Burnley Grammar School

Harper - simply: Well Said!

It's the job of a PE teacher, or at least it once was, to push you out of the comfort zone and discover yourself and what you can do and to do all the uncomfortable things you might not like, whether that's playing football, going swimming, running for four miles, climbing rope to the roof or doing cartwheels across the gym, doing it with or without your shirt and finished off with a group wash with your tackle out for a minute or two once or twice a week. That is the essence of what PE is. Are we supposed to have loved PE and what it got us doing, not so sure about that, but it was good for us and not everything that is good for us we end up liking. Much that I did in PE from various disagreeable sports, to what I wore or didn't, to being told to shower endlessly I took objection to at the time as an opinionated youngster with typical teenage attitude about the world and school but looking back can see it was everything it should have been and I needed it all to have happened.

I left school in 1975 and PE of that decade in schools was pretty strong stuff full of the rough and the smooth you all had to take on the chin and work your way through it all, sometimes find yourself completely humiliated and sometimes feel proud of yourself quietly in a little way. I had the good cop - bad cop teachers, the one we liked and the one we didn't.

Two things I discovered that I was very good at in school PE that I never would have otherwise, first was was running short track distances and winning with good times and also squash which I thought I would hate at first, turned out I was quite good at so enjoyed it and after leaving school I joined a local club and played for a further ten years or so on and off. Anyone who has played squash will know it is intense and I'd sweat buckets especially once we'd finished and I used to go voluntarily to the club's shower room and take one with others present, something I'd never have done at school if I hadn't been made to.

Yeah, so you do need pushing hard sometimes. You never know what you might find out about yourself and it can sometimes be unexpected. Your regular school PE lesson 1970 to 1975 would probably horrify even some of us who were there doing it at the time if we could go back and retrace our time all over again about how much we did, how we were taught and what we were expected to be able to do compared to the class of 2023. For example, my old school doesn't even have a proper grass playing field anymore, they had it covered in fake turf a few years ago now at considerable expense I would think. You couldn't get a grass stain on your shorts however hard you tried.

Giles snippet from 11th March caught my eye.

"It was the kind of place where if you struggled they wouldn't accept it and pushed and pushed until you somehow improved even at anything you had no talent for. This meant some boys tears at times in PE either through frustration, being unhappy or getting hurt in some way."


The above is everything that is wrong with PE in school isn't it. Nothing wrong with pushing kids to do their best or discover talents they didn't even know they had and try to get the best out of them, that's fine and admirable. But at the same time why do we try and pretend that everyone should be good at this and that in school without realising we each have our talents in particular things, whether that's various parts of PE or other subjects. If only school, and I speak from my own personal experience in saying this, could recognise when you had no ability at something and instead focus you on something sporting you actually were reasonable at. To drive kids to frustrated tears is hardly positive is it. Nobody can surely disagree with that.

Giles. I'm not at all surprised your teacher was like you say he was because the Japanese do have a quite interesting culture of the public bath house where people can go along and bathe nude together, complete strangers. It's not something that one can easily imagine taking off in Britain if it was available.

During my time at Worcester Grammar in the early 1980's they ruled that place with a serious no nonsense PE regime at that time while I was there. Essentially we had what amounted to three PE sessions each week, one of the afternoon sessions was an extra long double period which switched every other week between being taken inside or outside but if the weather was truly bad we ditched it and kept inside. It was the kind of place where if you struggled they wouldn't accept it and pushed and pushed until you somehow improved even at anything you had no talent for. This meant some boys tears at times in PE either through frustration, being unhappy or getting hurt in some way.

One PE teacher was actually a Japanese gentleman. I use the word gentleman advisedly, he was extremely polite out of lesson but became a demanding beast of a man once in his PE element and you were under his thumb on some of those double periods in his gym. It was perhaps the nearest I could come to imagining our POW's in the far east under his nationality. My word did he get results though. It was like a class of Weightwatchers on steroids. He wanted the chubbier boys to lose weight and the slim ones to actually gain weight through muscle gain through our efforts, and lack of effort was often met with a sudden blast of big loud words close up to ache the eardrums. We had another English teacher who used to be handy with a slipper which would find random backsides on the end of it every once in a while. I got an almighty slap on the bum for not listening in PE to an instruction and needing it repeating. Didn't like that teacher much and I don't think he liked me either.

I was probably the fittest ever in my life the day I left school at 18. Unfortunately some personality types excel at that kind of PE class and others don't. It worked for me as someone who preferred proper style gym on an individual basis rather than team effort of various types. We did quite a lot of synchronised exercises and small group fitness things.

