Burnley Grammar School

Stuart K: Probably different reasons for different lads. Some probably always felt embarrassed so stopped, others might have just been taking advantage of the relaxed rules, and a few probably just out of laziness, but the older you get you feel more entitled to decide things for yourself and the chances are if you felt it embarrassing or humiliating to be herded in at 11, those feelings will still be there at 15 or 16 - perhaps even more so.

If most of us in school were not so bothered by the showering issue I've just got one simple point to make.

At fourth years in my own school they became free choice after three years being compulsory after PE. Guess what, nobody used them from the fourth form onwards. Nobody. Everyone stopped. I was in fourth form in 1988.

It was a funny decision because we still sweated out as much if not more than we did in the three lower years and we were well used to it.

But we all just dressed and got off. Nobody actually chose to shower.

Why?

Did my ears deceive me or did I really hear in one of the latest revelations on radio this lunchtime from that book being promoted all over the media currently that a certain ginger whinger had something called a "wash matron" I think it was described as, or some kind of similar wording, who was getting him up at prep school with all the other ones in the dorm and washing his hair each morning and a whole lot more, jesus wept.

Iain Dale on 9th January 2023 at 04:46

I am glad justice has finally caught up with the dirty old man - he couldn't help himself, even when he returned to South Africa. I think it is horrifying he got a job in a school for the deaf. Children with some sort of disability feel even more isolated - you can only hope he didn't get up to his squalid tricks there.

Nicholas, can you recount what subsequent mixed sessions were like? You said it always felt odd when the girls were present, did they ever tease you or cause discomfort in any way?

Did your parents know or comment on this PE policy? Did they approve? Did you ever question why you had to change schools too? Did you ever ask to return to your old school?

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-64173472

Nicholas you're talking my language here. Whilst not every secondary lesson I did was a shirtless one, loads were and you could never quite tell when the call would come to strip off in class like that. Sometimes we got told in the changing room not to bother and go along without shirts on and other times we'd go down for the lesson and be told at the sports hall. Sometimes we would start the lesson shirted and then a few minutes later whichever teacher we had that day would bark at us to take shirts off and throw them aside. It was very regular but also very random. Mostly only in male company but there were one or two times with some girls present, I think when we were outside, not in the gym. We only mingled with girls in PE on some of our outside classes on athletics days in the run up to our sports day annually as we practiced.

I'm very familiar with the arm fold you mention Nicholas. That was me too. I was always aware I was doing it a lot when I had to go to PE shirtless. What was being hidden by it, well is nipple shyness a thing with some boys in that situation with shirtless PE they're not keen on? I only felt this strong lack of confidence like that in school doing PE. I never liked being told what to do very much and certainly didn't like someone telling me that I had to go about shirtless in school. I also disliked uncertainty a lot and liked to be in control and know what to expect. Even during the lessons where we went the whole time in our tops I'd be concerned we may be told to get rid at any moment. You could easily tell from body language alone who the boys in class were who didn't like the shirtless mandate.

Somebody I was at school with joined the regular army when he left and one time he came home on leave and met up with me and told me all about his training and he told me they did more shirtless PE at our school than in the army training PE he did. I also remember being very surprised how much fitter and defined he looked after just a year or so. Nobody seemed to leave school after 4 years of secondary PE lessons looking stunningly different did they!

I remember in the late 80s I moved school for the start of fourth form. This was because a girl, who was the daughter of a family friend, was being bullied by the biology teacher to the extent that her parents decided to pull her out, and mine did the same, since the head would not do anything about it. We both went to the same new school. We were in the same year and got on well, though we weren't close friends.

I was quite surprised to find that the boys' kit for indoor PE was sometimes just shorts, depending on the activity, much like in the photo. Girls wore shorts and t shirts, which is what both boys and girls had worn in our previous school.

Lessons were usually separated by sex, but on some occasions it was mixed, including right at the start of the year. I was quite embarrassed in that first lesson when the teacher told us to wear shorts and no shirts, as I was very unfamiliar with the practice. I distinctly remember awkwardly saying hello to the girl I'd moved with, whilst folding my arms across my chest to try to cover it, and how she laughed nervously as I did so. Not out of malice, just because I think she could sense my embarrassment, which made her embarrassed.

To make matters worse I then got put in a group with her and another girl for the lesson (at the start of the year, the school would do its biannual fitness standards, for which we'd rotate round various physical tasks and measure our performance). I was very shy and wished I'd been allowed a shirt like them.

