Burnley Grammar School

Hey guys nice chat here.

I've got a tale from two schools about shirtless PE actually.

1st my middle school, which laid open the option when I was there that you could do PE in a T-shirt or bare chest, and do it in plimsolls or bare feet. This is what they told our parents , I remember reading it myself, I was a 70's/80's childhood. I think it went about half of boys bare chests and the rest T-shirts, in pure numbers that meant about 8 boys of each. I think I mixed it up a bit between the two options. Lessons included the girls like they did at middle school in PE unless the boys were outside playing a team game other than rounders.

But it didn't last that way for long, and we got a new male class teacher and when he took our PE and saw half the boys without tops he just told the rest of us to do the same, despite the clear option being either a T-shirt or a bare chest. It was meant to be OUR option not his but he obviously interpreted it as HIS option and of course young kids obediently oblige without a word. So all the boys at middle school were doing PE as bare chests in the end, and he took away the foot option too and we were barefoot.

At secondary school we also had a very nice school vest to stick on for PE, it was royal blue, it looked good on. But when we started PE there in the first month we all got down onto the floor of the gym properly dressed for PE as we should have been, only for that PE teacher to blow his whistle, he told us when he blew the whistle it meant we listen, and one blow of the whistle and it was 'right everyone get your vests off, let's see what they've given me to work with this year' and with that we pulled brand new school shop vest over our heads and off, everyone into bare chests as our PE teacher gazed around at us and made a few sarky comments about some of us. We were not allowed to put the vests back on and did the whole PE lesson in bare chests. Over the next six weeks or so with him and another teacher we wore the vests sometimes and didn't other times but after six weeks we just stopped wearing them completely and I never wore a top in the school gym for PE ever again, a very nice blue vest going completely to waste. Even in the 80's it was so obvious to anyone half sentient that a lot of boys DID NOT like being forced into going bare chested in PE. I wasn't too bothered for myself, but I do remember a friend who always looked very awkward in those lessons.

I think it's fair to say there are rules and then there are rules, and some get made up as they go along, teacher could interpret anything their own way I think.

Patrick your description of compulsory school showers is bang on the money there. I recognise that so much. We had no soap either, just water to do like you say. Our showers sometimes didn't even reach lukewarm, they often went cold on us while we took them when I had PE last thing. The kids who got the school bus were technically allowed to go ten minutes early at the end of the day but they still made the bus children take the PE shower and often kept the bus waiting!

Comment by: Terry on 22nd May 2025 at 13:59



Hi Terry, I was commenting on what Christine had written, this is the part I was referring to:




Comment by: Christine Sanderson on 21st May 2025 at 22:23



"......It's a concern, but there were very few meaningful safeguards in those days of the early 1970's and children were a lot more vulnerable to situations like you describe. When people remember things fifty years later, clearly something made an impression at the time...."


Now it seems to me, with the greatest respect Christine is biased towards the teaching profession, however much she protests she is not. She seems to be implying that questionable behaviour ended back in the 1970s - of course there comes a time when contemporary becomes vintage, and vintage becomes veteran. I was making the point that such questionable behaviour continued well into the 1980s and beyond, and there are probably instances even today. If something was wrong in the 1970s, it was wrong in the 1950s, 1960s and 1980s as well.



Comment by: Mr J Wootton on 22nd May 2025 at 18:14



"....Our school, an Essex academy catering for 11 to 18's regularly requests/requires (take your pick) that those who take PE through all the key stages in years 7 to 11 (boys) leave their tops off (bare chest) during indoor PE lessons, sometimes outside. I don't expect anyone (pupil or parent) to have an issue with that at all in the safe and closed confines of the school with their own age and gender present...."


Another word juggler!. It is a bit disingenuous to suggest a requirement is really a "request". As for being "safe and enclosed" - well let us hope it is. I am sure the authorities love having compliant parents like you appear to be yourself.

I was twelve when I took my first ever communal shower at school after a PE lesson. I remember it very well, new at school, fresh faced, still getting to know everyone, and this first PE lesson rolled around and we all had our towel in our bags in anticipation. That towel was for one thing only, the school showers. That innocent little towel that had been sitting on the rack in the bathroom at home was now a sinister symbol of what was pending.

The teacher didn't break us in gently, we were straight to it. I remember us all being asked if we had brought our towel and if anyone had not. Then being informed we had to shower there and then, and that nobody was to act all silly about it because we all look the same. He then walked to switch them on and a cascading sound of running water began. The sound of water actually made my nerves kick off, and strip we did and in we all went, nervous and awkward as hell. That teacher was lying through his teeth though. We were not all the same. I couldn't help but notice just how different everyone seemed to look. The only penis I'd ever seen in my life was my own, yet here were boys my age who had ones twice my size and with hair too. We were all so different and I was the late bloomer as they say, and didn't they like to remind me. Two years before I bloomed at fourteen. I thought it was weird that school PE had put me in that situation face to face with everyone forced to bare their private parts to each other like that, and found the whole thing quite utterly embarrassing. It was a rite of passage that I didn't feel in need of. We were so young when we did this too. You felt the eyes of the teachers all over you.