My grammar was yet another one of those that did away with the need for excessive PE kit for the gym. From the age of 11 until 16 the boys I shared PE with did not wear a top while doing gym at the school and that was the way it was, I knew nothing else at that age to think anything more of it really. It was just another one of the mandatory parts of the PE curriculum of that time. During our school's self styled athletics season which was May to July we went out in PE without a top if the teacher told us to do it.

We had compulsory showers, with soap, which had to be part of our PE kit bag along with towels and kit bits. There was none of this namby pamby attitude to things like communal showering that seems to be all the rage now around some parts. When we had our double period PE sessions which ran to the end of the school day we would jump out the showers in school and as we were dressing could see our PE teacher jump in all by himself, completely naked the same as we had just been ourselves, showering himself at the end of the school day, and sometimes you could see two teachers doing it together, but not while any of our actual class of boys were in at the same time. They didn't exactly flaunt themselves in front of us but they certainly didn't hide anything either. Our Japanese teacher was the biggest one for that.

All in all an overall generally good experience for most of us.

Robbie,
Thanks for your reply, I can see that playing football with a softball would make a huge difference. I’m sorry that I didn’t get to experience that now.

Answering your last line John in reply to my post last night.

I know quite well actually how I ended up playing indoors football barefoot in the school sports gym. It was nothing planned or decided as a fact but something that happened purely by accident really because some of us had trainers on and others didn't at one point during one school year. I think someone among the boys suggested it and our PE teacher took up on it as a gimmick but I think expecting the team of boys in trainers to beat us. We did this two or maybe three times and never again. You could call it some kind of unscientific experiment I suppose. It didn't seem to make too much difference or be a handicap. I actually liked playing football like that, on a hard indoor surface. It was a much more tactile experience as you'd probably expect and I think it gave me better ball control for some reason. Brazilians love playing football like it and they are some of the best in the world, although they often do so on sandy beaches, so it has its merits. The ball we used indoors was actually very light and I can't see how anyone could have sustained an injury kicking it without a boot/trainer even quite hard, but then we were inside and it was not going to get kicked too far anyway. Both teams when we played volleyball would do so barefoot because we not only used to use our hands to bang the ball back over the nets but were allowed to launch a high kick with our feet to get it back too, although I've no idea if that is even a genuine rule you can do in real competitive volleyball. I know I sprained my ankle quite painfully one day near the close of a PE lesson like this and limped to the side for the final five minutes but that was because I landed awkwardly, not because I'd kicked at anything, and you can do that whether you wear trainers or not.

The juxtaposition of "onions and dirty socks" made me laugh at it's randomness of those two smells.

I'm unsure what the smell of your average school changing room was years ago but one thing is sure from my perspective, I don't have any recollection of any deodorant doing the rounds unless there were a few discreet roll ons quickly applied, but then we actually showered there and then on the spot and some of us used soap as others have said so that took care of things, compared to so many now who simply mask their sweatiness with a quick blast of Lynx or equivalent at school, if they even do a PE lesson worth the name in the first place.

Replying to Robbie,
It was perfectly comfortable indoors in the gym playing team games shirtless and the coloured armbands were a good way to distinguish teams. I wouldn’t have wanted to have to wear a shirt or a vest, it was more comfortable being shirtless than having a hot and sweaty vest stuck to your back.

I would have disliked being made to be on a team playing sports like soccer barefooted though as you could injure your feet.

Replying to Robbie,
It was perfectly comfortable indoors in the gym playing team games shirtless and the coloured armbands were a good way to distinguish teams. I wouldn’t have wanted to have to wear a shirt or a vest, it was more comfortable being shirtless than having a hot and sweaty vest stuck to your back.

I would have disliked being made to be on a team playing sports like soccer barefooted though as you could injure your feet.

Peter on 9th March 2023 at 16:59

My point was that most lads shower at home and use deoderant , especially these days, and in the 1980s as well, so any BO is going to be mild. I am lucky that I do not have to use trains and buses much these days but when I do, you really get the full rankness of those who choose not to keep clean. I had occasion to use a train at rush hour time a few weeks ago, and it was like a mixture of onions and dirty socks - these of course were adults. Generally speaking now I think younger people are more aware of hygiene and personal freshness than older people.

It does seem daft in some ways to take PE shirtless and then sort the teams out by sticking some tiny armband on everyone to tell which side is which rather than do the obvious thing which is stick two different colour tops on, or at least one colour on one side. I also did indoors football/basketball/softball/volleyball quite a lot with red bibs against shirtless. I had some of these lessons where we boys were in trainers and others not, a real mix and match situation, not sure how that came about, but we ended up playing a football game of boots v bare teams and against expectations the bare team won, feet that is. Did that two or three times but there didn't seem to be an advantage/disadvantage either way. Teachers of PE liked getting the shirts off our backs and the socks off our feet in the sports gym.

