Burnley Grammar School

Chris K
You refer to the lack of detail in your PE kit list.
When I was changing from Primary to Secondary school, I had to attend a presentation with my parents and during the evening the uniform requirements were explained.
Then the P E teacher stood up and said that for that lesson we would wear shorts(no colour specified) no top indoors and plimsolls no socks. Then he added also no underpants will be worn. Then he went on to list requirement for the swimming lessons.
As you say in your comments much was omitted, and when it came to the lesson were you permitted to wear underwear or had the school decided to withhold that from the instructions previously issued?

I've never been FORCED to have showers after PE. At middle school I sometimes did if I had a lot of mud, but at upper school I never did because I preferred having mud on me than having to do that.

Communal showers are vile things, and any teacher who forces a child to have one should be jailed for ten years.

This admittedly contradicts my other belief that all PE teachers should be hanged upside down and flayed, but there you go.

Back in 1966 when I was at school aged eleven the PE block did not even have a proper changing room worth the name. There were no showers of any kind available to use. What we had instead was a row of large sink basins and had to use them when we came in from a class in gym or playing fields. This simply meant standing at the sink, shirt off using a flannel to wipe our top half and armpits. Our legs often neglected even though we wore shorts doing so.

Now doing this was a slow process and led to queueing up, even with sink sharing two to a basin. There were something like eight basins available. One morning an overconfident boy with dirty feet came back and while both teachers were not paying attention decided to climb up and actually stand with both his feet in one of the filled sink basins to do what he thought would make things easier, but in doing so he slipped in the wet falling hard onto the floor and broke both arms trying to soften his fall. It was getting caught and shouted at that made him jump, take fright and slip in the first place I think.

The sinks were big enough that if we had been allowed to (we weren't) then two normal sized twelve year olds could have sat in them legs crossed at a squeeze. One person easily.

That slipping incident more or less put paid to being allowed to use sink basins to wash and within two months the place had been gutted and some rudimentary communal showers were finally installed as a short term measure before the school got a proper upgrade a few years later to bring it up to modern requirements.

Our own personal hygiene was always something PE teachers took seriously at school and made us pay time and attention to even when we didn't think we needed to. I was only allowed one bath a week at home and until I was 8 I had to share with my sister sometimes and also until I was 13 with my brother, both a bit younger, so I welcomed the chance to use the school showers when they became available.

At home bath night for me was always on a Thursday for some reason and when my school switched the days we did PE one of them was on a Thursday but my bath night at home also remained on a Thursday too. My fathers bathing habits took precedence over his three children because of the job he did and he needed one many nights in the week.

I was always clean and well turned out both from home and school.

Going back to the start of the 1980's when I was a youngster just starting out I was at a grammar school in Tonbridge, called The Judd School where we had lots of lessons in PE where we never wore our vests, especially with one particular teacher who never let us do so in any of his lessons, everything we did on the inside and a hell of a lot on the outside too. I always felt strangely uncomfortable in his lessons in ways I didn't with other teachers. He was quite a young teacher, late 20's, early 30's at most. We always took showers same as anywhere else at the time would have done, nothing strange about that, but how many people had a PE teacher who would sometimes offer to dry your back with your towel for you, not many, but I saw that going on and just thought that was so weird even if your back is a bit hard to reach. There was always the easy technique for drying your back anyway. Once he'd got to know our class he actually shared showering with us one day and I couldn't get out quick enough, although apparently that was not exactly uncommon behaviour for the time either but it felt weird to me as a modest twelve or thirteen year old. I didn't really give this guy much thought until what must have been about ten years ago when his unusual surname (Mr Copestake) cropped up locally and I discovered there was a case being made against him surrounding his time at our school around about the time I was there and I think he got convicted of some offence and given about five years for something like befriending certain boys in PE and sharing a shower with them away from school at his home or something while they were still pupils at the school, along with inappropriate touching at school and away from school.

If you ever had a strong hunch about one of your PE teachers you were probably right. I was.

Chris K, I still have the note I was sent home with almost 50 years ago now that told my parents while I was still in primary school that they wanted me to start showering after PE following a school refit. I was just 10 at the time. I remember that nobody wanted to be the first one to drop their pants and show their willy until one of the others, a young boy I still remember called Toby did this and we all followed quite quickly. He was considered a very brave boy for doing that and being the first and we told him that.

