TELLING TALES OUT OF SCHOOL
Neil Foster remembers Prescot Grammar School in
the 1950s.
WE SEEK A FUTURE STATE
FUTURAM
CIVITATEM INQUIRIMUS said the school motto,
picked out in gold on the gates. WE SEEK A
FUTURE STATE. However, I am now going to
contradict it by seeking a past state my
days there between 1951 and 1956.October 1951. I
called for Malcolm Brownbill in Eaton Street,
Prescot. My mother had asked if I wanted her to
come with me to the gates and I had shaken my
head in horror: I would never have been able to
live down the shame!
As I walked
through the impressive, wrought-iron gates I did
not imagine that I was soon to meet characters
who were just as entertaining and memorable as
any in Dickens, with nicknames like
MEB, FAB,
Spud, Pinhead,
Nanny, Judder and
The Mekon!
The grounds
at the front of the school were dotted with
grass-covered mounds partly concealing
underground air-raid shelters left over from the
Second World War; no doubt the school governors
thought that they would still come in useful for
the atomic war that seemed more and more likely
as the 1950s progressed.
The
headmasters house, an attractive white
building with its own lawn, stood among a grove
of trees on the corner of St Helens Road,
opposite the old gates to Knowsley Park.
Red-and-cream trolleybuses whined past on their
way to St Helens.
It was a
new, strange, and rather frightening world, far
removed from the carefree days of primary school.
The childish playtime was now the
stern recess. The simple stream of
Arithmetic or Sums now
divided into its mysterious tributaries of
Algebra, Geometry, Trigonometry etc. There was a
school uniform, a Latin motto, a satchel, school
colours, and a history stretching back to AD
1544.
New boys
were newts; fair game to be
ragged on the first day. Any boy who
was undersized, timid, physically weak, or
unathletic, was a weed/(Not an
appropriate term, as any gardener will tell you:
weeds are very strong!)
Instead of
the favourite primary school outdoor game of
jacks there was, as well as the usual
schoolboy pastimes of conkers and bullying, a
strange game played on the thin strip of soil
just behind the wall overlooking St Helens Road.
This involved throwing a pen-knife into a circle
drawn on the ground and bisecting parts of the
circle where the blade stuck. (Does anyone
remember the rules of this game?)
On the
first day in a new form there was a roll-call and
this could be embarrassing for those with unusual
middle names, e.g. my friend at the time, William
Ramsey Maltman (sniggers at the
Ramsey). Our form-master read out
Roger Dixon and said approvingly,
Good old English name! A little
further on he read out a Scottish name that
started Alistair Myron and then
seemed to go on a tour of the Highlands. When he
reached the end of this goods-train of a name, a
voice from the back said ironically, Good
old English name!
ECCENTRIC
TEACHERS
One thing
that really dates that era is not only that
ball-point pens were frowned upon and sometimes
forbidden but also how unreliable and
unpredictable they were, with hideous, smudgy,
bright blue ink, prone to sudden haemorrhages on
the paper, or producing script like varicose
veins.
Are
teachers now as eccentric or individual as some
were then? Even their ways of maintaining order
were unique: the History master, Mr Herbert
Chant, used to hurl chalk at unruly boys; the
French master, Mr Scott, used to berate
wrong-doers by punctuating his sentence with
whacks from the board-rubber. (If you wore
braces, he would twang them like a banjo!)
Mr
F.A.Bailey, one of the History masters,
well-known now for his erudite works on local
history, used to have a curious system of
teaching. Each pupil in turn would read aloud
from a history book and an appointed
referee would shout Next!
whenever the reader tripped over a word or made a
mistake, whereupon the next boy would commence
reading. One day, a friend of mine read out
The Moers Boved instead of The
Boers Moved and the referee yelled,
Nest!(I mean Next!!
