Burnley Grammar School

Eight days ago when I had a chance to reunite with former staff and pupils at a Class of 84 reunion I was able to meet one of my main PE teachers from back in the day.

I asked why we were expected to run the school cross country barechested so often and so late in the year. His answer to me was that doing sports barechested is good for the immune system and especially when done outside, and distance running is very good for this. So he played on the health benefits physically. I retorted back about the mental health benefits on insecure pupils.

I certainly don't remember such an explanation in those days. There was never any explanation, but then nobody asked the question in the first place.

Matthew's post about eyesight tests reminded me of the medicals at my school in the late 1980s. There was a general medical for all boys each year and the first part was a sight test. For whatever reason, we all had to take off our shirts and then stand in a line waiting for our turn. Once your sight test was done, you went through to an office where the doctor did the rest of the exam, each boy in turn. Once inside the office you had to strip down to underwear and then (briefly) naked. But when you exited the office you were still shirtless of course. I could never understand why I had to be shirtless just to have my sight tested!

In reply to Matthew's comment about stripping to underwear for what seemed to be just an eyesight test is odd to say the least. And Yours Truly, in response to your comments about mass circumcision. I was at junior school 1958 to 1961 and it seems as if there was the situation where it seemed the thing for so many of the children to have their tonsils removed, when in fact in most cases it was unnecessary.
However, when I was at secondary school, there seemed to be the obsession during school medicals to check foreskins and in many cases recommend circumcision which several of my friends went through which again I suspect was totally unnecessary.

Comment by: Matthew on 15th November 2024 at 23:41


I suspect the idiots were trying to ape the procedures of the army (that and the semi naked PE lessons) - it was their outdated idea of military life.

There was an argument for it during the years of conscription, getting lads ready for the mass nudity and bull of the old army, but seeing those days ended 65 years ago, it just shows how behind the times educationalists are. MInd you, Bridget Phillipson will probably take us back to the 1930s.

Interesting to read that others went to schools that imposed the same PE kit rules on the sixth form. My school was the same and sixth formers were expected to have one PE and one games lesson a week and in the same PE kit as everyone else so shorts only shirtless and barefoot, which since that's what I wore in high school for pe it was fine I think I was more disgruntled at having to do PE

Julian P.

We had an examination one day in middle school where all the boys in our year had to assemble in the hall and get down to only our underwear and then go and sit in batches of boys about ten at a time on chairs along the corridor waiting outside the medical room to be seen. Once inside we were given an eye test by looking at a book and covering one eye at a time. That was it. Back to the hall to pick up my stuff and dress again. I could not understand why they went to such effort and made us remove nearly everything we had on, shirtless and barefoot, just to do an eye check on us. Very weird. I think I was 9 or 10 years old. That took place around 1976 or 1977.

Does anyone have anything like that?

Yours Truly, another decent read and am happy to respond.

Like your sister I tended to conform. Most of us did though didn't we? Looking back now I rather wish I had been a little less conformist and a lot more questioning. As a younger child I am told I was known as a "why? bird" and was always asking why this, why that, and why are we doing this, kind of questions. I'm like that much more now as an adult in more recent years, but I am not sure what happened during secondary years and that general age range. I must have been flattened into submission, it did sometimes feel that way.

You asked the sixth form question. As far as school was concerned in 1985-87 we knew the rules before we made the decision to stay on so we had no cause to complain about it. There were a lot of free periods so we had to fill them up with a minimum of at least one PE lesson each week, done shirtless if in the school gym or sports hall, or if spring summer athletics or a run. It was completely non negotiable even as lower and even upper sixth formers to age 18, we had to participate as required and in the manner the school laid down. I knew someone who was actually thrown out of the lower sixth form within three months for persistantly failing to meet his PE requirement, so he had to leave. I remember he was very upset about it but the answer was to simply continue with some PE but he wouldn't and so was gone. Rather foolishly I thought. In truth Julian I'd been doing barechetsed PE with the boys for 4 years by the time I'd got to lower sixth so was so well used to the situation that it no longer really registered with me as an issue to carry on doing so even in the sixth form and I think the majority who stayed on probably would say the same. Doing something for so long, even if you are unkeen, ends up being normalised. But there is an interesting addition to this however. There were a small group of boys who joined our school lower sixth from elsewhere in 1985 who had never been pupils at the school before and had not been subjected to the rigours of our school regards PE enforcement to the level those old timers like me had. I think one or two might have even found themselves doing a dose of barechested PE in school for the first time at lower sixth age, remarkably. One person in particular sticks in my mind about this. I used to play a lot of squash when in the sixth from which had these viewing areas, and we played squash the same as we were in the gym or sports hall. I played the new addition to our sixth form a few times and he thought it was ridiculous, but of course he conformed!

Another thing you mentioned that is highly relatable is getting used as sixth form boys to do the jobs of the teachers who were paid to do them. In my case this involved being designated a classroom to watch over during wet break times, meaning no break for those who had a class to get off to when it rained just to stand on guard like a lemon. Sometimes upper sixth boys were asked to join in helping on a PE lesson or supervising a changing room in place of a teacher. I was on the end of a sixth former doing this to me when in my youngest secondary year and you are right, they were just as bad as the teacher for being strict, like trying to prove a point to us. When I was in upper sixth I was asked to put my name to a list of boys on the stand in rota for the changing rooms and was very reluctant and didn't see this as any part of my reason for being at school, but it was drilled into us that it was one small part of all about taking and learning about responsibility and some leadership. I only did this twice in the upper sixth and out of an entire school found myself "standing guard" inside the changing room door on a group of two merged classes including my younger brother by three years who was about 14 and a half by then to my almost 17 and a half. I was left alone and had to make sure these boys showered. I'd have been happy to let them all go off as they wished with or without but knew from someone else that let that happen they'd be getting a real rollicking for it. My brother wasn't as sensitive to these issues as me but I just had to pretend I hadn't seen him and briefly stood back outside the door at one point. Sometimes I was told the teacher would suddenly appear as if trying to catch you out not doing as you'd been asked while standing in.

