In the early Sixties (not long before they became “Swinging”) Chris Baxter, Adrian Birch, Richard Ogden and Chris Simond joined the NCP. After meeting in Macquarie Division in September 1964, Adrian and Richard found that they were kindred spirits and before long they were spending every one of the precious moments of spare time they were allowed in those days learning to play their Woolworths “Rossetti “ acoustic-electric guitars, the same make and a similar model to the one which three years earlier Paul McCartney had purchased as his first electric guitar (although as can be seen in the pictures below, he played his the wrong way up !).

Twenty three years later, in May 1987 Richard met Paul McCartney for the first time and on June 1st that year he was appointed Managing Director of Paul’s management company, MPL Communications where he remained until the summer of 1993.  Richard has recently published a Memoir of his career in the music industry, titled “Bigger Than The Beatles : Sixty Years in Showbusiness” and below is an extract from it which covers his four years at the NCP. In the 442 page “quasi-autobiography” which spans a lifetime spent in the entertainment industry, Richard skips over the extraordinary events which occurred on the day when the news swept the school that permission had been refused for The Plague, the group the four boys formed in 1966, to perform on Founder’s Day 1967 which triggered a mini-Mutiny. There was mass chanting of one of their songs (“Mona”) at lunch time in the Mess Hall followed by the unanimous refusal of the whole school to sing at the rehearsal for what would be a very special Founder’s Day, which had been delayed until July 17th 1967 so that HM The Queen and Prince Philip could attend the school’s 50th Anniversary.          

Paul McCartney in Hamburg in 1960 and Richard (left) and Adrian in Macquarie in 1964

In “Bigger Than The Beatles” Richard takes up the story :  At the Naval school-cum-reformatory near Reading where from April 1963 to July 1967 for eight months of every year I lived as a boarder I found Adrian “Fred” Birch, a like-minded boy but who unlike me was talented enough to call himself a musician and he and I practised for every hour we could find, which wasn’t many in an institution dedicated to depriving its inmates of as much of their free time as possible. We had an hour off in the evenings and Sunday afternoon was also free but the minute we “went electric” we were banned from the school music room despite the fact we were the only boys who ever went anywhere near it. Mind you, it was next to the rifle range which may well have dissuaded any sensitive classical types from playing the old upright piano in the corner but for whatever reason we never saw anyone tickle its 88’s.  Fred and I came up with a marvellous wheeze: when given the option to study an additional language by the Berlitz method we chose Spanish, in the pursuit of excellence at which we were allowed to sequester ourselves in a large stationery store cupboard and follow along to a cassette which we would leave on repeat very loudly for the hour we were given to learn from it twice a week, grab our guitars which we pre-positioned, hidden behind the shelving and practice away to our hearts’ content, learning things like “On Top of Old Smokey”, “Freight Train, Freight Train”, “Casey Jones” and many other skiffle classics.

Even though The Beatles and The Rolling Stones had just landed like brothers from another planet we seemed to be stuck in skiffle but I can’t remember why; perhaps Fred had inherited some old song books from somebody. But to this day I can remember the woman on the Berlitz tape intoning “Dolores Garcia es uma chica, ella habla Espanhol”  beyond which our Spanish language skills never progressed because we left the Spaniards to talk amongst themselves whilst we slaved over a hot new Lonnie Donegan song. In the second year we discovered Chris “Simmo” Simond, a sardonic lad from another House who not only had a drum kit but could actually play it pretty well and at that point things got more serious.

I can’t remember where we were allowed to rehearse as a trio but we found somewhere. Simmo was a bit of a wit and named the band Meat and Two Veg and we swiftly progressed onto learning Yardbirds, Pretty Things and even some ‘Stones, of whom I had become a huge fan, but never Beatles songs for the perverse reason that by 1964 our mothers and if you were lucky enough to have one, our girlfriends liked The Beatles so naturally, we didn’t. Instead we unreservedly bought-in to Andrew Loog-Oldham’s brilliant vision for the ‘Stones as the representatives of disaffected youth amongst whom we numbered ourselves, even if in reality we were the most privileged-of-the-privileged few. The following year Chris Baxter, a rather mysterious boy known as “Bog Brush” because  of his naturally spiky hair, who was rumoured to “come from money” down in Cornwall but apparently had no parents, only a wealthy grandma who would send her chauffeur up to take him and his pals out for lunch on Sundays, started to pester us to let him join the band. Although he didn’t play or even own an instrument and because we had nowhere to go and nothing to go there in we couldn’t offer him the Neil Aspinall role of Tour Manager, we persuaded him to buy a Fender Precision bass along with its Bassman amp. and cabinet and a small PA system complete with three microphones.

