W. I. ("Billy")
Curnow spent most of his life encouraging the young of Blackpool,
though not, it must be said, in extravagance. As Second Master at
the town's Grammar School, he devoted himself to preparing pupils
for University entrance examinations — and those of Cambridge
in particular.
In the 1920s,
a University education was not high on the list of priorities of
most pupils at provincial Grammar schools. Not every promising scholar
responded to Billy's encouragement. One who did was young Alistair
Cooke, whose arrival at B.G.S. coincided with Billy's return from
war service in 1919. He attended the seminars, tutorials, mock interviews
and other forms of preparation, routinely offered by Billy and his
colleagues at Blackpool, but then rare elsewhere.
Cooke launched
his career with a scholarship to Jesus College, Cambridge, followed
by a Harkness scholarship to Yale and Harvard. His interest in the
United States had been fostered by Billy's teaching of American
History. In some of his broadcast Letters, he referred to the returned
war veteran whose enthusiasm had fired his own.
Those telegrams,
with which we started, were the result of events that led to the
abdication of King Edward VIII in 1936. As a young journalist in
America, Cooke had many opportunities to write and broadcast on
the major topic of the time. The major topic in the US, that is
— any mention of it in Britain was forbidden.
Cooke's research
into his stories was always thorough. Billy, one of whose strengths
was Constitutional History, was an obvious and enthusiastic source
on the issues of precedent, protocol, law and politics that had
everybody confused on both sides of the Atlantic. Until space made
this impossible, Billy kept the great pile of telegrams that had
so shocked the postmistress, together with Alistair's letters and
the signed copies of books that followed regularly.