When it came to the rain day break times there were many times I simply didn't show up or made out I'd left the school on a free period so hadn't been about, even if I had been. It only occassionally got checked up. I still do think it's an absolute nerve to expect 16 to 18 year olds to do unpaid work that teachers are paid to do. I can even remember sixth former being asked to go around litter picking, not just around school but even just outside the school perimeter that was not only not our job but not the school's either but the local council!

There was mentioned taking a dining room PE lesson. Again I can match you on that or even trump you with something more extraordinary. I can even remember the exact date it happened, Wednesday morning 17th February 1982. We found ourselves having a PE lesson in our changing room! I kid you not. Quite why this happened at a school with four squash courts available, a huge sports hall, a decnet sized gymnasium, an all weather sports pitch, tarmac tennis courts and an absolutely vast school playing fields with rugby and football pitches and cricket nets I have no idea, it was not like we were short of options. Okay so the changing room was decent sized but not enough to swing a ball and we all crammed in and sat along benches having changed to just shorts and did something akin to rounders in a changing room. A very bizarre experience that I wish I knew why it happened. It was just stupid. At the end of it all nobody had been able to move much or do anything and most of us had spent the time sitting on the benches as this makeshift game progressed and not drawn a bead of sweat or raised our heart rate, but the teacher still got someone to turn on the shower tap and tell us all to drop our shorts and head to the showers to wash off non existant sweat. You have to laugh now at it all.

I just wish to make clear regards the link I gave to the blog last night that although it appears to be run by someone called "No Shirt Dan" that is not me and I have no direct personal connection to that site and forum whatsoever, other than as a guest poster. I see someone else has posted there since me yesterday.

https://shirtlessbarefoot.blogspot.com/2018/05/how-to-start-shirtless-sports-and.html

Gosh there Danny C, I wish I looked as good as the picture of the boy on that blog you said you closely resembled on that. That was really good looking and athletic, I can't believe boys like you at school would worry when you had such good looks and body. It's a funny old world. I'd swap with you like a shot, I never quite shaped up or looked as good as that. I agree on the shorts, you could make three pairs of old style shorts from that amount of material he had there. Thanks for the heads up about that forum.

Hi Julian P,

Thanks for your reply.

As an adult I have seen it stated that the full exam was done to check for undescended testicles, which would explain why girls seemed to be spared the full ordeal.

However that doesn't explain why I also had to strip completely for my second school medical at aged 8 - surely once they were down there was no further need for checking??

That second exam was considerably worse than the first and stepping naked into that room felt like a shock of cold water. What really made this one worse was, in addition to the doctor and health worker/ nurse or whatever and my mum again, our old classroom assistant from Infants' was also there. I don't know why she had to be there, there were already two professional adults in the room. I have long speculated that the school just wanted to have one of their staff there to represent the school's authority even in a fraught and sensitive moment like this.

This woman was utterly vile. She had a hairtrigger temper and seemed to hate kids. She once sandblasted my ears because she claimed I had completed a painting too fast and therefore not only turned in a sloppy result but wasted precious school paint. There was no evidence of kindness in her and as an unusually self-conscious and nervy kid I used to draw her ire. I have plenty of memories of her scolding me harshly, shouting at me or seizing me by the arm. All this between my fourth and seventh birthdays. She once screeched at me because I stopped at the sight of a thorny bramble across the path. She was leading me down to the school's sports day, it was summer and as usual I was in shorts. Basically she should never have been allowed to work anywhere near children.

Given all that it really added insult to injury to see this vile woman in the room. I had to dangle meekly there in front of this harridan while I was weighed, measured, turned around to check my spine and had my heart beat checked. I can remember letting my mind drift away, becoming remote within myself, as a defensive response against the humiliation of it all.

Looking back over all these experiences it just seems my primary school was completely inconsiderate regarding the emotions of the young children in its care. It was as if they saw us as little animals that didn't have feelings. And if you did display emotion you got it in the neck for it. What they wanted was - compliant children.

I never experienced the trauma of having my balls palpated or my foreskin retracted as other respondents here have previously detailed. Much less the following arbitrary mass circumcisions that one respondent posted about several years back.

I came to realise that there was great inequality in the imposition of these violating exams across the country. I can remember a fellow secondary pupil recounting to another pupil about his primary medicals and the boy behind him later gloatingly repeating his tale to another boy - seemingly there were no medical exams at all at his primary even though he was the exact same age as me. On the other hand I recall the mother of an old primary friend telling my mum about his full nude medical at his secondary school which was different to mine. Seemingly there every child had to undergo a full medical exam at the start of every school year. Apart from the inevitable communal showers I never had to get my bare bollocks out ever again for any adult after I turned eleven. Inequality is always the worst thing.

Comment by: Yours Truly on 15th November 2024 at 01:02


...."You stated that even the sixth-form boys at your school had to take PE stripped to just shorts.

That is just appallingly callous and negligent. Imposing a belittling dress-code regime forcing boys in their mid-teens to get nearly naked is crossing a particular line......"

YT I couldn't agree more with you, in fact I agree with everything you have said and your feelings as you have stated them, because they echo mine.

What always angers me is - whether we are talking about 1964, 1984 or 2024 lads have all faced the same problems - to put it bluntly, lads in mid teenage are likely to experience involuntary erections (luckily it never happened to me - I was a bit slower than some of my peers), but you can just imagine the ribald comments that would
cause. If you are only wearing shorts there is no hiding place. If you have a top on at least you can try to disguise it.

Teachers, of whatever age should try to remember back to their teenage years and put themselves in those lads situation.

I sincerely HOPE the days of making older boys remove most of their clothing is over, but I definitely think that a 16 or 17 or 18 year old ought to be allowed to decide for himself whether he wishes to take clothes off or have showers.

To my mind there is something very dubious about teachers who are so obsessed about a lads clothing and his showering arrangements.