I work a lot in mindfulness coaching and think it would be a good idea if all schools had such a person on the staff. It might have been quite useful many years ago with a number of issues. Body related issues are always one of the top worries and to think that possibly our most insecure and self conscious age in our lives is possibly 10 to 16 and that is when most of us were forced into confronting communal nudity amongst each other or semi naked shirtless PE without a great deal of thought going into how that might affect each of us as individuals.

I got used to having to do PE shirtless but I still didn't like doing so very much and could never quite get rid of feeling incredibly self aware while I was in PE like it when the teacher wanted our shirts off time after time, skins v shirts stuff or just the whole class sometimes for some reason or another. It made my heart sink most times we did.

It was the same in the school showers. We were not provided with any choice about that. We had to remove all our clothing completely under the supervision of whatever teacher took us that day and wait for him to turn the showers on for us and walk sensibly into them together. He'd watch at the only entry/exit point to them while we showered and decide when we could all come back out again. Just the same as with shirtless PE, yes I got used to showers in school and having to be naked among a lot of other people but I never liked it and there was always every time a feeling of some kind of acute self awareness about myself, perhaps I'd even go so far as to say it fostered intense feelings of inadequacy.

Other people had a 180 degree different view. That was mine.

Answer to Steve.

No, we tended to run cross country in a vest but there were times when two or three took them off as we ran along and nothing was said. They just tucked the top into the shorts hanging down around the waist in some fashion. After we had run nearly everyone was pulling vests off even before we got back through the door to the changing rooms. Unlike some people on here, nobody ever told our cross country running group in PE that we all had to run bare chested because they had decided we must do so. But then most cross country running took place only from September until the Easter break so we would go a full five months at least not doing it and it resumed with the new school year again. We were always timed by our teachers and had our times registered in a little black book one of them had. Most run times seemed to be in the region of about 40 minutes on average and we always had to wait around for the slow finishers. I tended to be one of the median runners.

Indoors was barefoot mostly.

We had a checklist of what was considered the compulsory elements of PE and meeting certain criteria on fitness and achievement was quite a big part of it but PE showering was also a compulsory element.

Compulsory elements were quite the buzz word at school and applied to other subjects and even our appearance such as haircuts which was quite strict.

Sean on 16th April – I fully understand, appreciate and respect your feelings that ‘one-handed boxing’ was not for you. Indeed, I can think of several boys in my class who would have hated it, but personally I would have loved it. I usually looked forward to PE – not that I was any good at most of the activities, but I always anticipated a bit of freedom to run around, use up excess energy, get rid of pent-up frustrations, etc, instead of being sat at a desk wearing a shirt and tie and blazer, even in the summer no matter how hot it was. The reality however was usually that a lot of the time was spent doing seemingly endless circuit training – ten push-ups, ten sit-ups, ten star jumps, repeat, repeat, repeat. For me, it was boring, boring, boring! Excruciatingly so! I would have found your one-handed boxing tremendously exciting – something to really get the heart pumping and the adrenalin flowing. I’d have been fully focused and putting in maximum effort – which almost never happened in PE!
I’m a little intrigued as to how it worked in practice though, Sean. How were the pairings decided and who had which glove – surely a right-handed boy with the right-handed glove would have a significant advantage? And what did boys do with their ungloved hand – try to defend by keeping it in front of their bodies, try to catch hold of or push away their opponent’s gloved hand, or push his ungloved hand out of the way to try to land a clean punch, or what? I’d have made it a rule that the ungloved hand must be held behind one’s back! I can see some purpose to it – such an activity would involve hand-eye coordination, reaction times, etc, and as I said before, for me (and no doubt for quite a few of my mates), provided something different, interesting and exciting for once.

Finally, whilst I’m here, like Carter, being forced to be bare-chested for PE, did wonders for my self-confidence. Until I moved to secondary school, I was quite self-conscious and would do anything to avoid being shirtless in front of others. Being forced to be so in PE felt uncomfortable for the first couple of lessons, after which I started to quite enjoy it. It made me realise, though I would not have been able to phrase it in such terms at that age, that we are all different and we are all normal. I’m convinced that most of the body image hang ups many boys suffer from today simply would not exist if we still had sensible, practical PE kit policies in schools instead of trying to wrap kids in cotton wool. Typing this, has made me wonder how different my life might be today, had I not been forced to overcome my almost obsessive shyness about being shirtless – would I never have been able to sunbathe on a beach? Never go swimming with my kids? Maybe even never have kids if I was too scared to be naked with a girl!

By the way, unlike Chris K, my school’s uniform list (I can still remember it!) said “Indoor PE: White Shorts, White Ankle Socks and Plimsolls or bare feet, no shirt required”. By which, of course, it actually meant “no shirt allowed”. There was no need to “read between the lines” – it was all quite open and straightforward. And normal. This was an all boys state grammar school in the mid to late sixties.