Hi Patrick,

'The most important bit for the PE teachers wasn't the washing, it was the enforced naked ritual we had to undertake.'

Absolutely. Our showers were soapless just like yours so cleanliness can't have been the real issue. Ritualisation is exactly what I think it was, a ritualisation of the PE teacher's authority over us. It just seems to have been a universally held value that boys going into their teens needed to be kept down.

We were allowed in our form rooms during rainy breaktimes but the teachers did not allocate any staff member to supervise us, which meant that all sorts of high jinks and even bullying could and did happen. This was professional negligence in my opinion.

As for the bus home, oh boy. It was like a riot on a prison bus with kids having fights, settling scores and climbing over the seats. If my school had employed the same rule as yours there would have been constant mass detentions.


Hi Christine,

'I agree that general teaching staff should not have unconditional access to a changing room, and certainly not one with active showering participation where anyone is liable to be without any clothing on at all. In my view it would rarely be necessary for another teacher not connected to PE to be in attendance inside a boys school changing room'

You and me both. I remember one time in my first year at secondary school our Maths teacher came into our changing room just as we were finishing getting dressed. What he had to say had nothing to do with PE and there was no reason for him to be in our changing room. Seemingly several of us had forgotten to hand in items of work and he proceeded to shout and rant at us for several minutes - instead of telling us in a calm and reasonable manner that if we did it again we would get a detention.

What stands out is that he chose to get us in our changing room when he could have got us the next day after assembly, or whenever.

I had always assumed that he had just wanted to catch up with us before the end of that day. But some time ago when I looked on the facebook site for my former school a possibly darker subtext was referred to, with him and another male teacher slippering boys coming naked out of the showers for offences unrelated to PE. This would have been in the 70s. Of course this is facebook where anybody can claim anything without corroboration. But from what I knew of this man and his ugly temper I find it entirely believable.

This is why today's teachers are so harassed by Ofsted. Because back when they had wide powers and leeway they abused them both.


Hi Alan,

'I sometimes think teachers would make damned good MPs - they love telling other people what to do, without having to do it themselves, and they like to treat people like toddlers, who only have the concentration of a goldfish.'

Oh, tell me about schools propagating propaganda!

My parents were Irish catholics. They regarded 'normal' schools - ie. church of England schools - with an emotion somewhere between snobbery and outright revulsion.

When I went to my (catholic) secondary school for my open day prior to starting my mum was taken aside into a parents' meeting taken by the girls' head of year, a woman who I remember as having her nose permanently in the air.

Among plenty of other bullshit. she stated that the school didn't like its pupils socialising with pupils from other locals schools out of hours because it 'lowered the high standards' they were inculcating into us. I'm not kidding. That, according to my mum, is what she actually said.

She spoke as if the school was the unofficial equivalent of a grammar school or even almost on a par with some minor private school.

This was all pure bullshit. My secondary school was a completely bog standard school with middling academic results and lost of discipline problems. But my poor mum, who had never learned any sense of critical discernment, just lapped this drivel up.

My home town had big Irish and Italian communities, two groups who tend to demand catholic educations for their children, and this gave my school a constant captive intake group.

Sorry, that was all gloriously off-topic, wasn't it?

Thank you for your kind explanation, Christine (and thank you, too, Terry). The schools I went to were referred to in their names as an infant school (4-7, 1989-92), a junior school (7-11, 1992-96) and a high school afterwards. With none of them called "primary", that explains my not understanding what the word originally meant.

Comment by: Steve I. on 20th May 2025 at 20:32
School websites don't always paint an accurate picture and seem designed to project a certain image back at the wider world about the school.



Our school, an Essex academy catering for 11 to 18's regularly requests/requires (take your pick) that those who take PE through all the key stages in years 7 to 11 (boys) leave their tops off (bare chest) during indoor PE lessons, sometimes outside. I don't expect anyone (pupil or parent) to have an issue with that at all in the safe and closed confines of the school with their own age and gender present. It remains an appropriate mode of dress for PE in a boys only setting. Showers are required dependant on activity undertaken. I'm pleased you do not have a problem with this. Very few male parents do.

