Burnley Grammar School

Oh wow. I attended a boys only boarding school which took a rigorous approach to exercise and timetabled 90 mins PE/Games daily including Saturday mornings which oddly were never popular...strange eh! As you walked into the changing room there was a large sign with big black capital letters saying "All boys. Strip to the waist before entering the sports hall" so that was clear enough. We all knew older boys from 13 up were often told to remove tops and vests for outdoor PE or Games lessons, a couple in our dorm had older brothers who knew all about what to expect and and we'd often see them doing so from the classroom windows but for us 10 year olds 13 seemed a long way off. Change was in the air and returning from the summer holidays on that first day back we were sat listening (or pretending to) as the notices were read out. There was one announcement that got everyone's attention. Boys from the age of 11 up would begin performing outdoor PE activities stripped to the waist with immediate effect.
That was us....II do remember the words "where appropriate" being used somewhere. So after changing into vests and shorts we were taken outside and lined up on the field. Our teacher picked a new boy and made him stand in front of the class and take his vest off which he did and went down the line picking out a skins team.and within a couple minutes there was a line of vests on the field. That was a taste of what lay ahead. During winter we did at least one class a week outside barechested often it could be more. I do remember we were pushed hard but there wasn't much moaning...grumbles about going outside when it was freezing or in the rain absolutely but no-one shirked from doing it. With the warmer weather just now I've seen a few informal games of skins vs shirts football with lads showing bare chests. All they need is for their school to encourage that and let them embrace and experience barechested PE. There's no doubt the majority would love to give it a go

When I was a primary aged schoolkid in the early 80s I was a quite shy and reticent individual who kept my head down studiously and was not a natural at anything much in PE. There was a lad at the time in my class who used to be a pain in the neck and mildly bully me mostly with comments about me, knowing I was shy and not yet very confident.

In the run up to going to secondary school he said more than once to me that I wouldn't survive being in secondary school. He obviously thought I was too soft or something. Well he was wrong, I thrived at the school when I arrived and began liking PE. I soon got used to doing the showers even, but he ended up being one of those wimps who got into trouble for trying not to and being the wimp in PE generally. He thought I'd be like that. I walked past him quite confidently one day in the gym with my shirt off as we did some beam work and he was crying in front of our teacher over how hard he found what we were doing. I felt vindicated and this lad who'd low level verbally bullied me through my last couple of years at primary never did once when we went to secondary. It must have disappointed him so much to see me enjoy myself and do so well and be confident when he was the one who suddenly discovered he wasn't coping like he should.

You're over complicating matters Alan, whilst I also understand the points of historical context on early sixties America.


Isn't it just nice to be fit and healthy and look good? If you are all of those things then better all round mental wellbeing also follows. It's a win win situation.

I used to make a bit of a fuss around comprehensive PE lessons at school in the late 1970's, often trying to find excuses for not doing things, deliberately forgetting to bring my kit and preferring to do the alternative. Often trying to skip the school showers, mostly always failing. Dreadfully self conscious about my whole physical appearance for no good reason. Disliking not having my top on when told to remove it many times in gym and all that. Trying to dictate to various teachers what I'd actually prefer to be doing rather than what they wanted.

If my much older adult self could have given the younger me some advice I'd have been quite different. I rather regret acting like I did and rather admire the style of the La Sierra PE lesson which would have probably done me the world of good and left me with no time to be concerned about what I was doing or looked like. I think even timid weedy Charles Hawtrey could have benefitted.

Comment by: William on 20th June 2023 at 18:44


Le Sierra was a display of strength - a sort of gung ho display of power (of a sort) as America entered the long, ultimately pointless Vietnam war. I am sure that over the top training paid excellent dividends for the men conscripted into the military, especially if they wanted to join the USMC, but honestly, what would be the point in 2023 Britain? - the toughest guy to toss a burger, quickest off the mark to answer a call in a call centre?(have a nice day!).

The truth is that if there is a third world war, it won't matter if you are Charles Atlas or Charles Hawtrey - the result will be the same, and when the politicians come crawling out of their nuclear bunkers, they are going to have to build their own houses.

1962 is sixty odd years ago, what would be the point of such nonsense today? By the way, anybody who wishes to dream of the 1960s, the deviser of that fitness programme made many silent films in colour and black and white, of his pupils/victims, and all these years later the family and estate of the person concerned has put these films on You Tube

Dan, A belated response, but like you stripping off for gym didn't bother me. We never wore tops indoors. I don't think anyone would have dared to protest and as it was the same for everyone no-one felt hard done by. Same with showers: startling at first but quickly got used to them. In time, stripping off made me more confident about my skinny body and I grew to like our minimal kit.