Thanks Carter for your contributions.

Did you do indoor PE barefoot as well, or did you wear trainers ?

What about cross country, was that stripped to the waist also ?

Thanks.

I have in front of me my old comprehensive school uniform list for the newbies, given to our parents ahead of our start date that September. It's dated 8th July 1977. I found it amongst my parents belongings when I was having a sort out for them.

BOYS P.E -
Indoor Boys - Black P.E shorts.
Indoor Girls - Black Leotard.


I remember the discussion I had with my folks about that. I think me and they both thought, what else is there though, as if there had to be more on the list for an indoor P.E lesson. But it was correct. You read between the lines with this kind of uniform list. It was what it didn't say that was worth knowing. These kind of lists didn't actually seem to want to say out loud or in written print that the school P.E lesson would be a shirtless/barechested one, not forgetting barefoot with it too. I wonder why they didn't feel able to state it categorically, rather than just the - Black P.E shorts.

It's also like the line I have in the same list that says -

ALL BOYS P.E
Make sure to bring a towel.


No actual mention anywhere of the school requirement to shower that we had. The word doesn't even crop up, like they didn't dare say it out loud for some reason. Okay so you can read between the lines and work it out but why not say so properly and clearly.

When I came home from my first P.E lesson at this school one of the first questions my mum asked me was did I have a shower at school that day. She knew I thought of it as a bit of a big deal.

There is something about the kind of schools that Carter here mentions going to that just seems to instill an almost automatic all round confidence in people in a way that the vast majority of usual state schools used to fail miserably at even if they weren't actually poor schools.

Carter, thank you for the reply and your perspective.

Three main PE teachers at my secondary school in the 70s/80s and the one thing I truly detested about PE was the regular cross country that all the boys had to do when all the various PE ability groups came together as one large grouping of runners.

We always ran the cross country totally bare chested. PE teachers aslways seemed very keen to get boys in school like this. Not even allowed any jewellery either, watches or neck chains, it all had to come off. The reason for this was once explained to us - because it would make us all run faster, and the less warm it was outside the faster we'd run. I took that as typical PE teacher sarcasm and not a genuine explanation. Never forgot it though.

Back inside the gym hall we actually wore vests roughly two out of every three classes.

I'm 29, and left school 11 years ago having been sent to an independent school in Durham.

Never even considered such things an issue until I took a look here. I wouldn't have wanted to go to a school which nannyed me against doing things. Being seen bare chested even had the effect of making me quite confident among girls which was a bonus. I definitely became a more confident person in part because of it. We always ended with a hot shower too. Some people just end up easier in their own skin than others I suppose.

Carter on 15th April, I was also surprised you were doing PE bare-chested relatively recently. Don't mind my asking, but in what part of the country did you go to school?

Comment by: Carter on 15th April 2023 at 14:18
They should be shirtless in PE. No questions about it. I'm in my 20s and was in school not that long ago. But the boys all had to just wear shorts and went the full bare chest. It really helped me embrace my body. Being bare chested makes your stance better it improves your social skills too in my opinion. Also the girls in class (we shared sometimes) were also made to be used to guys shirtless. It's a normal thing. I still to this day don't wear a shirt most of the time in the garden over summer and leave the house like it for short trips about nearby. We're men. Men are allowed to be shirtless.


Good post this. I like reading younger ones, although obviously a site like this lends itself to an older person just because of what it is. What's interesting too is that shirtless PE is still very much around. How does it improve social skills though exactly? That bit I didn't get.

I'm not a boxing fan at all. But if professionals and amateurs choose to do it then who am I to stop them and that's their decision. If there is a boxing club or something voluntary in a school and it interests you and your parents consent then that's reasonable with choice and consent. But when it comes to a PE teacher instigating boxing of any kind which involves physical beating with an entire class drawn into it regardless of personal choice and only at a teacher instruction then I do have an issue with that kind of thing. No PE teacher should have the right to be able to tell his class to start punching each other, even if he does say avoid the head.

I saw the comment about the need for teachers to take a psychiatric test or analysis of some kind to prove their fitness for the job. Unsure if the poster thinks that should apply to all teachers or whether he meant just the PE ones. But anyway maybe my old PE teacher who took me for a year during 1976/77 should be considered.