In reply to Yours Truly, I vaguely remember the medical exams at infants school. As far as I remember we did not undress completely. I took off my shirt but of course in those days we all wore vests. that may have been removed but we kept our shorts on. Mum was present.

Worse was to come at Secondary school. (All boys school) for the medical exam we lined up outside the room already stripped to the waist. The rumour went round that you the doctor would tell you to drop your trousers during the examination. Upon being told to enter the room there was a boy in front being examined and then i found out that the rumour was true as he was told to drop his trousers and pants and so a got a full view of his behind!! And so my turn came and the instruction came and I just had to blank out what the Doctor was doing when he told me to cough.
I said earlier that at infants school mums were present at the exam. In fact mums were invited to attend the secondary school exams though much to all our relief no ones mum ever did attend. for me it was a greater relief because my mum had died and that manet my nan who was looking after me got the invitation and said she would attend. But luckily I dissuaded her and I am glad I did. To think I would have had to stand there with as a 14 year old fully exposed would have been mortifying.
Why were we put through such experiences?

Hi Danny C,

I just wanted to reply to a detail in one of your previous posts.

You stated that even the sixth-form boys at your school had to take PE stripped to just shorts.

That is just appallingly callous and negligent. Imposing a belittling dress-code regime forcing boys in their mid-teens to get nearly naked is crossing a particular line. A young person past their sixteenth birthday is a young adult and their dignity is to be respected. Especially given that they have chosen to remain at their school when they might just as easily have enrolled at the local sixth-form college where their dignity would have been respected. And also especially as boys that age have as many body issues as girls albeit different ones. Making them appear in public looking like Tarzan Of The Apes - well, frankly, that was bordering on assault.

My school imposed the same PE rule (not the appalling shorts-only one) for all sixth-formers and they too had to do PE until they did their A levels. In fact they seemed to use to used the sixth-formers as a kind of unofficial auxiliary police force, even detailing them to supervise classes of younger kids when there wasn't a teacher available. My first ever games lesson, the first Monday of my second week, was taken by two sixteen- or seventeen-year-old boys, who were exactly as conscientious and considerate of their younger charges as you would expect from boys that age. Ie, not very.

I have mentioned before about the unfortunate changing-rooms/ dinner hall/ assembly hall geography in my school. One morning we boys were taking a maths class in the dining hall when the assembly hall doors swung open and a class of girls in the usual aertex/ gym pants/ bare feet combo, filed out, led by two attractive sixth-form girls dressed the same way. Those girls received a piercing wolf-whistle from some boy in our class. They showed no reaction, just stalked past impassively, treating it with the indifference it deserved. But even so, and even as an especially gormless fifteen-year-old boy, I thought it was wrong they had been exposed to that, especially given their status as young adults.

My eldest sister went into our school's sixth form, I didn't. That meant she fell under the school's sixth-form PE policy. My sister was naturally conformist and really quite straightlaced. There was no illicit smoking or getting silly on weed for her. She actually believed our school's purported 'caring christian community' propaganda. I suppose because being conformist had worked out very well for her from her first day at school at four.

And yet. I can remember my sister gloating about how she and her friends were bullshitting the tyrannical head of the girls' sixth form in order to get out of doing sixth-form PE. She consistently ducked those PE sessions for the whole two years. This is the single sole example I am aware of of my sister ever deliberately engaging in rule-breaking.

Which is telling, isn't it?

Julian, yes when I refer to "boy pants" in my mind I'm talking about the skimpy y-fronts that parents bought for us when young. Around the time of my 16th birthday I started buying my own underwear and switched to my first pair of boxer shorts and since then have never changed habit, always buying boxers/trunks. I wish I'd worn the things as a younger child too. Thinking back I don't think many if any boys wore such things, I think we were all y-pants or similar type wearers.


Some on here might be interested to browse this site that I accidentally discovered recently which appears to have a lot of comments quite similar to those here in content. This morning before getting down to proper work I decided to paste up my debut post on this History World thread from this week four years ago onto it and it was published in my own name instantly on the site with no need to register. You would be able to quite easily have real time to and fro discussions on this, unlike here. Worth a mention to those who may feel interested or inclined.

The photo of the boy to go with this discussion is actually a spitting image of how I looked at his age in terms of body shape and look, hair and face for school PE, except for one big difference, the size and length of those shorts! The two pairs I used in black or white colour were much shorter and firmer fitting, and nobody wore longer or baggier shorts then.

Take a read on this;

https://shirtlessbarefoot.blogspot.com/2018/05/how-to-start-shirtless-sports-and.html

In reference to Danny C's comment "wearing little other than basic boy pants of the time" and Yours Truly's reference to pants I suppose during that era they were just briefs. At least the Boxer style underwear of today would have been less exposing. Although I should not think that nowadays boys would boy be treated in the same way.

I've previously on this site described my own school in the 1980's as having what I call a "barechested culture" when it came to boys and PE, which seemed to spill across into our drama department too, but then the head of drama stood in on some PE lessons himself on a regular basis, mainly rugby.

I also found football tedious and simply a bore, you described it as soul destroying Yours Truly, true if you had noo interest or were simply no good against others who were. Any chance to avoid it I'd take. That was next to impossible in a secondary school of the 80's. But my school's desire to keep PE lads as skins as much as possible even extended outdoors to football games sometimes, these were the few times at my school I actually did the skins and shirts set up. Inside we were always skins, so it didn't apply, even in team games which often got divided on shorts colour only.

So my house colour was red. Therefore we had plain red long sleeved sweatshirts for outside for over autumn and winter only. I still have mine. But the PE lessons were only taken by classes of boys within the same school house, so we were all red tops. We were not allowed vests or anything else under the tops, only the one layer. You can see the issue if you want to play football and divide up teams. So my main teacher went the skins v shirts option, and I always felt like I was on the barechested side of it. Sometimes it was quite chilly, and he made us just jump up and down furiously to warm up and thrash our arms about before getting on with things. So as someone who already hated football and had been made to do it barechested it was a double whammy of joyless endurance, add in some less than great weather and you got the full hatrick of hate.

