Nine: School Report

Striking development on the first day – Class 1A personnel

Teachers and their qualities

CATECHISM CONCERNING THE PRIORY SCHOOL FOR BOYS, SHREWSBURY

Describe the location and nature of the young man’s new grammar school.

The Priory School for Boys stood on the left bank of the Severn, between Porthill Bridge and Welsh Bridge. It was close to Cox’s Tanneries which regularly issued noxious fumes of a pungent quality that Dickens could have described superbly and at some length. The early twentieth century school was designed by the architect Frank Hearn Shayler, who, I discovered quite recently, was my close friend Michael Evans’s grandfather. His buildings faced the town’s swimming baths, and the school also incorporated a few Georgian houses at the back. The 500 boys in the school generated a powerfully male ethos, probably not unlike a boys’ public school, though without boarders. The school motto Possunt quia posse videntur meant ‘They can because they know they can’.

What were his feelings on that first day of a new phase of his education?

Walking down the hill on that first day he was aware that this was one of the biggest changes in a young life, moving out of the top form of your primary school to the first form of your secondary school - from being a big fish in a small pond to become a very small fish in a much larger one. His dominant overall feeling combined excitement and trepidation.

However, there was a much more serious and specific source of apprehension. The school’s main playground ran high above the river just below the art room end of the building. Its boundary towards the river was a row of spiked iron railings. At the bottom left hand corner, a set of stone steps led down to a tall, permanently locked wrought iron gate at road level, a former water gate to the River Severn. This unique corner was known in school tradition as the Dungeons. The tradition required that, on the first day of a new school year, all new boys should be rounded up and slung into the Dungeons. The chief promoters would be mainly the second-year boys who had suffered this fate the previous year. Once down there, the new year’s petrified victims would endure a repertoire of horrors and humiliations devised to entertain the rest of the school.

On that first day, they found their form-master for induction, registration and sundry other processing, and eventually joined the whole school for a welcoming address by the Headmaster in the Main Hall. Mr CWE Peckett was a small, dynamic, no-nonsense man, a Classics academic of some distinction. He stood high on the stage in his black gown with all the pupils facing him, standing in lines across the Hall in their respective years, with their form-master and prefect at one end of the line. First-year boys stood at the very front and he heard some second-year boys in the row behind them muttering, just loud enough for them to hear, about what promising material they were for the Dungeons treatment. This was the initial psychological pressure before the real action, something for them to tremble about through the morning until break time.

But this year was not quite like previous years. Mr Peckett’s speech ranged over the usual topics such as the school’s sporting achievements, its reputation for examination successes, the Combined Cadet Force, general behaviour issues, new members of staff, the school magazine and so on. Then, just before the end, he spoke of the grand tradition of Dungeoning and how long it had been a consistent feature of school life. Clearly, he and the staff all knew it went on, and turned a collective blind eye to its dubious character-forming qualities. However, the year before a new boy had fallen badly on the Dungeons steps, suffering serious head injury for which the school was responsible. This could not be allowed to happen again. From today, and forever, there would be no more Dungeons and the direst punishment awaited anyone caught doing anything that might be interpreted as Dungeoning. The subdued moan of disappointment from the rows behind them was almost tangible, as was their own deeply felt relief. For one occasion in their brief lives, they recognised that they were in the right place at the right time.

Were they subjected to any other forms of intimidation or maltreatment typical of this kind of institution?

Naturally, they did not escape other universally practised forms of light-to-moderate bullying during their first few weeks, though his recollection is that he may have fared better than some in this respect. One harmless form used by the less bright of the second-year boys was to ask you your name and then pronounce it in some distorted manner, or simply laugh at it. One asked him what his initial was. Whatever your initial was, you could not win this one. He replied ‘G’. The questioner chuckled to his companion – this kind of treatment was rarely conducted single-handed - and then said, positively squirming with mirth, ‘Oh, G for Jasper!’ When he told one of his friends about this, Jasper stuck as his nickname. In the regrettable nature of things they passed all these tricks on with similar fervour the following year. But for the Dungeons, a historic moment had taken place, and they had been there to enjoy it. The future would be different, a shade more civilised.

How was his first year class organised, and who were his fellow seekers after truth and enlightenment?

