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mickhorner wrote on Jan 22
ReplyDeleteSam Butcher thought it a crime when I cheered on the morning of Shipley's death after assembly. We were held in a class room until the teachers decided what to do. For some reason Sam was supervising our group. Nobody knew what was going on. At last we were told that Shipley had died and that the school buses had been sent for so that we could go home early. That's when I cheered. Time off school was like a prison term remission for me at that time. Sam decided my reaction to his sombre announcement was not appropriate and punished me the worst way possible. The buses came, probably about 11 o'clock, and he allowed everyone to leave except me. Then he left admonishing me to wait until he returned. I think he forgot and went home himself leaving me feeling very hard done by and getting hungry as lunch time passed. By about 1.30 I dismissed myself and hitch hiked home, getting back about the usual time. My parents didn't know of my 'different' day and Sam never mentioned the event again even though I saw him for art every week.
mickhorner wrote on Jan 22
ReplyDeleteSam Butcher thought it a crime when I cheered on the morning of Shipley's death after assembly. We were held in a class room until the teachers decided what to do. For some reason Sam was supervising our group. Nobody knew what was going on. At last we were told that Shipley had died and that the school buses had been sent for so that we could go home early. That's when I cheered. Time off school was like a prison term remission for me at that time. Sam decided my reaction to his sombre announcement was not appropriate and punished me the worst way possible. The buses came, probably about 11 o'clock, and he allowed everyone to leave except me. Then he left admonishing me to wait until he returned. I think he forgot and went home himself leaving me feeling very hard done by and getting hungry as lunch time passed. By about 1.30 I dismissed myself and hitch hiked home, getting back about the usual time. My parents didn't know of my 'different' day and Sam never mentioned the event again even though I saw him for art every week.
Let there be no moaning at the bar....But why do we have a picture of the wrong gaffer? that one belongs to some time in amtiquity,before Shipley. I don't object to somebody receiving applause when he checks out,I would hope that happens to me,if I were to deserve it,but I wouldn't want the applause (or the opprobrium)to go to someone else by mistake.
ReplyDeleteI wonder if the favourite memory of TGS is not standing up to sing, for the last time " Lord Dismiss Us ....." Then we went on our way, in some cases no doubt inwardly weeping,in others wildly cheering....
ReplyDeleteRon,
ReplyDeleteI presume John Constable has been sent back to keep an eye on us because he antedates all of us - no other person can claim seniority. He invented the name "Thorne Grammar School". Before that it was "Brookes Charity School", see:
http://thornegrammarschool.multiply.com/photos/album/193/Tercentenary_Reunion_-_1st_Oct_2005#4
But what about your memories of TGS. You could probably supply a chapter full.
Playing ball games on grass. I had prayed for the opportunity after a lifetime (and 11 yrs is a lifetime to an eleven year old) of footie in the street with a tennis ball, or cricket on packed clay with wickets chalked on a wall.
ReplyDeleteBe happy Allan
Whacking memories
ReplyDeleteDo I remember my first day at school? You bet! This was on (I think) 7 Sept 1953.
Dumped by our Blue Line Bus in the market place, my mates and I from Dunscroft plus all other obvious first formers ambled up Church Street to school. The bigger lads (principally second and third formers) dashed ahead. It was soon evident why.
They greeted us to TGS by lining the pathway from the ‘boys’ gate’ with slipper in hand. There was no escape. ‘Spotters’ had been organised to catch the fresh lads should they make a run for it down Church Balk. Many backsides were smarting that day – mine was for sure!
Explained away as a ‘tradition’, we new guys looked forward to the same day the following year for our fun. Nah – the ‘tradition’ had been banned!
I did receive the slipper twice more during that first year. Services provided by a certain Mr Reg Clayton.
The first occasion was in our very first games lesson. Two boys (I could name the other) were spotted by Reg performing handstands against the goal posts whilst he was explaining the fundamentals of the game of rugger! I smarted that day too but even worse that time because his slipper (I guess brand new) had power behind it.
The next time I had the slipper dished to me was at the time we were being provided dancing lessons in the gym for our first Xmas show some 3 weeks later. We boys were lined up on one side and the girls lined up opposite. After a demo by Reg and the female PE teacher we were asked to ‘take our partners’.
Now in those days I was a very shy lad. I stayed glued to the wall (I wasn’t the only lad who stayed put by the way) but then we wallflowers were instructed to select a partner. The other guys left me stranded but I didn’t budge. But I certainly did move as soon as he took his slipper off! I did get a couple of whacks as I passed him. What made this one worse it was in front of all those girls!
Just writing about it has brought the pain back!
Tootle Pip
MY MEMORIESS ARE HAPPY, ESPECIALLY THE XMAS PARTIES, SINGING "A HUNTING WE SHALL GO" AS WE FOLLOWED SHIPLEY AND MRS GOSLING, LEADING US IN FOR SUPPER. I WONDER HOW OLD THEY WERE, I, AND OTHERS, THOUGHTT THEY WERE ANCIENT.
ReplyDeleteanne clark 1944 to 1952
my memories were of Mr.Ward and his taffy teffy ta te ta.Also hiding under his piano in the hall at dancing,lolHe always knew we were there and when he lifted that cloth ,boy did we scatter,lol
ReplyDeleteWhen browsing through the School's sport's teams photographs I read of JEST's reaction to the news of the school's success in the ATC cross country event in 1950, I was reminded of another occasion .when the School achieved an outstanding success. It was in the summer term of 1947when the Inter School Sports were held at Mexborough and returned with the Victor Ludorum Trophy. The whole School had travelled to Mexborough by special train, and when the train reached Thorne North station on our return, JEST mounted the footbridge before any one was allowed to leave the platform and called for us all to join him in singing Nunc Canamus.
ReplyDeleteHowever he could be ruthless with failure when he would relapse into his native tongue. One of the best cross country runners of the time was called McLoughlin. Unfortunately in an Inter School Cross Country Race he lost his shoe in the mud and instead of coming in first as expected was low down the order and in consequence the School was not the winner as expected. JEST berated the lad in no uncertain terms , in English !
The above posting made by JAL prompted me to write of this little event involving JEST.
ReplyDelete1953 – 54 saw me in I Gamma. Our classroom was at the ‘school end’ of the long white building that also housed the classroom for I Delta, and then the canteen.
One very cold and snowy morning, about six of us lads were waiting inside the ‘cloakroom’ for our class teacher, Sheila Sutcliffe. It was stifling hot and stuffy in that cloakroom due to the radiators being on at full blast so we opened a couple of windows.
Some bigger lads outside saw the opportunity to have fun and so started to pelt snowballs at us. Of course many projectiles came through the window and made a mess on the floor.
The caretaker came and reported US! We received a one hour detention.
Several days later we boys were summoned to JEST’s office after assembly. Instead of the stern face that he normally wore along the corridors, he had a friendly and welcoming face. He had received a letter of complaint from a parent to say that we were hard done by blah, blah, blah. He told us that the next time we received a detention from either a teacher or a prefect, we were not to serve it and quote JEST as back-up.
As it happened JEST died just a short time later.
For the record, I never received another detention so in truth TGS owes me one hour of time! However, I think I will let it all pass now and not put in a claim!
It's a good job JEST never caught up with our "off-duty" activities on ATC camp. Why, for the expense of perhaps 4 denarii [old currency], the world and a pint of cider was yours, lad. Under age drinking? Not invented yet, lad.
ReplyDelete~~~~~~~~~~~~ geoff.
HI GEOFF, NICE SURPRISE TO SEE YOUR NAME IN MY MAIL BOX.. JEST WOULD MOST CERTAINLY HAVE BEEN FURIOUS HAD HE HAD KNOWN YOU WERE DRINKING. I WOULDN'T HAVE DARED TO STEP OUT OF LINE. I DON'T KNOW WHETHER OR NOT I APPEARED AS A GOODY.
ReplyDeleteanne
Jim - I remember very well that public reprimand of MacLaughlin. Shipley rabbitted on about Foolish Virgins and Wise Virgins. I thought it was very racy of him to mention a rude word like Virgin in front of a mixed audience!!
ReplyDeleteBe Happy Allan
It gets even better Anne ~~~~~~~ like a lunchtime half in some down town pub in Thorne during our last half-term there. My companions? My lips are sealed, but hope to see you at the next reunion, when names will be named. For the record, this was Friday lunchtimes only, and was the distant precursor of TGIF-day of later years.
ReplyDeleteKeep well and warm ~~~~~~~~~~~geoff.
No lunchtime half's in my day. But for the benefit of history aficionados I would like to pinpoint the earliest appearance of alcoholic beverages on TGS premises.I was there. Toward the end of the summer term, 1942, a group of nervous midday revellers might have been seen traversing the playground, lugging a case of beer, right in front of the masters'common room,then up to the prefects' room. It had been purchased at an off-licence on the market square and was consumed in celebration of the End of Term and Liberation after 7 years of attendance at TGS. The slippery slope, the descent into debauchery started there
ReplyDeleteI see on TV that you are having a 'significant weather event'. Now and again in the 50's it would be cold enough for the boys to create a slide on that little asphalt area outside the gym. This was in the few minutes between arriving at school and having to go into class. They were always gone by morning break. (salted? or just the weather warming up?) I loved those slides. They were rare events not even every year. I wonder if the boys at the academy are taking advantage of the weather and making their slides right now.
ReplyDeleteMick..
The boys and girls at the Academy were sent home from school yesterday at 2.30pm. It is closed today, along with other schools. Many teachers now live miles away from the schools, and have problems when we have the amount of snow yesterday. I doubt they would be allowed to make slides these days due to all the health and safety rules. Times have changed. I remember once there was one the full length of the walk alongside the tennis courts....it was like glass. That too had disappeared at break.
ReplyDeleteThe south of England had the worst of the snow yesterday, and apparently there wasn't a single bus running in London yesterday, with many schools closed.
Eileen
In response to Mick's note on his slide activities, well we first formers (1953-54) enjoyed those same slides - when the bigger lads allowed us a go!
ReplyDeleteTootle Pip
Ron
Sent home from school !! ~~~~~~~ what a set of wimps. Fast rewind to winter 1947 which was something to write home about, and not a single day of school missed. The Felix bus, like the U.S. mails always got through. We did run out of road one day alongside Hatfield Lane Wood. While the driver sorted things out, we indulged in a monumental snowball fight in the adjacent field. A couple of blasts on the horn and we resumed our journey to the distant Gulag, arriving by the end of the first lesson. Gone soft, that's what.
ReplyDelete~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ geoff.
As I said Geoff, the children were there, it was the staff who were missing. They don't live in Thorne like they did in our day. There are 1200 kids, and God knows how many teachers, and with a big percentage of the teachers living as far away as York, Leeds and similar distances from the school, they managed until 2.30 yesterday.
ReplyDeleteAs for getting to TGS in the 40's. Pat will remember that Moorends used public transport or bikes or walked, and we had to get to school whatever the weather. I had quite a walk before I reached the Welfare Club and I remember walking with a group one very foggy morning when the buses weren't running, and by the time we reached school, we had black streams running down our faces, a mixture of pit dust, smoke and smog. I also remember times when there were a lot of our classmates missing because the buses didn't run.
As for my grandchildren being wimps............wrong genes to be wimps, their dad managed to get to Leeds to work yesterday from Thorne.........so there. (tongue pulled out!)
Eileen
Bravo Eileen,and your grandchildren's father!
ReplyDeleteI should express sympathy for you freezing Brits,muddling through, or just muddling. Where I am it's 20C (or 70 Fahrenheit for the more fossilized who don't do centigrade} under a bright blue sky. But being an old grump, I ask: Why not do something sensible about it? It is costing hundreds of millions a day. What does it cost to send a few snowploughs to Yorkshire, compared to hundreds of tanks to Iraq? I just heard Boris Johnson say No, not worth it, it only happens once every 20 years. Hasn't he heard of climate change? Suppose it happens once every year?
I worked for a quarter of a century in a place reputed, among the great cities of the world, to receive most snow ( and masses of freezing rain). I rememember ONLY ONE DAY when I went to work and found only about a dozen of the 600 had turned up.
As for schools, I remember one day when our teacher was away with flu and we looked forward to chattering and fooling about:but in walked a prefect, Nigel Cutler, sat down at the teachers desk ands told us"Get a book out and read it" we went on chatting for a moment and he lifted a finger and said " I told you to get out a book and read it." Nigel was a great scholar ( later a Ph.D) and Victor Ludorum: we had great respect for him. We got out our books and read them.
Going back a bit: my mother who attended school l888 to 1906 told me that often a girl in the top class (12-13 yr olds) would be sent to "read to the little ones in the lower classes"
Where there's a will...
Ron
Going back to the days when we had really thick fogs - pea soupers - I remember one morning when a number of the staff were dribbling in after 10a.m. JEST met them with these words ' This despicable habit of living away from your work'. !!! Those were the days.
ReplyDeleteJim
Getting back to the slides in the yard for a moment. They were made possible by cold weather after rain or snow. The best ones were where several smaller frozen puddles could be joined together. We would come up the boys entrance and join the gang who were waiting in a rough line to take their turn. There might be a dozen or more waiting their turn,three or four in motion getting some speed up on the approach, and another handful on the slide itself flying along and separated by only a few feet . Where momentum, or the slide, ceased, was the beginning of the return line to the head of the slide. As more boys joined the group the slide got better and longer reaching its peak at the moment we had to go into school for morning class and assembly..
ReplyDeleteSome similarities to the slide were trips down to the welfare playground with a bit of greaseproof paper. A couple of trips sitting on the greaseproof sliding down the slide put a coating on the steel that produced lethal speeds after a bit of trouser polishing. We would stand aside and watch the unwary newcomer take their first slide and go flying off the end. We thought that a lot of fun. Even more than tobogganing down the side of the pit tip in August on a piece of corrugated steel.
Hello Ron ~~~~ can only thank my lucky stars that our times at the Gulag did not overlap. We'd probably finished up staked out on the cricket pitch awaiting the arrival of the heavy roller ~~ at a fast trot. My awesome admiration at your exploits. More life-enhancing skills ~~~ first Organic Chemistry lesson was how to identify certain organic compounds by smell. Technique was to lift the bottle stopper, and to gently waft the vapours towards your nose, and take a delicate sniff !! Samples evaluated included amyl acetate, acetone, butyric acid and methylamine. Totally forbidden these days I suppose, but sensibly done, and you learnt not to take a strong whiff at the Ammonia bottle.
ReplyDeleteKeep well etc. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ geoff.
Sliding can be a very perilous practice.I was once lured onto a long patch of ice at the top of Broadway by a girl called Amy. In the middle there was a square of concrete under the ice, and gradually the ice grew thinner there, and after a dozen slides I came a cropper, falling onto the point of my chin.No harm done except it knocked out my voice.I went home resigning myself to the fact that I would never speak again.
ReplyDeleteSuddenly,my voice came back. This was the luckiest moment in my life, considering that I earned my living from talking.
Nowadays, I wear a beard as protection in case I meet Amy again and she drags me off to the nearest ice.
The sliding adventure recounted above happened when I was 7 or 8 and TGS was no more than a very remote possibility for me, so I shouldn't have put it in under Memories of TGS. I don't know if it's lthe same for all of you, but my memories of my pre-thorne life seem much more immediate in my old age than my life at TGS. Since our elevation to Thorne was probably one of the most important events in our lives it may be of interest to tell how we got there. In my case the County Minor, known in our community as the County Miner exam was in February. A few weeks before, our teacher had given us a subject for a composition - Learning to ride a bicycle. I wrote my twelve lines ending with the words "falling off can be fateful" and the teacher, Mr Thornton asked me " Do you mean fateful or fatal ?" I had no idea of the difference but stuck to my "fateful".Mr Thornton thought for a minute then said "You rare right" Then, when we came to the scholarship exam, one of the subjects for the composition was, by a heaven-sent chance, Learning to ride a bicycle. So I trotted out my twelve lines not forgetting the fateful bit. A few months later I was enjoying a few weeks off school, playing with my mates, all recovering from the Mumps when word came that Neville Williams and I had passed the exam. Without my fateful bike experience I don't think I would ever have seen TGS. Arriving there, there was no running the gauntlet as in Geoff's time- you were simply seized by a gang of second year kids who threw you onto the low wall outside the gym and tore off your slipper and whacked you with it. Although he had no right to join in the whacking, being a first-year kid like me, Neville Williams did so in my case, remarking later " DId you feel a special hard one? -that was from me." Another thing to remember when I next meet his kid brother Keith.
ReplyDeleteA selection of memories----
ReplyDeleteTrying to avoid being slippered by older pupils on the walk up to school on my first day. ( Sept.1953 )
The morning assembly when JEST collapsed and later died, I was in 2 Alpha and seated a couple of rows from the stage.
Visits from --- the West Riding String Quartet, one piece they played was part of the Surprise Symphony, the Dolmesch family ( of recorder notoriety ) and ? Seligman, a writer and sailor with an impressive war record.