So we've done loads of these skins v shirts football games under this teacher, my head of PE at the time, and then another time we get another PE teacher come out with us wanting a game and all of a sudden he has a small cardboard box under his arm and out comes some green I think it was, flimsy bibs to stick over our heads on top of half the boys red shirts. No skins that lesson, and this guy took a few lessons over time when he did something similar, including rugby. Then we started having football games done with the head of PE again and it was back to half of us going skins to play again. Where were these bibs? Someone must have mentioned it and was told they were not essential. As head of PE he had the final say I guess. One thing I did notice about our Foxy (Mr Fox) was he'd sometimes join one of the teams of boys against the other and he never ever chose the skins team to play on.

Having read Danny C and Yours Truly's post's (I so agree with you YT and understand your feelings), I will say one thing for our school - we never had to endure "drama" lessons, because at least the school was pragmatic - we had to earn a living in a run-down area and apart from those childish"nativity plays" in the very early years (and I never took part in them either), we were spared "artistic" teachers or militant women concerned about the "patriarchy" in contemporary drama, because how would one expect to be employable if you had no practical skills except for reciting "Once more into the breach, dear friends, once more". It wouldn't have impressed our local employers, not even if we had given them Hamlet's soliloquy. "That this too, too solid flesh would melt" would have cut no ice with the manager of Woolworths or Currys, for what was left of local light industry.

Drama, like music, should be a voluntary pursuit. Not everyone was meant to be David Tennant (thank God!), or play the trumpet, and though I did, the latter, that was in my own time and I was well aware that trumpeters were ten a penny, as were actors. If anything, thanks to the lunatic budget Reeves forced on us a couple of weeks ago, people will struggle even harder to find work, and the theatre is well down the list of essentials.

Perhaps if schools cut out the crap, there would be no need to stay on till the boy was a man of 18. Let people develop as individuals. If they want to act, fine, but the local comp isn't RADA.

Only about 1% of Gen Z could survive the kind of physical education we lads were put through in the seventies and eighties in school. It was brutal at times. They'd be thinking they were in an army boot camp under some sergeant major if my gym was anything to go by. There was blood, sweat and tears and a lot of agony, scrapes and sprains. The equipment could be lethal. Went on a four mile run and were then expected to play football too for a further half hour and keep running the pitch, in a blizzard topped off with a naked parade to the unavoidable almost cold showers we shared as collective added torture while the teacher smirked at our predicament. So why am I kind of nostalgic for all this? We were a hardy PE battle scarred generation, the Boomers and Gen X.

Christian Cooper,

Weirdly enough, and rather unexpectedly for the same kid who hated shorts, dreaded school plays and found playing football soul-destroying, I got used to the communal showers pretty quickly, although I never felt them anything less than degrading. I suppose it was a question of having to. The sooner you got yourself in there the sooner it was over. Certainly there was no arguing with our stereotypically angry, hard-bastard games teacher. Male PE teachers seemed to be a specific breed, didn't they? At least during my growing-up years. It was as if they bred that way in kennels or something.

As regards the double standard with showers, that was quite simply sex discrimination and wrong. Girls got to preserve their dignity while we boys were herded like cattle. 'Tween' and adolescent boys lack the more sensitive and compassionate instincts that girls usually have and it takes us longer to discover our own basic humanity. If anything the practices ought to have been reversed, with the girls being treated more callously, given that they were much more likely to look out for each other and not let it degenerate into a Lord Of The Flies-type scenario.

On the other hand I find that worn-out trope that boys must be toughened up, which was the constant justification for so many
discriminatory practices against boys, to have a glaringly obvious flaw. My secondary school was basically a human zoo. Probably a third of the boys I went to school with did not need any more toughening up, they were quite toughened enough already. What they needed was civilising. But civilising was not on the curriculum. Perhaps schools are different today. But I shan't hold my breath.

I have remembered two other random details about PE kit at my secondary school.

As well as the aertex polo-tops and gym knickers the girls were also allowed to wear navy blue cardigans as part of their kit. I don't know why - since when has knitwear been a part of sportswear? It wasn't a thing I envied but it always made me scratch my head a bit. And most of the girls did wear them. They were happy enough to leave their trainers at home but anxious to remember their cardigans.

There was also an 'adult PE kit' for the women teachers - but not the men. This one is another headscratcher. Our male PE teachers just lived in their inevitable tracksuits, as you would expect (in the case of our tyrannical PE senior teacher I think he really did live in his, he only seemed to own the one). For the ladies though there was this somewhat minimalist standard issue PE attire of a vest top and a very short pleated skirt. (They could also wear tracksuits if they chose.) We had a constant stream of young student teachers through our secondary school and seeing the more attractive ones out on the playing fields bouncing around in youthful enthusiasm in this gear was an uplifting experience and an unexpected fringe benefit for us developing young men. Especially when it was the new school year and someone had obviously been on holiday and was nicely tanned.

It was character-building (har har) and the first intimation to me that there was actually more to life than daleks.

Yours Truly - I've enjoyed reading your comments, they are so accurate and I'm sure many will agree.

On school plays, I've mentioned the ones I did at secondary school. But one part I could have had a leading role in and declined was at my primary in my final year, where each Christmas we did a whole week of evening shows for parents about a fornight before Christmas if you were in the two top years. My final primary year I did Joseph & The Technicolour Dreamcoat. I had a nice enough child singing voice and was in contention for the main part of Joseph, requiring a solo song. This in itself didn't bother me too much, it would be great to get the lead role and my parents would be thrilled. But I declined the chance to do so, simply because I was told the part would mean I would have to stand up and be barechested for a period in the role. I was not going to do that voluntarily under any circumstances. Singing was nerve wracking enough but I could have just about done that for the pride of the main part. I told my music teacher I would prefer another part but did not give her the reason. I can only wonder what she would have said if I'd told her I would love the lead role but couldn't face an audience without my top on before I got the posh coloured dreamcoat on my shoulders. So the role went to another boy who did the honours instead on consecutive nights and I took a lesser role. I know my music teacher was surprised I declined. Then I was later off to the secondary where I was forced into these things anyway. These Christmas shows at primary were all done barefoot, and even the whole school choir beside the piano had to be too, which always seemed a little weird to me. A year earlier I'd done a week of David & Goliath, and although almost all were barefoot in that I managed to get away with new plimsolls on my feet in my role in that. No such luck with Joseph.