Robbie, A belated thank you for the film clip about La Sierra. It was remarkable and shows what boys can achieve if they are pushed out of their comfort zone and motivated to make a special effort. Better that than being allowed to opt out - a recipe for underachievement.

I can remember what some people said to me in school 65 years ago Tim, so forty, easy.

But I do often forget where I left the house or car keys. Such is life.


Thankyou again Joe for sharing your identical TV school punishment with me. I'm quite sure there are some people who will have found these type of goings on in school rather hard to believe. They occurred in schools that liked to think they operated in a mature way, such as the fictitious Kings School, but I don't think it's a mature grown up way to go about things. My school had so many petty minded rules I lost count. One was to stand facing the wall with two hardback books balanced on your head for a few minutes. If they fell off while doing so you added more time or received another small punishment. Discipline in school in the late 50's and early 60's was not all just about corporal punishment, and in PE lessons themselves one favourite was always to drop you to the floor for rapid press ups if you annoyed the teachers and sometimes you might even feel a foot on your back as you tried to push back up. We would also have to hold onto parallel bars until we could no longer take the strain and fell off, no mat underneath.

Don.

Your full blast common caught my eye. I may be completely wrong on this, others will have their own recollection, we all did it after all, but I'm convinced my own school shower had no full blast option and was just switched on and went at the same steady stream always. Sometimes a bit of a power shower or ability to blast it a bit more would have been advantageous because I remember many a time bending over trying hard to remove dirt off my legs and wishing the water was not only a bit hotter but more powerful. You didn't want to be bending over too long like that at school, you can imagine the unseemly comments that often did the rounds in those days.

Sensible comments here from William, Gary, Mike & Tanya.

Looking at 'That'll Teach 'Em', in the bits I've seen they're playing for effect - you can't take these as representative of schools seventy or so years ago (in one scene I think you see a 'production assistant' ducking out of camera shot). What strikes me is standard of knowledge compared with those years, which still seems to decline.

Another thing - it amazes me how people can recall exactly what teachers said to them in Primary School - forty years ago.

Paul, cold showers were common all year round and was the preferred method of punishment.Only the PE teachers were allowed to be present We always wore shorts but no undies and there were two shower heads one for your chest while the other was adjusted for the water to hit your shoulders and back. There was no escape and the showers were on full blast. It was quite common to be kept under the showers for longer than we should have been. It wasn't an easy way out.

On the Old Tamensians Facebook page there are warm and heartfelt tributes to Mr Daplyn from many of those who were taught by him and who actually knew him.

Nothing about this kind of TV is very genuine. Definite hamming it up. - I bet Joe was even wearing his shorts in the shower. Like you said Mike, not one of them was even doing any bare chested PE despite the associated B&W clips showing that was how fifties PE was mainly done and even many boys like us lot on here who were at school decades later in the seventies and eighties spent most of our gym time not allowed a top of any kind, an endless succession of men have come on saying it.

Mean/caring was the oxymoron Alan.

I wonder if you misread what I said.

I think many of us will remember a teacher at school who might have projected a fiercely strict, hard faced, no nonsense persona to the class but scratch beneath the surface and they were actually very committed and caring about those they taught.

I also know that some teachers were just outright swines with few redeeming features, obviously. Like politicians.

I do not agree with your comment about the PE teacher in the programme, and I have defended some of your comments previously - voyeuristic and an aggressive bully. I just don't think it needed saying about an actual individual like that on here. Perhaps the part where you said 'acting' was correct. I have a feeling they were acting up to stereotypical roles of the 1950's rather than being their true selves.

Comment by: Tanya on 16th June 2023 at 14:51
Thanks for the info Tanya - I know they say don't talk ill of the dead and all that, but either this man was acting the part of an aggresive bully, or he was a Beta male who could only kid himself he was an Alpha by bullying people who couldn't hit back because of rank.

Either way, he was a loser, because as that article suggests he was an object of ridicule to the boys he taught (or tried to teach)

I am sorry he died as he did, but I don't retract a word of what I wrote

The headmaster in the programme wanted our friend Joe to feel 'uncomfortable' but not to be frozen.

I've just looked the details of this throwback school programme up and it took place back in July and August in 2003. One of the hottest summers we have ever had. A cold shower would have made the recipient very comfortable surely!

One can't even begin to guess what the true motivation for these kind of petty punishments once was.

Interestingly one of the teachers in this series, Simon Warr, who had a bit of a profile, was subjected to false allegations of abuse in his real teaching career and later cleared.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon_Warr

The fearless investigative reporter Roger Cook who many may remember actually looked into the school Mr Warr worked at as a teacher in 1982 regards corporal punishment, and years later the actual head of that school was jailed for sexual abuse in 2010.