I got a bit more used to doing PE without a shirt over time, but it always felt a bit odd, especially when there were girls present.

Responding to Alan's comment earlier today about starting school as you mean to go on. Without wishing to repeat myself you might like to view a comment I wrote over on the Hesketh Fletcher Gym Team topic on 4th January about my own school days 1969 to 1981.

The three schools I attended over those years all took PE classes nearly always for the boys without letting us bother with any kind of garment up top, every single one of the boys was bared chest and my first PE memories right from the outset are of me in school in the hall at a very young age doing our PE with just some shorts. That carried on into the primary school as well, all lessons were of the boy and girl variety, nobody did things separate. So by the time I reached the age of 11 I was well used to doing things like that non shirted and it continued into senior school years at secondary as well, but not every single time like at the other two places, but even then we did share some shirt free lessons at secondary with the opposite sex and despite having so many years of this style of PE under my belt and sharing with girls at the other two schools I did suddenly hit a very self conscious period when I no longer wanted to be like that among them at school. But we had to do it. I didn't have a particularly bad problem with self image but there is undoubtedly that thing called 'the awkward age' no matter what and for me it was most definitely being 13. What I did beforehand counted for nothing, but it was a passing phase. I never gave the way I did PE in my first two younger schools a second thought and only when I reached 12 did I start thinking about it a lot more and thinking about how I was looking. I think that is actually perfectly normal though. I think my own experience could have proved a positive for a lot of people. I was also taking showers before I went to secondary school, they had them at my primary when I arrived there in the 1972/3 school year.

Richard - I called that out on the day it was written. As I said at the time, I prefer non fiction. The reply you elicited seems absurd. I'm surprised he even responded at all. I wonder what he wanted out of sharing his private details if all he was peddling on here was patently untrue and imaginary nonsense.

I went to school only in the 2010s so doing PE shirtless was pretty much dead as a practice, with a couple of exceptions. One was swimming, (primary and secondary) in which all boys had to take their shirts off. Another exception (in secondary) was there were a couple of occasions when a boy who forgot their kit had to do the lesson shirtless because they ran out of spare polo shirts (and they prioritised the girls). I remember one boy not seeming to mind at all, but another boy protesting until he was threatened with detention. I felt sorry for him as I probably would've gone with the detention. I think we all thought it was a bit creepy of the teacher, and also unfair since girls could just sit out if they ran out of spare kit.

Our PE teacher once threatened that boys would have to do gymnastics with our shirts off if we didn't tuck them in. I think he was bluffing as someone would've kicked up a fuss, but I'm not completely confident. At any rate it made me very nervous. I was very self-conscious at the time, perhaps in part because of being gay and not out, which also for obvious reasons meant I was worried about spending a lot of time with half-naked guys at that age in just a pair of shorts. Swimming was difficult enough. Thankfully it never happened.

I'm sure it most cases shirtless PE is just how things were done, and there was nothing sinister going on, even if it wasn't the best policy in hindsight. But I wouldn't discount the possibility that in some cases teachers' motivations were inappropriate. The way our teacher behaved, and seemed to delight in enforcing uniform rules very strictly for boys in particular, makes me suspect he should be included in that, and I'm grateful standards had evolved by the time I was in school to stop him doing anything too dodgy.

A word about "Allen Williams" and the comment he left on 21st December.


He left his email so I left a very brief comment on that email link on 2nd January confronting those comments made because they were so plainly suspicious. I had a very peculiar and fast middle of the night response saying this, and nothing else;


<allen.bowdon@gmail.com>

<Hello

Unfortunately, I have no idea what I said, and cannot, from what clues you have given me, find it.

Maybe you can provide a link

Allen>




This person wrote a lengthy article on here only a few days earlier and yet appeared to simply forget it or where they had made it. REALLY? So I cut and pasted the entire comment back to his email and also the link directly to that comment through this site. I even worried that this person's email had been used maliciously and they had not made the comment at all but as they did not seem surprised or actually deny making it that seems highly unlikely. Not heard another word.


Did anybody else use the attached email to that message and receive anything similar? Some people are genuinely puzzling how they act and why they do the things they do.

To answer John (7th January at 1358). I think if schools started out with minimal kit from the start, at 5, or even at 9 as yours did, there are not the issues of starting it at 11, when children are much more self-conscious, the growth spurt has started fro some and not others, and the feelings you have are much more complex. This was true in the 80s, and is probably even more relevant now.

