Alfie

I've just heard that Paul Hines, Jayne and I's  old form teacher in 1H and  2H, and my Geology teacher, has just died.

It was a Grammar school and a different era - very much chalk and talk - but he was a brilliant Geology teacher and I got my lifelong love of the subject from him. That is what good teachers do. He got very good results and worked us very hard for the A - level but when I studied Geology at Uni the level was way below what he had been teaching us. In the early 70s plate tectonics was in its infancy but Alfie was bang up to date with all the new theories. We did lots of practicals - the school had a very fine rock and mineral collection - down to him - and he was meticulous in how he taught us to observe and record. Again lifelong skills learnt. It was the only A level course  I really enjoyed.

I went off with Jaffa on the back of his Ariel Arrow (?) and scouted waste tips in the Preselis for bits of galena and sphalerite, hunted in quarries for crinoidal limestones and jasper and on Skomer for flow banded rhyolites.  Pembrokeshire is a geologists paradise - so we were very, very lucky. 

Paul was nicknamed 'Alfie' as Alfie Hinds was a famous criminal of the time, and I wrote thousands of lines for him "I must behave" and "I must be quiet" being memorable. The chime was "Hines means lines". He was pretty tough discipline wise in registration but considerably fairer than many of the bullies who taught us.

He caught us playing table tennis in geology prac. one time  - he had been called out to some meeting or other for half an hour - and didn't punish us - but he did shame us which was different in the era of the big stick approach. Shortly after we left at 18 he moved to Haverfordwest to teach as Head of  Geography and had a successful career there, retiring to France.