Quite a little backstory once you have a delve.

Oh come off it Alan, that is quite the OTT reaction making such a baseless judgement on somebody you don't even know.

https://thatllteachem.fandom.com/wiki/Mr._Peter_Daplyn

Comment by: Mike on 15th June 2023 at 22:53


With all due respect, Mike, are you joking?. Why should boys of 11 being confronted by PE teachers who think they are drilling the Royal Marines be expected to "understand" them?. Most kids don't understand themselves, let alone the complexities of unpleasant individuals who think their main job is to humiliate and demean them.

On the Joe McCready tape, I'd say Joe, well done for standing up to the bullying. I notice that though the teacher accompanied Joe to the shower, and remained more or less outside, he couldn't resist the urge to cop a look at him - what did he imagine Joe was going to do on his own under a cold shower?. This man was clearly voyeuristic, and enjoyed inflicting humiliation. It is one of the reasons I would ensure that all teachers were made to undergo some sort of psychological assessment before they were employed. There are some very unpleasant types (or were, back then and into the 1980s), who should never have been allowed anywhere near a classroom.

1950's teachers seem oxymoronic to me - mean caring types. Does anyone agree?

It really was the era of tough love.


I wonder if many people on here who say they disliked their teachers just misunderstood them.


I've watched the second part of That'll Teach 'Em and they got them doing some PE at last but all the boys were given white vests to put on whilst actual clips shown alongside from the real 50's showed the boys PE being done with bare chests.

Joe McCready.

At least they spared your blushes in the cold shower punishment Joe, nice bit of evasive camerawork there and you were only seen from the back anyway. Compare that to the middle school boys seen in the schools tv show last year placed here, with no censoring of any kind. A good example of how changes to privacy evolved rapidly over about 25 years from the late 1970's to the the early 2000's actually.

I re-read what you wrote a few weeks ago Dennis and then looked at the McCready item, nice one Joe thanks for the share there, and that was an amazingly accurate comparison but can there ever have been a dumber punishment than sending off for cold showers like that. It's not painful or especially humiliating is it but that is probably what it's meant to be.

Only one shower a week at a 1950's boarding school though? I couldn't believe that. I still find that very unlikely in an age back then.

I was at school myself in Switzerland for a short while back in the early 1950s, spending the summer term at Schule Kirchenfeld in Bern. We did PE (Turnen) several times a week, generally in our ordinary everyday clothes, which at that time of the year was usually just shorts and short-sleeved shirts, minus shoes and socks. Occasionally, when it was very hot, we moved outside onto the grass field, and went topless. There were no showers, so we usually went back to lessons a bit sweaty and grubby!

None of the ginger hair nicknames are ever very original are they - Copper Top, Duracell or Carrott in this case.

My three kids went to school in Switzerland where the school starting age was 7 years old when the first started in 1977. Whether they do nowadays I've no idea but mine were showering in PE from the day they started school age 7, that's one son and two daughters who did the same and I always thought it was a happy, healthy and well run school environment and had no complaints ever, and none of them ever have had.

One thing that sets you apart in school is being born with red hair. I was called 'Carrott' at school in the 1980's. I was very ginger and met with never ending comments for years at school which peaked in secondary school. Now I've never known why people born ginger find themselves targets while other hair colours don't, it's always been a bit of a mystery to me. My PE teacher at school even wrote a report and referenced my hair colour when he put pen to paper. But even worse than the hair on my head was the piss taking I got in the showers at school for having bright ginger pubic hair when it came through at 13. I could handle myself quite well and was quite athletic and able in PE especially at gymnastics but I barely went a month without yet another comment, like everyone was surprised I wasn't just ginger on my head and always found it funny down a bit lower. Being ginger in that area seemed to give the boys I shared PE with a good excuse to openly and directly check me out in ways they didn't with others. While other boys probably worried about their actual penis size in the school shower I was conscious of the hair around it. Nobody else non-ginger ever gets that. Having that hair colour also gives many ginger people paler skin tone and that was me, and even my nipples were exceptionally light coloured to the point of almost un-noticeable and I had to put up with comments about that too, even from one of my teachers. Being ginger haired and pale skin tone didn't in itself make me self conscious at all, I was what I was and okay about it. Luckily I didn't have too much of the other likely ginger trait of excessive freckly skin, I was just mainly very white pale. Taking a shower in school was not something that caused any concern to me and neither did the times when I did PE without a shirt, but it was just the comments simply for being a certain skin and hair tone that became so tedious after a while and did get to me when I was around my mid teens. I remember asking them what was so funny about being ginger and of course there was no answer. Even now as an adult with less dazzling but still ginger hair I come across comments, but school PE was were they came the most.