To answer your question Matthew I think this is something that has had a slight change of definition over time and in recent years. Most of us think of a primary school as the middle school we went to, not the youngest and not the oldest, general entry to primary school was considered to be when you were eight year old and you could either leave it after three years at the age of eleven, or four years at the age of twelve depending on your own education authority area. So for me, like many older people, over 35, I think of primary school being for children between 8 and 11 or 12. Also known to some as junior school.

But you are correct Matthew and I don't exactly know how or when this happened but primary does seem to cover the lower school age now too, so anything up to age twelve. There is a good example near me with two old schools within one perimeter fence, one was a lower/infant school for age 4/5 to 8, the other a primary school for age 8 to 12. The lower school was named as a "first school" and the primary was actually named as a "middle" school. Both have recently been merged into one named school and called a "primary" so covering all ages from 4 to 12 now, unlike before just a short time ago.

I think we all understand what we mean by the terms used however and for the purposes of this discussion I shall continue to use the term primary to mean middle school juniors if needed.

Oh yes Patrick you are so right on all that, schools certainly could be odd places when you start listing down the rules of the places. A soapless shower struggling for water, that's a novel one. I had to use soap and there was ample water for everyone and it was hot. At least if you want showers provide the means to do it properly I say. In my case they did. Our teachers not only watched us but once we were all in they would even tell some of us to get properly wet under the shower nozzles, hair fully wet as well, and to be fair they did power the water out quite well, not a power shower but certainly not a trickle, and the water stayed running for ages even when most of us were out.

The school break thing was accurate! If you got seen in the school corridor during lunchtime or morning or afternoon break time by a teacher there was an immediate interrogation on why you were there and an instruction to get out the building promptly. It takes a few years to understand odd school rules I think.

On the eating sweets in school thing, yes they were obsessed with anyone chewing something, or thinking you were chewing, even our pens! Someone I walked to school with used to drop in to our local sweet shop for a quarter of midget gems weighed out on scales and slipped into a little paper bag. He got accused of chewing in class on one one day in a geography lesson and that teacher emptied his bag, found the sweets and confiscated them, saying he'd enjoy them, and spent the lesson sitting at his desk while we worked in silence eating the entire bag. One rule for them, another for us. That was theft too!

Comment by: Alan on 22nd May 2025 at 09:25

VERISIMILITITUDE?

'Oooh, get you' as the girls would say at school if you said or did something fancy.


Comment by: Matthew S on 21st May 2025 at 23:21
The term "primary school" seems to have been used in two different senses.


It's a good question, I'm sure raised before. My understanding of a primary school is that it is a place for ages 8 to 12 but that may be an outdated answer now. The first school I went to was definitely not known as a primary school, but a 'first school' or 'the infants' and that went to the age of 8.

Comment by: Christine Sanderson on 21st May 2025 at 22:23



I think it needs to be pointed out, Christine, for the sake of verisimilitude that the rather unpleasant habits of the 1970s, went on at least until the next decade, as I said before our teacher would lean up against the wall watching us intently, and any of his visitors would wait in the changing area, so they got the same chance to gawp at us, except we were dry or semi dry by that time. It shouldn't have happened in the 1970s, 1980s or indeed at any time.


Comment by: Patrick on 22nd May 2025 at 02:40



Patrick your school sounds worse than mine - they couldn't give a toss what we did once school was over, but you do have to wonder why schools adopted that ludicrous militaristic outlook. Prior to the 1960s, arguably it might have been employed to get lads used to the lack of privacy they would encounter in the army, but national service ended as that decade began, I believe, and certainly by the 70s and 80s very few P.E. teachers would have had military experience. Today with their list of do's and dont's they make themselves a hideous, laughable anachronism

Mike,Christine,it did happen to me where a female teacher whose husband taught the boys PE would enter the boys' changing and showering area.
I was not conditioned to being seen naked by females apart from at home so it came as a shock . As she probably made a habit of this she must have seen a lot of boys naked.

The soapless - indeed almost waterless school showers of the 1970's did have a ritualistic quality. The whole set up seems bizarre to me now and what they put us all through every week of the school year. We couldn't use soap in the showers at school, and the water trickled pathetically out of a silver spout in the wall, and it was only ever lukewarm. You sort of splashed what water you got gold of onto your body and half heartedly rubbed it about a bit with your hands, mostly across your chest and arms, trying not to bend over too much, everyone going through the motions doing the same ritual time after time with an adult teacher viewer. The most important bit for the PE teachers wasn't the washing, it was the enforced naked ritual we had to undertake. Group nakedness was compulsory at the finish of PE before you could go. You must get naked for your PE teachers, and wet. The actual wash was the least important part, and they forced all this on us all the time!

