year. No longer was it considered satisfactory to have a handful of staff overseeing the progress of sixteen or so groups of boys as they endeavoured to get from one side of the Berwyn Mountain range to the other. Michael's stepping down was the moment Basic Year was brought into step with the "guidelines for mountaineering activities" recommended by bodies such as the British Mountaineering Council.
Mark Twells spent a stressful five years after Michael's departure restructuring the activity, alongside an even bigger commitment to overhaul the way in which the school's IT networking system functioned.
A talk concerning his "impossible work load" resulted in my being summoned into the Headmaster's office. In a haze of phrases that included, "no extra pay", "no reduction in teaching duties" and "an important middle management position" I emerged with the title "Master in charge of Basic Year".
And so to Basic Year as it is now. We take forty boys a year through a fun programme of which I am confident Michael would approve. We rock-climb, canoe, mountain-bike, orienteer, and hill-walk by both day and night. It's a very popular option and many boys who want to join are turned down. There is something about the beauty of nature and how different the world is once you step out of school into wild country that makes many a boy reach for a camera. We've recently launched our own website (www.basicyear.com) and every week load up another batch of photographs, mostly taken by Basic Year boys.
Basic Year is alive and well. The spirit of Michael Hall lives on.