One of the
Latin masters had a habit of dropping his small
suitcase, packed with books, onto his table,
which stood on a narrow, L-shaped dais. We boys
wondered what would happen if we were to move the
legs of his table almost off the dais. The master
arrived and paused, suspicious of the
unaccustomed silence and attentiveness of the
class, all staring with fixed, intent
_expressions towards him. He knew that something
was up but had no idea what. While he was
thinking about it, he dropped his case onto the
table.
How many
times have you seen a cowboy film with the horses
somersaulting spectacularly? This table did the
same, turning over and over with astonishing
realism until it came to rest against the door,
raising clouds of chalk dust. No stunt-man could
have arranged it better.
As the
echoes died away, the master allowed himself a
wry smile and then quietly detailed some of the
boys to replace the table; unfortunately, it was
a trick we could do once only.
EXPELLED!
Another
Latin master, Mr Burrows, was involved in one of
the most sensational incidents at the school
during my stay. He was trying to discipline one
of his class and told him to come out to the
front. The boy refused and when Mr Burrows moved
towards him, he suddenly punched him in the face,
blacking both his eyes. He was expelled
practically on the spot, of course. The news
spread around the school like wildfire and within
ten minutes, it seemed everyone knew. (I wonder
what he is doing now? Probably on the short list
to replace the Bishop of Durham!) Mr Burrows
turned up the next day, looking like a Giant
Panda, with two puffy black eyes, saying
defiantly, You didnt think Id
be here today, boys, did you?
About 20
years later, of course, a far worse disaster
befell the school when a pupil with a grudge
against one of the masters made several attempts
to burn the place down and eventually succeeded,
causing a quarter of a million pounds worth of
damage. I doubt whether the 50s tearaway
would have gone so far!
English was
my favourite subject so it is natural that I
should have strong memories of the two English
masters I encountered: Mr Heywood (Hayward? Never
sure.) and Mr Charles Middlehurst.
GRUBBY-MINDED
SCHOOLBOYS
There could
not have been two more contrasting personalities.
Mr Haywood looked like a gaunt, brown bird in his
gown. He had spent some time in Egypt and several
boys soon learned that he could always be
side-tracked from lessons by an innocent-sounding
query about his days there. Anyone entering his
class some days would have found the board
covered with Arabic as the boys skilfully played
him like anglers until the lesson was half-gone
and he realized that he had better get back to
English.
Even then,
there were pitfalls, like reading poetry to a
roomful of grubby-minded schoolboys, expert in
double entendres. One day he was declaiming some
Elizabeth Barrett Browning and began, What
was he doing, the great god Pan, down in the
reeds by the river? He stopped,
disconcerted by a chorus of sniggers from those
who had found their own answer to that question
and it was not that in the mind of Mrs Browning!
Another
time, he was reading from Tennysons
Maud and giving examples from it of
the pathetic fallacy, i.e. the
attribution of human emotions to Nature and
inanimate objects. He came to the line,
when I heard your rivulet fall
when once again the same sniggerers stopped him.
He smiled patiently at one of the worst
offenders, Gilling, and said indulgently, I
am afraid Gilling is obsessed with cloacal
matters. (When we discovered what the word
meant, we realized how right he was!) we were
reading The Merchant of Venice and
came to the scene where Portia and her maid dress
up in mens clothes; so well that Portia
exclaims, .. they shall think we are
accomplished with what we lack. He asked if
we understood this line. The class wavered
uncertainly so he asked us to be quiet and
whispered, What she means is that they will
think weve got balls!
The class
sat stunned as they heard a master using one of
the forbidden words. Then they created such an
uproar that it was about five minutes before they
settled down. I suppose it was only poetic
justice that not long after Mr Heywood was off
ill for a considerable time and it came out that
he had received the full force of a cricket-ball
where it hurt most!
He was a
cricket-lover and he once read us an essay he had
written about his favourite sport. It was good,
as one would expect, but did not get the
reception he expected. He began by saying,
Cricket is our national game, and
this was immediately challenged by a boy called
Byron, who protested, But sir, Football is
our national game, not Cricket.