It's genuinely hard to believe that there are secondary school ages out there now or recent leavers who have never done any PE like gets described on these pages, never done a shirtless PE lesson and never taken a school shower. Not that many years ago it would have seemed almost impossible. When you went to school you used to expect these things as the regular normal.

To the commenter who suggested that most boys don't give off odour, really, is that saying they have the Prince Andrew no sweat condition then? I think everybody gives off body odour quite easily, how strongly is another matter, but there's no such thing as somebody that doesn't, just like the laughable notion that somebody cannot sweat. That's a lie, everybody HAS to sweat, otherwise you'd overheat and basically, well, die to be blunt about it.

Replying to Chris N re his post of 4th March 2023.
Hi Chris,
I was always topless for PE by default like you and I completely agree that the bibs were uncomfortable. It always seemed strange to me that the Head of PE wanted boys to do PE stripped to the waist but then covered up the chests of half of the lads with bibs to play basketball and other team games.

The bibs were scratchy and too tight for most of us by the age of 15. It got better when we got a new Head of PE who got rid of the bibs and replaced them with different coloured armbands for each team. The armbands were comfortable.

I can't see the point of showers without soap either. My school had soap, it was sort of optional I think. Nobody forced it, as long as you got stripped fully off and wet that was the main thing. Is it hygienic to share someone else's soap, because I did that a lot in PE showers with another lad and even shared his towel now and again when I couldn't be bothered to bring my own.

I don't know whether you mis-wrote that line about body odour Alan because in school I think all teenagers, certainly all boys definitely do have it if their hygiene isn't up to scratch and you don't need to have done a high energy PE lesson to give it off. I remember at about the age of 14 the initials B.O regularly getting thrown around as an insult actually. The last thing you wanted in school was an accusation you reeked of B.O.

Many years back there was one of those fly-on-the-wall style documentaries following raw army recruits into the British Army, it might have been Marine's or something like that. They got shown during training how to take a proper shower and had to stand around and watch their instructor, whatever rank he was, not many years older than them, get wet, lather up and wash himself while he told them what to pay special attention to, all the while this group of lads keeping completely straight faces as this guy tells them how to wash in the most intricate detail I don't need to spell out here.

A shame they didn't do that in school if it was a place to educate!

Andrew and Jim: There were far more "Edgar's" prowling round school gyms than will ever be admitted to, or even known about, because their colleagues decided to keep their mouths shut, and headmasters their eyes closed. I can't see the point of showers without soap because it will do nothing to expel the "B.O" that in reality most young lads do not suffer from.

Comment by: Matt Grahame on 6th March 2023 at 16:23

<they told us to use a handful of liquid soap straight from a dispenser at the showers entrance before going in, which I always used to throw straight down onto my groin first before rubbing it over the rest of me. Not using it meant getting sent straight back in again.>


There were two things to do with cleanliness they went big on at school in my time back throughout the 70's. One was making sure your hands were clean and washed for school dinners where we had to go and wash them at a sink in the classroom or out in the toilets, with soap before trotting along to the canteen where the lady at the entrance would make us hold our hands out to see if they were clean enough to enter for lunch.

The other was of course that school staple of the PE class, the going in the showers with your mates. At school we did the showers with no soap at all. Teachers told us we didn't have time for that when someone asked why we didn't. So it was just plain lukewarm water for a couple of minutes soak down. Not quite my idea of a proper wash, only useful for mucky legs now and again fresh from the playing field after rugger lessons in the main.

Dinner ladies endlessly checking hands before lunch and PE teachers over excessively watching over showering boys after PE both long lasting memories of cleanliness in school.

Perhaps not so much the going commando aspect of school PE shorts and no pants in itself the big problem here rather than one or two of the highly distasteful mentions that have been made of occasional PE teachers actively stretching shorts open to check down them. That is the really unacceptable part of the whole issue to me that tells me a lot about anyone who did so.

I agree with Matt, that dictating underwear "rules" is questionable in the extreme. On another topic, it is good to see that at last old "Edgar" has been named and shamed as he cowers in South Africa, trying to avoid deportation to the UK to face justice - but how sad that it took somebody famous to out him. I wonder how many Edgar's got away Scot free because the boys they chose to molest never became broadcasters?:

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11831999/Unmasked-Man-accused-Nicky-Campbell-paedophile-named-Iain-Wares-83.html

The whole not being allowed to wear your everyday pants/underwear beneath the PE shorts you would change into never fails to amuse and amaze me for it's sheer weirdness. Whose business should it be to tell anyone, even kids in school, whether they can or cannot wear underwear, unless they're walking into the school showers with their pants on, I'd agree they should take them off in that case. Some schools nowadays allow that I believe.