That mission accomplished we changed our name to The Plague and hey presto ! we were a bona fide 1960’s beat group with the de rigeur line up of two guitars, bass and drums and Fred, me and Simmo on vocals. Bog Brush got by with a chord chart on top of his amp and a nod from me every time a change was a-coming. I find it hard to believe today, even though it was me doing it but after a few  months practising for a measly three or four hours a week The Plague was deemed good enough to be allowed to put on a concert in the school gym-cum-theatre so one wintry Saturday night in 1966 we set ourselves up, our sound bolstered by the house PA system and the stage illuminated by the school theatre lighting nerd, the doors were thrown open and the whole complement of two-hundred and sixty boys rushed in and upon hearing the first notes of our first song, the Yardbirds’ “For Your Love” instantly went completely and utterly bananas.

I remember boys jumping off the low balcony at the back of the hall and others climbing up the parallel bars and diving onto the seething mass below. From the beginning of 1966 we were doing one of these concerts every term, always to a mad, writhing, heaving and pogoing (before it was invented) mass of boys. In the Christmas term we were allowed to play the school dance where girls from nearby Ladies’ Colleges were invited but that longed-for “rockstar magic” didn’t work for me, perhaps because I played the gig with my right wrist in plaster having broken it playing rugby a few weeks previously (it was small consolation that the incident was reported in the Daily Telegraph as “the Navy was sunk when Ogden went off with a damaged hand”).

At the end of my last term in July 1967 we were even booked to play a private party in a posh house in Sunningdale where we actually got paid, I forget how much. I recently heard from a girl (now a 73 year-old woman) who was at that party who told me she had thought that The Plague was “brilliant”. I thought she’d probably only ever seen one band and that was us because we most certainly were not “brilliant”, we undoubtedly were “crap”.  The day after the gig in Sunningdale and fully aware of my musical limitations I put the Plectric back in its case and never played it again. Simmo told me that he went semi-pro but it didn’t lead anywhere and he emigrated to South Africa and then Australia where I met him in 1993 when I was on tour with Paul McCartney and he was a reporter for a  TV News station.

Bog Brush joined the Marines for whom he brandished some far more dangerous bits of kit than a bass guitar when he served in the the Falklands and in Northern Ireland, but I lost touch with Fred. Occasionally, on the first World Tour when McCartney still kind-of liked me he would join his band and me for a late dinner and after one or two of his favourite, very ‘60s whisky-and-cokes he would tell tales of Beatlemania which we all loved to hear and during which I have to admit to occasionally thinking “yeah, been there, done that”. Ridiculous, I know - in fact so ridiculous I ought to delete it immediately and pretend I never even thought it.    

This extract is taken from ’Bigger Than The Beatles’: Sixty Years in Showbusiness, available now from The Great British Book Shop and Amazon worldwide

Biographical Notes :

Chris Baxter entered the NCP through Port Jackson Division in January 1964.  The Baxter family tree is remarkable : his Great-grandfather was Carl Haag, the Court painter to Queen Victoria and Prince Albert and his Grandmother was Doris Maud de Winton Wills of the tobacco family (which he seldom mentioned at school). Chris says he “was sporting not academic” and in 1966 he became the bass guitarist in The Plague, the NCP’s first ever pop group.  He also played First XV rugby and was an outstanding fencer. Under the expert coaching of NCP Master-at-Arms Jackie Finch Chris won the Young Officers and Cadets Foil competition at the Royal Tournament in 1966 and went on to be both RN and RM “Champion at Arms”.  After leaving the NCP Chris joined Port Line as an officer cadet but after a year he decided to apply for a Commission in the Royal Marines which he joined in January 1969 at first on a Short Service and later a Regular Commission. His schooling at the NCP - which he shared with fellow Marine officers Colin Howard, James Wigram, Charlie Daniel, Paddy George and Paddy Quinlan - meant it was a natural step for him to qualify in 1972 as a Landing Craft Officer and he says that the highlight of that role was leading the First Raiding Squadron Royal Marines (1RSRM) in the 1982 Falklands Conflict, for which his team of twenty-two men was awarded no less than three “ Mentions in Despatches”. In 1984, he was involved in the creation of 539 ASRM as 2nd in command to another OP, Major Ewen Southby Tailyour.  After leaving the Marines in 1995, Chris went to Seale Hayne Agricultural College to study for a BSc (Hons) RICS-accredited degree in Rural Estate Management followed by a post-graduate course in Personnel and Development at the Plymouth University Business School. From September 2000 until February 2023 he was the Administrator for the Abbeyfield South West Society, a charity providing housing and looking after lonely old folks, a task which he greatly enjoyed.  Chris is a keen and long-standing member of the Dart Angling Association and of the British Falconers Club, in which he pursues his passion for sparrowhawks.