Schools in the 1970's could be really odd places for a determination to implement rules. Ours had a visceral horror of boys going to their form room at lunchtime. Heaven knows what they thought we would do in there. Unless a positive monsoon was falling, we had to go outside. Guards were stationed on every door to make sure some pathetic specimen did not try and sneak in and read a book. If there was impossibly heavy rain we were allowed to mill round pointlessly in the hall, shoving each other and kicking the walls with boredom.

We were also prohibited from saying the word 'ok', from wearing boots, even in the snow, from bringing even the tiniest snack from home, and from eating sweets in school uniform even on the bus home. All these things were punishable in some quite draconian ways.

Christine Sanderson, thank you for sharing your professional knowledge here. Please may I ask a question about a small thing, just from curiosity?

The term "primary school" seems to have been used in two different senses. Several commenters here recall attending a "primary school" (in England, between the seventies and nineties) which educated children only from eight to twelve or so. The usage I've seen recently on the Ofsted site, in newspapers and implied by many school names, is that a "primary school" now educates those from four to eleven. The Oxford English Dictionary definition, updated in 2007, says "a school where young children are taught" and more specifically "(in the United Kingdom) a school for children between the ages of about five and eleven".

Unfortunately, I accidentally offended someone a while back on this site, not realising there are apparently two senses of the term. Given your long experience, inspecting many schools, would you mind saying something about how the term "primary school" has been used? Thank you.

The points you raised on the accuracy of the website of the school your child goes to Steve were interesting to me. I don't think I would expect the website to specifically try and cover all aspects of what a PE teacher might require in his (or her) lessons, such as a periodic loss of top for example but a showering requirement would and should be mentioned in my opinion, if such a thing is being required there.

Whether some of these things are said or not, these things cannot be hidden and parents will all become fully aware, like you have, of what their child does in school because parents ask their children what they do and children tell them. There is nothing about what you described that would cause me any particular issue other than one of complete transparency, but if school wishes showering after PE why is the towel not part of the PE list in that case.

I do agree with you on the presentation of many school websites. Many I've looked at often seem to hide all the most important information that parents want out of the way in harder to find areas, like term dates or uniform, and promote other areas more so. I think you forgot the actual link when posting but I was able to find it and take a look.


Mike Tusa, although it was a very long time ago in your own case I like the way you made your point. School inspectors have access all areas for obvious reasons of scrutiny, but in many schools all the teaching staff, certainly of old, would treat all areas of the school premises as access all areas to them also, and I agree that general teaching staff should not have unconditional access to a changing room, and certainly not one with active showering participation where anyone is liable to be without any clothing on at all. In my view it would rarely be necessary for another teacher not connected to PE to be in attendance inside a boys school changing room like you maintained on many occasions and so it is quite possible that some of the children at your school in those days had a good antenna, children often do. It's a concern, but there were very few meaningful safeguards in those days of the early 1970's and children were a lot more vulnerable to situations like you describe. When people remember things fifty years later, clearly something made an impression at the time. If my own son had made such comments at the time he was in school like you did I would have made discreet inquiries. Access to the PE changing room should be strictly limited, even if it is just changing clothing, never mind showering too, except for emergencies.

Mike you've asked for anyone else to come forward with anything similar to yourself, and I'd agree and would like to know if there are others and if this was a common theme of school changing rooms, for boys especially.

Comment by: Mike Tusa on 20th May 2025 at 15:36





".....In my comprehensive school I was at for five years from 1971 to 1976 even this area was open to anyone. I remember lots of non-PE teachers coming in on us in our changing room/showers. I remember many times I was in the school showers after PE and walking back out to discover there was some random teacher standing in the middle of the room gassing away to another PE teacher, lots did this. They didn't treat the boys changing rooms like any kind of private area at all. We used to joke about one or two of them, if you know what I mean........."

We were lucky, Mike, in that our building was so old that there was a sort of deep archway between the changing area and the showers, so that it wasn't that easy to see us IN the shower, but of course, as we were not allowed to take our towels into the shower area, the teachers(s) had the chance to get an eyeful as we came out of the area. We had two pervert teachers - I have already mentioned the proclivities of the P.E. teacher (though the current government would no doubt describe him as "brave" - he wasn't he was an old fashioned perv who liked looking at boys) - the other one, our science/Technical Drawing teacher was more of a "discipline fetishist", in that he loved caning and slippering boys - he would have you bend over a desk, and he had the temerity to feel your backside, before he administered the punishment. It was noticeable that two teachers always took the opportunity to come into the changing area, because they suddenly remembered they had something vitally important to say to Roberts, the P.E. teacher, and once the message was delivered, they would have a chinwag like a couple of old women - one was the deputy headmaster - I think he just enjoyed our discomfiture at humiliating us, and the other was a harmless old bugger, who I assume, got his only cheap thrills through looking at us. I have to say, of course, that all the lads had them sussed early on. There was one lad, whose dad ran a local mission hall, and he was as green as grass, but even he said there was "something peculiar" about the behaviour of old cane-happy and the P.E. teacher.

