I knew Dave Killick who with myself and Bill Hitchins were allowed motorcycles at school in the mistaken belief that it would keep us out of trouble!


Dozy barn was situated in a small hollow not far from the road and the farm gate overlooking Pitt Wood, five minutes’ walk from the school, across the Harries Field, I may have been responsible for the destruction of Dozy Barn as one end of the old stone building was converted into a den or camp, where we could all smoke, drink or in my case make bombs from “black powder” out of shotgun shells.
This den was an accident waiting to happen, it was constructed using old settees, blankets and curtains raided from the school tip. Old plastic fertiliser bags waterproofed the leaky tile roof and the tine sheet floor rested on wooden logs, with an open fire in one corner!
I was the last person to leave Dozy Barn on the night it burnt down and lit up the surrounding countryside. The following day at school assembly, Lesley Stephens, the Headmaster was not amused (he was never amused) and the assembled boys were harangued in the best tradition of a Nazi Rally!


However, I had by this time, learnt to trust no one and kept quit, thus avoiding a thrashing from the headmaster or head prefects, who were licensed to do the same!

The offending open fire was used for warmth – a rare commodity at school, but also for Toast, a luxury as only a few senior boys had access to a toaster. Tea and coffee were also brewed with water from a nearby stream. All food and drink having been purloined from Geralds’s kitchen as Gerald had very poor eyesight.


There were other Camps or dens all around the school, even a cave near the village of West Buckland, where on one occasion I had trout on toast with Angus Walker who was later expelled for threatening Leslie Stephens with a shotgun.


I recall that the Popplewell Brothers were good a tickling trout, a skill much used by poachers or hungry boys or both! Until quite recently I carried a souvenir of Dozy Barn days in my right ear. This was a piece of lab test tube that was filled with shotgun powder then lobbed onto the fire. I missed the fire and then kept peeping from behind a stone pillar to see what happened next. On my fourth or fifth peep it blew up, giving me a fixed glass earing!


The skills I learnt in the countryside around West Buckland have stood me in good stead in the years since and any organisation that required fortitude, endurance, singlemindedness and “bush” skills would have done well to employ the Dozy Barn Gang!

Bruce Dougan 64-69C (aka “Jonny Walker”)