Bernard - What is it with mothers and vests?

My own parents were regular vest wearers throughout their lives, Mum, in particular being keen that I followed their example even, like you, until my early secondary school days. Occasionally during my primary school years even she had to admit, albeit reluctantly, that vests were overkill on days when the mercury soared above 80C, but it was not until the summer following my tenth birthday that I went vestless from the start of the summer term until school went back in September.

Of course, when I wasn't wearing a vest during the day, it didn't make sense to wear one under my PJ top at night, as I had done up until then, so I didn't, but omitted to broadcast the fact. So when July produced a heatwave, and Mum told me to leave off my PJ top, expecting me to be wearing a vest underneath, she inadvertently introduced me to sleeping topless, although she didn't realise this for a week or so. She and Dad saw the funny side of this, and nothing more was said until school restarted, when she insisted that I needed a vest again. I reluctantly acquiesced for day-time, but surprisingly, neither Mum nor Dad batted an eyelid when I didn't go back to wearing vests and PJ tops to bed.

Full liberation came when topless PE was introduced during my 2nd or 3rd year in secondary school, the unintended consequence of this being that I, along with most of my class, soon stopped wearing vests altogther. Although Dad thought the topless PE bit was a good idea, Mum wasn't quite so sure, although she did see the benefit of not having to buy me vests any more.

Some guys with too much self liking do I think love peacocking in gym situations.

Joe.

Well done for noticing my comment on 26th May there.

So you did that there, magnificent.

We have something very much in common. A good looking cheeky chappie. The exact similarity to my own memory I told last month is uncanny down to the precise detail isn't it. I was a bit younger though. As I said last month, I didn't think I was alone having what was known as a "cool down" and seeing it being given in a programme drawing on the ways of the 1950's proves my commented opinion correct that I wasn't alone in receiving such discipline.

There was just no tolerance at all of any backchat 65 years ago in school. Sometimes it didn't even have to be words but simple demeanour that got you in trouble. You were very similar to me. The shame is that there was this desire to try and remove a lot of personal individuality at school in those days and that didn't suit me. We should want to let all our unique individual qualities flourish in our youth don't you think, not suppress them.

That looked like fun. I see there are other parts to watch. I shall enjoy seeing how it went in the follow up episodes I can see are also available.

Nigel
I think that you have made a valid point when you in the sense of overall attitude to our bodies and the different generations. I also used to attend a small gym , and the changing facilities were rather confined. Like you I would undress get changed for the gym and afterwards change into trunks for the swimming pool. Over time I observed that when the younger generation entered the room
when they saw someone else changing they would go into the toilet cubicle and change in there. Also when using the showers I am wearing nothing and there have been other people present.
Never though have I had anyone make a comment to me such as you received, and I understand that you were offended.
I to have now changed to another Gym because it is £20 per month cheaper. The facilities are larger and the changing rooms much bigger.
There is more provision for those who wish to to change in private which suits the men who prefer to do so.

Enjoyable viewing thanks for sharing that Joe. I watched the whole episode.

I'm not so sure how the cold shower was much of a punishment that year if that was summer 2003, which was a phenomenal record breaker for heat that many will remember. Cold showers would have been a treat to cool off with and relief in those conditions, not a punishment. What a silly headmaster. I liked the reaction afterwards.

I see they were going for total 50s authenticity there but commentary stated corporal punishment had finally been made illegal in the late 90s. I always thought it was mid 80s, but anyway even if it had still been legal only 20 years ago I very much doubt they would have gone that far with authenticity and started dishing out corporal punishment and caning modern kids 50s style, not with any real force anyway.

That matron was just awful!

Chris - unfortunately it was several years after that that I managed to persuade my mother that I didn't need to wear a vest and haven't worn one since. The vestless boys at primary school had no effect on me other than making me somewhat jealous. We had to wear our underwear, however much or little that may be. Just because a couple of other boys never wore vests didn't mean that I or any other vest wearer could remove that item for p.e. - it seemed totally illogical but that was the way it was.

Comment by: Dennis on 26th May 2023 at 17:07

Take a look here Dennis. Something identical to what you described happening to you in your school took place in this retrospective TV programme That'll Teach 'Em shown twenty years ago when kids in school around the millennium went back to the 1950s for a bit.

I should know - it's me! I'm now nearly 37, time flies. I was in school 1998-2003, this was just after our GCSE exams, this was our summer holiday that year.

View 37 minutes in but there's a lot more other stuff. I failed the challenge. There's a load more stuff you can find out there about it.

Cheers.

https://youtu.be/vv_V5Sh27nc?t=2241