A fire in the roof, instead of gathering at the appointed place as per instruction during fire drills, we all ran to the front of the building to see what was happening. Watching the engine arrive, the ladder extending, the chief fireman enjoying the occasion, climbing the ladder and then dropping the hose! More frustration from the staff as we attempted to get on the engine to have our photos taken by the local press .
One weekend, some trees were removed from the field and the stumps blown up, on the Monday morning our class had PE and we were told to keep away from the craters, we did not and received a good slippering from Reg. C.
A cross country run, on the moors after staggering across a stream and saying to some classmates--' what bastard thought this course up' only to hear -It was me and get another slippering from - guess who! On another run, leaving the class, I and Derek Gorst went to his house on Southfield Road, played some records for a while before rejoining the class on the way back to school. Perhaps that was truanting.
The only lessons I ever really truanted were music lessons in the church hall, The only teacher I ever hated was Pop Ward, he humiliated me in front of the class for singing out of tune. I and Peter Davies went into a nearby bookies, the only bet I ever had was on a horse called Sovereign Path, it came 3rd and I won a few shillings with an each way bet.Peter went on to running some bookies shops in later life
After O levels Derek and I went to Spain (by train ). One day we took a local train to a nearby resort, San Fileu de Guixols, where we met Miss Craig our form teacher, in a most bizarre meeting we exchanged greetings and went our separate ways.
Oh happy days!
Ken Atkinson 1953-1960
Memories of TGS !! so many ...what to pick?
ReplyDeleteTrailing down to the Old Grammar school for our lessons in the bitter winter of 1947. No central heating there!! just a pot bellied stove...and they split us up into two forms of girls and two of boys for that year. Only the girls went down to the old school.....couldn't trust the boys. I think this was because of overcrowding due to the influx of 11 pluses and before the new classrooms/dining hall were built.
Having 6th form geography lessons in the ATC hut and four of us sitting around the stove with Bernard Hazelton. Helping him to set up a weather station in the yard by the caretakers house and coming in during the summer hols to take the readings.
ATC being one of my first lessons in gender discrimination....girls were not allowed to join!!!! Another being expected to turn up on Saturday mornings to get the refreshments ready for the boys after their rugby matches ....we were really expected to know our place in the order of things!
( I joined the TA when I went to university and they taught me to shoot and drive and salute( and that before you can give orders you need to be able to take them)...never liked the boys in blue since)
Eileen is quite right..no luxury of a special bus for those who came from Moorends we got there how we could....I cycled every day come wind or storm in gym slip and school beret...even had a tassel on it in the later years . As prefect I used to have regular run ins with a certain young woman a few years below me( who shall remain nameless but also came from Moorends ) who found it difficult to accept my strong advice to remove herself from the science corridor at break and lunchtimes. I used to find to my amusement that on getting her bike from the bikeshed the tyres on my bike mysteriously went flat. I think I recognised a kindred spirit all those years ago and in later life our paths were much the same...running a school, becoming a local councillor on retirement etc.
One of my embarrassing but amusing memories was our form in the fifth year putting on Macbeth ....a very amateur production involving the whole class which we were made to perform before the school. Brian Nunns and Jo Archer, not the worlds greatest actors, were roped in very reluctantly as soldiers. We furnished all the props ourselves and the sight of the two of them standing glowering at the back of the stage draped in my mothers tartan travel rugs still brings a smile of delight to my face after all these years.
Making friends who have stood the test of time ... and distance!
Finally my memories of Ship....I thought he was great I know he was an awful autocrat but he did give us pride in our school, and a good education. As a certain learned and respected teacher said to me as he looked over his glasses (with a little smile I remember well from history lessons) when we met at one of our earlier reunions.." you have to be a bit of a bastard to be a good headteacher" I enjoyed crossing swords with him at the debating society and he was OK if you stood up to him. According to our former English teacher, Mrs Howard,Ship rubbished the value of our trip to Hadrians wall and turned up at the meeting, where we were reporting back, to prove it. To her amusment when he asked me a difficult question I replied I knew nothing about that but I would described the way the wall was built and proceeded to do so.
Not so happy memories...not always having proper uniform, missing getting our certs at speech day 'cos the Princess Royal was there and only prize winners were allowed, working late on my Christmas post round and missing the last school party, being bottom of the class for many years in the term exams, hating organised games, always making a mess of my cooking in DS. etc.
Ken's posting reminded me that I (innocent Carr) joined a certain 'Smith' in peeling off the cross country training runs into Wike Gate Rd to have a cuppa at one of his friend's place on the 'new' estate. We timed it just right to rejoin the pack on the way back into school - fully 'exhausted'. You missed that didn't you Reg?
ReplyDeleteTootle Pip
Having exchanged not one word with J E Shipley Turner nor engaged in any private conversation with any teacher during my school life am I a member of an elite group?
ReplyDeleteNever a pupil of Mrs.Gosling, I was admonished by her on many occasion and was once invited into her room to discuss my reading of The Lesson for Assembly and my pronunciation of the word 'Con-TROVERSY'.
Being female I was not given 'the slipper', but was harshly overruled.....ControVERSY!.....ControVERSY!
Shirl.
Shirl, I am in your group where the teachers were concerned, but I engaged in more than a private conversation with JEST. As that has been well documented, unless anyone wants to hear about it, all I will say is that it was not enjoyable, and if he could have caned me he would have! Instead, I was sent to Miss Hazell for a private conversation........and punishment, but even as a very distressed twelve year old, I could see that she had great difficulty hiding her amusement. She was lovely, gave me a piece of torn up cotton to wipe my eyes and nose, (no tissues in 1943!) and sent me out.
ReplyDeleteI wouldn't have got the same reaction from Mrs Gosling.
Eileen, Like you my feelings towards Mrs. Gosling are negative. She was my teacher for European History in the 6th form. There were only 4 or 5 of us so the classes were held in her office. Each class began with dictation. Peter the Great, Frederick the Great, Napoleon, Ulm, Austerlitz, dictation,dictation, dictation from start to finish. What we all ended up with was a fat notebook and a large hard lesion on our pen fingers. Thank the Lord we weren't still dipping pens into ink wells by this stage. On the other hand what she was good at was 'picking' topics that might come up on our A level exam. She would go through previous years papers and decide that , say, Catherine the Great had not come up for two years so it was a strong possibility for the next exam. As far as I remember she was quite good at this. It was only years later that I wondered why she spent so long dictating all those pages of notes on topics that weren't going to come up. We could have learned what a really interesting person Catherine was rather than the stock facts.I suppose she couldn't trust her judgement 100%. My opinion is that she was a poor teacher but was good at preparing you for an exam-not at all the same thing
ReplyDeletePat mentioned sitting in the little hut with the pot bellied stove for Geography with Mr. Hazelton. Ten years later I was in that same location for my A level Geography class with Bill Voyce. I consider him to have been a good teacher although I don't think he was at TGS for long.I only had a few pages of notes in his class but I did have tons of typewritten papers that he had prepared as part of his MA thesis and run off copies on green paper for each of us-only four in the class.(Sugden,Harker,Naylor,Horner) We would read, discuss, and relate written statements to the atlas and texts and do our own research and essays.
He got us to think rather than memorise and regurgitate.
That stove was a beauty. We would get it red hot in the winter. The place was like a sauna. Perfect background for studying The Amazon Basin.
Mick...
Pat,
ReplyDeleteRe Ship. You say 'If you stood up to him'. Allow me to tell you a little story. Pat Rice and I joined TGS on March 1st 1947 when Thorne was knee deep in snow. When making the timetable Ship saw to it that his Latin lessons took place either immediately before break or immediately before lunch so that he could extend them. But there were five that could not be so fitted. After a couple of weeks at the school Pat was exasperated that one of his Upper VI French classes was always late , having been detained In Ship's Latin lesson. Pat stormed off to Ship's room, knocked, entered and said ' Mr Turner, have been waiting ten minutes to start my VIth Form French lesson. Will you please release them'. And he did. Pat was henceforward held in high esteem by Ship.
Jim
Ken,I was too terrified of Pop Ward to hate him. The night before Music I would be trying to learn whichever psalm we would be tested on the next day. On the Felix bus the next morning it would be the same thing and any spare moment before 'the test'. Once we got there he would go around the class.Each person would say their line or two and then he would pass on to the next. I would be estimating what my bit was likely to be and looking at a copy under the desk. Almost always got it wrong and got a blast. He could be very big and loud. He may not have realized just how frightening some of us found him. Wish I'd known then what I know now. That first year at TGS would have been easier. Not easy mind you, there were many pit falls for an eleven year old.
ReplyDeleteMick..
Mick, my memory goes back just two years when I came to Canada. You met us for a short time, during which we discussed various teachers. I was amused when you and my son discussed the same teacher (who will be nameless,) and you both disliked him very much, and had similar tales about him which were very funny. It was all the more interesting because you left TGS twenty years before my son started there, yet you both thought the same about him, and made me laugh.
ReplyDeleteEileen
Eileen, It's not just your son and I who shared that view. Every now and then on one thread or another someone else confirms it even though we are, generally speaking, circumspect.
ReplyDeleteI remember the miserable weather we were having when you were in Toronto and whether the tree foliage would still be colourful. Things don't change that much as today is quite challenging. Yesterday was -14 all day,dropping to -18 in the evening and -20 overnight. It was -20 at breakfast today and I waited for it to warm up a bit before taking the dog a walk. By 10 a.m. it was -18(wind chill -23) so the dog wore his coat and I wore mine plus cap and hood and gloves. I also bought some 'ice grippers' for my boots which are very reassuring walking through the park. It has been below freezing pretty much since Jan. 13th so every flake of snow that has fallen is still hanging about in the park. Road snow is ploughed and then removed quite efficiently as Ron mentioned in his email. Still, practice makes perfect.Home owners are responsible for clearing the snow from the path in front of their property within 24 hours of a storm. Most are conscientious but there are always the same few who don't bother.
The forecast for the weekend has a temperature of 5 for one day. It's going to feel like Florida. We will go from snow and ice to slush and water. Many of the street drains will be blocked so there will be lots of surface water and the possibility of a spray for pedestrians from unthinking car drivers.
Mick..
I found music very difficult and was petrified I would be asked questions in Pop Wards class until the 6th form. Every note he played sounded the same to me. Was I a soprano or an alto? I couldn't tell the difference, others could why couldn't I ? Must be thick.
ReplyDeleteFor some reason ....forming a 6th form choir?....he decided to test our voices. When it was time for me to go in he kept going over stuff much longer than with the others and finally announced I was tone deaf!!! You have no idea how happy this made me. I now understood why music was incomprhensible to me while everyone around was in to pop stars etc.So for the rest of my life I could stop worrying that I couldn't tell God save the weasel from Pop goes the queen .....bliss!!!
More random memories,
ReplyDelete9th Sept.1953, cold and dull ( according to my diary ) first day at TGS. I was in 1 Alpha, Miss Hasler our teacher, in a domestic science room 16? At the end of the year I believe she left and went to Australia. Mrs Solomon and Mrs Getty were the DS teachers in this part of the school.
In my second year I was in 2 Alpha with Dennis Best as form teacher in, I think, room 13 with tiered seating, in our maths lessons we were introduced to Mr BODMAS
After the death of JEST I went into 3 Science and then 4/5 Science.
I remember being mildly chastised by JAL for suggesting that Maltesers were inhabitants of Malta.
On the wall of room 6 was a very evocative print entitled 'Off Valparaiso' I now know it was painted by T J Somerscales.
In this room a large piece of ceiling plaster fell in prior to some O level exams.
I recall the boys only assemblies run by Mr Colvin in the Gym, a regular feature of which was the raising and lowering of the beams during prayers by some 5th.formers .
One day we had a biology lesson with Minnie Martin (fortunately not our regular teacher ) she filled the b/board with copious notes on the Thallophyta , plants with no stems,roots or leaves, I was left wondering- what the hell did they have? Having become a biology teacher, I now know!
I once had to write out Archimedes Principle 25 times for some misdemeanour in a physics lesson with a Mr Williamson - 'when a body is totally or partially immersed in a fluid, it experiences etc. etc etc
The procedure for obtaining a new exercise book was to have the old one signed by the member of staff, Stan Willis's signature was a doddle to forge!
I had French lessons with Mr Windass and then Miss Mason-- Ah les jambes longue. Latin with the unipulmonary Mr Marsh and the winsome Miss Binns. Caesar adsum iam forte, sed Brutus passus sum, Caesar sic in omnibus, Brutus sic in at.
The relief at being able to buy an English translation of Virgil, thus saving untold hours of Latin Homework.' I sing of arms and a man'
English with Miss Craig -- the dreaded clause analysis, the interminable Memoirs of a Foxhunting Man by Seigfreid Sassoon and -'a preposition is a bad word to end a sentence with'
RE with Mr Addinall, he with the large nose and small chin, nicknamed +1-1. St. Paul and his letters were, and still are, incredibly boring.
6th. form lessons with Mrs Bean, nice lady and Mr Croft an Anglisiced version of Jacques Tati.
A week off lessons when I and Don Fox went to Malham Tarn Field Centre. I can still identify the Craven Fault line by the change in vegetation on either side of it.
Regrets--- never being in Charlie Vickers lessons, the laughter could be heard around the school, never being in Miss Sutcliffes lessons, for very different, hormonal reasons!
Never having any kind of career advice other than a 2 minute conversation with PT Griffiths, when he asked me what I intended to do after A levels.
After leaving TGS -- In the summer of 1969 ( I was teaching in Rossington) On a camping holiday, on the way to Italy, and in a bar in Innsbruck one wet afternoon, meeting Reg Clayton and his family. The next time I met Reg was in 1996. I had recently retired from full time teaching and was attending ( at TGS ) a computing for the terrified class, Reg was also in the class.
In 1996/7 I did some supply teaching back at TGS, quite strange being on the other side, as it were. In a lab where I had done much work whilst in the 6th form I found a set of text books used by our class in 1959 and bearing the names of some classmates, Dave Lister and Steve Ferrari, not mine unfortunately. There was also a book bearing the name Lesley Garrett - whatever happened to her?
Time to go
Ken Atkinson
WELL, HOW MANY MEMORIES HAVE BEEN DUG FROM THE DEPTHS OF MY ELDERLY BRAIN, FIRST THOUGH IS NOT A MEMORY, BUT A FACT. LESLEY GARRATT , WHO SANG IN MUSICALS AT TGS CHOSE TO STUDY MUSIC AND) BECAME A FAMOUS AND WEALTHY SINGER. SHE IS V ERY POPULAR, AND HAS PROGRAMMES OF HER OWN. SHE WAS BEFORE MY TIME, I WAS WAS MARRIED TO , A MEMBER OF STAFF AND HEARD NEWS FROM HIM. HE WAS ONE OF THE FEW STAFF WHO WORKED THERE FROM SOON AFTER THE WAR UNTIL THEY RETIRED. OUTSTANDIG HAS TO BE JIM (JAMES) LAWSON, BUT REG CLAYTON, DENNIS BEST, (HIS WIFE JOAN ARRIVED NOT A LONGER AFTER DENNIS. STAN WILLIS AND THE ONLY OTHER PERSON MY FORMER HUSBAND, RON ASQUITH.
ReplyDeleteanneclark 1944.
When I look at some of the memories above I realize that conditions at TGS didn't change much from year to year,decade to decade, or even generation to generation. Like Ken, above. I too was in 1 Alpha but a couple of years ahead of him. Our home room was the domestic science room too. I can't remember my first homeroom teachers name other than she was nice,taught PT, and had lots of freckles..My 2 Alpha homeroom was also the tiered classroom with the same teacher, Dennis Best. Sixth form Geography was still being taught in the hut with the stove when I took it and it was taught there 10 years earlier by Mr. Hazelton. I don't remember ever having a new text book but there must have been some. Academic classes were largely chalk,talk,copy and dictation. There were a few exceptions. Mr.Todd comes to mind with his science experiments that began with the words 'take a treacle tin' and Mr. Vickers whose off-beat imagination gave a new spin to biblical events in religious studies. Of course we never told them but we did appreciate those teachers who made that extra effort. What a contrast with todays school and classroom. Outstanding teachers may still be few and far between but learning resources for teacher and for student use have made schools in the last generation as different from TGS as I knew it as to be almost unrecognizable.
ReplyDeleteMick..
Your first homeroom teacher could have been Mrs Yeoman, Mick. The description sounds like her. If you look in the Heads and Teachers folder in the photos, she is on one of the bottom photos "Teachers Revisiting - 1985", She's with her husband, Andy Yeoman. I could be wrong, but it sounds like her.
ReplyDeleteEileen
You are right Eileen. Thank you. You jogged my memory. Was it the freckles? I looked at the photo and could see it was the same person even though it was 34 years later. Asquith was a bit of a Dorian Gray wasn't he?
ReplyDeleteWhat I was trying to convey in my previous comment above (having slept on it) was that the school, its facilities, and even its teachers changed very little over the years. We were all going through the same environment, and we all came from the same environment, so many of our experiences were similar. I wonder if the teachers thought 'same old same old' when they saw each new annual batch of students. We were remarkably similar.I don't remember thinking anyone was poor or rich or was in another 'class' or was an immigrant. Les Long was the first black student I ever met. Perhaps I was naive. It took an interview for Cambridge (unfavourable as it happened) for me to bump into the class system, and know it, for the first time.