Mr Haywood (vehemently), NO, IT
ISNT!
He read his
essay but seemed to be unaware of the ambiguity
of his last sentence, Yes, its a
great game. Long may it reign over our summer
fields.
He frowned
in annoyance at the dead silence and puzzled
_expressions on the boys faces as he
finished, but the reason was simple: we all
thought he had said, Long may it rain over
our summer fields!
Mr Haywood
always stressed the inestimable value of reading
for the development of a good vocabulary and
command of English.(Right! And even more vital
today in this, the age of the video illiterate)
and one day he was hammering this point home when
the same luckless Byron said defensively,
But, sir, I dont want to ruin my eyes
with too much reading.
Mr
Haywoods eyes bulged like those of a
crocodile that has suddenly realized it should
not have taken that last mouthful of wildebeeste.
For a second he gazed in mute horror at this
Philistine who dared to bear a noble literary
name. Then the dam broke. Oh, Byron, you
fool, you fool! he stormed. For every
book youve read, Ive probably read a
thousand AND THERES NOTHING WRONG
WITH MY EYES!
The
(unliterary) Byron shrank back, red-faced, into
his seat, like a genie struggling to get back
into its bottle, and said no more.
BURN THE
DICTI0NARY!
Mr
Haywoods colleague, the sardonic and
cynically amusing Mr Charles Middlehurst, had the
driest humour of any master I have ever known.
Sparing in his praise but devasting in his
criticism, he made no attempt whatsoever to
ingratiate himself with the boys but because of
this peculiar sense of humour, was widely
popular.
The
afore-mentioned Gilling sat near the front of the
class and was one of his favourite targets,
receiving a tirade of caustic comments, greatly
relished by all of us and by Gilling, who enjoyed
his fame!).
A favourite
joke was when Mr Middlehurst came to allocate the
parts when we were reading Shakespeare. Mr
Middlehurst (reading a stage direction),
Enter Caesar in his nightshirt.
Caesar Hillier, Nightshirt
Gilling!
At the time
we were doing Julius Caesar, there
had been a violent incident at the Capitol in
Washington. Several armed Puerto Rican
nationalists had tried to force their way in. Mr
Middlehurst came to the line in the play which
says, Caesar enters the Capitol and
added drily, .. where, no doubt, several
Puerto Ricans are waiting with large
revolvers.
He enjoyed
baiting the Scousers in the class by grotesquely
parodying their accents. The homewairk
tonight will be .. and all the Huytonians
joined in delightedly, parodying him parodying
them!
Some of his
rejoinders were biting. A wrong answer would
often be crushed with the scathing,
Rubbish, Balderdash, Piffle, Tripe and
Rot!
Once he was
defining the meaning of a word when someone
protested, But, sir, it says in the
dictionary.. Mr Middlehurst (ferociously),
Burn the dictionary!
On a
serious note: he was a first-class teacher of
English and I shall never forget his masterly
exposition of T.S.Eliots The Journey
of the Magi. The Headmaster, Mr R.Spencer
Briggs, I found most formidable and I have never
forgotten his explosive roar of anger when I
translated aloud the conjunction for
by the French preposition pour,
instead of the correct car. I never
made that mistake again! He once made one of the
cleverest boys in the class, Chris Hillier, stand
on his chair for the duration of the lesson, as a
punishment for talking.
Talking
about the teaching of French; the aim then seemed
to be accuracy, not fluency. For the first few
weeks we had to write out all our exercises using
the symbols of the International Phonetic
Alphabet, still the only reliable way of
representing the sounds of a foreign language on
the printed page.(This system is far superior to
the imitated pronunciation used in so
many phrase books.)
We did, by
the way, have a French boy in the class, Jean
Dupuy, the son of a cook working for Lord Derby.