Adrian Birch joined Port Jackson in September 1963 from HMS Worcester and had an undistinguished education and sporting career, but in 1966 he became rhythm guitarist and vocalist for “The Plague” before joining the RN in 1967. He says that “an undistinguished career brutally cut short by his own incompetence” in the Royal Navy was followed by a successful  career as a chartered building surveyor, working in London and Bristol and then as Senior Lecturer heading up the building surveying courses at UWE Bristol until his first retirement in 2013. He continued in private practice until his second retirement in 2022 which was followed by a third career as a politician, representing the Green Party at the Forest of Dean District Council, of which he became leader in 2024. Having had two wives, two kids and one grandson Adrian has lived in the Wye Valley since 1982. He still plays slide guitar and sings the Blues at open mic. events and says he “feels like I'm living my life backwards and looking forward to my second teenage years”.

Richard Ogden, who came from West Hartlepool, entered Port Jackson in the summer term of 1963 and left Pangbourne in July 1967, immediately after having been inspected by HM The Queen and Prince Philip. After enduring the 10-day Royal Navy induction course at BRNC Dartmouth Richard chose to continue his education and in 1971 he graduated from The University of Leicester with a 2.1 Honours Degree in Combined Arts. His extra-curricular activities whilst at University as a journalist and publisher of his own Fanzine, “Fast and Bulbous” led to a career in the music industry in which - 59 years after he left the NCP - he is still working. During his 55 years as a music industry professional Richard has been a corporate and independent publicist, an artiste manager (three times) a senior record company executive (twice) an industry consultant and most recently a talent buyer in the concert promoting business. The list of artistes with whom he has worked – and about whom he writes in his autobiography -  is extraordinary and includes Aerosmith. Shirley Bassey, Beyonce, Mariah Carey, Celine Dion, Hawkwind, Michael Jackson, Jean-Michel Jarre, Ricky Martin, Paul McCartney, Van Morrison, Motorhead, Oasis, Rihanna, Shakira and The Offspring.        

Chris Simond. “Simmo”,  who has recently published his first novel “Tap Dancers” writes from Australia : “An inconspicuous career at the Nautical College was improved immensely when I was allowed to bring my drum kit to school. It was the full Premier number with hi-hat and sizzle cymbals complementing two tom-toms, a snare and a bass drum. I had been into percussion since the age of 5 but it wasn’t until I met Richard and Adrian (or “Rick” and “Fred”) that I realised that such a combo. together could create a passable sound. I suggested the name Meat and Two Veg. for the trio, later supplanted by The Plague as the chosen handle.  Memories of gigs performed at the College and at private parties are faint, but I do clearly recall the one song that was given to the tone-deaf drummer :  “Sunny Afternoon” by The Kinks was my one vocal contribution, and it has never been performed since. After leaving the College and joining an advertising agency in London my side gig became a semi-pro. outfit called The Sovereigns which toured sporadically. Its one claim to fame was the night we were hired as the support act for the rock band Cream, fronted by one of the greatest blues guitarists of all time, Eric Clapton. My musical career finally ground to a halt in 1974 when I was appointed to establish a sports marketing business in Sydney Australia. After fourteen years there I switched careers to become a news and current affairs reporter-producer for a leading Australian TV network. Since then, I have become a Commonwealth Wedding Celebrant, a mentor to high school kids and the author of the novel ‘Tap Dancers” (Amazon) about a cyberattack on a city’s water supply. Occasionally I remind myself that all this all started in a school music room more than 60 years ago !”.