I always hope such "men" were weeded out of the profession when CRB checks became the norm, but, in truth, though there might now be less, you can be sure there are a few scoundrels still hovering around in plain sight, as the many court cases that go on to this day attest..




Comment by: Steve I. on 20th May 2025 at 20:32


"School websites don't always paint an accurate picture and seem designed to project a certain image back at the wider world about the school.

My 15 year old chap goes to school in Nottingham at Oakwood Academy. But if you look at the current website for example, there is no mention of how he really does PE. I don't mind but I'm told the boys spend a lot of time doing gym in school in bare chests at the teachers request, more than one teacher infact......"


I sometimes think teachers would make damned good MPs - they love telling other people what to do, without having to do it themselves, and they like to treat people like toddlers, who only have the concentration of a goldfish. I can never understand why P.E teachers, in particular, are given so much autonomy. It also makes you wonder why schools are so embarrassed about painting a true picture of what goes on in their establishments, if it is all above board. They probably know that many parents, let alone the pupils, would not be happy with their arrangements.

That's an interesting comment Steve I.

I looked on the website link you provided and it does say there is a change of PE kit, but why so long to change it over from old to new. Will that mean an end to shirtless PE there then. It just looks like another school where the PE teachers don't have to adhere to the exact PE kit if they don't want to. Like many of us seem to remember. Perhaps things haven't changed quite as much as we think.

School websites don't always paint an accurate picture and seem designed to project a certain image back at the wider world about the school.

My 15 year old chap goes to school in Nottingham at Oakwood Academy. But if you look at the current website for example, there is no mention of how he really does PE. I don't mind but I'm told the boys spend a lot of time doing gym in school in bare chests at the teachers request, more than one teacher infact.

Also, there is no mention anywhere on the school website about bringing in towels with PE kits, or that scary word - showering, yet this school maintains a need to shower after PE which my own chap has done since he started. No mention anywhere on the web pages though.

I don't mind any of it, he's a boy and boys should expect that kind of thing. I'm 53, grew up in the 80s and did all that. But nowhere on the school website does it mention a need to shower after a PE lesson, or any sense that PE can be done in bare chests, so it's being a little dishonest.

Luckily I don't mind this but I thought it was worth dropping on here for a discussion point about school honesty and why they might be trying to pretend some things do not happen in school when I know full well they do.

Comment by: James on 20th May 2025 at 10:25
I also found it excruciatingly embarrassing to be seen naked in the showers by so many boys,some of whom I didn't know and some that I had known for some time.Some of us were teased unmercifully if we hadn't got the 'right' physique.



WHY JAMES?

What was the right physique you should have had?

Quoting comment by Alan on 20th May 2025.
"Also, the shower was one place where decrepit old teachers couldn't barge in, as they did in our gym, taking a short cut to the other half of the school, as walking down two corridors was too much trouble."



In my comprehensive school I was at for five years from 1971 to 1976 even this area was open to anyone. I remember lots of non-PE teachers coming in on us in our changing room/showers. I remember many times I was in the school showers after PE and walking back out to discover there was some random teacher standing in the middle of the room gassing away to another PE teacher, lots did this. They didn't treat the boys changing rooms like any kind of private area at all. We used to joke about one or two of them, if you know what I mean.

If you looked at the timings on our school timetable for example, like any other school, you would know what time in the day lessons were ending, so when I think of it now, there would have been four times each school days when the lessons were ending, including PE, and in the final ten minutes of each of these times that would be the obvious time the PE showers were flowing with a bunch of naked PE lads made to get into them and under the water. So back in those days lessons ended at 10.30am, 12 noon, 2.30pm and 4pm, meaning if you went back ten minutes from those times and popped along to see a PE teacher as it ended you got access to the changing room, you'd hear the noise and know we were in there anyway, and would almost surely guarantee a faceful of boys all stripped and milling about, which now leads me to wonder if some teachers did use this as an "opportunity" and possibly with the connivance of a PE teacher. It's all pure guesswork and possibly over suspicion on my part, I don't know, but lots of male teachers with no direct PE connections came into our changing rooms while we were in them in various stages of undress or fully naked from showers we had to take and it was easy to do if they were there to look at us because nobody stopped any of them. I'm sure the school secretary even once dropped in on us.

The showers at school were not avoidable, they were mandatory requirement, everyone had to do them, you own personal feelings of insecurity or shyness about showing your body with nothing on with others was of little concern to any of our teachers. I think it's fair to say the attitude was boys don't do modesty.

Whether the girls at my school had a similar experience with their women teachers would be something to know.