Body image issues, teasing and bullying is far more likely at 11 than it is at a younger age - also there are other considerations , like the child who might be homosexual, for example, is likely to feel much more uncomfortable around his/her peers, in a state of undress. The one thing most schools didn't understand then (do they now I wonder?) is child psychology. As I think these hundreds of pages and thousands of posts prove, is that one size certainly doesn't fit all.

John on 7th January 2023 at 22:06

+1

Comment by: Robbie on 5th July 2022 at 04:10
Re: Good Health - it surprises me that none of the pupils in that have yet searched it out and written a comment underneath, especially some of those boys, now men of course. I don't think I'd forget the day that TV came to school in those circumstances.



Referencing my comment from back in the summer above, I noticed that you can no longer view that school children's educational programme on You Tube without age verification. I went to show it to someone much younger than me that I work with and couldn't without a login. You can still view others in that series normally though. Something 80's kids were allowed to look at 20's kids are not now. Someone's obviously complained and made more of it than was strictly necessary.

Same school at the same time with two PE teachers and two extremes. Both events happened within weeks in January 1985.

I'll define each as Mr A and Mr B, their real surname initials

Mr A went out of his way to be incredibly decent, one day bringing my brother home after an accident in PE when he injured himself and couldn't walk. He drove him home after school and came into the house to explain and make sure everything was alright before leaving. Next morning he unexpectedly knocked and gave him a lift to school and did so for the next couple of days. I was still at school too at the time and I was even allowed to hitch a lift with my PE teacher too. Absolutely delightful and saved a half hour walk. PE teachers have this certain cliched image and he was nothing like it and he was softly spoken too. Never really lost his temper much but he was no slouch and probably had the best behaved of all the classes I was in for PE, and had one important thing well worth having - respect of his pupils.

Mr B, just so different. Loud and mouthy, arrogant and short tempered and even negligent. Never really seemed interested in listening to us much or thinking of us as individuals worth the time. In his class we watched someone have an epileptic fit and he just stood thinking it was some wind up rather than a medical issue to act on immediately until I myself ran out the door to grab some help without his permission. I was 15 and had seen a fit before with a cousin of mine.

I could list 10 fab points about Mr A and nothing bad at all about him or even close to bad. I could list another 10 points about Mr B, all bad and very little that was any good. Same school, same time. Both teachers were about the same age.

Mr A was always on first name terms with everyone all the time. Mr B was one of those who went with surnames only.

It will come as no surprise that most of us at school could sense that the two teachers were not the closest of colleagues.


I fully endorse with the comments of both Mike and John.

Mike,
I agree with you that we need to show compassion and understanding towards those who had bad experiences at school and disliked PE and we need to listen. Those who have had bad experiences also need to listen to and accept those who had good experiences at school when they were boys and enjoyed PE and not to accuse them of lying when they comment that they preferred doing PE stripped to the waist and had no concerns about playing shirts vs skins team games. Most PE teachers were professional and didn’t act inappropriately.

For those who had a very bad time in school for whatever reasons that live long in their memories as adults I think showing compassion and understanding is the answer and to be prepared to listen too.

Fiona,

I agree with everything that you said in your last post. My mum made my brother and I wear a vest underneath our school shirts. Another added bonus of topless PE being introduced at Primary School when I was 9 was that my mum then realised that I disliked wearing vests. From then on mum allowed me to stop wearing a vest.

I see my troll is back. If I am "inadequate" - even though I have run my own business for several years now, there is something rather sad about an elderly playground bully reliving his glory days with personal insults, probably concocted in his mum's basement. Grow up, Andy. I never said "ALL" teachers - I have made that perfectly clear several times, no doubt you are so busy dreaming up your insults you don;t actually read the content. Happy new year, Andy.

Chris Overby: 2 Jan 2023

Perhaps a bit more information than I was expecting, as Tanya has observed, but an interesting reflection on times past.

Chris G, Nathan and others

As Chris G and Nathan have posted, children, boys especially, were often expected to wear vests under their nightwear in the unheated bedrooms of the mid 20th century, and you definitely weren't alone in being subjected to this indignity. I say boys especially, because girls tend to wear lighter/briefer nightwear and underwear than boys and are generally encouraged by their mothers to shun vests permanently once they became eligible to wear bras. In contrast, as others have pointed out here, many boys only got around to discarding vests when confronted with topless PE at secondary school.

Times have moved on, and with centrally heated homes, schools and workplaces, vests as underwear have become largely extinct amongst the under-65 age group, especially under nightwear, itself becoming superfluous.. My mother stopped wearing vests when she got her first bra, and I haven't worn one since before I started school; my teenage son likewise.