The new intake formed three classes, 1A, 1B and 1C. He and Chris Cureton were put in 1A. There could not have been any educational differentiation between the three groups, but the pupils in 1A naturally assumed they were the best. Did being put in 1C quite by chance make anyone in that class feel or behave like second best? It is possible. There were certainly fellow pupils from Pengwern House in the other two classes, so perhaps there was a policy of separating large groups from particular primary schools. Their attitudes towards, for example, Clive Freeman or David Phillips were no different from before. They were still the friends they had always been, and they all saw one another after school or at weekends just as they always had done.

Reconstructing that first classroom and its occupants is no easy task. Some faces, names and other details do rise to the surface, sometimes with surprising clarity and suddenness. Submerged and ignored for decades, they have time-travelled successfully across fifty years to sit up again in his welcoming mind. This may confirm that nothing we experience is ever completely lost. Everything is retained somewhere in the lumpy greyness of the brain, nestling among its potential electrical contacts, waiting to be fired.

They sat in alphabetical order of surnames. The sequence went up the first row from the front, down the second, up the third and so on across to the corridor side of the room. He was in the first row against the outside wall of the building whose windows were far too high to allow them to see out and be distracted. The opposite long wall was lined with large windows giving onto the corridor that ran the length of the building, leading along to the Main Hall and the Head’s office beyond. Their desks were of the old single unit design with a hinged seat attached by cast iron extrusions to the desk itself. There was a hole with an inkwell in it at the top right hand corner, a curved slot for pens and a hinged sloping lid for making a noise. The teacher’s desk at the front was like a tall, solid pulpit with a similarly hinged lid. There was a long pole in the room with a tilde-shaped hook on one end for opening and closing the high skylight windows. When no teacher was present, this came in for a variety of alternative and unorthodox applications that only small boys can invent.

But can he recall the names of any of the other pupils?

He certainly can. In front of him sat a very quiet, shy boy called Alvis and a large, much more mature character called Gordon Barnett. Chris Cureton was behind him in the same row, and behind him sat Deacon and Dee. At the back of the next row was Beefy Edwards who lived out of town at Nesscliffe. Then came the prettily blond Alan Fishwick, and someone plump and swarthy of Mediterranean origin, referred to by everyone only by his entry in the class register, ‘Genetta, G.L.’ Immediately on his right sat Fatty Goode, a farmer’s son. He was always inventing names for a new gang and making membership cards for them. The Ferd Gang sounded particularly promising but never got further beyond membership cards than any of the others. Dennis England was at the front of that second row, out of alphabetical order because he arrived after the beginning of term. Halfway across the room, there was a Harris and a Lewis. There was also Gerald Leake, whose black instead of grey socks he always envied as much as the boy’s air of maturity and self-confidence. Contacts in this environment were extremely parochial and, on the whole, the further across the room they sat, the less you knew them (unless you knew them already). There was the notorious Willy Morris over there, always stifling a giggle about something, often to do with one of his silent but remarkably heady farts. Nearby were Fatty Page, a rather straight-laced character, Tim Preece, Peter Roberts, Malcolm Scott and Spider Richards - Spider for his coy, gentle, girlish face on an unusually large head above very spindly limbs.

Was the school in the habit of assembling all its pupils and staff for an annual school photograph?

Yes, it was, and, years later, it provides an effective aide mémoire for the faces and names of some of the boys he knew. Look now at the school photograph of June 1950, three feet six inches long, supplied by Panora Ltd, 56 Eagle Street, London WC1 – who must have cornered the market for years in the long panoramic official school photo. His parents, not realising how big it was, were startled by the price when he asked for the money to buy one. His whining ‘Oooh, but everyone else is having one’ seemed to do the trick. His father should have known the score because he had a framed one from his own schooldays at Wilson’s Grammar School, Peckham High Street. Having entered the school in September 1949, aged 10½, he is shown in this picture at the end of his first summer term. (One result of this was that, on moving to North Staffordshire in summer 1951, he was kept down to do his second year again because Staffordshire secondary education apparently began a year later than Shropshire’s. He spent his first weeks there in a very untypical class of about 25 girls and seven boys, a terrifying ordeal after nearly two years in boys-only surroundings.)