Okay so I've read a couple of the explanations for this practice but they really are pretty damned tenuous. Your pants don't even get that sweaty in the first place, nothing like enough to worry about like maybe a top would with armpit and sweat stains on the chest and back. Even if you do get a bit overheated down below we were all at the time straight into the showers after PE to rinse ourselves down, including any sweaty balls and came back out fairly freshened up. Well I did at my school anyway where they told us to use a handful of liquid soap straight from a dispenser at the showers entrance before going in, which I always used to throw straight down onto my groin first before rubbing it over the rest of me. Not using it meant getting sent straight back in again.

Tanya, That's a fair question. With jockstraps, unlike bras, there seem to be two quite different experiences. Some men went through secondary school never wearing anything under shorts, whereas others were encouraged to wear something supportive and find it hard to imagine how we who wore nothing managed. For me the only interesting question is when the change occurred, probably in the 1970s. I was at school in the '60s and never saw or heard of a jockstrap.

Why do some men obsess about wearing jockstraps exactly?

Women aren't coming on here talking about starting to wear bra's during school PE.

Just saying.

Chris G
I totally agree with your last sentence. I too have a couple that I have held onto to wear under shorts,

Re jockstraps:
I attended two secondary schools, aged 11-15 and 15-18 respectively. At both schools, we were free to wear what, if anything, we wore under our PE shorts. At the first, we generally went commando. After one incident in which one of the lads in my class got accidentally kicked in a tender region, the PE teacher advised us that we were probably getting to the stage of developmenet where we ought to think of wearing something supportive under our shorts. He mentioned a jock-strap, but none of us had any idea what one of these was. We did, however take his advice, and most of us took to wearing either our underpants or swimming trunks. At my second school, virtually everyone wore something under their shorts, briefs, swimming trunks or, in an increasing number of cases, actual jock-straps. Some lads took to wearing their jocks as everyday underwear or sleepwear. I was a boarder at that school, and I lost no time in getting my parents to buy me a couple (one on and one in the wash) and send them on to me. Sensible, i.e. classic narrow-waistband jock-straps are hard to come by these days, but I like to keep a few around for general summer wear, especially with shorts.

Hello David,

I was at school in the 1980s and nobody in PE talked about jockstraps at any point and some of the boys I was in PE with and shared changing rooms with by the time we were about 15 packed some decent chunky sized well developed adult looking appendages between the legs, I saw that up close, as we all did in those days of the compulsory regular naked close proximity showers with each other in almost all schools. But we always wore our underwear so that kept everything secure anyway. None of these can't wear your pants places.

Much the same goes for my own father who left school at the age of 15 back in 1960 (I left on the same date as my father 30 years later in 1990) who tells me nobody talked of jockstraps in his school either or made demands on removing pants under shorts. Neither of us have ever seen anyone wear one in school, or even talk of them.

I'm unsure what kind of actual PE kit my father actually had back in the late 50s but my own one in the 80s for gym was generally the barefoot variety on the gym floor, quite short shorts, with pants underneath and those with stark vibrant coloured pants often showed through easily as the shorts were mostly white. Tops (vests, T shirts or similar) of any kind were completely forbidden for PE inside the gym on the floor unless we played a team game in which case some flimsy bibs got handed out, which I wasn't a fan of and preferred not having one as they felt scratchy on direct skin. This was mainly for basketball. Because we were always topless by default in PE I would always have chosen to remain as the "skin" rather than bother with a bib when they were handed out.

Broadly agree with Jim's point here.

Sam, I went to a Mixed Secondary School from 1960 - 1966 & we were told not to wear anything under our pe shorts! which along with plimsols, is all we wore for pe. I had never heard of jockstraps until reading this forum . All the boys in my class were shorts only. No teacher mentioned jockstraps!

Sam - A lot of people have talked about such experiences if you look further back. Last summer that subject came to a head amongst readers. Infact so many comments on that subject that it was getting ridiculous and started getting called out as there was literally nothing especially new or illuminating to say on the subject.

I agree with Jeff about wearing a jockstrap for PE and sport. I am surprised that others who attended school in the 60s and 70s have not spoken of their experiences with jockstraps. Our school in the late 60s made them compulsory for boys from about the age of 14. We had no regrets as they were very comfortable and supportive to wear.

Wayne that's not an unfamiliar cross country story. There must be another two or three along the same lines from others, you might have seen if you went back a while on here. What was it with PE teachers taking classes out like that past the school gates, I find that completely unreasonable of them. Self contained PE lessons such as in the photo that illustrates this forum topic are one thing but taking such a class out into the wider community just seems like a mickey take to me.

I wore a jockstrap at school (1970s) for pe running rugby etc. and continued to wear one for sports after school and college. I found that a jockstrap gave more support than underpants and so was my sports underwear of choice. Before getting a jockstrap when I was 13 nothing was worn under the shorts.