I remember a feeling of embarrassment even age 5 when I first had to do barefoot PE in infants. No idea why or where that came from. I had no shirtless anxiety at the same age, that came later. I remember a teacher making me be the only one in tne school hall remove my footwear and socks when I was around 6, and feeling dreadful. I'd forgotten to bring the right shoes for something we were doing so lost what I had on completely. I felt punished like that.

At my infants school I do remember the whole class of both boys and girls taking the PE in the school hall in just pants and knickers, even the girls like the boys. Not often, but just now and again from age 5 to 6, maybe 7 tops. Even at that incredibly tender young age I looked on at the others and thought it wasn't right that the girls were in their knickers like that and had no top on like the boys. These lessons were taken by a lady, there were no men at all in my infants school anyway.

I have one memory of my mother taking me to a riverside park with another mum and child when I was about 4, pre-school and her being fine with removing all my clothes off of me with others around after I'd been in the shallow river water. An age so young that self consciousness hasn't kicked in yet much. I also at 5 have another memory of being around a friends house with him at his pool and then me and him being taken to the bathroom with both our mums and being bathed naked together. I recall it well. Us boys were not deemed to have any need for personal privacy even from our own mothers.

Hi Christian Cooper,

Admittedly I was an unusually inhibited child. School plays and football were particularly torturous to me.

Out of interest, what were the girls' sports kits like at the schools you attended? Hopefully not as blatantly discriminatory as the regimes Simon and Danny C had to endure?

Bare chest anxiety I get, I had it and stomach churn when made to remove tops and stay shirtless so many times I lost count. Bare foot anxiety I also get. I had that too, disliked both my feet and chest being out. Had little choice from primary onwards. Never quite got into the comfort zone about it. Whole bare body, don't even go there, communal showers was an ordeal I never fully adjusted to. Didn't even know we'd take them until the day I had to. Nobody mentioned showers until I suddenly heard running water in the background and we were told to all get straight in, Christ I was shaking, my head racing thoughts at 1000mph thinking how I could escape it. I couldn't, nobody did. My god it was a shock for an eleven year old. The communal shower was closed off by a door one end of our chnaging room so wasn't obvious until the door was opened for their use. The loud sound of that strong running water from lots of outlets actually terrified the life out of me. You could never believe such a mundane sound would cause such a feeling inside. Some boys are made that way and shouldn't be treated badly because of it. But that was then, and boys were treated rough at times because they were boys, not because they were bad. Me and my sister were treated very differently by our father even at home. My sister never had to shower at school like boys did. Same school, we were there at the same time, two years apart. Danny C that was a horrible thing to happen to you. I was shouted at many times to go and shower and given the odd nudge in the back to help me on my way. So bare bodies, bare chests, bare feet are one thing, but bare legs is another. I've not heard anyone bothered by their bare legs at a young age before and wearing shorts Yours Truly. That's a first. I had to wear a purple cap on my head to my first school and disliked that. I preferred my head bare on top. At times it's amusing to note what they insisted we wore and then insisted we were not allowed to wear.

Hey Danny C,

You have tripped my particular switch mentioning school plays.

I made my acting debut (har har) aged five. I was one of the sheep (one of many sheep, as Perry Farrell might have it) in the manger in my infants' school's Christmas nativity play.

Even at the age of five I had detected that there was an agenda to it - I had been appointed one of the sheep because the teacher had decided I was one of the worthless kids. It was noticeable throughout my time at primary school how much the handful of clever kids were favoured. The two cleverest boys in the class were always allocated starring roles in any school play, even though I am pretty sure at least one of them couldn't sing . . .

Anyway. There I was, a sheep. My sheep's costume consisted of a sheep mask which I had made myself (they made us make our own sheep masks, I think as a way of making us collaborative in our own humiliation, har har) and a blanket or towel thrown over my back and that was my fleece.

Underneath my costume I was stripped down to my pants . . .
Why? Just - why?

Nobody could see me under my blanket so . . . why the extreme undressing? When I could just have taken my shoes and socks off and it would have made no difference to the audience? I had to crawl out on my hands and knees in front of an audience of parents, feeling vulnerable, naked and humiliated. Really - just, WHY?

They made us all strip off. Girls as well as boys. I don't know what it was about it but there seemed to be a lot of excuses to get us out of our clothes at infants' school. I think the most charitable interpretation of it is that they though that, as such young kids, we hadn't developed any inhibitions yet. Well, I ***king had for starters and I didn't appreciate it.

PE was conducted in vests and pants/ knickers. I have heard of other infant schools where they stipulated some rudimentary PE kit but not at mine.

Then there was the awful shock of school medical exams.

I have gained the impression that these exams were less harsh for girls, that they just had to be stripped to the waist or whatever. Certainly the girls I saw after their exams never seemed upset in any way, like it was something easy they had taken in their stride. But for us boys it was strictly birthday suits and a shocked expression. What makes it particularly galling is that I had three younger sisters, who will never have been degraded the way I was - because they were girls.

I was six the first time I encountered this particular form of torture. My mother came to the school and met me, which was nice! Then she made me strip naked. Which wasn't. I was sitting in the assembly hall waiting my turn to be ritually humiliated. It turned out the teachers hadn't co-ordinated the exams properly - across the hall from me was one of the girls from my year, who had obviously just had her own exam. She was shuffling up and down the hall in her summer dress and sandals, which were undone, happily burbling some nonsense song to herself, accompanied by her little sister, who looked like her own mini-me.

