Item 04: Memoirs of a Colonial Boy by Robert Joseph Stewart, ca. 1971 - Page 129
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[Page 129]
64
Before the end of my first year at "Scots", fuzzy hair was growing on my face and I was impelled to go to the "Boss" (as the Principal was popularly known to us) to ask for money to buy one of the "cut-throat" Bengal razors then universally used: the price being about 6/6d. However, the "Gillette", and a cheaper "Star", safety razors had just been invented and put on the market, and the "Boss" insisted that I should get one of the latter, having recently purchased one himself. So I was invited to watch him using it, early the next morning, in his basement dressing room. The other boys teased me unmercifully about this, and nearly all insisted on trying out this new contraption I had been compelled to buy. I was branded as a "cissy", frightened of a few facial cuts, and very soon I wrote to Mother for the money to buy an ordinary razor: for the rest of my long life I have rarely used any other type.
The Principal had a phobia about male hair being parted in the centre, despite its being the hair-do of that great soldier Lord Kitchener, whose face frequently appeared in the daily and weekly press. He insisted that our hair should be parted on one side, the farther off-centre the better; obviously because his own hair was parted down near his ear and the long side-lock brushed carefully straight across to hide a central eroded spot.
After her graduation, Dr Jessie Aspinall became a Resident at the Childrens Hospital at Camperdown, and she was also the College Doctor. She was dark-haired, pretty, petite and always intensely sympathetic. All the senior boys had a "calf" love for Dr Jessie, as they also had for her good looking University chum Madge Barnes, who as well as being the College Dentist, had a general practice in Macquarie St. The boys considered Madge to be a very good "sport" inasmuch as, if she could stretch a dental operation into two visits, she always did so: this enabled a pupil to have two absences from afternoon classes instead of one, and an extra pleasurable visit to the city. As she was paid a fixed fee for a filling or an extraction, she made no monetary gain by doing this. Her fees were low enough to : for a difficult extraction, a gold inlay, and five or six