The cane and the Bunsen burner tube. That'll teach you....

King James I: within these walls...
Picture: pit-yacker

In the summer before we moved up from Timothy Hackworth (pictured) in Shildon, the bigger boys already at the grammar school in Bishop Auckland filled our hearts with terror.

The 11-plus safely passed, our places at King James I secured, we sat in the recreation ground between games of cricket and listened open-mouthed to tales of ferocious school fights that were broken up by prowling staff or prefects and led to equally ferocious canings.

Fighting was by no means the only offence that would steer hapless pupils towards an excruciating session in old Neddy Deans's study. But that's how things were in those days.

Years later, I reflected on this when my newspaper sent me to Ireland to interview women who had also been beaten, in their cases while incarcerated in bleak orphanages run by nuns. Decades on, they were demanding - and eventually won - some recognition from the Roman Catholic Church of the harsh treatment meted out to them.

My guess was that in the era in question, the early 1950s, you didn't need to be in such an institution to be clattered; a similar fate awaited most children wherever they went to school in the British Isles.

By the end of the decade, girls were much more likely to be spared. Even so, it depended entirely on which schools they attended.

Tin Tacks, as Timothy Hackworth (pictured left) was known, was a mixed school and everyone risked the cane, although oddly enough it was the prospect of having the event recorded in the Punishment Book that worried us most. The same was true at most local secondary modern schools. Did it really help, incidentally, to rub your hands in advance?

Our sisters faced nothing worse than detentions at the girls' grammar school across the playing fields from King James I. But for the boys, corporal punishment was part of daily life and it was applied by various teachers with escalating levels of severity.

The methods included slipperings - which actually meant being whacked with a size 10 plimsoll or bigger by the senior gym master, Les Rawe, or a younger colleague - and an improvisation favoured by one teacher who was nicknamed "Cosher" because he wielded a Bunsen burner tube.

If these were bad enough, being sent to the head was what we all dreaded. "The first two hurt like hell but then your arse is numb and you don't feel the rest," said one of the older lads marking our cards, and his words offered not the least reassurance.

I remember receiving the slipper from the younger gym teacher - not too bad; he apparenty lacked Les Rawe's enthusiastic delivery - and, more painfully, that "cosh". And I also fell foul of a languages master with a habit of prodding book ends into the sides of inattentive boys' heads.

My closest brush with Neddy and his cane came after my mother marched up to school to ask why my report had been so bad when I'd been getting such good marks, selectively shown of course, all through the term.

I was ordered out of music lesson and staggered to the head's study weighed down by all the exercise books from my desk. Over and again, as he leafed through the incontrovertible evidence before his eyes, he warned me that I was about to be thrashed. Somehow, presumably because my mother was present, I left his office trembling with fear but uncaned.

It is unrealistic to look back at the practices of half a century ago and apply modern tests of what is right and wrong. And for every person of a certain age who says "our teachers would be jailed these days for what they did to us then", there are probably two others who swear it did them no harm.

Maybe both are right in their own ways. On the one hand, strict discipline inspired some respect for authority. On the other, the fear on which that respect was founded did not make for a particularly healthy school atmosphere, though I do occasionally wonder what would have happened to my own grammar school career had Neddy carried out his threat.

Not to mince words, I had been caught in the act of utterly wasting the opportunity handed to me as reward for the 11-plus pass. My head was so full of trainspotting, football and later pop music that there was no room left for schoolwork. One decent subject a year, maybe two; that was about all I could manage. French in the first form, English in the second, Maths in the third, with desperately low marks for everything else.

Would six of the best at 12 have shocked me so much, and made me so afraid of being sent for more, that I'd have bucked up my ideas and got down to some proper work? Or would it have made no difference to the under-achievement that continued until the school finally lost patience?

"Apart from Maths, not good enough for a grammar school," was the damning assessment of Dennis Weatherly, who succeeded Neddy Deans as head, at the foot of the page on my third form report. As night follows day, the letter from Durham education authority arrived one Saturday a few weeks later.

Two things about The Letter Episode have stuck in mind in the intervening 46 years. For some reason, I have always remembered that it plonked down on the mat the morning after I'd seen William Holden, Jack Hawkins, Alec Guinness in The Bridge On the River Kwai at Bishop Auckland Odeon. And no one could ever forget such an opening line as this: "Due to your son's continued lack of academic success, it has been decided.........."

The gist of what followed is not hard to imagine. Off I was shunted to Woodhouse Close, a secondary modern up past the council estate of the same name on Bishop's outskirts.

My dad, horrified at his feckless son's failings, said it could have been a lot worse. He meant the Shildon Boys' Modern School, which had what may most kindly be described as a rough-and-ready reputation. At least Woodhouse Close had a GCE stream.

Not that I was entering a gentle new world of education. "Did you say Woodhouse Close?" a friend's father, himself a teacher elsewhere in Bishop, asked as we waited together for the No 1 United bus in my first week or so. "I hear they swing the stick about quite a bit up there..........."

Comments

[Dumdad]

I went to Leeds Boys Grammar school (juniors) and the thrashings were carried out with what was called The Bat although it looked more like a wooden paddle and had been specially made for the task.

I remember the first time I got six of the best (I flicked a piece of paper at the boy in front of me - crime of the century!) and the first whack didn't really register. I guess the body was in shock but by the third whack the pain started to roll across me in waves.

And the pain continued for quite a while afterwards. I didn't cry though.

I passed my 11 plus but we moved south and I ended up as a scholarship boy in a public school. Now that place was brutal: POWs in Germany were better off.