I was panicking, with my hands clasped over my essentials, while my mum tried to soothe me. This girl used to tease me mercilessly and her seeing me naked was my absolute worst nightmare. It was going to be all round the school, me and my bare bits.

Strangely it never was. I don't know how she didn't see me. Maybe she just pretended not to. Maybe she could see I was in a predicament and decided, for just the once, to be kind. It would have been out of character for this girl but I can think of no other explanation.

Anyway I had my turn in the doctor's office where I was duly weighed, measured, poked and prodded. I got a bonk-on in the sight of two disinterested middle-aged women doctors, much to the mortification of my timid Irish mum. Serves her right.

The strangest thing I remember is one school trip to the local park, which was extensive, with the local river running through it. It was sprung on us all of a sudden by the two women teachers supervising us, that we boys should go catching tadpoles in the river. It may or may not be significant that the girls weren't with us at that moment - they were off somewhere else, doing something else. Probably something where they got to keep their clothes on.

We all had to strip down to our shorts and then the teachers had an 'inspiration' - what we really should do was strip right off to our pants! That way if one of us fell into the water he would still have his shorts to change back into. So there we all were, an entire classful of six-year-old
boys, stripped damn near naked, in a public park.

Just let any teacher try that one in 2024 without ending up on some kind of register. WTF?

The telling thing was, they had brought two fishing nets with them, those ones on the end of a long pole. Which means they had decided beforehand to take us tadpoleing (is that a word? I don't know. It is now.). The whole thing had clearly been premeditated. In which case why didn't they tell our parents in advance to send us on the trip with a spare pair of shorts or swimming shorts?

Please don't misunderstand me - there was nothing sinister going on. Once again I think it was emblematic of the attitude prevalent then that small boys didn't have any instinct or need for dignity (wrong) - or maybe that we were easier to control when our dignity was taken away from us. And as I say, once again, the girls were spared the indignity of the tadpoleing.

Getting back to the school plays, the following year I played, variously, the front and the back end of the pantomime cow in the school's production of Jack And The Beanstalk. Once again stripped down to my pants under the costume. After that I decided that enough was enough. From then on I started feigning illnesses to get my mum to write me a sicknote. By my last year at primary the teachers wouldn't cast me in the school plays at all. They didn't dare. They knew that one way or another I wasn't going to be there on the day.

EM Forster wrote that the past was a foreign country where they did things differently. Well the 1970s were certainly very foreign. Particularly if you were a boy.

Hi Danny C,

Thank you for your comment.

Just a few final words on the double standard.

I can only conclude that the shorts requirement in infants' school was to cut us young chaps down to size by making us feel vulnerable and undignified. I do not think it can have been an official rule since there was no uniform requirement at that stage. They were absolutely serious about it though. I tried turning up to school in long trousers - after all, trousers were a clothing item traditionally gender-specific to boys and hey, the girls were wearing trousers so why couldn't I?

The second day I did so I got taken aside and shown the school's implement of torture, the so-called 'slipper', which was in fact a large black plimsoll, by my scary class teacher. She turned it this way and that, making sure I got a thorough, unhurried look at it, while she warned me that if I turned up in long trousers again I wouldn't just be staring at the slipper . . . It was a terrifying moment for a five-year-old. It was shorts for me all the way after that. It takes a certain type of specialist to intentionally terrify a five-year-old child but my primary school seemed to have a knack for recruiting such people.

Like I have said, in contrast to your school, it was the girls who often went barefoot in PE and even outdoor games lessons. The difference was, it was through their own free choice - a choice which we boys also had, but chose not to choose. I can even remember the odd woman PE teacher out on the playing fields taking her class in her bare feet.

I think we can all remember being forced out onto the muddy, waterlogged playing field to play football while we froze our nipples off in flimsy nylon tops and shorts during those Siberian winters we got in the UK back in the 1980s . . . only to get back to class afterwards to discover that the girls had spent the same PE period doing a dance class or whatever in the nice warmth of the assembly hall or the gym.

If we forgot our PE/ games kit we were kept in the changing room where we had to write out lines. When the girls forgot theirs they just had to take their shoes and socks off and were allowed to mooch about on the sidelines, chatting to their mates.

First world problems, I know. Well, apart from the shorts thing, I realise many people who read this will think I'm harping on it too much, but I honestly felt half-naked going to school in short trousers. I had been having a hard time adjusting to school as it was and this just made my life unnecessarily difficult and unpleasant. I know every other boy seemed to take it in their stride but really, forcing that on me was just unthinking cruelty.

This was the mid-1970s and the whole culture was totally unreconstructed by today's standards. A child who was resisting wasn't in distress for some personal reason which ought to have been understood, they were just bad and they had to be made to toe the line by whatever means necessary.

Comment by: Charles on 6th November 2024 at 09:51
Danny C (3rd November) – I’m not saying I agree with it, but I can kind of see the argument for removing shoes, socks and shirts for Drama lessons. I am, however, completely puzzled about the three stage shows you had to perform shirtless. Were these plays where it was appropriate for the character you were playing to be shirtless, or some sort of song and dance performances, or what? And were all the boys taking part required to be bare-chested, or just those with certain roles or parts?




Charles - Happy to give you a separate answer to your question from my other comment.

Certainly the main one was very appropriate if you were keeping true to the book. It was a Lord Of The Flies enactment, mirroring the book we were doing in English Literature at much the same time. I was nearly 15 at the time. Although we began fully dressed within about 5 minutes we went behind a curtain and all the boys were down to our underpants and a bit of flimsy cloth to hide them, and not a stitch of anything else. That was ALL the boys, it must have been at least 20, possibly even 30 of us. We then spent the rest of the time on stage like that, for an evening performance in front of all our parents and whoever else was watching us, all shirtless. There was very little female involvement in this one. Our drama teacher of the time would not take no for an answer in terms of involvement in it.

I met this drama teacher again just 4 days ago for the first time in 37 years!