It came as a shock to me that he did not come top
of the class at French!
He once
caused much mirth by asking innocently what
manslaughter was, pronouncing the
last two syllables like laughter but
really, it was he who should have laughed at the
ramshackle phonetics of the English language,
which make no sense at all.
Our Music
teacher was Joe Fielding Kirk, much
younger than most of the other masters and I
certainly owe him a debt of gratitude for
introducing me to the pleasures of classical
music. He played us some of the most exciting
music ever written (loud, bellowing
music, as he described it) like The
Ride of the Valkyries and In the Hall
of the Mountain King and it was in his
class that I first heard the music of my
favourite classical composer, Khatchaturian.
BAD
LANGUAGE IN THE BIBLE!
One day,
the History master, Herbert Chant, was taking us
for Religious Knowledge. We were reading from the
Bible and came to this passage,
them
that pisseth against the wall. The whole
class gasped in disbelief. Bad language in the
Bible! Mr Chant (hastily), Its all
right: its only the Bibles way of
saying the male issue. The boys
did not seem convinced. They were probably
thinking what I was thinking, Why was it
wrong to write words like that on a wall but all
right for the Bible to print them?
THE FIFTH
BEATLE
Taking us
for Art was Mr Walters, a gentle, soft-spoken
Welshman, with the looks and build of Freddy
Mills, the boxer. One of his most talented
pupils(then painting in a conventional, not his
later, abstract, style) was destined to become
known as The Fifth Beatle and was
John Lennons best friend until his untimely
death from a brain haemorrhage in 1962.
This was
Stuart Sutcliffe, a small, slightly-built, very
pale-faced boy, with a rather monotonous voice.
While his artistic talent was obvious and
outstanding(some of his painting were regularly
hung on the walls of the Art class) he had never
shown any interest in, or aptitude for, Music. I
was most surprised, therefore, when I met him in
a Liverpool beat club in 1960 and he told me that
he was in a beat group and that they had just
come back from Hamburg.
When he
told me the name of the group, I nearly fell to
the floor, laughing, but he took himself so
seriously that I did not want to hurt his
feelings. The group had the ridiculous name of
The Beetles(He did not explain it was
a pun so I naturally assumed that it was spelled
in that way.) Does anyone know what happened to
them?
Another
musical prodigy(?) in my class was Michael Cox,
who later appeared on the pop TV show Boy
Meets Girls and had a minor hit in 1959
with a cover record, Angela Jones. He
now lives in New Zealand, I understand.(A wise
move, Mike. Get as far away from the scene of the
crime as possible!).
ONE FOR
NEATNESS!
I have
never forgotten Mr
Pinnington(Pinhead), one of our Maths
masters, and he certainly would not forget me,
because, as far as I know, I was(and perhaps,
still am) the only pupil ever to have gained just
one mark out of sixty in a mock GCE
Maths paper!
He called
me out and lowering his voice to a whisper, said
something like this, Foster, you might find
this hard to believe in fact I can hardly
believe it myself but even after going
through your Maths paper with a fine tooth-comb,
I cannot award you a single mark! However, I must
admit it is neatly set out so, to save you the
disgrace of receiving nought out of sixty, I
shall give you one for neatness. And he
did!
This sounds
like one of those school anecdotes that are
too bad to be true, doesnt it?
Slightly exaggerated, you think? No! Ask anyone
who knew me, for, although I could claim for most
of my school career to be A1 at English, I was
never better than Z3 at Maths an Einstein
in reverse, in fact!
Another
reason for my remembering
Pinhead(sorry! Mr Pinnington) was a
remark he made in class one day. He said that in
his opinion the only school subjects that
demanded real brains were Mathematics and the
Sciences; all the rest, he maintained, were just
memorization (dates, facts, rules etc.)