In the photo, the first year boys sit cross-legged on the ground on the front row in their short grey trousers and blazers. A handful of them wear long trousers, something he had to wait and lobby hard for until he was nearly fourteen. A few, including him for some reason, wear a grey jacket instead of the blazer. It may have been an authorised option for those parents who considered the official outfitters’ price for the school blazer to be extortionate – which it generally was in every town in Britain. He can recognise today the faces of all those 1A boys, and immediately see as well Peter Sower and Colin Tanswell sitting together, Keith Bishop, a Scottish boy he became good friends with who lived a long bus ride away on the northern side of Shrewsbury. David Phillips and Mal Riley are there; so is Clive Freeman looking blondely clean and serene; and a face that instantly supplies him with the name Gleeson, resembling a very young JF Kennedy.

What other categories of information does this historical document provide?

The central row contains all the masters. Most of their names are much more difficult because he hardly knew most of them during the relatively short time he was there. He comes up readily with Mr Gregson, their second year form master who had a new House named after him when the existing Houses had become full. They were proud of that, being connected to someone who had a House named after them and was still alive, rather than a meaningless name from the school’s or the nation’s distant history. Then there’s Doctor Loehry, their first year form master, GG Mountain, the Majors Morris and Bolland, Peckett in the centre, Scott, Higginbottom, Major Bland and the art master Mr Barker. The remaining eleven have to be nameless, and there is no sign of Mr Lewis, their geography teacher. And there, among all these rows of five hundred males aged between 10½ and 60 are two women, the school secretary Miss Hasler and her assistant.

Any vertical section of the photo will give a similar stratified sample. The new boys, sitting uncomfortably but obediently on the playground’s surface, are nearly all smiling. This is because they are new and young, and this is what you do when someone is taking your photograph. At his next school, one friend used to deliberately catch the sun reflected on his glasses, making his eyes look like two burnt out discs of bright light. Here hardly anyone else is smiling, though several of the masters are making a rather obvious effort to soften their expressions. There is quite a number of white open-necked shirts with collars turned down over their jacket lapels, a very dated style of the 1940s and 50s, presumably an authorised dress code for the summer term. There is a strong sprinkling of grey jackets from the fourth year upwards, with sixth formers and prefects, the school Gods, having largely abandoned the blazer completely.

Judging from appearance only, the prefects - near-adults aged 16 plus - who seemed to him much more like teachers than pupils, mostly fall into one of two quite distinct categories. There are those built like rugby players, which they probably were, including Richardson the Head Boy; and those of the limper, wispy, vague aesthete tendency. The ten or eleven year-olds appear to present a richer variety of types and persuasions. Among them there is a large contingent who simply look like typical boys of their age – he believes himself to be one of those. Others look more like little girls, and still others, with remarkably composed and adult faces, wear expressions suggesting that they are already in training to become barristers, broadcasters, field marshals, bishops or senior civil servants at home or abroad. Just a few - because this was, after all, a grammar school - look more like animals than the roughest of rough human beings.

Finally there are those few who are physically more mature than the rest of them. They are bigger than the average, they walk and move generally with a confidence the others have still to develop, and they have hair in places where the others did not realise hair grew. Above all, they are more experienced, or claim to be - especially in the art of masturbation. At that age, many did this in their own clumsy and idiosyncratic way, often without even knowing what it was called or really what it was for. The physically advanced specimens, of whom Gordon Barnett was one, even seemed to know one or two important things about girls, and used words of a very specialised terminology on this arcane and frightening subject.

Does he know whether any of his classmates went on to achieve fame or notoriety in any particular field of human endeavour?

As far as he knows, his only contemporary to become widely known was Tim Preece. Even at age eleven, Tim was committed to acting and put himself forward more willingly than most of them for parts in the school play. He even played the part of a woman in something. Somebody had to in a school populated by nothing but boys. He had no idea how this track of Tim’s life had progressed until he appeared before the nation’s eyes as the nerdy dandelion wine maker son-in-law Tom in the very witty 1980s TV series The Rise and Fall of Reginald Perrin, starring the late and much missed actor Leonard Rossiter. Tim also played the 19th century explorer Richard Burton in a television biography. No doubt, as in any sample of humanity frozen for a moment in time, some from the 1949-50 intake will have achieved fame and made millions, and others not. No intelligence of such successes (or failures) has reached him over the intervening years.