Mick..
Mick, you're right. Mrs Yeoman wasn't at the school when I was. but I did see her about. It was the freckles......I felt I had something in common with a freckled person. If you look at my "before" photo in Me, Then and Now, you will see what I mean.
ReplyDeleteMr Yeoman taught my older son. He took after me and didn't have a mathematical mind. He needed to get a Maths O level to be able to take the post he had provisionally got at YEB, but he had to have five O'levels, with maths and English Lang.essential, and Mr Yeoman gave him the confidence he needed, and he passed.
Mr and Mrs Yeoman were a lovely couple.
I can't remember a black student while I was at TGS. I was also naive, and very proud to be there, but I was very conscious about the class I was in, and always felt inferior as I got older. We were treated differently, but as it has already been well documented, I'll leave it there.
I loved the chances we had with music, and I liked Mr Ward very much. I couldn't play an instrument, but I enjoyed singing, so I joined the Music Club as soon as I could. I was only in one opera, but many years after I left the school, Mr Ward started what he called Thorne Special Choir. We sang The Messiah at Easter in St Nicholas Church in 58/59/60. I wouldn't have had the confidence to do that without the musical background from TGS.
Eileen
Does anyone else remember the Empire Hymn, which we all sang on Empire Day with fourth form girls and upwards providing the descant? As far as I remember, these are the words - if my memory is correct, maybe someone could add this to the school songs sector.
ReplyDeleteTo hearth and home they said goodbye and gaily wandered forth
Against the storm and tempest high, they sailed both south and north.
And so a mighty realm was made whose glory shall not fade.
(Chorus)
Deep is the love that maketh an Empire strong
Great is the family to which her sons belong
One in their loyalty and thus, when the trumpets sound,
Close by her side, her children shall all be found.
The common good at once befalls where common justice runs
And one by one to service calls her daughters and her sons
And so this realm from shore to shore shall flourish more and more.
(Chorus)
May Farmer Crescat forever walk to Orum.
Anne
No Empire Hymn in my time.Perhaps that only started when there was no more Empire. We had one double lessson in music once a week,for the first two years.Mr Ward,imposing, like the Gaff, by virtue of his corpulence,an unusual feature among the men of that time, was very pleasant to the girls and ignored the boys, except when they needed shouting at. After all, it was the boys' fault that from thirteen years of age we lost our angelic treble voices and so TGS could only offer him about a third of the work of any other teacher.
ReplyDeleteHe had a hard time with farmer Crescat, and the two French songs we had to learn, because he knew no Latin and less French. But we did learn a couple of pieces like "where e're you walk cool breezes fan the shade,and all things flourish" which seemed completely daft at the time, but somehow echoed in our minds, and with the operettes of Gilbert and Sullivan laid a foundation for appreciation of music later in life.
We were supposed to be able to read music from a score and some of us found this completely impossible. At the elementary school singng had been fun,music at TGS was deadly boring (like History,Geography,English,Art,Maths and Science, but here I'm speaking for myself). I was roped in by the Headmistress for the Mikado in1942 ( only in the chorus of course where you could sing the middle bits, but when the note went up high or went down low you just kept quiet with your mouth open).On the First Night Rex Waller,the Wandering Minstrel had a bad cold with sore throat but bravely soldiered on.
I was disappointed to hear the tune of Lord Dismiss Us on this site - it had been speeded up to sound like a merry little dance,losing all its nostalgic power.
Ron
Correction to the above. It should be glade,not shade.We also sang something about nymphs and shepherds coming away,for this is Flora's holiday. Not as exciting as Three times round went she,then three times round went she, then three times round went our gallant ship and she sank to the bottom of the sea,the sea the sea.....or There is a tavern in the town,in the town,and there my dear love sits him down,sits him down...or the inspirational The sun had set behind yon hill beyond yon dreary moor when weary and lame a poor boy cane up to the farmers door, (the favourite of Fredddie, the head of Broadway elementary school)
ReplyDeleteFrom about 1938 the Gaff decided not to say prayers at the morning assembly, but to raise his voice in a sort of chant, and we had to respond e.g.Blessed are the pure in heart -- For they shall see God... Had we gone all HighChurch?-.a barbaric change for the Primitive Methodists among us,and the less said about the Gaff's asthmatic voice the better.
Ron
I was at TGS between 1953 and 1960 and we sang the Empire Hymn every year. I thought it was an old tradition!
ReplyDeleteI was in 1 Alpha along with Ken Atkinson. Other names that come to mind are Jennifer Cawood, Josephine Cox, Valerie Hobson, Jessie Carr, Anne Chives, Margaret Wadsworth, John Platt, John "Broll" Connolly, Mick Hole, Rob Henstock, Bill Gull and David Welsh. I remember Miss Hasler - she left at Easter and Miss Simmonds (later Mrs Best) became our form teacher. We all clubbed together and got Miss H a vase as a leaving present. She taught science and for one term after she'd gone we had a temporary teacher, a little man with dark hair and a moustache. His real name is long gone, but for some reason he was known as Antonio Spaghetti. (I don't know why - he didn't look Italian!) We weren't the best-behaved form with Antonio, but at the end of the summer term our consciences got us and we gave him a box of chocolates as a leaving present, so all ended well.
Ken, did Ship collapse in assembly? I remember it was a memorial assembly for Mr Hazelton, a teacher who used to sing in the opera and who died of cancer. The way I remember it, Ship didn't look too good, but made it off the stage okay. 2nd lesson was PE in the hall with Miss Simmonds and about 20 minutes from the end, Pop Ward came rushing in looking very upset. He spoke to Miss Simmonds, who stared at him in shock and then sent us all to the cloakroom to change. We knew something was up and at break rumours were flying round, first that Ship had been taken ill and then that he was dead. 3rd lesson was Latin with Big Mr Wright and he said it was his sad duty to tell us that the rumour was true. A message came round soon after that the busses had been sent for and we were all being sent home. My mother had been at TGS under Ship and she got the shock of her life when I appeared and broke the news. We were all asked to contribute 1 penny for a wreath - I saw it in the cemetery and it was huge, mainly white, purple and red flowers and the card read "From all his pupils". On the day of the funeral, the school lined St Nicholas Road as the cortege went past (with press photographers in the churchyard at the end of the road) and then school was dismissed. I didn't like Ship, but it was an upsetting time all the same.
The Turner family requested that Xmas parties be held as usual. Charlie Vickers had taught us history for a term and he was leaving, much to our sorrow. When we were all eating the party goodies in the dining hall, Charlie's table was having a high old time. We had Mrs Morris (formerly Mrs Gull) and Sam Butcher on ours, so we were more sedate. They hardly said a word to any of us, but talked to each other throughout.
Another memory of my first year was all first formers spending a lesson in the dining hall, while Ship and Mrs Gosling ran us through the correct way to use cutlery! As far as I know, we were already adept at using knife, fork and spoon, though I did learn that at a formal dinner with loads of cutlery, one started at the outside and worked one's way in and, in an emergency, waited a moment to see what other people were eating with. (By the way, has anyone ever tried eating peas with a knife? I tried once, for the hell of it, and it's not easy to do!)
Other random memories are the poetry reading competition every summer term and the house play-reading competition - all good fun. The Inter-School sports were a good day out and we girls felt very superior to Wath girls one year. They had toilet rolls hanging OUTSIDE the cubicles, whereas the more civilised Thornensians could rip toilet paper sheets off in privacy! While on the subject of toilets, once someone (shock, horror) wrote "f*** off" on the inside of a girls' toilet door and it was declared out of order, until Bob Foster, the caretaker, managed to remove this. Autre temps, autres moeurs.
More later.
May Farmer Crescat forever walk to Orum.
Anne
A similar inscription on a toilet door was discovered in about 1938.A special assembly was called:the Gaff constituted a special investigating committee to interview suspected miscreants. A gloom hung over the school,we were threatened witrh cancellation of the impending half-term holiday, then at the last moment we were saved: it was rumoured that the offender had been found - a lad from Armthorpe (where else?) and peace and calm were restored. The armthorpian malefactor was never seen again.
ReplyDeleteRon
Something much worse happened later, I think in 1940 or 41. In the morning assembly the Gaff fulminated as never before,but without deigning to describe what had happened.
ReplyDelete"What,he screamed, was the purpose of of a school," could it possibly be for education, or only to provide an opportunity for vandalism,hooliganism and wanton destruction?
But we had seen it all. The cloakroom was flooded, and there were great chunks of pocelain lying everywhere.
The WRCC in its wisdom had decreed that schoools should be open to the public for dances, perhaps to boost morale in wartime and to make a bit of dough. What the Gaff called the local louts paid their shilling and congregated on Saturday evenings. One of them had no doubt lost a coin in a toilet so he had to go home and fetch a sledgehammer to retrieve it. For a headmaster who took such pride in his school that there was hell to pay if he discovered a pencil mark on a wall, this was something like armageddon.
Ron
I could say quite a bit about the negative side of TGS, but for the moment I'll stick to the more positive aspects. I certainly can't fault the education I received (Mrs Gosling's wretched dictation of history notes excepted) and when I spent some years as a supply teacher, I was surprised at how easy it was actually to teach subjects in which I'm not qualified. (If I had £10 for every class I've shown how to multiply, divide, use algebra etc ....) Whatever the politicians say, GCSE is easy compared to O Levels. The teachers meant more to us as well and most were respected a lot. In most schools I've taught in down south, half the teachers seemed unknown to half the pupils at any given time. I remember Stan Willis teaching us that (x+y)(x-y) = x2 - y2 and the way he did this was by asking if there was a courting couple in the class. There was and so he wrote down (Val+Renton)(Val-Renton) = Val2 - Renton2. I still remember it! A favourite memory is when Jim Lawson (Sir, he was then) brought a prehistoric stone axe to show 1 Alpha. I'll never forget the way Jim looked at it and said "I couldn't make one of these, but they could". Sounds daft, I know, but a tunnel seemed to open up in the classroom and run all the way back to the Stone Age. My formal study of History ended with O Level, but Jim kindled a deep love of prehistory in me and to this day I'll go out of my way to see a dolmen anywhere in Europe. (I'm also interested in Nazi Germany and Assyria, but the blame for any totalitarian tendencies on the part of yours truly can't be laid at Jim's door. Other TGS doors are a lot more culpable ...)
ReplyDeleteSome very funny things happened as well. Pop Ward always had to keep leaving his seat on the front of the stage on Speech Day to conduct the choir etc and on one gorgeous occasion he slipped and almost throttled Dr Straughan, whom he grabbed to stop himself going base over apex off the edge of the stage. Mrs Gosling flicked a basilisk eye over us prize winners, who all sat there inwardly exploding but probably looking like a row of Easter Island heads. Another highlight was when Boggy Marsh took me for Lower Sixth Greek in the book cupboard (!), sat on one of those old blue canvas chairs with a tubular frame and the seat gave way. Boggy just sort of folded up neatly and went through it, with his knees hanging over the front bit of the frame. I didn't know whether to haul him out or not, but did in the end and he asked me to get him another chair from the hall. Ken Topham was teaching a French class round a radiator (we were taught in some odd places in those days) and they all stopped to stare at a Martindale laughing hysterically, as she dragged a broken chair in and departed with an intact one. Worse thing was, I had to translate a long piece of Demosthenes from then until break, with a diaphragm that was killing me! The other funny thing was when PT Griffiths shouted at us in 4th Form Latin, partially dislodged his false teeth and had to turn his back on us while he readjusted them. Happy days, sometimes.
Keep walking, Farmer Crescat.
Anne
I have just been re=reading all the stories on this site and Pat's mention of the stoves at the Old Grammar School reminded of an incident shortly after I came to the school. My lesson was in one of the rooms at the rear of the main building and was heated by one such stove. Some one had decided that, as a new master, I should be subject to an initiation ceremony, and had shredded an india rubber on the hot lid.The room reeked with the stench of burning rubber, and the class were waiting to see how 'Sir' would re-act.But, unknown to them, 'Sir' to use an expression common at that time ' Had got some service in ', and he proceeded to teach them from the class-room door. They never tried rhat trick on me again
ReplyDeleteAnne
ReplyDeleteI also remember the annual singing of the Empire Day song, I too thought it a long standing tradition.
The teacher with the moustache whose name I cannot recall reminds me of Manuel in Fawlty Towers.
Perhaps you are right about the details of JEST's demise, as recent research has shown, memory is a complex and unreliable process.
Jennifer Cawood taught Home Economics for many years at Campsmount School, Askern. John Platt also went into teaching, Rob Henstock worked for ICI in Cheshire, I have been told John Connolly went to Australia and has since died. I go to an art class every week and Judith Hole also attends, she tells me Michael Hole, her cousin, followed a highly academic career but she doesn't know in what discipline. Anne, when we were in yr.1 or 2 I recall a ? Martindale gaining a place at Oxford, he was, presumably a relative, what did he do?
Although I taught science I also have a great interest in art/history and have visited sites in Europe, North Africa, the Middle East and Central Asia.
There was a rumour that Charlie Vickers had won a fair sum on the football pools, does anyone out there know why he left?
More later.
Ken.
Just to confirm that I feel 100% sure there was no Empire song sung at TGS in 1935-42 as far as my usually reliable memory assures me. But as Ken says, memory is a strange process, and as I said before, I was not very good at music. So there is a faint possibility that I may have been singing the Empire Song when I thought I was singing the National Anthem or Nunc Canamus.
ReplyDeleteThere were also occasions when whatever I was doing or being supposed to learn, I had no idea what was going on, my thoughts being elsewhere,
that's how I survived and kept my insanity.
Ron
I think this may be the time to mention Mr Lawson's book
ReplyDeleteHi Ken, good to hear from another 1 Alpha-ite. You're right about Antonio Spaghetti - now that i come to think of it, he did look like Manuel! As for Robert (Bob) Martindale, he was my cousin and head boy during our first year. He won the Hulme Open Scholarship to Brasenose College, Oxford, and after that moved to Cambridge, where he got an MLitt. He spent his entire career first researching and then editing a massive tome called "The Prosopography of the Later Roman Empire". (Don't ask!) Ship was very pleased about Robert's winning the scholarship, announced it in assembly and said he would hire the "Everest film" to celebrate. Everest had only been climbed the year before and "Ascent of Everest" had been a popular film in the cinema, so we all cheered. We never saw the film in school though! I met John Platt about 15 years ago, when I was staying in Thorne overnight after my husband had had an interview in York, and he was still teaching then. I'm sure I'm right about Ship's death - I can still see Pop Ward in my mind's eye hurrying into the hall looking very distressed. I know we had the first two lessons all right and it was at break that rumours were flying round the school. As for Charlie Vickers, he taight 2 Alpha history for one term only - I remember those
ReplyDeleteNot sure what happened then - I must have hit submit by accident! As I was saying, I remember Charlie's quizzes and he was missed. I didn't hear anything about his winning the pools. Interesting to hear you're into historical sites, Ken - have you been to Petra, Jerash and the like in Jordan?
ReplyDeleteKeep on walking, Farmer Crescat.
Anne
WARNING
ReplyDeleteMessages posted here that the management considers defamatory are likely to be deleted. It is no justification that your message contains an accurate report of what someone else has said. The site managers carry a legal responsibility that equates to that of a publisher, since they have the power of veto. Rather than risk citation as publishers of a libel, we will remove any message that we believe carries that risk. I suggest that all members review what they have posted, and edit out any remarks that could be construed to be defamatory.
Permit me to make some minor corrections.
ReplyDelete1. JEST died in his study having just left Big School where he had conducted a Memorial Service for Bernard Hazelton whose funeral had taken place a few days previously.
2. Bernard died of a brain tumour not cancer. Unlike today, brain tumours were generally fatal those days.He had been a Spitfire pilot.
3. Mr Vickers was known to his colleagues as Jimmy. He left TGS to go to a better post at Doncaster Grammar School which ,in those days , was a school with a high reputation. He stayed there until his retirement and lived to a ripe old age. I cannot vouch for Mrs. Gull's statement which is news to me.
4.I remember Jest's funeral. Mr Colvin and I, as senior hands, were deputed to head the cortage through Thorne to the church. It surprised no-one that he was 20 minutes late for the service.
Thanks for the information, Jim. I seem to remember one teacher dying of cancer, though - was it perhaps Mr Walton? I think he started teaching at the school in 1957, when Asian flu was going round. I didn't catch it, but every morning there were fewer people in assembly and forms had to combined for a short while.
ReplyDeleteOther teachers I remember fondly include Mr Smith, head of English, who had some nice turns of phrase. One was describing someone as being "a bit of a bungalow where intellect was concerned" and he sometimes said that looking for intelligent life on Thursday afternoons was like looking for diamonds in rice pudding. Once I was a teacher myself, I knew exactly what he meant by that and pinched the phrase.