The other two times were a Barnardos childrens home play we did where I played a grubby kid brought in off the street covered in dirt. I was wearing rags, an old oversized shirt of my father. Other boys were the same , about 6 to 8 of us I think, and we had our rags removed for our pretend wash in a silver metal tub pushed on stage. We were in pants, two of the others sat facing each other in the metal tub and splashed what was about two inches of cold water over themselves for effect. The rest of us beasically got our rags taken off us and had to sit down as we were for a bit, shirtless and barefoot in pants, and with painted pretend dirt on our legs, body and faces. I was not quite 13 doing this.

The other time was rather different. An early example of doing something environmental with a message, where five drama class boys were picked out at ransom, me being one of them, oh the luck, and once more ending up in just our pants but this time we were fully body painted in green on our torsos all over and brown for our legs and had to be wound together as one large growing tree. This one was presented to the school, and felt quite different actually. Although wearing little other than basic boy pants of the time and having a bare body the paint on me made me feel I had coverage and felt less obvious compared to normal pasty white skin on show. The green was very helpful in covering things up, but I was still barechetsed all the same. I remember girls smirking faces watching me and wondering what they thought. Once done we had to walk across to the PE block and shower it all off but it was special stuff meant for skin use, not a pot of Dulux.

I did also do another 7 things on the school stage where I did manage to keep things on by the way. I'd hoped to get the suited role in the Barnardos play which meant I could just wear my blazer and shoes but that went to another boy in class and I remember sitting on that stage as we did that, in my pants, everyone watching me and the others like me, made to look a homeless grubby street urchin and thinking what a lucky so and so my classmate Andrew was who looked so smart, and he was one of the sportier self confident ones in school who was full of confidence when it came to PE and all that went with it going barechested and all the rest, so should have had my role instead! But his confidence didn't stretch enough to have the urchin role. From memory nobody chose the grubby urchin roles, they were simply assigned to us without much choice.


To end, I just want to mention the question someone asked about how girls treated boys in school who were around them while barechested. For me it was not the PE lessons we did that proved tricky, it was the drama classes we did, because they always involved girls from our immediate form and the class lasted a double period. ALmost half of drama was shirtless boys. Often if we removed shirts and ties at the start we stayed that way for the two hour duration. Very occasionally we could be in shorts only, just like in PE but a lot of the time the boys just removed our blazers if we had one on, our shirt and tie and placed them on hangers in a clothing area of our drama studio or laid somewhere at the side or on a spare chair piled up. Unlike PE, everyone's shoes and socks came off, girls too, so no double standard in drama on that one that I recall. Much of the time this left all the boys sitting around in our dark grey long trousers, barefoot and barechested. It felt odd and unnatural like that. We often did small group drama tasks and girls would be up close and make comments at us, and me, knowing full well that a lot of boys in our class were not really up for haging around girls like this without our tops on, and the girls knowing we had no choice in some cases took advantage to tease and attempt to get reactions. Not many girls, just a very small handful, but that was enough. I actually think some of the nicer and quieter intelligent girls were quite embarrassed to be around a lot of barechested boys during drama like that and may have even had some empathy.

I had a conversation 4 days ago with the very man, my head of drama, that did all this to me and others for three years from 1981 to 1984 when I did drama under him and let's just say in a nutshell he didn't in principle have any issue with any of this whatsoever, and remembered me as being fairly at ease with myself and creative! Perhaps he was pretending to remember. It sort of matched up with one of my report slips of the time but how anyone cannot pick up on awkwardness under his tutoring eyes I do not know when you are telling boys aged 12 to 14 to remove shirts all afternoon among a bunch girls. Of course many of us were awkward, would he not have been if we'd made him and the other men in school sit around the staff room half dressed?

Nice relatable comments Yours Truly. Your own and Simon's comments on double standards ring a big bell with me personally.

At my secondary school the girls PE was done in footwear, mainly plimsolls and short white socks but the boys had to be barefoot for the gym/sports hall activity (as well as barechested) and even for lots of spring/summer activities outside on the grass, sometimes beside plimsolled girls. We didn't share heaps of lessons with girls in secondary, about one in six lessons were a shared boy/girl thing. My timetable never changed much with PE, it was three early morning PE lessons each week at school, sometimes the girls shared a lesson in gym with us as often as once a fortnight. If I'm perfectly honest I don't know why they did when at other times they did things to themselves with their own teacher. We had a huge sports hall and a slightly smaller gym for indoor use, plus four squash courts with a viewing area from above.

Anyway, the girls had their footwear, the boys did not. So when the girls came and joined us in the gym for PE, sometimes under dual instruction from a male and female teacher, at other times our male teacher left the girls teacher in charge of the lot of us, the double standards noticed dramatically. The girls nearly always all wore their plimsolls, yet in the same lesson doing the same things the boys had to be barefooted. Some of us wished to wear trainers or plimsolls and were not allowed to do so, while the girls could. I never understood it. What's the difference, are boys feet tougher and girls more tender, of course not. But this double standard was striking and I was always happiest in footwear doing things. We knew this in school as young schoolboys at the time, this is no being wise after the event years later kind of thinking. The footwear difference for boys and girls was the real weird one. I played squash barefoot and barechested with a girl a few times, while she was in footwear and shorts and polo type top. I even played a female PE teacher in full tracksuit and trainers while I was in just shorts and nothing else. She insisted on playing me, so awkward and must have looked ridiculous to those watching us above. On parents sports days out on the grass in summer each first Monday afternoon in July the boys had to be barefoot all afternoon (4 hours worth) there too but the girls had footwear and socks. But you could make the same point about no tops allowed on boys at mine too, whilst girls had theirs. A boy at my school was not allowed to wear a top of any kind in the school gym/sports hall. That was the blanket rule across all of our gender whatever year you were in, even including boys of the lower and upper sixth who had to do PE in our free periods at least once a week as a condition of staying on to study further.