I don't think being beaten made me a better person. I think the whole thing is barbaric.

Quick joke:

"Have you ever hit your children?"

"Only in self defence."

[Bill Taylor]

I lasted at King James until I failed O Levels in everything but English Language and Literature and my parents were recommended to "try and find him a job somewhere." (Doggarts department store for two years before I blagged my way into a three-month trial at the Evening Gazette on Teesside.)
Grammar school was a place of sanctioned but often ad-hoc savagery. Among the teachers I remember are a woman who taught music and was known as the Scalper, for her habit of seizing you by the hair with one hand and slapping your face with the other; Cosher, of course; and Lez Rawe; who once gym-slippered our whole class because he heard someone swear and no one would own up to it. The younger gym teacher can only have been "Nixie" Guy, who had the "humorous" habit of throwing from close range a basketball at your midriff. When it hit you and doubled you over, he would say, "You should have caught that." On one occasion I saw it coming, did catch it and threw it back. It hit him but, given that he had rather better stomach muscles than mine, he wasn't much doubled up. Nor did he see the funny or just side of it. He walloped me soundly with a gym shoe. And, finally, there was the Latin master who carried -- and used -- an officer's swagger stick. Someone stole it and hid it behind the sliding blackboard. Alas, they also wrote a taunting message on that same board. In a rage, he wrenched a chair apart. After two of us had been clobbered with a chair leg, his swagger stick was restored to him. We knew when we were well off.
The worst part of it was if you happened to admit to your parents that you'd been beaten. Chances were you'd get another dose to encourage you to behave better at school.
Did it teach me anything? Nothing more than certain evasive tactics such as, when I hadn't done my math homework, the desirability of sitting at the front with the swots. The teacher was in the habit of belting miscreants across the head with the exercise books he'd collected. He had more of an armful by the time he got to the back and a well-aimed swing could knock you off your chair.

[Pete Sixsmith]

Ah, Bishop Auckland Grammar School, the old alma mater. One of those schools that we look back on with nostalgia and fond memories at the quality of teaching, the kindness and sparkling wit of the teachers and the opportunities it gave us boys what had dragged themselves out of the working class gutter to become proud members of the middle classes.
What a dump. Poor teaching - if you couldn't do it they wouldn't/couldn't teach you how.We had a maths teacher who stuck a couple of examples on the board, told us to do Exercise whatever and then spent the rest of the lesson reading a racy novel behind his teachers version of aforementioned text book. Some were OK and some were even Sunderland supporters but others were just whiling away the time to retirement and an early grave.
Some were savage. The Music/French teacher would have been turned down by Wackford Squeers on the grounds that he beat the boys too much.
Unpleasant sarcasm substituted for wit and humour and was often more hurtful than the cane.
Too many boys and girls (I was the first of the mixed school)were forgotten about and ignored at the expense of those who would achieve anyway. You could see some of the teachers looking down their noses at those whose parents weren't the sons and daughters of clothing factory managers or petrol company sales managers.
For every good grammar school (and there were more bad ones than good ones)there were 4 awful Sec Mods. The Comprehensive movement came late to Labour controlled Durham County Council but anyone who looks back to the Grammar Schools as halcyon days needs to look again very carefully.

[Bill Taylor]

I'd almost forgotten the snobbery and the sarcasm. And the guy who "taught" us German for five years and somehow managed almost totally to avoid having us actually speak the language out loud. It made the oral segment of the O-Level exam... interesting.
I did have one brilliant English teacher -- Keith (I think) Adams, who had me reading Kerouac at 13. He gave me a bad mark on a homework essay once and I was so appalled, I did it over. That would never have happened with any of the other teachers.

[Bob Scarlett]

I was at KJ in the 1960s. I remember the rude and sarcastic manner that some of the teachers adopted towards their charges. I also remember how lazy and incompetent some of the teachers were. Although there were a few good teachers and no small number were both polite and caring.

As regards the music/french teacher that Peter Sixsmith refers to, he was an odball character given the nickname 'Bongo'. He was mercilessly taunted by the boys. The 'savagery' he responded with was just desperation on his part. He couldn't last even at a school like ours. I recall that he left KJ in 1965.

[Stuart Watkins]

How things have changed over the years. I was at the Grammar School from 1946 to 1954. I remember "Clues" Mr Wells who was called Clues because his brother was a detective. "Inky" Stan Ince, "Bunny" Mr Hare, "Beefy" Mr Hoggett. "Doc Willy" Dr Wilson."Danny" Robinson and many more. Some of these teachers were sadistic. The beating they handed out would have landed them in jail today. Danny and Maurice Hare did not use the cane. They used four by two planks of wood. Doc Willey had a case with four canes in it and because he was the Latin teacher he named them all with Latin names. When we were due for a whacking we had to choose a cane to be whacked with. There are so many horrible memories of these teachers but there are also many memories I will never forget. I played rugby and cricket for the school. I played rugby and cricket with the Old Leos when I left. I now live in Brisbane, Australia and have done for the past 30 years. I kept in contact with a few friends but sadly most of them have gone.

[Judith Mallin]

I thought it was just me! It’s amazing that,at the age of 70, I’ve found out … it wasn’t just me…
The teachers were so so so discriminatory because my dad was just a ‘machinists Shildon Shops’ I spent my whole time there wishing I was ‘dead’ - left at 15
Wouldn’t go back and went to tech… now can finally set the nightmare free… cos it wasn’t just me!!! Thank you
Judith

[Barrie]

Any 49ers left standing