Is he able to recall the impression made by individual teachers in any detail?

A few examples come to mind. In that first year their form-master was Doctor Loehry. He was Austrian and noted for the high speed of both his delivery of the spoken word and his physical movements. Most masters wore a black gown for teaching, and Doc’s flew out and around him like the cloak of Dracula as he strode, swept, turned and darted around the room. He was a highly active, innovative teacher who knew what education was for. He believed the heart of it was located in language, history, literature, the classics and the arts generally. The Headmaster Peckett had written Principia, the Latin textbook they used, a very modern treatment of this ancient language and traditional school subject. When he moved to his school in Staffordshire, Mrs Wagner, the soon-to-retire Latin teacher there, asked what textbook he had been using. ‘Oh, Principia,’ he replied. She asked if that were the Principia by someone whose name he had never heard. ‘No,’ he said proudly, ‘Principia by Peckett’. ‘Peckett? I’ve never heard of Peckett’, and he was doomed, along with all the other tens of thousands, to work with the dreariness of North and Hillard and Kennedy’s Latin Primer, names his father recognised immediately from his own distant schooldays.

Doc Loehry and Peckett had invented a new subject, or rather a more effective and interesting way of using educational time. They called it Humanities. There was no more of ‘doing’ Latin, History or English as discrete subjects. Instead, they experienced them through a single, integrated curriculum, with Greek language and mythology thrown in too. As members of 1A that year, they were the first consumers of this ground-breaking experiment. It must have been dramatically revolutionary in those post-war years that were otherwise so dull and unimaginative in practically every department of life. Exciting and stimulating as it was for them at the time, apparently it caused considerable difficulty later when the composite experience had to be unravelled and dismantled for pupils to take their ‘O’ levels in the individual traditional subjects.

It seems to him now that they enjoyed Humanities immensely. The ‘direct method’ for Latin meant that they had to abandon their own names. Doc gave them each a Latin first name that was closest to their own English one. The Romans had nothing like ‘Graham’, so he became ‘Gaius’. Others in the class whose names would not translate were named for one of their physical features such as their size, shape or hair colour. As they progressed, they conversed with Doc in hesitant and rudimentary Latin, though he always reverted to Austro-English whenever he lost his temper with them, shouting things like ‘Are you crazy? Are you from the moon?’ This one remained a favourite from among his expansive repertoire of curses and irate catchphrases, passing effortlessly into their everyday vernacular.

Under Doc’s direction, they acted in Latin the Pyramus and Thisbe scene from A Midsummer Night’s Dream. He wrote a mass of dialogues for them to perform, containing Latin expletives such as ‘O me misere! Furcifer, carnifex, sceleratissime, abominandissime!’ They learned and acted Greek myths, began learning and using the Greek alphabet, worked through the feudal manorial system, and wrote their own epic blank verse pieces based on events in their own not very epic lives. Doc taught with boundless commitment, enthusiasm, vigour and energy. His example was infectious and, once they had got used to the new compound subject and to his particular style, they took part readily, enjoyed and learned.

Were there other masters who had a less stimulating effect than the good Doctor?

There were indeed. How different, for example, was geography with Mr Lewis, absent from the 1950 school photo. His method was impeccably uniform every time, making the minimum of demands on his preparation time. He came into the classroom, sat at the desk, opened his textbook and, having requested and obtained complete silence, read them the next chapter in his dry, dusty voice. They propped their books up, ostensibly to follow his reading, the better to conceal the supply of sweets and crisps they each had on the desk in front of them. Eatables and notes were passed noiselessly round the class, Fatty Goode created new gangs and designed their membership cards, and Mr Lewis had a class apparently free of any kind of disruption - or of application to the more obvious points of geography. It was as though they had quietly negotiated a mutual non-disturbance conspiracy with him. It was in those classes that he learned about the formation of ox-bow lakes but little more. The only unscripted information Mr Lewis gave them was how the principle of squatters’ rights worked. He told them this more than once, probably because some smart Aleck in the class asked him about it a couple of weeks later, and again a couple of weeks after that. Periodically, he gave them a test on the chapters of the textbook he had read to them since the previous test.

