The final countdown. (School days Part4)

The car park light.

In the 1950's & 60's schools considered the pupils to be ambassadors for their schools, even off the premises and out of school hours. Near our school was a public house and it had illuminated lights at the entrance & exit to it's car park. Over a weekend one of the lights got smashed and a neighbour recognised some of the boys responsible but, instead of telling their parents they informed the school.

Monday morning assembly saw the boys punished, and the school paid for the damage and claimed the money from the boys' parents. This wouldn't happen now of course.

The Woodwork teacher.

The woodwork teacher always seemed to be in a bad mood and very aggressive. He kept small (and not so small) off cuts of wood lined up along his desk to throw at misbehaving pupils in class, for talking, laughing or just day dreaming. The bits of wood often hit the wrong pupil.

On one occasion a pupil was called out to the front and was about to get the cane but, to our shock and amazement the boy said NO, I WONT. The teacher went purple, we thought he was about to have a heart attack! Again he ordered the boy to hold out his hand for the cane but he said “my dad says if any teacher tries to cane you, you're to refuse and refer them to me”. The teacher marched the boy off to the head master, who sent the boy home.

The boys father was a managing director of a well know company in town. The next day the boy returned with a letter from the company solicitor stating what would happen if he wasn't allowed back or if any other attempt was made to cane him in the future.

That boy never had woodwork lessons again, but had extra English & Maths lessons instead.

It must have stood him in good stead however as, after leaving the secondary modern school he went on to train as, and successfully become a teacher. His first post as a teacher was, would you believe, the secondary modern school we had all attended, and the woodwork teacher was still there. I would have loved to have been a fly on the wall of the staff room!

“The Cricket Match”

You may recall I said the geography teacher ran a school cricket team, it was an out of hours affair and the team would play against other school teams at weekends. Well some wag dreamed up the idea of the pupils cricket team challenging a team made up of teachers and to everyone's surprise, the challenge was accepted. It took place just before the school broke up for the six week summer break, out of hours one evening, and it drew quite a good crowd. I've never seen so many “bouncers” or generally aggressive bowling by by the pupils team. It was all over in less than an hour.

At the next morning assembly the head master announced the result and congratulated the boys cricket team on their win and, surprisingly, he had a slight smile when doing so and I'm certain he had to assert plenty of control to prevent himself from laughing out loud.

“Five a side Football tournament”

Although I was very bad at football and had very little interest in it, a view I hold to this day, the annual 5 a side football tournament was always something I looked forward. It was a knockout competition and took most of the day to complete and was held in normal school hours, so we got off lessons. 

School leaving day!

The day I had looked forward to for so long finally arrived, leaving day!

I left school still aged 14 as my 15^th birthday was during the Christmas school holidays before school opened again in the New Year. It was one of the best days of my life, up to that point, but not everyone enjoyed it.

At the end of each term we pupils would go to the metal work and woodwork classes to collect our finished pieces of work to take home. At the woodwork classroom the teacher began handing our work out and when he got to one pupils' piece he held it back saying “are you seriously going to take this home”? It was a pencil case and to be honest, was pretty awful. The boy said yes he was, very proudly. Then the woodwork teacher told the boy “it needs a bit of an adjustment” and put the pencil case into a vice, slowly turned the handle and reduced it to matchwood! After putting the bits in a bag he handed it to the distraught boy saying “maybe you now wish you'd paid a bit more attention in class when making this”. The boy, to his credit, never flinched but accepted the bag, thanked the teacher and took it home!

A final footnote.

After leaving school I had a job in the building trade but then became a telephone engineer working for British Telecom, a job I held up to my retirement. On several occasions I had telephone work to do at my old school and on one occasion I came face to face with the teacher that had punished me more than any other, the strict games teacher. He recognised me, but now I was an adult and he treat me as an equal, he asked me if I had enjoyed my time there. I just couldn't bring myself to tell him the truth, something I've regretted bitterly.

On another job at my old school I was accompanied by a much younger colleague who had also been at the school. We were doing work in the head masters study, not the one I remembered, he had retired long ago, but this head had been there while my colleague was a pupil.

The head master was chiding a boy for not working hard enough and told him that if he didn't do well at his forthcoming exams he might end up with a lowly job, like these two telephone engineers. In a flash, my colleague said “but if you fail to pass your exams, you can always become a teacher”!

I wanted the ground to open up but the head master obviously remembered my colleague from school and answered “you always were a gobby so and so” and just laughed.

These have been my recollections of an unhappy period of my life at school, today's pupils have a much better, easy going time and to quote Monty Python, if you were to tell them now, how things were then, “they wouldn't believe you”