I see his
point but dont agree! Just memorizing
grammatical rules or lists of words will never
make one a good, let alone a great, writer;
learning lists of words in a foreign language
will not make one a linguist; History is
understanding why things happened, not just when
and how they happened, and there is infinitely
more to Geography than maps and industries and
capital cities.
MY JUDO
CAREER
Finally, I
must mention a ludicrous incident that occurred
on the playing fields. I was always useless at
any sport so often just hung about watching the
cricket, etc. One summer day I was being harassed
by the previously-mentioned Roger Dixon, who was
pretending to box with me and was making a real
nuisance of himself.
I pushed
him away and by chance, tripped him up. He fell
heavily and when he got up he looked at me in
astonishment and said with a new respect,
Gee, Fozzer, I didnt know you were a
Judo expert!
I
didnt deny it, reasoning that a reputation
as a Judo-expert could be useful. So, what
happened? He had to go and spread the good news,
didnt he? Half an hour later, I was lying
on my stomach, watching the cricket, when a huge
shadow fell between me and the sun. Startled, I
looked up, to see the biggest and toughest boy in
the whole school, built like King Kongs
dad, come to test my prowess at Judo. He merely
said, Dixon tells me youre a Judo
expert, Fozzer! Well, Mr Judo-expert, get out of
this! Whereupon he sat down heavily upon me
and drove my face about six inches into the turf.
I decided
instantly that I would abandon my Judo career and
take up running instead!
END-OF-TERM
REPORT
Prescot
Grammar School disappeared as such in the
educational reforms of the 70s, initiated
by Shirley Williams, then in charge of the
nations education. It became a
Comprehensive School. Let us conduct a
post-mortem.
Was the
Grammar School system elitist; a breeding ground
for snobs, as its critics tirelessly asserted?
I
dont think so. How could I, for example, a
boy from a working-class family, living in a
two-up, two-down terraced house in
old Mines Avenue, Prescot, with no bathroom and
an outside loo, possibly have anything to be
snobbish about?
WINNING THE
SCHOLARSHIP
The critics
forget that in those days winning the
scholarship was a cause for celebration in
any working-class home.(it certainly was in
mine.) My parents considered a good education of
very great importance for life, not just
for a career.
It was the
selection system that was unfair. The 11-plus
examination, the result of which decided whether
one would go to a grammar school or secondary
modern, unfairly discriminated against those
pupils who were intelligent but lacked
book-learning and communication
skills. Worst of all (now fortunately
discredited) was the absurd intelligence
test, incorporated into the 11-plus.
I shall
always be proud that I attended Prescot Grammar
School and feel that the values that it tried to
instill into its pupils are with me still: in no
way do I consider them outmoded on the
contrary they need to be urgently re-instated!
The
teachers I knew then had very high standards; not
just in the subjects they taught but in the
equally important areas of dress, attitude and
behaviour. Even the bad boys, the
rebels, the educational no-hopers of the time,
knew this. They were well aware that
insubordination would only be tolerated up to a
certain well-defined point. After that, the full
force of authority would descend on the
miscreant!
BADLY-DRESSED,
WORSE-EDUCATED
What would
such teachers have thought of some of
todays badly-dressed, worse-educated
teachers, struggling to control their
ungovernable classes? Not much, you can be sure!
Sublime futility: the uneducated trying to teach
the ineducable!
Nor would
they have had much sympathy with the excesses of
some of todays trendy educationalists, with
their half-baked theories, their glib talk of
equality and their abject terror of
encouraging any form of competition(as if life
itself is not all competition!) It is certain
that they would have reacted with horrified
incredulity to the numerous reports over recent
years revealing the huge numbers of young people
who have serious difficulties with reading,
writing and spelling. This, after nearly 140
years of compulsory education and the expenditure
of billions of pounds (an amount second only to
that spent on defence!)
FUTURAM
CIVITATEM INQUIRIMUS We seek a
future state. Yet I am quite sure that the
state of some parts of the British education
system today was not what my teachers were
seeking 50 years ago!
THE END
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