Schoolboy exam howlers through the ages

These were being published in books from at least the late nineteenth century. Peter Haining, most of whose archive we now hold, collected a number of them for a projected book. Here are some examples he found. The first were sent in for a prize competition of c1900, the second bunch was assembled by Charlie James from a northern comprehensive school in 1987 and the third lot of howlers has a more international flavour:

1900

Ben Johnson was the man who wrote a life of Bothwell. Bothwell was the man who murdered Mary Queen of Scots.

The fire of London, although looked on at first as a calamity, really did a great deal of good. It purified the city from the dregs of the plague and burnt down 89 churches.

 Edward III would have been King of France if his mother had been a man.

When will you expect an eclipse of the sun to take place?
In the night.

The sun never sets on English possessions because the sun sets in the west and our colonies are in the north, south and east.

The zebra is like the horse, only striped, and is chiefly used to illustrate the letter Z.

Esther Rantzen in School Mag 1958

Saus—age—s…!

While in the Upper Sixth of the prestigious North London Collegiate School, where her schoolfellows included psychologist Susie (then called Susan) Orbach, budding writer Esther Rantzen seems to have got her head down working for her scholarship to Oxford. For in the school magazine for 1957/58 we look in vain for her name among the Orchestra, Netball, Hockey, Tennis, Rounders and Swimming teams. She wasn’t a prefect and doesn’t even appear to have bothered herself with the Drama Group, which is bizarre. But she was a member of the School Magazine Committee, which may account for her two contributions—a slightly silly piece of verse about cows and this long appreciation of food, rendered as a dream.  This gastronomic knowledge must have stood the presenter of That’s Life in good stead when it came to offering members of the public bat stew and selecting rude shaped vegetables to titter at.

Would hyberbolic Esther have made it as a novelist, like her ancestor Ada Leverson, author of The Little Ottleys (and known to Oscar Wilde as 'The Sphinx') had not the BBC come calling ? We’ll never know. [R.H.]

Love at First Bite- click to read!