Lots of sensible discussion going on here but please, to new comers, don't take notice of Alan. Just look back a few months and you will see his posts follow a single theme that every PE teacher was an utter abuser of boys and that no one had a happy time at school and especially in PE because he didn't and was rather inadequate, which he still is. Please, keey the discussion healthy and keep away from his posts.

What was said by Ollie seems sadly familiar There were six full time male PE teachers on the staff at my school while I was there, 70s. Four of them were fairly good actually, one was totally useless but pleasant enough, but there was one total arse. PE was sometimes like having the good cop bad cop routine. I forgot my football boots and he gave me a spare pair of his instead but I was size 7 and he gave me size 10 which I was made to use with three pairs of thick old socks from lost property to bulk up my feet. It was humiliation as I could barely walk properly never mind play an actual game and run in them, so I was made to take them off and play football in just the socks, all three pairs over each other, which of course ended up muddy and then I was made to take these socks that didn't even belong to me back home to get washed and return them. The look on my mum's face was a picture I can tell you and she flat refused to do so because I'd been told to play in socks and told me just to go back and hand them in next morning, which I did, along with a short note from my mum. I then received a detention for disobedience and was clearly being singled out in his class for the next month or so.

I suspect like many, it's not the good teachers you remember most but the minority bad ones you came up against.

I can sympathise with both Nathan and Chris Owerby, as my experience back in the 1950s and 1960s mirrors elements of both their reports.

Like Nathan, until I was 8 or 9, I wore itchy woollen t-shirt style vests and baggy trunks in winter and cotton singlets and briefs in summer. Like Chris O, I was expected to wear my vest under my pyjamas at night, to the despair of a children's nanny that Mum knew, who maintained that you shouldn't sleep in anything worn during the daytime.

Mum was very keen on vests. Although there were hot days during my primary school years when even she had to grudgingly agree that I didn't need one, it was not until the summer of my tenth birthday that I went vest-less for more than a few days at a time.

Not wearing a vest during the day inevitably led to not wearing one under my PJs at night, a reasonable outcome in Summer, but something that Mum still needed convincing about when daytime vests resumed in the autumn.

And resume they did, Mum being adamant that I should wear vests when I went back to school, but accepting the compromise that they were were optional at night.

I went to secondary school in the late 90s / early 00s so well past the experiences of a lot of commenters - thank goodness!

Our indoor PE kit was polo shirt and shorts for girls and boys. Outdoors boys wore reversible rugby tops, girls wore fleeces over their polo shirts. The only slightly odd thing was that girls were given the option of leggings or tracksuit bottoms indoors and out, but that option was not given to boys!

The only time we had to take our shirts off was in swimming, when boys wore black swim trunks. Girls wore one piece costumes, with rash tops and shorts over the top also allowed (I think for religions reasons or in mixed sex lessons only but I’m not sure). As a fairly skinny boy I found that a bit uncomfortable at that age, so certainly would not have enjoyed doing all PE lessons dressed like that.

I was more self-conscious in year 10 and 11 when PE was mixed, and I think a few other boys were too. Most awkward was at the start of year 10 when me and a couple of other boys wore rash tops assuming we’d be allowed given the girls could, but the teacher made us take them off in front of a full class of boys and girls.

I empathize with Ollie, and it makes me even more convinced that teachers - especially PE teachers, ought to be psychiatrically examined before being placed in schools. Many of them verged on meglomania, and many of them were clearly totally unsuitable for the work, and entered the profession for the wrong reasons. I suppose these days they would be "personal trainers" for masochists.

Steve
I now understand where you are coming from.

Our turnout in the school's hall/gym was much like the photo that accompanies the chat here, just some white shorts and that was that. Somewhat later than the photo, for me it was 1970 when I went up to the big one.

I'm going to keep referring to "the dreaded one", this means a man called Wilkins who was one of my own PE teachers at the beginning of the 1970s. I hated the guy with a passion and will not repeat his name again, once is too much.

When I think back about it I remember the strictness of those teachers, the no nonsense attitude they all took with us. That's not to say they were unfriendly or anything like that, most were not, but alas it seems everyone has to go to school and be met with at least one who lives long in the mind as pretty awful and the one you dreaded getting.