Mr Morgan took us for French for our first term in TGS and I still know the French version of Adeste Fideles, thanks to him. He also set the first piece of homework that didn't involve backing books - the present tense of etre. Mr Windass was another excellent French teacher. He was our form master for a while in the Lower Sixth and left to become Head of Appleby Grammar School. We gave him a pair of leather gloves as a going-away present and Mr Voyce very kindly found out the correct size for us. Once I was at uni, I got to know a girl from Appleby who took a Xmas card home with her for him. I was delighted when she returned with a New Year's card from him and his best wishes.
I also have pleasant memories of PT Griffiths, the Head Gaff. I was the only one doing A-Level Greek and got to know him quite well over the Unseens and Aeschylus's "Persians". As some people possibly know, I was in local politics during my time in the north-east and was actually Chairman of the Education committee for a year. The local stringer for the Donny Gazette somehow found this out and a piece appeared in the paper. I was paying my summer visit to Thorne and met PTG on King Street, who saw me from a distance and started smiling. "Haha", though Madame Chairman "I'm on equal terms with you at last! Now's my chance!" "Well, Anne" said the Head Gaff, "I hear you've been making quite a name for yourself in the north-east". "Yes, sir" I said - and could have kicked myself. I guess my unconscious wasn't all that equal after all.
Keep walking, Crescat.
Anne
Ken
ReplyDeleteIf you look at #22 on the panoramic school photos, you'll see our old friend Antonio Spaghetti sitting between Mr Smith and Ken Topham. I still have no idea why we called him that, though I have a vague feeling you boys had something to do with it. If asked, I would have said Antonio had been in his 30s, yet he's clearly in his early 20s.
It's strange how we always thought teachers were older than they were. Mr Todd took us for RE in 1 Alpha and I thought he must be near retirement then, but he was still going strong when I left school to go to university.
Anne
On a grumpy day some time ago I complained about the apparent speeding up of the Lord Behold us hymn in the 3 musical pieces Keith had sent.
ReplyDeleteNow he has done me the honour of adding another, slower version for which I am duly grateful, though I now realize that it isn't only a dirge for the departing but also a welcoming song for those returning, so there was no foundation for my complaint. Still some people like me are never satisfied, and I find that it now is a bit on the slow side, but maybe that applies to me rather than to the music.I'm not asking for a further adjustment of two and a half per cent re-acceleration.
I'm also inclined to imagine that when people suddenly come across the words Lord behold us for Ron Bidmade they might think this is some sort of an obituary, and their reaction if they thought I had kicked the bucket might well be Lord Preserve us from any more like him.
So for better or worse I have to assure you all that I am alive and kicking and have every intention of presenting more and more of my drivel on this site for many years to come.
Ron
There could be some members who don't know there is a book still on sale called "Teacher's Tales" by J A Lawson. It was produced in 2005, and the proceeds were presented to the Trinity Academy, to help towards creating a TGS Alumni fund. Details about this can be found in the Notes section.
ReplyDeleteI helped to sell the books, and I have a few at my home which are on sale. The price of the book is £10 plus £1.00 postage in the UK and £2.00 outside the UK. The proceeds go towards the Alumni Fund.
It is important if you are interested in purchasing a book, that you send a personal message to me (click on my headshot above). I will then send my address so you can post a cheque together with your address. I will then send you the book, by return of post.
They will be sold on a first come first served basis.
Eileen
Anne,
ReplyDeleteI just got back from a long holiday and have spent a couple of hours catching up on the TGS news. Your comments on the Empire Hymn got me singing it, badly, as usual. I have never forgotten the first verse and the chorus but the second verse had gone totally from my memory. I always enjoyed the build up of the chorus, especially 'thus , when the trumpets sound' but could never, and still can't, hit the correct note for the word 'sound' at the end of the line. However, have managed to fake an alternative that satisfies me.
Mick.
Mick,
ReplyDeleteHope the holiday did you good. We had to sing the word "sound" as "sow-ownd" and the voice went up on the "ownd" bit. I hope that helps make your bathtime more melodious ! Thank your lucky stars you never heard my attempts at the descant !
Incidentally, was it you who got the Duke of Edinburgh's Gold Award ?
Anne
That was a long time ago Anne. I started the D. of E. when I was at TGS and finished it first year university. My Mum and Dad came down from Doncaster to Buckingham Palace to see the Duke present the award only to find that just one of them would be allowed in. My poor Dad who had done so much to encourage me had to stay outside. That took a lot of the pleasure out of the day for all of us.
ReplyDeleteMick.
I thought it was you, Mick ! Did you know that Mr Griffiths actually announced in Assembly that you'd got the Gold ? He gave a great long introduction about the D of E awards and how worthwhile they were and we were all expecting him to say that anyone interested should see him. Instead, he announced that you'd got the Gold.
ReplyDeleteAnne
Live and learn. That's news to me Anne but I hope Mr. Griffiths managed to get a programme going as this was very early days in the scheme which did eventually get well established in Britain and spread into the Commonwealth as well. I believe we were the first group to go to the palace and it was certainly a thrill to go down those corridors lined with oil paintings and then shake hands with the Duke and exchange a few tongue-tied words.
ReplyDeleteMick.
Prefects' Caps complete with Tassels.
ReplyDeleteBig School.
School Song in Latin.
Priority of Latin over all other subjects.
Morning Service (The Sung Service)
Rugby.
All these, and more, came to TGS with JEST.
WATCH THIS SPACE AND ALL WILL BE REVEALED ( Subject to the constraints of the Libel Laws.)
.
lol.. James.. you mean there was a time when TGS was NOT as you described!
ReplyDeleteThat is the TGS I attended, and felt good because I took Latin instead of German.
My nickname was 'virtus' said the latin way of course (not a quantum leap, as my name was Weir)from the school song.
I remember my time there with affection, and a sense of pride, but I had to wait until my middle years to continue with my academic studies, here in Australia.
I await your further revelations with eager anticipation .. perhaps a picture of what might have been?
Now for a more serious interlude.
ReplyDeleteTo understand the changes which befell TGS post 1929 come back with me to 1870 an the introduction of state elementary education with its limited objective to provide basic literacy and numeracy for the masses. However, by the 1890s it was becoming obvious that this was not enough. Britain's industrial and commercial supremacy was being threatened by the challenge from Germany, believed to be based upon her superior educational system. So we get the Balfour Act of 1902 which introduced State Secondary education aimed at supplying the NCOs and junior officers for commerce and industry.
To achieve this objective the leading politicians and senior Whitehall adminisrators, mostly Public School and Oxbridge graduates,were confident that they had the solution. The Public School ethos, with appropriate modifications, would be adopted by the new schools.
The way was now opened for JEST to burst upon the scene.
To be continued.
The practical needs associated with industrialisation, and the desire to Keep up with the Germans were no doubt major reasons for reform, but I think one might also mention the humanitarian and emancipatory surge of the 18th and 19th Centuries,more evident in France in literature and philosophy but perhaps implemented more in England - at least in patches- posssibly with a nudge from the Scots who,I think,had mass education a couple of centuries earlier.
ReplyDeleteAlso,The stultifying hand of the Church was also losing it grip,and in 1900 Labour politicians burst upon the scene.
Looking forward to the ontinuation,James.
.
What was JEST's background. Was he Public School and Oxbridge?
ReplyDeleteI think it will come in the next instalment Ches. J.A.L is just whetting your appetite!
ReplyDeleteJames has certainly whetted my appetite. This is history to which one can relate. All I can remember of my 1950's history lessons is Charlie Vickers banging on about the Egyptians, (pronounced egg-wipe-tians) and his being caught hiding in an Egyptian tomb, (the well of his desk), by P T Griffiths' sudden entry into the classroom. Charlie was a lovely man and a humorous teacher; it was the stuff that he had to try to instill into our overcrowded brains that we found difficult to appreciate. Although I passed History 'O' level I remember nothing else.
ReplyDeleteJames certainly knew JEST better than I, but he might agree with me: JEST was not one of the Public School & Oxbridge mandarins, just an alumnus of Birmingham,a red-brick place if ever there was one, almost as vulgar as the place I went to, University College London, founded by rabble -rousers,scorned as the Cockney University, and opening its doors to all comers irrespective of sex, religion,colour and class.JEST's favourite slogan was NIL NOVUM SUB SOLE. The Oxbridge types in charge of Policy, and the more or less wise,more or less ignorant county councillors knew that a good zookeeper appoints a cantankerous Alpha Male as Boss of the monkey house or there'll be nothing but bedlam and that's not what secondary education is supposed to be about, though it did happen in Mr xxx's and Miss yyy's class.
ReplyDeleteJEST's saving grace was his pride in His School and loyalty to the idea that TGS, being His School,was the greatest thing invented since the Garden of Eden.
Now let us give thanks for the seven years of Terror that saved us from the coalmine.
Hush. Less chatter at the back there. JAL, please continue.
ReplyDeleteInterlude to enable me to build up a new head of steam to reveal why Thorne might never have heard of JEST and future Reunions, or at least the 'Silver Backs' ( or should I say Silver Heads ?) among them, deprived of one major topic of conversation.
ReplyDeleteJ.A.L.
Ron, On reading yours of the 1st. June I thought I heard that booming voice, which which each morning filled Big School, declaiming ' Bidmade, No-one made a monkey out of me'. He would have been much mollified by your concluding sentence.
ReplyDeleteJ.A.L.
End of Interlude.
ReplyDeleteIn days long ago before JEST knew the difference between Vocative and Ablative or knew the correct pronunciation of SUMUS events were about to take place which would affect the lives not only of JEST but also of countless others east of Armthorpe,
Following the Balfour Act of 1902 decisions had to be made where the new Secondary Schools should be built and what type. In the case of Thorne it was decided that it should be a Rural Secondary School as befitted the rural nature of the area. Also it would be sited in Thorne. Other local villages believed that they had a better claim than Thorne and opposed the plan, though they could not agree which of them should have the new school. As for Thorne there was a strong body of opinion opposed to the whole plan. They claimed that , with Travis School, a Board School with infant and senior sections together with the Grammar School Thorne was well served.
There was also a feeling that the scheme would lead to an increase in rates with Thorne bearing an unfair burden for the benefit of other villages.
The upshot was that the education authorities concentrated their efforts elsewhere. ( Goole Secondary School was opened in 1909 ) Then came The Great War with further delays and so it was that when the question of secondary education for the area was again considered there was a new urgency caused by the development of the coalfield east of Doncaster.
And waiting in the wings now was JEST.
Can't wait ! the suspense is agonising.....much worse than waiting for the next episode of Dick Barton.
ReplyDeleteBut it's worth waiting for isn't it Pat?
ReplyDeleteI hesitate to correct a historian regarding a date, but the inter-school clean sweep at Mexborough took place in 1951. See the photo with all the trophies. The overhead walkway at Thorne North was indeed tested by the whole school as nunc canamus rang out. The infamous 'no oil in his lamp' dressing down of Mac refers to the 1948 inter-school cross-country race. See the photo with Alan leading off with me right at the back. The race was a disaster. First home for TGS was 5th and it wasn't Alan. Which reminds me: I was staying at the Westin Resort in Macau at the same time as the British Olympic team. I met Paula several times and each time thought of Alan. Why?
ReplyDeleteLike patabe - I can't wait. As I was around 1953 to 1959, I saw both JEST and PT Griffiths as Headmasters and I will very interested to learn of JAL's thoughts and comments on both.
ReplyDeleteTootle Pip
Ron
JEST was waiting in the wings, but would he ever make centre stage ?
ReplyDeleteHe was ambitious or why would he, with a Red Brick degree, have sought a post at Warwick School and not in some less prestigious institution ? He must have known that there was no future for him in Public Schools where promotion was the preserve of ex- public school men and Oxbridge graduates. Or was he aware of the possibilities in the new State secondary schools ?
His opportunity came from Thorne, a place which he had probably never heard of, where where the new secondary school would incorporate the old moribund Grammar School but retain the title of Grammar School. The Authorities would be looking for a man who would enhance the status of the new foundation. On the short list were
were three nominees of the West Riding Authority, probably with connivance of the Board of Education. One of these was JEST. The bait ? transfer to the new school when it opened provided the man appointed lived up to expectations.
JEST impressed and was appointed and spent the years until the opening of the new premises preparing for his magnum opus. Apart from prefects' caps , with tassels, what new features would he introduce to enhance the status of his school ? The Assembly Hall would be called Big School - a title straight fro the world he had left. ( I remember seeing a print of a Public School in the 18th, century in which all the pupils were being taught in groups in one large hall ) Then there was the Latin Grace. Not only was this said at school dinners but also after games on Saturdays , and woe betide any master who allowed the meal to start before JEST arrived and said Grace. The School song in Latin was a direct import from the public school world ( except Harrow )and has echoes of the Songs sung in many other schools. Then there was Rugby. ( 'A game for gentlemen pretending to be hooligans ') There is a photograph of Shipley, when at the Old Grammar School, seated with the school Association Foot ball team but when he came to the new school he changed the school game to Rugby, ( He once denounced soccer as a game for paid gladiators )
Finally there was the morning Service in Big School, an adaptation of Morning Chapel in many Public Schools to which JEST brought his experience as a Lay Reader in the Church of England.
This Service always began with the Collect for the Day. One began with ' O Lord, The day returns with its petty round of irritating concern and duties'. Some of us wondered whether he was making a formal complaint to the Almighty. The Collect continued ' Help us to play the man '. Some thought that strange when half the school were girls .
But joking apart, there were occasions when he was at his best at morning Assembly. Such a one was his swan song. It was the valedictory service for Bernard Hazelton who had died the previous week. He conducted it with great dignity and sincerity before marching slowly down the central isle. I was the last member of Staff he spoke to before marching to his study where he collapsed - a manner of departure, if not of timing , which befitted a man for whom the School was his life.
J.A.L
Maybe my memory's playing tricks, but I don't remember there ever being a central aisle in Assembly (though there was on Speech Day). The 6th. form sat on chairs, which stretched from one side of the hall to the other and everyone else sat on the floor, with the end girl in a row and the end boy being elbow to elbow next to each other. I remember Ship's final assembly, for he didn't look at all well and seemed very distressed at Mr Hazelton's death. However, as far as I recall, he exited stage left (looking at it from his viewpoint) as usual.
ReplyDeleteShip died in my 4th term at TGS, but I don't recall hearing the expression Big School at TGS either. Maybe it was used by people further up the school, but we just referred to the Hall. Perhaps the term had become archaic. I know some of Ship's other notions, such as having boys' staircases and girls' staircases, were.
I always wondered why Ship called the hall Big School. Mr Hazelton taught me geography Alevel...a brilliant teacher. He set up a weather station in the school yard near the caretaker's house. It was our job as his 6th form class to take the readings every day including the holidays !!
ReplyDeleteIn my time there was a wide central aisle in the Hall and when Ship came in in the mornng, we rose like a wave of the sea,starting at the back. No sitting on the floor,and no amorous elbowing. We were about 400 plus 20 teachers in 1935 (fourteen classes with about 33 pupils in each but much less in the 6th - I know it was exactly 33 in Form 3B in 1936 because I came 33rd in the half-term order out of thirty three. I thought of telliing my parents that 33rd was the highest, but knowng that it wouldn't work I signed my report card myself instead of bothering my father with it. I think the school was overwhelmed by numbers later on. They should have produced two or three clones to cope with this instead of cramming everyone into the old place or building ramshackle shacks around it.But it might have been difficult to clone JEST and some of the rest of us.
ReplyDeleteJames has given us a very good linsight into the origins of TGS and now it's up to those of us who attended up the time when he came on the scene to provide more tales of life there as we remember it in is the 30s, 40s.and 50s
There were 720 pupils or so in my day, around 120 of these being in the sixth form. I remember the first time I went into the Hall for assembly. Miss Haslar was our form teacher and she led us in. The sixth formers were sitting on their chairs, looking very aloof indeed, and Mr Colvin was on the platform, supervising the gathering and looking grim. He always told the boys at some stage "Now when you sit down, don't throw yourselves backwards" - until someone listed teachers' catch phrases in Acta one year. After that, he never said it again. We had to sit on the floor - and I occasionally got splinters to prove it - but there was no amorous elbowing. The only excitement for me was once when I was next to a boy (Dave Welch?) who ate an entire Mars bar during assembly ! The Head entered through the door near the stage on our right and took up position at the central table. I think the chair was supposed to be pulled out ready for Ship to stand at the table. One morning Pop Ward got a bit agitated and was hissing at the girl prefect who would read the lesson, telling her to move something. She couldn't understand him, but when Ship entered, he had to pull the chair back himself. This put him in a foul mood and I thought at the time it was a bit petty of him. When I began teaching myself, I heard morning assembly described as "a hymn, a prayer and a bollocking" and it often was in Ship's day. Anyone else remember how he used to read out the names of those who'd come first, second and third in the half-term and full-term tests ? This went on for ages and most people were glad when PT Griffiths chose not to do this. It might not have been too bad for those whose names were read out, but very boring for the majority !
ReplyDeleteYou are correct Anne - JEST entered and left the Assembly Hall by the double doors to the right of the stage - certainly in my time (1953 onwards) as did PT Griffiths. You have the description of the sixth formers off to a “T”. With the teachers along with a spattering of prefects sat on chairs along each side of the hall made the whole scene quite daunting that first year. I thought that the splinters were on the boys’ side of assembly and that it was only me that got snagged!