Has anybody else ever encountered something similar to this?


When we went to the local leisure centre to go swimming as a class in those days they gave all the girls the private individual changing booths that were there but the boys had to make do with the communal changing area and we were supervised in this quite often by a leisure centre worker and not our teacher who was with the girls. The girls booths had a small crack in the build of each one of them where some of the booths allowed a view into the communal changing area and some girls told stories of how they were able to privately without anyone knowing look through at us and see us, but it was just a hazard we had to put up with!

Someone here has mentioned a modern day 20 year old struggling to grasp the realities of school a few decades ago. I've been asked this question before myself about what it was like. Whilst I never ran a cross country in my bare feet like someone suggested doing, I did do quite a few without my top on at school, not my decision, and when it comes to school gym we had a flimsy vest at times but went without it more than we wore it and shirtless was more the way it ended up being.

Not long after I started school in 1971 there was a boy who answered a PE teacher back and he took his plimsoll off his foot and threw it at him, picked it up and then, I lost count, hit him with it what must have been ten times, all because as he was being hit he kept shouting "more" which made the teacher lose complete control and give him more. At the end this lad even smiled about it and treated it like something that made him a hard man to have taken that from a teacher. For the rest of us we learnt one thing, don't answer back.

I don't think the early seventies sound like the greatest period in the history of teaching do they!

I also found it excruciatingly embarrassing to be seen naked in the showers by so many boys,some of whom I didn't know and some that I had known for some time.Some of us were teased unmercifully if we hadn't got the 'right' physique.
Same as when we had to go topless and bare foot for PE and we just had wear our shorts.I was the only boy to wear satin shorts as other boys wore cotton.My mother chose them and they were bought to fit perfectly which gave a shiny shimmering effect.I was just as embarrassed to wear those as I was to go in the showers.

Comment by: James on 19th May 2025 at 22:31


......The shower thing - I like showers myself, and didn't object to taking them, it was our pervy P.E. teacher sizing us all up, so to speak, which I objected to.




"I don't really understand this Alan. You objected to being told to do school PE in a bare chest total shirtless, but you actually liked taking showers where you lost the bottom half as well as the top half at the same time, kind of naked was fine but semi naked was not! Ugh?........"

Probably does sound a bit mixed up, James, but I will try and explain: I have included that small piece from myself because in a way that sums it up in a nutshell. When you are 13/14 it is very unpleasant to know that a middle aged man is getting off on watching - I think we can all agree on that. Also, the shower was one place where decrepit old teachers couldn't barge in, as they did in our gym, taking a short cut to the other half of the school, as walking down two corridors was too much trouble, I remember once our school secretary, a lovely woman called Mrs. Fennemore walked in to the gym because she had an urgent message for the teacher - it was only once, but it had to be in our lesson. I don't want people seeing me at my worst.

The fact is I perspired very easily from a young age, and it is very uncomfortable. There were times, for example, when playing trumpet, with lights overhead that I reminded myself of Louis Armstrong, who made a feature in his act about sweating - the pile of handkerchiefs on the piano which he would constantly dab his forehead with, and draw attention to. Like you, perspiration would be dripping off my back, and I can remember instances where in the middle of winter, I would be wearing a lightweight summer suit, shirt and tie, standing on a tube train platform with the sweat drying on my back and getting very cold. Of course the adrenalin and indoor heat, turned very icy when you were outside, and my suit would still be damp next morning, so it would be off to the dry cleaners, as I couldn't wear it a second time. I had two "playing suits", and they alternated but the dry cleaning bills were quite expensive. I have always liked being physically clean. These days I don't perspire quite so much, but even so, when we have weather like we have recently, I still shower in the mornings and then again in the evening, and often do in cooler times, if I have been dismantling some really dirty equipment. Of course, these days I shower in privacy.

All that said, I would still prefer lads (and girls) to make the decision to shower or not a matter of choice. Though Lynx won't make perspiration disappear it does mask it, and I am sure that many shower when they get home from school.At the very least adults should not be allowed into the shower area, unless there is some emergency - they should not be allowed to have their free peep show.

One final point, in answer to a message yesterday (I have forgotten the name as I have been busy recently and just saw it without registering the name) regarding making lads to PE in their underpants - what sort of creep makes boys do that?. Some underpants have fly holes not always secure to do up. Are such teachers like my one was and it gives them an extra cheap thrill. It is demeaning and it should be stopped if it is still going on.

Paul if nobody's ability to do the PE was affected then you have to wonder why more school's didn't simply do like yours did there. If I had been given a choice I'd have probably been boringly obvious and gone with a decent pair of trainers/plimsolls, a snazzy pair of non white shorts and a t-shirt. I very much doubt I'd have chosen shirtless for the gym.