He for me was the one who never ceased shredding people to bits on ability, effort and worst of all from my point of view, physical appearance. When you're a pre-teen 11 - 13 years old you are just starting to discover yourself and your strengths as well as change physically and this is just when you can find yourself up against it. Getting sent into our PE hall/gym stripped right down to the basic essentials of the shorts really did fire up not just the exposure but with it the vulnerability of all concerned who did it and when you came up against that one pretty awful teacher you dreaded getting it was a toxic combination. That teacher for me at my school used to play class kids off against each other and make endless demeaning comments. He never seemed to get tired of doing so. Not only was there no hiding place within the hall where we did PE but there was no hiding place for our own selves, served up before him as we were, all of us barefooted and barechested. Like many who've come before me on these pages, not everyone feels that great when stripped of their shoes and socks and the chance to wear a proper PE top.

Nearly all of us were good, well behaved and intelligent lads. I don't remember many class clowns or bullies, that was the preserve of one or two teachers instead, such as the dreaded one in PE. I saw the comment about those who can, do and those who can't do, teach. I think a few PE teachers had hang ups about their place in the school pecking order and really did look on some of us brighter kids with envy which they then took out on us.

We'd never quite know who was going to take our PE class until we went along to it and walked in the changing room. It could often be one of at least 4 different men. My heart would sink if it was the dreaded one, and lift if it wasn't. There was not one lad, regardless of appearance or ability who the dreaded one didn't mock and denigrate, physically or verbally abuse to some degree or another. Not one.

One notorious time on the ropes, such a cliche I know but not all boys can climb them with confidence. I couldn't. I watched as the dreaded one got his trainer off and whacked a lad for hesitancy on the rope to get going upwards fast. But it didn't work and he received the mother of all roastings for his failure to climb more than about five or six feet. My turn came and I got the same whack from the trainer too. I was almost tearing up as I climbed I was so upset by it, but still only managed halfway. For me that wasn't about incentivising, it was demoralising. I felt like I owed the dreaded one nothing at all. I hated the man, who was the only adult male in my whole childhood who physically hit me in that PE hall. The only other person being female, my mother with the occasional smack. My own father never ever laid a finger on me even when he might have had a good reason to now and then.

He ruled not just the PE hall/gym with physical and verbal intimidation but also the changing room. He'd crack lads heads together and boot them up the behind. He might have been better employed in a juvenile offenders borstal with some genuinely bad lads instead of in our school with a bunch of great ones. Like everyone else we showered in school after PE and the dreaded one always supervised closely. We always had to strip off first, line up ready and then file in past him and his hand would touch your back as you entered. There were always lots of yellowy previously used soaps lying across the showers floor ready to pick up and use. You had to bend down and pick one up and when finished just leave it back on the floor, often for the next PE class later on. The dreaded one decided for us when we had finished and let us back out to dry. He punished someone later on in school for attempting to skive a shower by sending them in and then throwing all their clothes, PE kit and school uniform, shoes and underwear in with him too, plus schoolbag and told him not to dare touch it or throw it back out. He was one of those teachers who made our enforced PE nudity more uncomfortable than it needed to be. It was different to others who took PE with us.

He was fond of commenting and touching lads hair. In 1970 and the year or two after some of us had longer hair than had been normal in previous years. He hated this. He'd lost most of his to male pattern baldness and looked older than he was. He threatened to cut a few heads of hair he didn't like the length of.

He took it on himself to go on-to-one against lads in various PE games we did and was so fiercely competitive against us he would not stand being bettered by his own pupils and if he was then we would suffer the big mood he'd throw. I beat him doing some timed press ups where you clap between each one, so he told another lad to literally stand on my back as I lay on the floor and see how that worked out. Of course I couldn't lift up like that. I wondered why a PE teacher wouldn't feel good about us doing well. Our reports written by him were often horrendous. All the lads in class bunched together when they issued our half year report and none of us in his whole class had achieved a grade A or B, it was all C, D and E which just didn't reflect reality. The truth was we would never have been any good for him and it was all about the freedom he had to do as he pleased for himself, not others. One of those teachers that many of us will remember having who you never saw smile.

Comment by: James G. on 31st December 2022 at 22:21
Did anyone at all actually believe a word of the Allen Williams comment of 21st December?

No, thought not.




OF COURSE NOT!

Just a complete pack of lies James. Well written lies but lies all the same. There is not one single school in this country at any point in the past century or more that would have conducted the style of lesson and requirement that person described. I'm not even going to repeat what he said it was so pathetic, and everyone here knows it as he's had no defenders and he himself has failed to come back again.

With teenage boys it was normally socks, not vests for that kind of thing Fiona.

Too much information I know!