ReplyDeleteFrom memory I had the embarrassment of sitting next to a girl only once in assembly and that was in my first form – I soon wised up doing a quick head count as we lined up outside to ensure that I sat mid –stream and well amongst the boys. Mind you, from the fourth form on it was a different matter and no matter how I tried, I just couldn't’t make it!
Tootle Pip for now
I forgot to mention in my last entry that JEST did read out the riot act and headlines as he thought necessary but he quite often included praise for special sporting achievements made by his flock of pupils. For some reason, PT Griffiths would not do this which upset me on the occasion on my taking a ‘Hat-Trick’ for the 1st XI one weekend – JEST would have!
ReplyDeleteTootle Pip again
Sitting next to a member of the opposite sex in assembly....never in my time! A wide aisle divided us, and Ship strode majestically down the middle of it.....gown flying. I got splinters too, it's a wonder there was any floor left.
ReplyDeleteWhen was the new hall built? Some of you could be talking about a different hall altogether....although I can't see that there would be splinters in that floor.
The "new" hall, gym, laboratories, changing rooms etc were completed in 1960 according to the ACTA of that year
ReplyDeleteThank you Rod, I should have looked it up myself, but I got excited at the thought that girls and boys sat together.....never the twain shall meet in my day.....in fact girls would have been boys in my day if Ship was anything to go by!!
ReplyDeleteThe building of the extensions, "new" hall etc began when I was Lower Sixth and the vibrations from the building work loosened a lot of the plaster ceilings in the classrooms at the front of the school. This was only discovered when one of them descended. It was decided that it was too dangerous to have everyone in and so all but the examination years got a few days off. John "Sep" Saunders was Head Boy 1958/59 and after "A" Levels, he worked for a year on the building site. This was considered faintly scandalous for some reason ! I know some of the new buildings came into use during my Upper Sixth year, possibly during the summer term, for I remember having school lunch in the new dining hall. As far as I recall, the old hall continued to be used for assemblies and only became the library after I left. I certainly remember shedding the obligatory tears during my last "Lord, Dismiss Us", then wondering why, after I got home. Peer group pressure, I suppose, for all the other girls were snivelling away. I was glad to leave TGS, in actual fact.
ReplyDeleteMore later.
I wonder if anyone remembers the morning assembly when a boy called Sylvester Abbot called out from the floor to correct Jest who had mispronounced a girl students name. I fully expected thunder ,lightning and the March of the Valkyries to break out and engulf us all but as I recall it all passed over with barely a murmur. I was very impressed by the courage of Sylvester who I vaguely remember as being a different sort of a boy and certainly the only Sylvester at TGS.
ReplyDeleteI don't remember either the event or Sylvester himself, Mick. Was he in a year above you ?
ReplyDeleteI think the aforementioned Sylvester came from Armthorpe, I started at TGS in1953, Sylvester was in his second or third year at this time. I do not recall the event in assembly.Anyone know what happened to him?
ReplyDeleteA centre aisle or not in assembly? Sorry Eileen but my recollection is that no aisle existed and, had you had to sit on the boys' side, you too would be as certain as I am. The first stage in the process would take place when the call 'all stand' was made.The guy on the outside chair would move the chair in front of him a fraction to the right, nudge the guy to his left, who would do likewise and so on until, by the time the last boy in the row in front came to sit down, a full chair space had been formed and a full chair had 'disappeared' . 'Be seated' - hard to forget moments like that!
ReplyDeleteNice to hear from you Adrian.
ReplyDeleteBut senility has crept in here. If I can remember things that were not there, when your old memories are supposed to be stronger in old age, there isn't much hope for me!
As we were there more or less at the same time, you are probably right.........and me......dementia.......but I do remember that I sat on the floor until the third form, and never near a boy!!
When I was at TGS (1953 - 1960), only the Sixth Form sat on chairs. Years 1 - 5 all sat on the floor. I wonder if, when I joined the Lower Sixth, the new First Formers saw me as remote and aloof as I thought the Sixth Formers were back in 1953 ? They included Anne Straw, Delia Grant, Alan Overton and that mainstay of the opera, Brian Milner. I'm sure he was at TGS far longer than most people were - anyone know what happened to him?
ReplyDeleteKen, I believe Sylvester Abbot was same year as me so a couple ahead of you and the event took place either Sylvesters first or second year so he was just a nothing in the scheme of things which partly accounts for how dumbfounding an event I found it to be. Yes I think he was from Armthorpe but he was an invisible man. I don't recall him being at Armthorpe Juniors, I never saw him on the school bus to Thorne, he didn't play cricket or rugby and I can't recall him being in any of the classes. Also at some point he just ceased to attend the school. I too would like to know what happened to him.
ReplyDeleteKen, you are my source of information for esoteric events and people, such as half man-half orangutan Craggs, so if you dont know it will remain a mystery.
Mick, I'm afraid I cannot contribute much else about Sylvester, I had completely forgotten about him until Anne mentioned the name, I do recall him on the school bus but that's all, and as you say he was 'invisible'. A similar situation occurred at the college I attended, after 3 years a fellow student suddenly became a celebrity purely on account of having been anonymous since he started.
ReplyDeleteInteresting news this week, Peter Davies who came from the depths of Sykehouse and was in my year has, much to the surprise of most of Doncaster's inhabitants, and himself, has just been elected as Mayor of Doncaster, a position of some power and authority, watch this space!
Doncaster's 'other' Civic ie ceremonial Mayor, is Paul Coddington also of TGS and my half cousin.
Ken, there's some chat about Pete Davies becoming Mayor on the No-Thread Thread.
ReplyDeleteJames has enriched our knowldge of TGS and JEST and I hope he has more to say. I was impressed by cetain facts: e.g that our area was so slow in getting a grammar school because of bickering and dithering of local councils: and a new light is shed on JEST, who seemed such a conventional character but who we now know was a great gambler - what a catastrophe it would have been for him if he had not been appointed Headmaster! he might never have been such a big fish ( though in a small pond)if that hadn't happened.
ReplyDeleteJust a detail but it all adds to the mediaeval playlet of Assembly with Ship as the Star Turn. That is the opening of the show. All the kids were assembled (except for R.C's, Jews and the like) in ascending order from front to back. Cute Moore would be on stage orchestrating the whole thing. Waiting like a bald eagle ready to swoop on any miscreant. Prefects were awarded the privelege of lounging against the radiators at the back. Then the show was on the road. The sound of Ship EMERGING FROM HIS OFFICE. He would stop at the Double Doors, while we all waited for complete silence. Then the nearest prefect would holler "The Headmasterrrrrrr". I used to love that job. Then he would sweep through the Centre Aisle, with his gown flying behind. What an entry. What theatre.
ReplyDeleteBe happy Allan
By the time I reached the hallowed portals of TGS in 1954, the number of pupils which had to be packed into the hall for Assembly occupied what had been the Centre Aisle. J E Shipley-Turner, (and later P T Griffiths), had to enter by the front, right-hand doors adjacent to the stage still resplendent in cap and gown. Pupil numbers must have continued to increase because my 1st Form year was excluded from Speech Day due to lack of space. The following year 1st and 2nd Forms were excluded and the following year it became an Upper School only event unless, of course, one was a prize-winner, (something which I never achieved!). For some reason I never attended Speech Day during my Upper School years but cannot remember why. I do remember that Bill, my elder brother, used to think it was most unjust that he had to endure the rigours of Speech Day when both my sister and I were excluded from same.
ReplyDeleteWalk on part. One appearance only.
ReplyDeleteThe heavy Holy Bible was centrally placed on the lectern. Opening it at the appropriate place caused an imbalance. With two thirds of The Book hanging off lectern the bulk weighed heavily on my trembling arm. Ship's glower dimmed the stage. I read The Lesson under Mrs.Gosling's glare. Miss Jackson, resplendent in white aertex blouse and navy shorts, beamed a smile. 'Here endeth The Lesson' were the sweetest words I uttered.
Hello Shirley ~~~~~~~~~~ fast rewind to December 1950, and try reading the parthenogenetic bit whilst keeping a straight and suitably reverent face. I tried!!
ReplyDeleteKeep well etc. ~~~~ geoff.
......are we talking unfertilised usually female gamete, a mature sexually reproductive cell possessing a haploid (single) chromosome set and capable of imitating formation of a new diploid (twice haploid) individual by fusion with a gamete of the opposite sex? Give me a minute to think this one through. My brow is furrowed.
ReplyDeleteAs the story goes....... One December long long ago, the virgin birth..the miraculous conception not to be confused with immaculate conception, in the days before contraception, a child was born....
ReplyDeleteProbably lifted a few eyebrows even then.
Apologies for being obscure and raising a few furrows, but the "shepherds abiding in the fields" albeit two thousand years ago, was in mind. Your mention of Miss Jackson gently stirred a few grey cells ~~~~~ when the bright lads from 1 alpha and beta went along to our first P.T. session in 1944, we were confronted with said gym mistress. No street-cred in that! Unbelieveable !! Now Miss Jackson was a no-nonsense lady, and her response to us hanging around in the nice warm showers after gym was to stalk in and promptly turn off the hot water supply. Think of what the red-tops would have made of that in these enlightened days.
ReplyDeleteWe were greatly relieved when Reg. returned from war service. ~~ geoff.
On her watch, Miss Jackson would want to see all of you in rude health.
ReplyDeleteShirley - did you write 'rude' or 'nude'? - I couldn't quite make it out (I pick up my new specs tomorrow as it happens).
ReplyDeleteTootle Pip
Ron ~~~ glad to hear you're well and in your usual rude/nude state of health. Just takes longer for the penny to drop these days, that's all. You might forward your old pair of glasses, I think I could use some ~~ geoff.
ReplyDeleteThe shepherds washed their socks by night.......pause for speculation and another edit..some letters on my keyboard are in the wrong place.
ReplyDeleteDo any remember the Saturday morning detention ?
ReplyDeleteHear is a little story told me by a friend, a mere 84 year old. He was a member of the 1st. XV who had the misfortune to collect a detention. However he ad been tipped off by the team's captian to bring his rugby togs to detention. Just turned 9am JEST entered the detention room, went up to the lad and bellowed "What are you doing here ? Get out there and get changed "
J.A.L.
HERE I hang my head in shame !!! I have been entertained lunch and this lapse must be the result.
ReplyDeleteMiss Jackson was a real goer. Without any real knowledge of the Laws of the game, she taught us all abt Rugby and then did a tidy job of refereeing us in the games period. She even made the National Dailies for it, in the early 40's. And that took some doing when the broadsheets only had 4 pages in those days. Another lasting memory was her climbing up onto the desk in the Dom. Sci, room, grabbing a cricket bat, and showing us (well quite a lot) but mainly the off drive and sundry other strokes.
ReplyDeleteBe happy Allan
Jim - there is a song which goes "Nobody knows what goes on behind closed doors". You must have a million stories, but you manage to clam up real well. But the odd tiddler like the one up above keeps us all hot and sweaty waiting for the next revelation. Sometime next year I s'pose.
ReplyDeleteBe happy Allan
James, I am surprised! Any further repetition of this sort of thing and we''ll have to ask the Senior Management Committee to vet your list of lunchtime companions, but it sounds as though you enjoyed yourselves.
ReplyDeleteNow, July 1949, our avuncular Physics master "podge" Edwards left, I think to go to Doncaster Tech., which was a tad disappointing as he was a brilliant physics teacher. Miss Jackson left at the same time. Was this a simple coincidence, or was it a happy coincidence? I don't recall any mention being made of it at the time.
keep well and warm ~~~~~~~~~~ geoff.
Sorry Geoff, he was with members of the Senior Management, and we did!!
ReplyDeleteMr Edwards and Miss Jackson married and lived happily ever after - Noggy
ReplyDeleteI remember Mr.Edwards spoke about gradients. My mind was inclined to wander.
ReplyDeleteMr. Edwards also impressed on my mind that the linear coefficient of expansion of iron was .000018, with each digit being impressed on my brain by the simultaneous arrival of the blue physics book ~~~~~ I forget the writer but remember the colour. He also had an artistic frame of mind, ~~~~~ his definition of a cloud as "the visible top of an invisible column" was equally memorable.
ReplyDeletekeep well and warm ~~~~~~~~~~~ geoff.
You are absolutely spot on Geoff - Mr. Edwards was a brilliant teacher. I didn't know that he married Miss Jackson but I know he went to Doncaster Tech: Do you remember his aid to checking arithmetic by 'casting out the nines' or his frequent recommendations that we should read Paradise Lost ? Always interesting, always enthralling!
ReplyDeleteAido
Great to hear from you Aido. I remember him starting out his lessons on the lever by proclaiming to his assorted students "Give me a lever long enough and strong enough, and a place to rest my fulcrum, and I'll lift the Earth", which from the confines of the Physics Lab. at TGS sounded a pretty tall order. Am afraid I missed out on the Paradise Lost bit, and the substance of casting out the nines has also disappeared, but remind me next time we meet.
ReplyDeletekeep well and warm ~~~~~~~~~~~ geoff.
I was interested to learn that Mr. Edwards and Miss Jackson had married and lived happily ever after. We are all delighted when that is the way things work out.
ReplyDeleteHowever, unfortunately, in this case, with the evidence which is before me, I have have serious doubts that things worked out as has been suggested
Why ? 1. On the rare occasions in the days of JEST that a wedding was impending between members of the Staff he always gave them his blessing at a Staff Meeting and always included a coy reference to a ' bassinet' -
( which is 19th. century argot for cradle or possibly baby buggy ) The above mentioned couple were never prepared for matrimony in this way.
2. In the men's Staff Room, where Mr. Edwards was a respected member, we were aware that something might be in the air but it was never discussed. Some knew that Mr Edwards' daughters were strongly opposed to his re-marriage. ( Not an uncommon re-action )
3. It is well known that Mr. Edwards left TGS and went to Doncaster Tech. About the some time or shortly afterwards both Miss Whearat AND Miss Jackson left TGS for posts in the SAME school in Swindon. This seems, to a simple minded person like me, rather strange behaviour for a couple bent upon Holy Matrimony. In those days before the days of motorways visits between Doncaster and Swindon were time consuming. Of course there could have been some compelling reason for this change of habitat.
4. By far the most compelling reason for believing that they never married comes from my connections with the Swindon School which the two ladies joined - the Headlands Grammar School, Swindon. Shortly after the end of the last war a colleague of mine left the ship after six years service and joined the Maths staff of Headlands School. I used to visit him regularly until his death a few years ago and he kept me posted about Jacko and Wheary. They bought a country cottage outside Swindon where they lived until their retirement. He told me that Jacko lived a very active life both in school and out of school, Wheary died some time ago. Since then I have no further news, but of this I am certain - neither entered the marriage state.
All this is circumstantial evidence, though I find it compelling If however I can be proved to be wrong I shall find umble pie a delightful repast .
J.A.L.
>
Never mind the pie, James, but I think I owe you a pint for all that.
ReplyDeleteIn view of recent events, do I need to approach the Senior Management Committee before progressing with this idea?
keep well and warm ~~~~~~~~~ geoff.
As Rupert Brooke put it: "Intolerable consanguinity!". Pity! I liked both of them. I was surprised when we started Chemistry to find that the location of the geological strata that Mr Edwards cited in introducing us to the source of common chemicals (limestone, red sandstone, millstone grit etc) all lay conveniently along the railway line from Doncaster to North Wales, the route of my annual pilgrimage to my ancestral home. I mentioned this to him and discovered that he made the same annual pilgrimage. But for School Certificate I chose to drop Mr Edwards’ Chemistry (all those formulae to remember) in favour of Mrs Moseley's RI. The only lasting benefit is my ability to cite Acts of the Apostles Chapter 4 verses 32 to 4 as evidence that Christ inspired his followers to adopt socialist ideals.
ReplyDeleteMiss Jackson had many fine qualities, some of which Allan Swales is more familiar with than I am. But she and I shared the third desk of the second violins in the 1948 production of Patience, and she taught me that we could get away with playing only the first note of each triplet in that very fast accompaniment to the Bunthorne and Grosvenor duet in Act 2. (“A most intense young man, a soulful eyed young man” etc). She stressed that the important thing was that our bowing was synchronised to fool LW and the audience. I don't think LW was fooled.
But I have two questions to put to Noggy – at the beginning of the Spring Term 1950, following the departure of Gerald Vessey and I think Roy Arthur at Xmas '49, two of us were elevated from sub to full prefect status. I was one, and I believe you were the other. Am I correct? I was never able to claim my rightful allocation of shelf space in the “Black Hole” at the boys’ end of the science corridor but I did sport the tassel for a couple of terms.
And for the record how did Ron transmogrify to Noggy?
Geoff - if it was sky blue you are dealing with Bartons "Heat." Penguin book size but hard backed.
ReplyDeleteBe happy Allan
Hello Allan, the circumstantial evidence you quote is compelling ~~~~~~~~ blue cover, book on "heat", must have had .000018 in it dozens of times, and memorably very hard backed. My thanks, and keep well.
ReplyDelete~~~~~~~~~~ geoff.