There were at least three retired military Majors on the school staff. Major Bland was no more than a name, but the other two featured frequently. Whatever it was that Major Morris taught, it allowed him to read to them from Kipling’s Just So Stories during one afternoon per week. He was a gentle, kindly, avuncular man, whose lessons they genuinely looked forward to. He read superbly, did all the different voices properly and entertained them immensely. Like a parent with a favourite story, he was quite prepared to take requests to re-read things they had already heard. As a teaching technique, reading aloud was clearly a favourite with both teachers and pupils. Major Bolland was a short, stocky, confident man with a sharp moustache and a track-suit. He took them for PT, shouting them round the Main Hall on cold winter mornings as they jogged and athletically strode in a ragged and largely reluctant circle, or helping them to jump over padded boxes like the POWs in The Wooden Horse.

They all had to play both rugby and cricket in season but he could never recall being given the faintest idea of what these games were about. Most of the others seemed to know instinctively how they worked and where the various positions were on the field. Spectacles were not advisable wear for playing rugby but, having worn them since the age of four and unable to see very well without them, he had to keep them on, so was positioned in relative safety out on the wing near the touch line. There he could pretend to keep up with the action by running back and forth, but with no need to go slamming himself into other people’s bodies. He quite liked dressing up in long white trousers for cricket, but that was as far as it went. ‘Square leg for you, Brown’ meant absolutely nothing to him. His father had been a considerable swimmer in his day and may well have been disappointed by his son’s almost complete lack of interest in or skill at anything athletic or sport-related. At the time, the boy simply could not see the point of that sort of thing, and never did.

They learned their French with Mr GG Mountain, an older teacher with a sad, pale face and very little hair remaining. He was tall and gangly and always seemed to them to be in the wrong business. They nicknamed him ‘Gregory George’ and one of those was probably correct. French was a disorderly experience because GG simply did not have the kind of personality or style to command the necessary respect. He certainly had little in his repertoire to motivate their interest or attention. Even more unsuitably, he was the school scout master in charge of the 17th Shrewsbury troop to which the boy belonged. He enjoyed this particularly because the troop leader was one of the school’s senior prefects who really knew how to interest and organise them in activities that meant something to them. Chris Cureton told him a few years later that Gregory George had died and there was a rumour of suicide.

Mr Scott taught them Maths in the second year. He was bright and relatively strict, but a very effective teacher with a developed sense of humour. His own son Malcolm, a good friend who lived in Kenwood Drive, was in the class and they all wondered how this would work. In the event, his father called him ‘Scott’ and treated him exactly like the rest. On one occasion Malcolm had to admit that he had left his homework at home, a very common excuse that usually meant you had not done it. Mr Scott dealt with this precisely and to the point: ‘Then go home and get it. Now.’

Mr Higginbottom taught chemistry. A surname like that was asking for trouble in any school and unfortunately his was not the kind of personality to carry it off. For reasons submerged in the archives of school folk history, his nickname was 'Tam'. Lessons with him achieved much less than they should have done, largely because practical chemistry offers such excellent opportunities for messing about with bits of equipment, substances and fire, regardless of personal safety.

How did he feel when he had to leave this school halfway through the summer term of his second year?

He recalls very little of that event, and probably took its disturbing aspects largely as part of life’s normal pattern and got on with it. His father was being promoted to a training post with Post Office Telephones which meant moving home to North Staffordshire. Chris was the friend with whom he kept up the closest contact after that. They exchanged visits during the coming years, cycling the forty miles or so in their summer holidays. They could easily have been replicating the journey Josiah Wedgwood made to convince Darwin’s father that young Charles should join the Beagle expedition. Their visits continued until they were about seventeen when, despite his brain-power and obvious potential for ‘A’ levels, Chris decided to leave school and join the RAF. He saw much less of Michael Evans during these years but did catch up with him later on a visit to Shrewsbury about a year after beginning his life in London. His mother and Mary Evans continued to exchange wordy Christmas cards for many years until it was assumed that Mary had died.

Thus the Priory School for Boys had launched him on the second main phase of his life but was not destined to complete the job. Alleyne’s Grammar School picked up that task in Stone, Staffs, where, in addition to the usual sources of uncertainty and bewilderment, there were girl pupils and female teachers. His experiences there belong to another story.

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