The way you have articulated the whole attitude to boys in school compared to girls "Yours Truly" is spot on and so well said. No matter how well behaved or how much you tried you could feel the wrath of some staff teachers, or even a caretaker or a matron simply for existing. I saw this happen to others. That's true. Our school had a dedicated librarian middle aged woman who was a right old curmudgeon, always treating some boys like they didn't belong in the school library at any time. I was very well behaved and had friends who were intelligent and well mannered and who did the work, but even so I still had my brushes with a few.

You state one of your worst experiences was your first school shower. This was one of mine too, I related it four years ago on here I think. Basically me and my best friend were caught trying to slope off out the changing room after PE soon after starting secondary at the ages of 12, fully dressed with coats on and bags slung on our shoulders when we got apprehended and accused of not joining the others for our debut secondary school communal shower, which was true, we had tried not to shower. I'm sure there were a couple of others who also didn't but didn't get caught, so we were out of luck. I regretted this almost immediately. Neither of us were very sweaty or dirty from memory. We were nervous about it and shy, hardly a crime for new boys, with a lot of new faces around us, and facing such a new situation but me and my best friend were turned around and while everyone else was done and almost dressed, the two of us had this PE teacher bearing down over us both and made us remove our coats and strip naked for him on the spot before grabbing the two of us together by the back of our necks with each of his hands squeezing tightly and marching us across the large changing room floor stripped off, to the now empty showers and literally threw the two of us in with quite some push. That's 43 years ago now, in September of 1981 and I recall it like it was yesterday.

To this day I would not dream of sharing that event with any family member, although I have done so on here. Now last Friday I attended a school reunion for a Class of 84, my secondary years are actually 1981 to 1987. Although that teacher was not there, another who took me in 1984 and all the other years I was at the school was, and I mentioned this to him and gained a sympathetic hearing and a comment from him telling me he wished I had told him at the time. Telling one teacher what another had done never crossed my mind in those days. Maybe he knew something about this other chap I've no idea, I didn't press the point too much, I wanted a nice evening not a heavy going one, as at the time in the early 1980's I just thought this was the almost normal way boys were expected to be treated at secondary schools at the time, many which came with a reputation ahead of attending them, even the very good ones like the one I was a pupil at, one of the best in my area. But there you have it.

The reunion took place in the large sports hall I spent many hours in during the 80's and once inside, with no windows and artificially lit, it could have been all the way back to 1981 again, it was virtually unchanged to look around at, even the basketball nets and benches looked like the same ones to me. I'd already been back two years ago for a previous reunion, Class of 82, and that had been my first step in that place since 1987 and it was a bit like time travelling to the past just looking at the building, before you got to the actual people there.

Another thing: did you ever have to share PE classes with the girls?

Hi Simon,

Thank you for your reply to my post. Yours is far and away the worst example of double standards I have come across on this forum. I felt utterly outraged reading your account. I absolutely hated my secondary school days but, reading the testimonies from other respondents on here, I have come to realise that I didn't actually have it that bad. I was severely shy all through my schooldays and being forced to take PE lessons stripped off as if I were about to go on the beach wouldn't have done anything good for my confidence.

Just a few more details that come to mind.

There was no putative footwear rule at my secondary school, it was purely up to the individual pupil, of either gender, whether they wore footwear or not. It threw up a weird and obscure gender divide whereby the girls often seemed perfectly happy to take their PE lessons barefoot. During any indoor lesson half to maybe 70% of the girls wouldn't have bothered bringing any trainers. I can even remember numerous girls happily playing rounders or performing athletics out on the playing fields during the summer months barefoot. By stark contrast none of us boys ever did the same. I don't know why, it wasn't something I ever discussed with anyone else. I just took the view that the world didn't need to see my feet and, seemingly, every other boy in my year felt the same.

My school had tennis courts, which always seemed an extravagance for a bog-standard comprehensive school in the mid-1980s with acute funding problems courtesy of Maggie. The strangest thing is, they were never used for tennis lessons, apart from one half-term when the girls - only the girls - did tennis. I always wondered what that was about, given that tennis is not a gender-specific sport. I can only assume that the school authorities decided that we boys needed to do team sports for the usual 'character-building' bullshit reasons.

In my final year self-defence classes were introduced - for the girls only. I had always wanted to learn some form of self-defence but had always been too shy to do so. If these classes had been offered to the boys I would have taken them up. I had been badly bullied and wanted to make it stop. But never mind. I was only a boy. I am still angry about this blatant discrimination almost forty years later.

The amusing thing is, the school specified a particular change to the girls' PE kit for these lessons: a loose-fitting top and long trousers/ leggings and bare feet. This more maximalist kit was presumably because the instructors taking these self-defence classes happened to be two fit, good-looking young blokes in their mid-twenties, who by the nature of the activity, were going to be getting 'hands-on' with the girls.

Anyway, that rule went out the window straight away. The girls in my school year being the bolshie lot they were, half of them turned up to the first class in their usual aertex tops and gym knickers. I know this because we boys saw them filing into the assembly hall. Har har, I bet that had the senior staff at my catholic school grinding their teeth in chagrin!

Hi Simon,

Out of interest, did you have any siblings at the same school?

Several people have posted about their experiences with school PE/Cross Country and the limited kit allowed. At my school it was only shorts for a gym detention.

I wondered what sanctions were applied for rule breaking.

With us it ranged for cold showers, up to caning. The most common was to repeat the detention another day. Caning was rare in detentions, but I recall one situation where 2 boys started to push one another/fight – the result was 6 strokes each of the senior cane immediately after the run.

Hi Yours Truly,

I found one sentence in your post particularly interesting: "They see boys as little beasts that need to be put in their place, cut down to size." That perfectly captures what I felt about my school’s approach, especially the PE regime. There seemed to be no real reason to have us lads constantly shirtless and barefoot; it all served as a way to keep us under control, to reinforce a sense of discipline and humility. It often felt less about physical education and more about asserting authority over us.

Thanks for giving voice to a perspective I hadn't heard in a while—it really resonated with me.