Not circumstantial Geoff. Just got a long term memory. Don't ask me if I had Bran Flakes or Porridge for breakfast today - cos I just cannot remember. But to go back 60 odd years, no prob.
ReplyDeleteBe Happy Allan
Ditto, long term memory, Allan, and a final one from me on our revered Physics master, Mr. Edwards. He was also noted for his little homilies to the class. December 1949, and he said to us that it must be nice for any young lad to be able to go home for Christmas, having done well in his end of term Physics test. This was indeed a novel idea ! To encourage us, he announced a prize for the lad with the highest marks in the test he was about to spring. The prize? unbelievable, but true ~~~ 3 optical filters, green, blue and red ~~~ I suppose if you had a torch, you could project coloured discs onto the ceiling if you thought about it. The winner? ~~ one of the lads from the alpha side of the class, who to his intense chagrin, was promptly nicknamed " Filt". Surprising what fills the long term memory box isn't it? Perhaps I could ask James to peek into his ditty box, and see if there's anything there about Miss Lyall, our English teacher, who departed July 1948, for parts unknown.
ReplyDeleteKeep well and warm ~~~~~~~~~ geoff..
Geoff,
ReplyDeleteMiss Lyall and I were like ships that pass in the night. I came on 1st. March and she left in July 1947. In those days the Ladies' Common Room was rather rather like a nunnery with Mrs. Martin acting as the Abbess. I gather that Miss L. was not interested in an elderly 32 year old ; indeed , I am told that she held me in very low esteem.
Would you believe it that when, much later a Joint Common Room was established, quite a number of the ladies preferred to meet in the Ladies retiring room rather than in the new common room.
J.A.L.
Having experience of both types of common room, I must admit I find it quite believable, James.
ReplyDeleteAs for Miss L, I understand she left the boys a bit weak a t the knees !! However,her claim to fame in my estimation was her undoubted skill at teaching grammar, especially clauses......wonderful !!! However, even that pales before rotten boroughs being taught by a certain Mr L. Anyone who can imbue a sense of sheer impish delight into that lesson must be held in very high esteem.
We've talked abt Female teachers and abt Math teachers, but not the twain. I was reminded cos Miss Lyall lodged just round the corner from me - just by the Bull Ring in Lime Tree Grove. Another lodger there was Miss Bonnington - a little dwtty young woman. She was quite competent but swimming agst the tide of public opinion really. Nobody believed in combining women and maths. I am tempted to say that even now they have difficulty counting up to .............but I am not.
ReplyDeleteBe Happy Allan
Can you interpret dwtty Allan please? ditty? dotty?.......
ReplyDeleteIt would also be useful to know (forthe sake of mathematical precision) whether a little dwtty young woman is a young woman who is little and dwtty or a young woman who is a little dwtty
ReplyDeleteA neat and tidy package comes to mind, but we'll have to wait and see until Allan pronounces. In the meanwhile, any chance of a photo, Allan, to adorn these columns? Something bardic or druidic would be fine, and nicely off-set Ron's old sea dog portrait.
ReplyDeletekeep well and warm ~~~~~~~~~ geoff.
Women and maths...their perspective on different angles is cute...
ReplyDelete'A man has one hundred dollars and you leave him with two dollars. That's subtraction.' Mae West
'I'm a marvellous housekeeper. Every time I leave a man I keep his house. How many husbamds have I had? You mean apart from my own?' Zsa Zsa Gabor.
'If all the girls from Yale were laid end to end I wouldn't be surprised' Dorothy Parker.
One way or another it all adds up.
If we are quoting what about.???.......
ReplyDelete" When sleeping beauty woke up she was about 50 yrs old" I think I was younger than that when I "woke" up ....some women never do !
"Marilyn Monroe was a female impersonator: we are all trained to be female impersonators." Of course with some of us it doesn't work.
and my favourite..." time and trouble will tame an advanced young woman , but an advanced old woman is uncontrollable by any earthly force"
Calculate: Given that a digression has no bearing on a main subject, how long does it take a constable to formulate a reproof? Ascertain by computation.
ReplyDeleteHere are some of my favourite quotes :
ReplyDeleteGood girls go to heaven, bad girls go everywhere. (Helen Gurley Brown)
Age to women is like Kryptonite to Superman. (Kathy Lette)
Whatever women do they must do twice as well as men to be thought half as good. Luckily, this is not difficult. (Charlotte Witton)
Being a woman is a terribly difficult task, since it consists principally in dealing with men. (Joseph Conrad)
Women now have choices. They can be married, not married, have a job, not have a job, be married with children, unmarried with children. Men have the same choice we've always had: work or prison. (Tim Allen)
When women are depressed they either eat or go shopping. Men invade another country. (Elayne Boosier)
If I saw what I thought I saw, I hope I didn't see it ! (Mrs Martin, upon seeing two Lower Sixth formers exchange a kiss on Sports Day 1959)
On a more serious note, James's comment about the women's staffroom operating as a sort of nunnery brought back a few memories. When I started teaching in 1964, equal pay for women teachers was already a fact of life - and did some of the men still resent it ! My first school was called a "comprehensive phase 1", which meant it was the old grammar school in new buildings and destined to go comp at some stage. Staffrooms were separate, but the duplicator lived in a walk-in cupboard in the men's staffroom and so we women (much fewer in number) had to go in to use it. The younger women often stayed for a quick cup of coffee, but we had to be careful not to outstay our welcome - as I recall, some of the men became resentful if a woman was still there when second sitting school lunch came out. The attitudes of certain male staff would now be called sexist and this was brought home to me forcibly in 1967. That was an interesting year for me, for in May I stood as a straw candidate in what was supposed to be a safe Labour ward, won it by 44 votes and unseated a Labour councillor who was not only long-serving but also the Mayor-elect. (They had to find someone else in a hurry !) I was only 25 and became the youngest member of the Council, so I got a lot of publicity. Most of my colleagues were either pleased for me or saw it as a good opportunity to pull my leg, but it was very obvious that some of the men resented a mere woman getting elected unexpectedly in the first place. Anyway, not long after this the Derby took place and one Gordon Smith as usual organised the school sweep at £1 an entry, the first prize being £25, the second £10 and the third £5 (all well worth winning in those days). I didn't even know I'd drawn a horse, but got a message during last lesson asking me to see Mr. Smith in the male staffroom at the end of school. I'd drawn Royal Palace, the winner, and Gordon handed over £25 ! Then all hell broke loose, for a surprising number of the men started mouthing off about how one of them "should" have won, for they had "bills to pay" and the like. My retort was did they think I lived on a park bench ? Of course, they thought I'd spend it all on clothes, perfume etc, as I was a single woman. That was the attitude of a certain type of male teacher then - they thought women would teach for a few years and then leave to have children, so it wasn't fair to pay us the same as men who be teachers for ever. The fact that half the women staff were unmarried and over 40 seemed to have escaped them, as had the women teachers who had returned after having children. As I recall, members of the NAS were the most resentful and, I must admit, I laughed my socks off, when they eventually combined to become the NAS/UWT. When extensions were finally built, the staffroom became larger and mixed and reactions were similar to what James said happened at TGS. Most people soon got used to the idea, but when I left a year later, some staff were still using the cookery and woodwork rooms as annexes to the main room, rather than mingle at break and lunchtime with the opposite sex. Mixed staffrooms, though, did a lot to knock sexism on the head, I'm glad to say. It's incredible now that once male teachers objected to equal pay on the grounds, among others, that it would mean more women becoming headteachers and taking jobs away from men !
ReplyDeleteSome men (mostly grumps and bores) revel in, or take refuge in all-male company. Some women may be like that too. I really don't want to know them - invite me to an all-male party and you can be sure I won't be there.If this website were for men only, how many of us would be members?Not me. Does anyone know of a male, or female alumni site that flourishes like this one?
ReplyDeleteProfessionally, there is still some way to go, though I'm surprised to hear that it existed
Some men (mostly grumps and bores) revel in,or take refuge in,all-men institutions and gatherings.Invite me to an all-male party and you can be sure I won't be there. Has anyone heard of a one-sex alumni site that flourishes like this one?
ReplyDeleteI'm surprised that discrimination existed in teaching long after 1945. I believe that up to 1939 married women could not be employed in state schools.It would have been better to exclude single men.
Sorry for going off into a foreign language. DWT means little/small etc. DWTTY/DWTTI is just an affectionate usage, rather than being totally specific. You are still little, but we don't hold it against you, and love you all the same.
ReplyDeleteIsn't school a funny place. In my last job female staff were finally recruited on to the shop floor and into supervisory positions. It was a works rule that all site workers had to shower at end of shift, so separate facilities of toilets, changing rooms, showers had to be built for the girls. To ensure their modesty all the girls were issued with a key and it was kept locked. But what to do in an emergency? No prob. A spare key was held by a gay male member of staff!!! I am not joking. But now for the crunch. It was surprising how many blokes got lucky, and were invited to share an end of shift shower. Hot blooded see.
Girls can cause probs tho. The female supervisor reported in at 06.00 and was briefed on her initial duties. Just to be friendly, I was in the habit of saying "Hyah tuts" and then getting down to business. Of course one day it had to happen and she was greeted by "Hyah tits". Luckily she was well endowed, and was pleased to hear they got recognition!!!
But to get back to Miss Bonnington, cos there has been no recognition signal. She was under 5 ft. Competent at Math. Just looked a bit comical walking down the corridor with other members of staff, having to take enormous strides to keep in step.
Be Happy Allan
Wow, Ann, at last a soul mate ! I had the Charlotte Witton quote on my desk at work. It helped calm me down when working with men.I retired at the same time as six male colleagues and at our retirement dinner I quoted Witton and much to my surprise they cheered me..I had been the only woman head out of twelve in Bradford so I'm not sure if the cheering was ironic or relief that they wouldn't have to put up with me any more.
ReplyDeleteAnother was " One thousand lemmings can't be wrong " .....produced a wry smile and put things in perspective when trying to get the accounts done.....not my strong point.
When I started teaching equal pay had just arrived but only by stages so for several years I worked for less money than my male colleagues. In one school the men used one side of the staffroom and women the other. I was amazed on my first week when the men went into a huddle if any decisions were to be made and then the deputy head came over and told us what had been decided. I voiced my objections to this state of affairs and didn't stay there very long.
Pat, it's Anne-with-an-e !
ReplyDeleteThings weren't as bad when I began teaching in 1964, though the men's staffroom had a "Senior Man", the Head of Maths who was paid extra for being Senior Man, but the women's staffroom didn't have a Senior Woman. (A question for James - was Mr Colvin the official Senior Man at TGS ?) It was more a question of the attitude of certain men and age didn't seem to have much to do with it. I taught in a huddle of top floor classrooms with David Wilson, my own HOD, plus the Head of French and the Head of German. They were all in their late forties and had no problems whatever with women teachers - as far as they were concerned, all that mattered was if you did your job properly or not. I was given a little Sixth Form teaching in my probation year, did well at it, got far more in my second year and was promoted to Second in Dept in my third year of teaching. The trouble was men of all ages who thought we women saw teaching just as a stop-gap until we acquired a husband and had children. Their argument was it really took five years or so to become an accomplished teacher and by then many women had quit to have a baby. That type resented women putting their oar in at staff meetings as well ! Looking back on it, though, I think the fact that my first school was a grammar school in "comprehensive phase 1" guise had something to do with it. The old male/female divide still existed in their minds. In 1973, after two promotions, I moved on to become a Head of Year in a large Newcastle comprehensive school. It was one of those massive places beloved of the 1970's and had problems of its own, but one thing in its favour was that on the whole men and women operated as equals. The staffroom was mixed and though a couple of groups in it were predominantly male, that seemed based on common interests and they didn't start quacking if a woman joined them at break or lunchtime. In fact, I was invited to join one such group, once they found I wasn't bad at the Times crossword ! My former school went fully comp a year after I left and a lot of the old guard soon took early retirement, rather than cope with former secondary modern kids - and it made me smirk, when I heard that a lady teacher from one of the old secondary mods had reported one of the worst offenders to the Head for making sexist remarks. He had his knuckles rapped by the Chairman of Governors as well !
Hi Anne, sorry, I tend to go for the easiest spelling if there is a choice and it has been mentioned before on this site when I went for an American spelling 'cos it was shorter so perhaps i ought to mend my ways !
ReplyDeleteYour resume sounds very much like mine only a few years later. I think it is getting better. As I said before I was the only female secondary school head in Bradford for many years but now they have several. To get back to TGS....did you find sexism there or had they learnt to hide it by your time? I can remember being annoyed that we had a ATC unit for the boys but nothing for the girls and that the girls were expected to turn up to do the teas for the boys rugby matches ......no boys doing it for the girls hockey matches. ...and the subtle but difficult to put your finger on discrimination that was fairly prevalent in those days. I suppose I should be thankful that I became aware of it so young and learnt to subvert it when ever possible.
I can remember being asked in a job interview what my husband thought of having to move home if I got it !! Also at a headship interview how would I deal with boys who had to be disciplined. I asked if they had asked the male interviewees a similiar question re girls.......don't think that went down well !
J.A.L. told us once that at his interview with Ship he was advised to treat the girls like cabbages......those were the days!!!!
Believe it or not, Pat, I was named after Anne of Green Gables and I guess you know how particular she was at being Anne-with-an-e !
ReplyDeleteRegarding TGS, even as a lowly first former, I couldn't see the sense in the boys' staircases/girls' staircases system we had during Ship's day. Okay, maybe on one side of the school there were the cloakrooms and toilets and on the other there were the staffrooms, but there was never anything spicy to see as regards either. After all, the cloakrooms never disgorged hordes of nude pupils and even if the male staff had removed their trousers at break, the clouds of cigarette smoke would have stopped anyone seeing them do it ! I thought then - and still do - that it was a rule for the sake of having a rule and it was completely pointless for a girl who had, say, lesson 1 in room 5 and lesson 2 in room 10 to have to battle her way the length of the corridor, up the girls' staircase and along the top corridor, when she could have nipped up the "boys' staircase" and been there in a few seconds. It was the same with the gates. I can see why one gate should be for staff only, as some arrived in cars, but why segregate the entrances by gender as well ? PT Griffiths obviously felt the same way about it as I did, for one of the first things he did was make the staircases and gates unisex. The ATC didn't bother me, for I had no interest that way, and nobody ever asked me to prepare refreshments for anything but Sports Day, but I think at the time society generally saw women of being less than men's equals. My mother's other children were much younger than me and I sometimes went with her, when she took the baby to be weighed etc at the clinic. It used to horrify me when mums complained to each other about such things as a husband being so annoyed at the new baby not being a boy that he hadn't give his wife any extra housekeeping since it turned up and she was having problems managing. The awful thing was how they accepted this as much as they resented it. I thought, catch me putting up with that sort of thing - and I never have ! Girls were also expected to do a lot round the house, while boys as like as not just went out and played football ! I mentioned this to my mother once and all she said was that was the way things were and I'd better put up with it ! Two things I did notice about TGS was that it was always the Head Boy who made a speech, if one was required, and never the Head Girl. Also, when Mrs Gosling was Acting Head after Ship's death until the arrival of PT Griffiths, at the end of the Spring term a presentation was made to her in acknowledgement of the good job she had done. (She had, as well). Various male members of staff praised her, but what sticks in my mind was what was said by one of them (maybe Pop Ward, but I don't know now), namely how impressed they were that "she, a woman" had done such a magnificent job. Nowadays I'd think "sexist pigs" or "condescending sods", but at the time it was probably "cheeky buggers". (Apologies to anyone who has the vapours at such vocabulary). Nobody will be surprised at my becoming a feminist at university or, as we called it then, a women's libber. In the USA, years ago, one brand of cigarettes, Virginia Slims, was aimed at women and the slogan was "You've come a long way, baby". One advert for them read ""Back then, every man gave his wife at least one day a week out of the house. You've come a long way, baby"
Indeed we have, indeed we have.
So we have,Anne, an aquaintance of mine who worked in the engineering dept at Bradford university,ran a degree course to train problem solvers for modern industry and he preferred to recruit women ('cos they are lateral thinkers) who had done languages at Alevel. Perhaps they are waking up (just) to the fact that we cannot afford to waste the talent of half our young people.
ReplyDeleteThey used to think it was in the genes for most boys to achieve better than girls at school but now the playing field is more even and girls are outstripping the boys, they are in a panic and the education system must be wrong.
Going back to the fifites....those gym slips !!!! Riding a bike to school in the wind and rain in one of them not to mention the obligatory school beret was a feat worthy of wonder woman. Can you imagine Mrs Gosling's face if I had turned up in trousers? I hope the girls at the Academy are allowed trousers ....do you know, Eileen? ( and ,by the way, thanks for your initiative in getting our venue booked for the reunion)
It's funny, when you think about it now, but a girl turning up at TGS in trousers would have had Mrs Gosling in full harpy mode, but, if you forgot your shorts, they sent you out on to the hockey pitch in your navy blue knickers without a second thought ! I'm sure boys occasionally forgot their shorts, but I don't recall ever seeing one of them running around in his underpants. Another thing I remember (and which I mentioned on the old site) was the question of girls wearing watches. Some girl had her watch stolen and Mrs G dealt with this by decreeing that no girl in years 1 - 5 could wear a watch in school. Boys, on the other hand, could ! Sometimes in the Thursday girls' assembly we all had to raise both arms in the air so that teachers could see if we were wearing an illegal watch. This rule seemed to lapse of its own accord during PT Griffiths's régime.
