Boarding school ‘good for boys’

Press, Volume CXII, Issue 33063, 2 November 1972, Page 6

Boarding school ‘good for boys’

Boarding school for boys from about 13 to 18 is recommended by the visiting singer, Rita Morris. “It helps smooth them over what I call the generation ‘bump,’ she said in Christchurch yesterday.

•It is good for boys to get away from mum breathing down their necks during adolescence, but it is awful for mum when they go.” Mrs Morris saje she has not haid a good night’s sleep “for fretting” since her own two sons went to a boarding school near their home in York shin? in September. “I went to see them about six timei; before I left on this tour —playing on the fact that I have given several recitals at the school over the last few j'ears and presuming that the school owed me something,’’ she said. HARD DECISION Mrs Morris and her husband, David Morris, found it a wery hard decision to make in sending their sons to boarding school — their father’s old school — but felt the advantages outweighed the disadvantages of State schools, “where classes are so big that most of the time is spent in disciplining the pupils.” “Boarding school helps boys to stand on their own feet and, if it is a good one, provides more individual attention and develops talents,” iMrs Morris said. “It also means that the boys have easy access to spprts, clubs, and other interests on the spot.” But Rita Morris admits that she could not send her sons, now 11 and 10, to a boarding school far away from home, and she will take her younger son back home to live as soon as she returns to Yorkshire next month. Her present tour of seven weeks is the longest time she has been away from her husband and sons. Her husband, who is a textile-company executive, has been to New Zealand twice and was so enchanted by the country he wanted his wife to see it. “So when the opportunity came to go on a tour with Kenneth McKellar. which included New Zealand, I was all for it,” she said. Rita Morris, who is a coloratura soprano, will sing in Kenneth McKellar’s concert at the Town Hall this evening. She regards the highlight of her career as a singer, the 8.8. C. television series, “She Shall Have Music,” and hopes to do another when time allows.

“There is a possibility that this series will be shown in New Zealand, but I hope it will not come here until you get colour television,” she said. “The colours in this series are simply beautiful—soft browns, beige, greens, and golds.” The set includes Louis XV furniture, antiques which cost about £lOOO a show to hire.

“This is a very intimate show, without a studio audience,” Mrs Morris said. “It gives the feeling that it is happening right in the viewer’s own room. Many viewers wrote to me asking if the series had been set in my own ‘stately home,’ but it was not, of course.” Mrs Morris and her husband live in a one-storey house surrounded by two acres of woodland, about seven miles from Leeds.

Besides giving concerts and singing on television, Mrs Morris has also presented many educational television programmes and interviewed personalities on them. She likes variety in her work, as long as it does not take her too far from home for long.