James I don't think what you said is that unusual if you come from a large extended family who all live in the same close area. I had three cousins who went to the same school as me, two girls and a boy, all were much older than me so our paths did not cross but had we been the same ages who knows what might have happened.

Comment by: Alan on 17th May 2025 at 09:56I wish I had been a student at your school, Paul!. Your school embraced exactly the kind of regime I would have encouraged, you could wear what you like, so you were, all, automatically, relaxed and comfortable. You have also confirmed what I have always suspected, that most lads preferred to wear a top.
The shower thing - I like showers myself, and didn't object to taking them, it was our pervy P.E. teacher sizing us all up, so to speak, which I objected to.




I don't really understand this Alan. You objected to being told to do school PE in a bare chest total shirtless, but you actually liked taking showers where you lost the bottom half as well as the top half at the same time, kind of naked was fine but semi naked was not! Ugh?

I disliked showers for another reason at school in the early nineties. I had a cousin, Andrew, I was close to and the same age as me in another form at the same school but our two classes combined for boys PE at secondary school and we ended up together in all our PE lessons. This meant we had to shower together as well and everyone knew we were cousins and it made for a very awkward feeling situation for us both and we even had to put up with a 'pervy' comment from some idiot about teenage cousins sharing a shower together, even though we were doing it with 25 others. When we first knew we were going to share PE and did so we knew it was going to be very, very awkward to deal with and we were in one of those schools which did the majority of gym PE in bare chests. When we first saw each other naked in the school shower after PE in our first lesson when we were twelve (1990), both of us tried hard not to look at each other. Our parents all thought it was absolutely lovely that we did some things like this at school together and could look out for one another. Up to a point though.

The one positive we made of it was we became quite competitive with each other and our cross country times and strived to beat the other, having our own little contest within the class itself. I was fastest cousin most of the time.

Between 1990 and 1995 shirtless PE was continual and showers at that time were compulsory in our secondary for all boys and I think girls too.

Comment has been made replying to Paul 1975 that asserts the minority only like doing PE shirtless but unless I am mistaken wasn't the reverse point made here last year when the PE teacher asked and discovered three quarters of boys were fine with shirtless PE where he was.

The easy going school that you went to Paul bears no resemblance to mine that's for sure, but isn't it telling that even in your 'easy going' school on PE kits they were not prepared to allow that to play out when it came to the showers after PE and you fall into line with everywhere else at the time. It was the one immovable requirement that everywhere did at one point. Every day of the week forty or fifty years ago there must have been a million or more school kids getting slung in the showers after PE by the teachers! Possibly more. I was a confident school showerer and shirt remover. I even ran shirtless when I was at uni on a running team there, but that was all our choice to do that then. When I was at school proper I was told to but found it fine for me.

I was a bit like you Paul 1975, I quite liked going off to PE and stripping out of my uniform, especially on hot days, and if anything wished I could stay out of it for longer. Remembering how my bare back used to be dripping with sweat after PE on such days I cannot imagine not having the use of a shower to rid that sweat off me before putting on my shirt again. Perhaps because we knew we were all going in the showers come what may after PE lessons we just went for it much harder and faster in what we did because it didn't matter how sweaty we got, or muddy, we were sure to be cleaning up at the end. The fact that so many schools nowadays refuse to even offer it is an absolute disgrace. You cannot spray Lynx over sweat and call that freshening up.

At my secondary school in 1972 if you got an after school detention you had to report to the teacher on that day who was taking the detention class. This would often be a maths or english teacher which meant simply reporting to a certain classroom and being bored doing extra maths for an hour at a desk, but two of the PE teachers at our school also were on the rota for after school detention duty and if you found your detention was on a day when they were taking it you didn't sit on your bum at a desk but instead went direct to a changing room and got ready for an hour in the gym with them and others on detention, even girls if there were any, although it seemed mostly boys got them. If you had no PE kit on you that day then you went to detention in pants and nothing else, but even if you did have a kit on you it was a case of get along in your shorts just like normal PE was, and no top on, a bare chest was our school gym kit anyway. Some boys on detention actually preferred getting this as detention and finding out one of our PE teachers was taking it for an hour. You didn't know what you were getting until you turned up at the detention room if it was a desk detention or a gym one. The average detention seemed to have about 7 or 8 boys in it of an afterschool and if it was a gym one, I had a couple of these, we were made to feel like scum by the PE teacher in charge who would work us to the point of near collapse, and we would be made to shower after the detention too. Boys at school were known to actually get detentions for failing to shower after PE at school as well or not have the correct PE items. The PE detention could be taken inside or out and if the PE teacher on detention rota on any given day had a sense of humour failure he might even take you outside to get a soak in the rain with your shirt off to punish you. All boys in one of my classes got given a detention once and this happened to all of us, and I remember a lot of shouting going on, and a lot of aggro from these teachers on defenceless boys having to agree to their wilder ideas.