ReplyDeleteWhy did we put up with things like that - and why did our parents ? I'd like to see a school getting away with that sort of rule nowadays.
Pat, the girls at the Academy may wear trousers,long black stockings, (yes) or socks. They have a choice.
ReplyDeleteI have to ask, Eileen, but are the Academy even-handed in all this? Do the boys get a choice ? Skirts maybe not, though I don't see why not. Perhaps a kilt then. Now there's something, but I think we've had this debate before.
ReplyDeleteKeep well etc. ~~~~~~~~~~ geoff.
We seem to be heading for a reductio ad absurdum now ! However, I still think it unfair that during Old Ma G's "Reign of Terror" Lower and Middle School boys could wear watches, but girls couldn't. Pat, another example of sexism was when we chose O Level options. I was in 4 Arts and Domestic Science and Chemistry were timetabled together - Chem for the boys and DS for the girls ! Some of us went to see PT Griffiths, who agreed that we could take Chemistry instead. Guess who Mrs G later told off for being spokesperson ? Yes - me !
ReplyDeleteI believe you, Anne. I'm afraid I wasn't one of Dora's buddies. She took us for compulsory RE in the 6th. She seemed to be a bit put out by my enthusiasm for judaic myth/history side by side with my atheism.....but probably not.She was a wiley old bird.
ReplyDeleteWhen our options came up all the girls were put into the biology class and the boys into Physics. I think two or three of us rebelled at this and insisted on taking physics.....Cute Moore who was head of science then ,interviewed us and as a great privilege we were allowed to take this really,really difficult subject that was a more suitable for boys brains !!
One of my daughters attended a girls'school where, after acquiring her uniform,she had to kneel in front of the headmistress to ensure that the skirt touched the ground. Anything shorter would have been tabu.She only lasted a year and then was much happier in the local comprehensive-type school. She didn't get no latin there but later on got a good degree in modern. languages. The only sartorial regulation for boys that I remember at TGS was that you were allowed to wear an open-necked shirt in the summer term.Once a boy was caught by JEST wearing such a garment out of season. "Mr Brooks said we could" said the poor miscreant and JEST screamed petulantly " He's not Headmaster, I'm Headmaster!"
ReplyDeleteWhat bothers me a bit is Pat's reference to a problem-solving expert who thought that girls were better at "lateral thinking". This catchword was invented by Edward de Bono,the Maltese Guru. Surely any serious thinking involves not just thinking of, but thinking about -i.e.forward and backward,not just sideways. W.Churchill knew how to do this- when asked whether he really believed the nonsense the astrologers whom he cosulted told him he said Of course not, but Hitler does!
ReplyDeleteWhereas the bone-headed generals in 1940 couldn't stretch their thoughts far enough,back or sideways, to imagine the Germans pushing through rough terrain and sneaking in on the right flank: had they never heard of Hannibal crossing the Alps, etc,etc?
I know a man who has to do a lot of calculation and planning. He was once sent on a Lateral Thinking Course. I asked him what he had learnt and he said Absolutely Nothing.
Whether girls can think better or worse than boys I dont know, and the fact that the "Great Thinkers" have mostly been men would only indicate that men have generally had more time and leisure for such pursuits than women.
It might also indicate that women were kept too busy with pregnancy, child-rearing and running a home to spare too much time for Great Thinking ! And also, it's only comparatively recently that it was considered worthwhile to educate girls to the same level as boys !
ReplyDeleteOh yes, Geoff. I am sure that if a boy wanted to go to school in a skirt and black stockings, no one would deny him the chance to do so.
ReplyDeleteDon't encourage him, Eileen !! He's in his fighting for the rights of men mode. Got a real shock when he read in the paper that scientists are now producing sperm in vitro. Don't think the traditional way will ever go out of fashion though.
ReplyDeleteHi Ron, not surprised your friend learnt nothing on his lateral thinking course.....you can't learn it, you are born with it and then it's nurtured by running a home, caring for a housefull of children and holding down a job at the same time. I do agree that most of our great thinkers so far have been men, probably for the reasons you state but I was talking of a specific situation and rejoicing in the fact that at last some one had recognised women's ability in this area and even went so far as to utilise it......so, wow, isn't it about time!
I think lateral thinking involves backward information, forward planning and looking at a problem from every side. The comment re languages I thought very interesting. They say fluency in languages uses parts of the brain not used by other disciplines.....is that why you and Anne have such lively minds? However if I might put in a word for the study of history.......anyone making decisions without a sound knowledge of the history of the environment in which they operate is skating on very thin ice indeed. Churchill was a great leader because he knew his history. Wish I could say the same for the leaders, both capitalist and political, of our western world today.
Thanks for saying I have a lively mind,Pat, but I often find it is dead sluggish.Like yesterday when I drove to the mailbox,a mile away, posted my letter,couldn't get back into my car because I had locked it, had to walk home in the 30C midday sun to get a spare key and walk back again...Ive only done this once before, at the same time last year but perhaps it will become an annual event...
ReplyDeleteI don't know whether knowledge of languages gives any intellectual benefit:
I agree that decision-making requires a knowledge of history. But that's very tricky for instance I think you have to be able to read in a couple of European languages to know about the past, and even then if you read an English book about Napoleon you may think he doesn't at all resemble the chap you read about in a French book. Translations are useful, but of course Traduttore Traditore. And I wouldn't want to read a book about Turkish history written by a Turk (or a Greek) so what do you do ? You can't read everything in all languages.
I remember tuning in to Swiss radio during the war: it was a way of escaping the embroideries of the Ministry of Information: you got the story from both sides, but of course you had to understand German or French.
Congratulations to Barry Marks, a member of this site, and a pupil at TGS from 1963 - 1970, who retired as head of PE this week.
ReplyDeleteBarry was also a PE teacher at TGS from 1974 until it closed in 2005.
I am also proud to say that Barry, a Moorends boy, was one of my nursery children at West Rd Infants, when he was three!
I have posted a full account about Barry in the Thorne and District blog. Please add anything you might want to say on here.
Good morning,Ron. Your " annual event " may have been hard work but at least you were able to do it ! I think a few of us may have struggled.Where is the 30C in Canada or Malta.....it helps ,if for those of us who are more or less static, we can visualise where you are
ReplyDeleteAs for history books ...if you are expecting to get the whole unvarnished truth from any of them you will be sadly disappointed but isn't the study of history looking at all sources you can get your hands on and making your own mind up with a strong pinch of salt handy. It must help to be able to do it in other languages. I had a tutor who used to say "you are the world's leading expert on your opinion" Being rather self opinionated from an early age it was something I'd always believed anyway!!
Listening to Swiss radio during the war must have been interesting.....what did you learn anything from it? you mustn't dismiss the rest of us as too ignorant. I can remember my father protesting at some of the stuff we listened to.....he'd say that's a load of rubbish.What about .....and go on to disparage the report. Our parents had learnt a great deal from surviving the depression and the miners strike and were very sceptical about any official information so I think a lot of us in mining villages were not taken in by the Ministry of Information. Today if you speak to young people in the mining areas who lived thro the strike of 1984 you will find a strong streak of scepticism re goverments/politics because what they saw happening then, wasn't what was reported to the rest of the country or written up in the "history" books.
I suppose what I'm really nattering about is that if we have a grain of sense life teaches us all to have a healthy cynicism and how biased we become depends on how much we have learnt/can appreciate the other point of view. That tolerance can be nurtured by good history teaching which has been sorely missing in schools recently.Lack of it leads to a BNP being elected MEP for Yorkshire. But that, of course, is only my opinion!!!!
Congratulations to Barry Marks, a member of this site, and a pupil at TGS from 1963 - 1970, who retired as head of PE this week.
ReplyDeleteBarry was also a PE teacher at TGS from 1974 until it closed in 2005.
I am also proud to say that Barry, a Moorends boy, was one of my nursery children at West Rd Infants, when he was three!
Barry then went on to teach my two sons and also my two grandsons!
I have posted a full account about Barry in the Thorne and District blog. Please add anything you might want to say on here.
Pat, I am in
ReplyDeletePat,I am in the depths of the forest of western Quebec,where you can hear lake water lapping with low sounds on the shore, and the 30 deg weather only lasts a few days and then subsides,whereas in Malta at this time of the year it climbs to 40. One of the very few sensible things I ve done in my life is this annual migration.
ReplyDeleteWhen writing my last comment I was thinking of a report in an English paper that students are less interested than ever in learning foreign languages.
Learning a language is much more than being able to say or understand the same thing with different words. It never is the same thing!
At this moment my granddaughter is on a summer course in Copenhagen which incudes a 6week Introduction to Danish. It will never be of any practical use to her but it may open her mind to the Scandinavian way of looking at things,which is as different from the English one as the English is from the Ialian.
Good day Ron, Quebec is very, very big and has an awful lot of lakes something to do with glaciation according to Miss Goddard. The natives speak French and Wolfe won the Battle of Quebec by climbing up some cliffs.. That is all I know about Quebec......should I be ashamed of myself?
ReplyDeleteMy granddaughter is doing an engineering taster course this summer courtesy of the National Academy for talented children. She wants to be an aeronautical engineer and says languages are a waste of time 'cos everyone speaks English anyway.This in spite of the fact that her school offers a variety of European languages as well as Mandarin Chinese and Japanese. Can you imagine Ship's reaction to having Japanese on the curriculum.
Oh, the confidence of youth. I wish my life contained such certainties.
I have always been intrigued by dialect and as our captive linguistics expert you may be amused by one of my earliest recollections.
Moorends pit was sunk in 1926 and by the early 30s miners were flooding into the newly built village from Wales, Ireland, Durham, midlands and other parts of Yorkshire. ( who were not by any means in the majority and the village was practically cut off from all other forms of society with one road in and out)) yet tho' all our parents spoke in different dialects, all the children spoke broad yorkshire.
It's very odd the way a language can have so many dialects. Do you think there will ever come a time when we can no longer understand one another's spoken English but the written word will still show it is the same language ( I believe this already happens in the far East where the written word is based on pictograms) or will modern communication gradually wipe out all the differences? I find it difficult to understand spoken Strine now. Will it move further away from "standard" English ?
People say since radio etc dialects have been dying out. Which may be true in rual areas of England but city dialects are on the increase and world wide there are so many more....and another thing when does dialect become pidgin English?
So much to be interested in so little time left !!!!
It would be hard to explain the differences in attitude towards the learning of foreign languages. They vary from Goethe's pronouncement that a German should learn all languages so that he can go anywhere and no one will be a stranger in his house,to the antipathy towards all things foreign that lingers in many countries. Then there is the experience of a Dutch friend of mine -"You are told at an early age that you'll never get a decent job if you don't know at laeast 3 languages" There is the also the French view- I impose my language - if someone does not have the education and culture to speak French I want nothing to do with him.Finally the Anglo-American:Waste of time: everybody speaks English.This is the source of many misunderderstandings. If Chamberlain had just known a bit of German he might have understood what Paul Schmidt, Hitler's interpreter was hinting at, but didn't dare to say, and wouldn't have come back to UK and blurted out Peace in our time.
ReplyDeleteIt's also hard to understand why we spoke Yorkshire as kids when for instance in Broadway so many of the people were Irish Geordies, but one good thing was that we had language training from the age of 5. Then you had to know Teacher English so that when the Teacher said Where's the bin you didn't reply 'ome for mi dinner.The prefects called upon to read the lesson at TGS seemed a bit perplexed - they accepted that they had to sound their aitches, but were unsure about the long southern "a" sound. Fortunately, I was never considered holy enough to be selected for that function.
I
On re-reading earlier contributions I gained the impression that Mrs Gosling was an ardent anti-feminist. Permit me to make a mild corrective to this view.
ReplyDeleteJEST died in the autumn of 1954 and the following year TGS was due to be the venue of the Inter School Sports. One day after the funeral she call Reg Clayton and me into her room,. Reg was in charge all the athletic arrangements while I was responsible for all other administration. She said that the other four headmasters in the group were suggesting that the Sports be transferred to one of their schools. She asked both of us how our arrangements were going. Then she said: "The Sports will be held here".
Clearly something of the Pankhurst spirit motivated her. I sometimes think that Dora was an unfortunate name for a girl to have in the post Great War years. It reminded people of the highly unpopular D.O.R.A. which had imposed severe restrictions during the first World War and was highly unpopular.
J.A.L.
Hello Ronquebec ~~~ not holy enough ?? With such a beard I expect you're able to walk on water [watter] should the occasion demand. I think I have your migratory pattern sorted after wondering how you could lose a car on something the size of Malta, which for all I know isn't even the size of a well-known Principality.
ReplyDeleteTo my recall, the lunchtime incident actually took place in form 4A's classroom in Armthorpe's old tin rattler, one day circa 1944. The trainee teacher originated from south of Bawtry, which is where the South began. It was repeated in a well-known broadsheet some years later, and I just wondered how it got to Quebec or Malta as the case might be.
keep well and warm ~~~~~~~~~~ geoff.
Good morning Ron,......so true, I have worked with German and French assistants in schools for many years and always heaved a sigh of relief when the later left and always wished the Germans could stay longer. All to do with attitude but didn't know it was anything to do with Goethe.
ReplyDeleteYour historical snippet about Munich was fascinating and new to me. I don't suppose it would have altered anything tho'. Chamberlain was desperate to believe Adolf and he had plenty of other people at home and in Germany warning him and wouldn't believe them either. We might have been a bit quicker at rearming. I had never thought about the influence of interpreteters on history. Someone somewhere must have written a thesis on it I'm sure !
I hope you continue to enjoy your sojourn in Quebec. Sounds like you have it made !!!
We are off to Cornwall with ten teenage boys, our grandsons and their mates who are intent on throwing themselves off surf boards, eating enough to kill several elephants, and chatting up any young female brave enough to glance their way. I can't wait !!!
Europeans are not as we. Especially the French. The phrase 'Wogs begin at Cally' has stuck with me since TGS days for its brutal jingoistic ignorance tempered by a little voice saying 'true but it's funny init'?
ReplyDeleteMy grandmother and her contemporaries used to speak of "t'other side of Donny" as if it were foreign parts and undesirable parts at that, eg "she married some man from t'other side of Donny". The implication seemed to be that if you had to marry from that far afield, those nearer home wouldn't touch you with a bargepole !
ReplyDeleteBut " t'other side of Donny" were foreign parts if you thought about it. Arriving at Christ Church, you had to leg it to Waterdale [Watterdale?], or the railway station to get anywhere else. And where might that be? Conisborough?, Mexborough or even Maltby! Really a step too far. How about Donny itself for a potential husband? "Full of tuppence 'a'penny bloodyconservatives" according to dad. Better by far to settle for a local pit lad who would scrub up quite well after a run through the local pit-head baths ~~~~~~~~~~~ geoff
ReplyDeleteWalking on t'wotter Geoff -why not, it's a cinch. If I want to visit my friend Henry on the other side of the lake, I just go down to the shore and leg it across. No problem at all, from Christmas to mid-April.
ReplyDeleteI'm glad to have the " Where's the bin" story authenticated. I heard it first from Eileen. You Armthorpe kids must have been slower to learn posh Teacher Talk than the rest of us.
That happened in my classroom when I was teaching, in about 1977. I dare say it has happened before, but my little boy had a sense of humour, and he asked me where's the bin. I said I said I've bin nowhere, where've you bin.,,,,and that's Moorends circa 1976.
ReplyDeleteI'll always remember Miss Thompson at Thorne Travis School telling someone off for saying "tin tin tin". When asked for the red crayon, his reply had been "t'int in tin" ! And I bet I'm not the only one who's heard someone at school say "Weev gorrer gerruz imbux".
ReplyDeleteAnd now? Have teachers stopped being supercilious and learnt to respect local dialects? Have they also accepted common usage - i.e. not insisting on putting the stress on the second syllable in advertisement,and the third in controversy, not condemning modern usage of I instead of me ( "He invited my wife and I to dinner" makes Latinists cringe but no one else)
ReplyDeleteIt is unfortunatey too late to have dialects promoted to the status of languages ( as has happened in less pedantic countries) and on the whole it's a good thing to have a"standard English" that is internationally understood,(though it is in fact just a dialect like any other) but we stand to lose part of oure indentity through this standardisation.
As James told us, the Grammar Schools established a century ago were modelled on the Public Schools. No other model would have occurred to the powers that be - but has nobody wondered about the accompanying alienation -and are we happy to be ersats old Etonians?Actually, I think we are glad to have escaped becoming ersats old Etonians, for a'that and a'that.
Ron, my daughter used to say things like "me and X went to the cinema". I always asked her "If you'd gone on your own, would you say 'me went to the cinema'?" Think about it - nobody would say "he invited I to dinner", so just because your wife goes as well, it's no excuse for breaking grammatical rules ! Long live the good old subject/object, Latin or no Latin. I must admit, though, that at junior school I spoke two languages - the one I used at home and the one I used with friends. At one stage, I could thee and tha with the best of them.
ReplyDeleteAnd on that subject, some words do remain in the unconscious for all time. I'm sure we all remember Maradona's "hand of God" goal in the 1986 World Cup, which knocked us out of the competition and which neither the referee nor linesmen saw. Yours truly, who hadn't even visited Thorne since 1975, gawped at the scandalous goings-on on the TV screen and roared "Sithee !" in a broad Yorkshire accent and with great indignation. I've never lived that down !
I think that besides the subject and object forms there is also the Polite Form -the word "me" has a bad reputation because of phrases like " me and X went..." So to avoid it people commit the solecism (according to grammarians) of saying "invited my wife and I"
ReplyDeleteIn the case of a reply to a question like "Which of you...." it has gone the other way and the reply is not I but Me - an "emphatic" form like French "moi"
"You" itself is a polite form - the singular was once always "Thou" until we decided to give everybody the Royal Plural. All this may be fascinating for a few people like Annne and me, but I'm afraid it is royally boring to everybody else who will be saying Us is Not Amused, so maybe we should put a sock in it.
My main idea is that there is no such thing as "correct English" -there's just different dialects and fashions. Nowadays everybody avoids saying "in the future and says "going forward" - Why? A few years ago it started being fashionable to use the obscure word "proactive" which adds nothing at all to the word "active".........
Dialects can be very confusing for someone from a different part of the country, though. Take Newcastle, for example : if a Geordie asks who the "tart" was he saw you with at the weekend, he's just enquiring about the identity of your female companion. Anywhere else, he'd be impugning her apparent morals ! When I moved to Portsmouth and took up a teaching job, the kids often used the word "dinlo" or "din" when referring to a peer. It means "idiot", but I've never heard it anywhere else. I had to smile once, when I had a free period, was on my way to the staffroom and passed a class where the teacher was late. I told the class to "stop that din" and was promptly asked which din I meant !
ReplyDeleteAs for "proactive", I've always interpreted this as referring to anticipatory action, taking steps to deal with a possible future problem, rather than reacting after a situation has already occurred. Having a flu jab at the start of winter to be on the safe side, for example, is "proactive", but getting Tamiflu when you've already been diagnosed with swine flu is just "active".
What I don't like are ugly words like "hospitalization" !
Dialects can be very confusing for someone from a different part of the country, though. Take Newcastle, for example : if a Geordie asks who the "tart" was he saw you with at the weekend, he's just enquiring about the identity of your female companion. Anywhere else, he'd be impugning her apparent morals ! When I moved to Portsmouth and took up a teaching job, the kids often used the word "dinlo" or "din" when referring to a peer. It means "idiot", but I've never heard it anywhere else. I had to smile once, when I had a free period, was on my way to the staffroom amd passed a class where the teacher was late. I told the class to "stop that din" and was promptly asked which din I meant !
ReplyDeleteAs for "proactive", I've always interpreted this as referring to anticipatory action, taking steps to deal with a possible future problem, rather than reacting after a situation has already occurred. Having a flu jab at the start of winter to be on the safe side, for example, is "proactive", but getting Tamiflu when you've already been diagnosed with swine flu is just "active".
What I don't like are ugly words like "hospitalization" !
I am apreciative,even proapreciative of your point,Anne,but I would still prefer to say things in one word or syllable rather than two. And though I'm an otiose type,when I'm stirred itnto action I hope that state lasts longer than the non-existent moment between the present and the future.
ReplyDeleteI dare say you told those dinlo kids to be proquiet and prodocile and proindustrious in their work.
My teachers at TGS used to say I was uninterested, lethargic and apathetic. They were actualy being very kind, because I had no intention of altering my course and was in fact prouninterested,prolethargic and proapathetic which must be much worse,in fact proworse.That was until I reached 15 and got into the 6th Form,where I became a little bit more active,though not claiming to be all that proactive,being by natue proindolent.
Much worse than proactive is the phrase that is beginning to appear in official documents: to "work collaboratively with" How would you work with someone without collaborating? It started in USA of course,maybe thems guys didn't got no Latin.
I suppose working collaboratively means two or more people working hand-in-glove on the same project, rather than just being colleagues. In the late Sixties/early Seventies the Cambridge Latin Course came into vogue, to give Latin a boost. We decided to introduce it to the school where I was teaching, along with what's best called a handicraft/art element - mosaics, cardboard models, friezes etc. I was working with my HOD and the third teacher in the department in the sense that we shared the Greek and Latin teaching, but had to "work collaboratively" with the Head of Art on the practical syllabus (though neither of us called it that).
ReplyDeleteI know what you mean, though, Ron. If you really want advanced gobbledygook, try reading the public sector job ads in the Guardian ! As I think I mentioned once before, my personal favourite is "teenage pregnancy coordinator" whose job description included "interfacing" with girls deemed most likely to become young mothers. The mind boggled.
Having thought about it, am I right in thinking the teenage pregnancy coordinator would probably promote proactive prophylaxis for the promiscuous progeny of the procreative proletariat ?
ReplyDeleteJust a thought. :-D
I am new to this site, having just realised that it existed.. I was a member of the old site and enjoyed communicating with various people around the world. I have skimmed through the comments here, and have been in stitches by some of the reminiscences! The one about boggy Marsh in the cupboard falling through his chair seemed to strike a chord! Pop Ward was to be feared by me also! I was good at art, and my friend Anne could do music dictation and I found it difficult, so I drew her pictures and she did my dictation! These days, Pop's one chord full-weight- on-the-keys-with-both-arms means of getting quiet from the class, would constitute a symphony!
ReplyDeleteI will stop here, as at least two hours have past in this world gone by and I need to wake up to reality, and get ready for bed! Off to France for a week where big brother Tim Turner now lives. His years at TGS must have been around 1958 to 1964. He didn't go on to A Levels, wanting rather to move into Agricultural Engineering and went to Doncaster Tech for a while to take chemistry, then on to Shuttleworth College and a working life as an agronomist with the sugar beet industry.
Despite being in a Lower Science form at TGS, my younger brother Jonathan did not take a science O Level !! and had to take chemistry outside the school. He now has a Ph.D in Agricultural Economics, is Dean of his faculty at the Royal Agricultural College, where he has been all but one year of his working life - now aged 57. He still plays cricket - always putting that first at TGS - dreaming of being in the Yorkshire team, and at one time taking out Botham's wife, who was a pupil at TGS - in an effort, I think, of worming his way into Yorkshire Cricket circles, as her father was a friend of Brian Close.
Administrator - what happened to the picture on the old site - of "Merrie England" which included yours truly in the chorus, and Lesley Garrett as a page?
My years at TGS were 1961 - 1968. I was a shy, former Doncaster Convent girl, so didn't get up to much mischief. I remember really liking the Head Boy Johnie Woodhead, who starred in Ruddigore, and taking up badminton after school, despite living in Branton, in the sticks - needing to catch two buses, as I liked Nurse who was also learning to play.
I was caught in an exam throwing a paper aeroplane that had landed on my desk and the teacher supervising asked my name several times and never did catch it correctly. I pronounced those famous words in Julius Caesar, "Et tu, Brute" with a creditable French accent, which caused the class to erupt! I was present when the RE teacher was bundled into the teacher's desk cupboard for a whole lesson; I was the cause of Figaro, my Spanish teacher, actually climbing up the wall, hanging onto the pipes that ran along the ceiling of the "cowshed" classroom, when I couldn't answer a seemingly obvious question. A friend and I thought the O Level Latin exam started half an hour later than it did, so P T Griffiths who was teaching me by then gave me a "Tut, Tut" when I only achieved a grade 3, instead of the expected grade 1. I was too shy to tell him what had happened - I knew it but just ran out of time!!!
Anyway, having spent at least 2 hours reminiscing about school days, I must get back to reality and get ready for bed. It has been good to hear of all your escapades. I have just a few weeks ago met a TGS student at a dinner party in Guildford, just by a chance remark in a conversation - small world indeed!
Rowena Stewart (nee Turner)
PS I don't know what happened to my last comment! Repeating myself - that's what comes of advancing years! I do apologise! R
ReplyDeleteThe picture you mentioned is on site Rowena. They were all transferred over from the old site before it was closed down.
ReplyDeleteThere is an index for the photos, and if you find the musicals, Merrie England is in the correct order..1968. I hope you manage to find it. It's so different to the MSN site, but you'll soon get used to it. You can edit and correct your words if you want to. Just be sure to hit submit before you post, or you will lose it all.
I hope this helps.
Late correction: Mr Edwards and Miss Jackson did NOT marry and they lived happily ever after.
ReplyDeleteThis blog seems to have gone very quiet recently. So here goes...
ReplyDeleteHow many of us can recall where we were on the 3rd of September 1939 ? I still have a clear memory of sitting round the household wireless in the kitchen with my parents and my late sister Norma, listening to Neville Chamberlain's announcement that we were at war with Germany. We were living at the time at no.24 Junction Road, Stainforth (wonder if it's still standing; might go back and have a look one day). As I failed the 11 plus it was the summer of 1944 before I made it to TGS thanks to the Transfer Scholarship. Not having homework and after school sports to occupy my time I spent lots of hours listening to the wireless and reading about the progress of the war in the Daily Mail, which in those days was quite a solid broadsheet, and had lots of maps of war zones with thick black arrows showing who was attacking whom, and where. Popular songs were of course an important ingredient of the war effort for the mass of the population, and having a very good memory for poetry and song lyrics I learned a vast quantity of them by heart. Still have most of them somewhere in the depths of my memory,all mixed up with bits of Keats and Shakespeare (School Certificate 1948 - thank you Harold Loukes) and Victor Hugo and Musset (Higher School Certificate 1950 - merci infiniment Pat Rice).
So does anyone else remember 3 September 1939?
Am writing this in the heat of a Provencal late summer afternoon. Looking forward to seeing those of you who are qualified by age for the reunion later this month. Time for my daily pastis - good health and fortune to you all . Eric
My father was in the army reserve and on the Saturday night ( 2nd Sept) we were getting ready to go to the cinema, our usual weekly treat, when a telegram arrived. It was a calling up notice for my father. He had to go to the post office on Monday and collect his rail pass to go to Salisbury to join his regiment...The Royal Artillery. Mum got the camera out and took photos and then we went to the cinema as usual. The next day was hectic.....arranging for my father to leave but we did have time to listen to the broadcast. My father arranged for us to go down to Salisbury as soon as he could and I went to school there for a while.He was a gunnery sergeant and was sent to a big camp in Northumberland to train conscripts. We followed him up there and I went to a delightful one roomed/one class village school in Otterburn.......in between I was sent to an aunt's and to a grandma's while mum stayed wherever father was. So had schooling in two other villages. I quite enjoyed all these changes but I never did learn my timetables ...they had either done them or were going to do them and I would leave. It's always been a mystery to me how I managed to pass the eleven plus and I did treat my first few years at TGS as if it was another transit camp before eventually realising about the fourth year that this was for real this time.
ReplyDeleteI'm writing this on a grey morning before getting up the courage to go for my morning run. I now live in Salisbury again ....funny how life can turn full circle.
Looking forward to seeing everyone .....it's about the only thing my age qualifies me for except my bus pass!
It was a Sunday morning so I was at Bethesda Methodist Chapel, King Street Thorne. The Pastor announced the news from the pulpit. You were just supposd to toddle off home, but I knew better than that. War was shooting and killing. And I was scared to death negotiating the 200 yard journey home, fully expecting to be mown down in the crossfire. Crikey!! I was only eight.
ReplyDeleteBe happy Allan
Be happy Allan
Well you all know I am a born again historian (well - now and again. i.e. when I read a book) and also a bit of a hoarder. I put these two talents to good use and turned up and read too "The Thorne and District Gazette" dated Friday June 2nd 1933. Price 1d. And how this for an ad.
ReplyDeleteMoorends Hotel - The Greenley Boys - PIANOS, BANJOES, VOCAL HARMONY & COMEDY - Our DARLEYS ALES are now in tip top condition...........A. WILSON. Proprietor
So what? This refers to "Shake" Ramseys uncle. And also to the father of young Wilson who was a couple of years below us. (He played drums for Arthur Garrett.)
One for you Shirl - a reference to Arthur Hemingway being Captain of the Thorne Colliery cricket team. I knew (and played with him)when he was with Thorne Town cricket team, but had no idea he had played at such a high level. I remember going down to the Recreation ground for a Yorkshire League match, where a young lad was playing for Maltby and hurling them down at 90 m.p.h. Fred Trueman his name. So you can tell the class he was in.
And for Geoff - you could get a Royal Enfield bike for £4/19/6 or 8/- deposit and 2/2 weekly (old machine taken in part payment).
Watch this space folks - more to come over the next umpteen weeks!! You ain't heard nuttin' yet.
Be happy Allan P.S. I did say 1932
Been away, only just read this interesting snippet....here's another one...I think, Arthur and Garry Hemingway were the only father & son to have won the Victor Ludorum.
ReplyDeleteShirl.
That's a wonderful record. Arthur was a great cricketer but I would never have thought of him as a top doh all round athlete. A Victor Ludorum takes some getting. (Just ask Daley Thompson.) He must have been very proud that Garry followed in his footsteps. I know I feel it that none of mine have any real interest or ability for sports. Well, Pete was an outstanding golfer, but I had left it too late to start that up as a fresh pursuit.
ReplyDeleteBe Happy Allan
I suppose this is really about non-memories of TGS
ReplyDeleteSitting in the warm in a West London suburb which is relatively unaffected by the rude wintry weather, and feeling sorry for the stricken Northern shires, I have been puzzled over the last few days by the comparisons of this cold spell to those of the past century (as I have to make an effort to remember to call it). Obviously the commentators are very, very young, for their memories seem to go no further back than the 1980s. Those of us who were around in the winter of 1946-47 could, like the Ancient Mariner, tell them a thing or two. So I was interested to see in last Saturday's Telegraph to see a piece by Dominic Sandbrook entitled " "This winter seems bad but the freeze of 1947, the worst in living memory, tested the resolve of war-weary Britons to the limit." ( Why won't this go into italic?). If you haven't read it already I recommend you do so. And another piece, this time in the Independent online this morning (11 Jan) is a marvellous read for those of us who lived in freezing cold council houses with only one room heated in the whole house. (Remember dashing upstairs to bed clutching a rapidly cooling hot water bottle? Did any of you have central heating in your luxurious bourgeois homes?) It's by Robert Chesshyre and entitled " Cold? You should have been around in the 1950s"
Reading and listening to the polemics in the various media, I am amused by the criticism of local authorities and head teachers for keeping their schools closed in the bleak midwinter. Wouldn't have happened in our day! Of course most of our teachers lived quite close to TGS by modern standards, and could probably struggle in on foot. Few, if any, would have owned or relied on a car. And freezing temperatures in the classroom would not have been seen in those days as a sufficient reason for ceasing to study Archimedes' principle or the Repeal of the Corn Laws. But here memory fails me - did we really never have any days off because of the weather? How did we manage to keep the school radiators warm? Did we go on playing rugby and hockey in the snow? Did Mr Severn's buses manage every day to transport us from Stainforth along ungritted roads to Thorne and back.? So many gaps in the memories....
I suppose this is really about non-memories of TGS
ReplyDeleteSitting in the warm in a West London suburb which is relatively unaffected by the rude wintry weather, and feeling sorry for the stricken Northern shires, I have been puzzled over the last few days by the comparisons of this cold spell to those of the past century (as I have to make an effort to remember to call it). Obviously the commentators are very, very young, for their memories seem to go no further back than the 1980s. Those of us who were around in the winter of 1946-47 could, like the Ancient Mariner, tell them a thing or two. So I was interested to see in last Saturday's Telegraph to see a piece by Dominic Sandbrook entitled " "This winter seems bad but the freeze of 1947, the worst in living memory, tested the resolve of war-weary Britons to the limit." ( Why won't this go into italic?). If you haven't read it already I recommend you do so. And another piece, this time in the Independent online this morning (11 Jan) is a marvellous read for those of us who lived in freezing cold council houses with only one room heated in the whole house. (Remember dashing upstairs to bed clutching a rapidly cooling hot water bottle? Did any of you have central heating in your luxurious bourgeois homes?) It's by Robert Chesshyre and entitled " Cold? You should have been around in the 1950s"
Reading and listening to the polemics in the various media, I am amused by the criticism of local authorities and head teachers for keeping their schools closed in the bleak midwinter. Wouldn't have happened in our day! Of course most of our teachers lived quite close to TGS by modern standards, and could probably struggle in on foot. Few, if any, would have owned or relied on a car. And freezing temperatures in the classroom would not have been seen in those days as a sufficient reason for ceasing to study Archimedes' principle or the Repeal of the Corn Laws. But here memory fails me - did we really never have any days off because of the weather? How did we manage to keep the school radiators warm? Did we go on playing rugby and hockey in the snow? Did Mr Severn's buses manage every day to transport us from Stainforth along ungritted roads to Thorne and back.? So many gaps in the memories....