Paul 1975, that school of yours sounds to have offered quite lot more free choice and seems an outlier for the time compared to many others, including me. I went to PE exactly how they wanted me, not how I wanted, and wore the exact items I was told and nothing else. We were all expected to look the same, and when tops were off they were off for everyone, which was gym PE in my school. The shorts had to be the same colour and style.

Comment by: Paul 1975 on 17th May 2025 at 03:00



"...It was not quite so set in stone for PE like many of you guys when I was at secondary school, 1987 - 1992......."

I wish I had been a student at your school, Paul!. Your school embraced exactly the kind of regime I would have encouraged, you could wear what you like, so you were, all, automatically, relaxed and comfortable. You have also confirmed what I have always suspected, that most lads preferred to wear a top.

The shower thing - I like showers myself, and didn't object to taking them, it was our pervy P.E. teacher sizing us all up, so to speak, which I objected to.

Hi.

It was not quite so set in stone for PE like many of you guys when I was at secondary school, 1987 - 1992.

They were fairly relaxed in our school gym and you could make your own choice. Unlike many here I liked to get out of my restrictive school blazer, strangling necktie, shirt with top button done up, my long trousers and knee length socks and hard leather shoes, so I always preferred just getting along to gym in my bare chest and not bothering with either a tee shirt or a vest. I also liked the feel of being bare foot and did that too, and always took my pants off before putting on my PE shorts so I didn't put any clothes on that I'd worn for PE. I liked having an hour like that in PE doing gym.

How I seem to remember it was that it was a mixed bag among the boys, most did wear either a mix of tee-shirts or vests for PE, and boys like me who actually chose to wear nothing on top at all were the minority, I seem to remember about 5 or 6 of us would often be shirtless in the school gym for PE out of a class of about 20 to 25 of us. It was generally a mix of bare feet and trainers too, the majority wore trainers but not everyone chose to. Some who wore tee-shirts chose going bare foot, and some who went bare chests wore trainers.

Our teachers seemed fine with any combination going in the gym, and we had one quite young PE teacher in the late 80's who would frequently also do gym with us shirtless from time to time. I'm unsure why he chose the moments he did that, it was just here and there, rather random, but you noticed because teachers didn't usually take their own tops off to do PE with us.

I suppose this way kept us all happy. If you wanted your top off you could, if not you didn't. There were skins v shirts team games though where bare chests were asked of boys to make up the teams, I seem to recall it was mostly done for basketball, but do recall volleyball and indoor football the same.

I never ran a shirtless cross country, and reading this now I rather wish I'd been brave enough to give it a go. I don't think the teachers would have minded, but the weather when we did them always seemed the worst. We never ran cross country in the spring or summer. I did do a lot of summer sports outside with my top off like in the gym though.

When it came to showers that was where the freedom to choose ended. Nobody could refuse to shower properly at school and they made you do it, fully stripped bare with nothing on. Luckily for me I liked having a shower at school and didn't mind sharing the deed, and I do think making us do that was sensible even if it does give some people a nervous breakdown. School showers were never that bad in the end where they, after three or four years everyone was well used to doing that. I did notice how some teachers took more notice of us doing that than others. None ever attempted to share though.

Mark, I watched that and it's true. I did swimming for the final two years at primary school and the first two at secondary school, and swam at one of our swimming galas, a series of races for the stronger swimmers at school. At that age there did seem to be some quite big girls compared to us, I can remember them now and boys did seem to be less big than some girls before we had our own growth spurts. I did swimming and PE with girls and wasn't in the least bothered if they saw me shirtless or in a small pair of swim trunks, and if we had to share the gym PE with girls I was no less likely to choose to do it without my top on like I did just with boys only.

I think the only difference between people like me at school and others on here is that I didn't think too much about it and it seems like others did. My own physical appearance was not earth shatteringly awesome, I was a normal looking schoolboy with a slim to medium sized physique and a pale while skinned body much like others.

Here's another one of those children's schools TV programmes showing up a bunch of boys (bare chests of course!) and girls at the age of 12 for their differences at the same age, poolside.

There's a clearly overweight boy in this. I bet he was picked for that reason too. Imagine that, and for TV.

Everybody's Different - https://youtu.be/QyJAo5SAT68?feature=shared&t=277

Comment by: Martin on 15th May 2025


What some people may not get Martin is that it's very hard for men and boys to admit to certain feelings, even online from relatively safe anonymity.

It must have been a very big deal if so many of you are now saying things like this after such a lengthy time has passed in most cases.