Along with all the usual stuff everyone did in gym we did some quite unique "sports". I had a teacher who brought in his own pair of boxing gloves, huge things they seemed. I was reminded of this when I took a look at the Birth Of A Nation film left on here a couple of weeks ago where the PE teacher put some boxing gloves on the poor kid an d said it would stop him playing with himself if I recall it right.

So this PE teacher of mine was quite the fan of boxing but it wasn't really a part of PE at my school. By the way I'm another who took gym generally as standard while wearing only shorts, never needing our feet or tops covering unless instructed otherwise. So this teacher would pair boys up and hand his one boxing glove to one boy and another to the other in the pair, so one had a left handed and the other a right. We then had to fight each other in front of the other boys one handed boxing and could punch as hard as we liked but never at the head, just at anywhere else, mainly the body. No chance of a KO but we were scored on body punches to the torso and legs. We did it for a couple of minutes each, took the gloves off and another pair had a go and we watched.

I never really understood what the hell we were doing it for. I think our teacher got more enjoyment out of it than us. Some boys really went for it and I just pretended a bit. But even with just one glove on some of us took a fair beating and our chests came up red with a good punch and it was still easy to send someone over onto the floor. We did this on mats so any fall was broken and soft. It was just a made up "sport" that our PE teacher got us going at and seemed designed to bring out aggression. He also had us go at kickboxing in the gym one time after we did the one arm boxing, just encouraging us all across the gym to start launching our legs at various opponents with our bared feet. It worked up a bit of energy but I took some persuading it was doing me any favours and felt more traditional gym PE was preferable. The same PE teacher also took the school judo club as well so was involved and had a taste for all things directly physical between boys which I didn't share.

They should be shirtless in PE. No questions about it. I'm in my 20s and was in school not that long ago. But the boys all had to just wear shorts and went the full bare chest. It really helped me embrace my body. Being bare chested makes your stance better it improves your social skills too in my opinion. Also the girls in class (we shared sometimes) were also made to be used to guys shirtless. It's a normal thing. I still to this day don't wear a shirt most of the time in the garden over summer and leave the house like it for short trips about nearby. We're men. Men are allowed to be shirtless.

In answer to your question to me, Robbie, you might well be right, but they were not around at my dump, and these days teachers are not allowed to rule by fear and threats. Could I ask what decade you went to school in, and what sort of school it was (comp/grammar/whatever)?

To answer the question about earning respect, I should say you earn it through encouraging others to share your interest and your specialization, to remember that some people, hard though they might try, will never measure up to your own ability, and to have tolerance for that but still try to encourage ,and not go for condescending sarcasm, belittling others and by -to use an old expression - acting like a gentleman, not raising your voice or your hand and certainly not by threatening behaviour. I only had experience with school masters, not mistresses, though I am sure there were some tyrants amongst those as well.

Lads that feel bothered, scared or shy about taking their shirts off or showering in PE should maybe see a shrink too, eh Alan?

I'm serious. I remember our school had a child psychologist available on request.

As for you Graham, how does a PE teacher go about earning the respect of his pupils in a practical sense?

There is a big difference between teachers who demand respect and those who earn it. I like to think I was in the latter category myself. I'll leave it at that for now.

Rowan on 13th April 2023 at 22:16

There is an example of somebody who really should have been seen by a psychiatrist. The great problem with a number of teachers who "demand respect" is that they are too ignorant or narcissistic to realise that respect is earned and not demanded, and ruling by fear is exactly what people like Putin do. I really feel that today's pupils would not tolerate it in the way we were made to do, and your Mr Andrews would probably end up in A & E if he tried it today. I am not saying that is right, but that tyrants should be tamed.

I got caned in school for standing on the viewing platform of a squash court looking down at somebody I didn't like and gobbing on his head from above. The teacher caught me and carted me off pretty roughly by my collar to his office and after my parents were told I was back next day and given three strikes. If my parents had refused I'd have been suspended for a week. Massive argument at home that night, I wanted the week off school, they didn't. Such was grammar school life in 1965.

I can answer Leo here and provide a possible explanation.

I was always prone to blistering easily in running shoes, even one's that appeared to fit well. I didn't even have to run far for it to happen. I had to take my trainers off during a couple of school cross country runs and had a teacher look at my blisters. He blamed the trainers obviously, but another new pair did the same another time. So I took them off in those couple of instances and as running in socks kind of looked silly and rather ruined them I took the lot off and found it surprisingly okay to do skin on ground. Our feet are quite resilient and up to the job.

The deputy head teacher of the school I attended between 1969 and 1973 also doubled up as the deputy head of PE. Always the deputy, never the master as we used to say about him. Mr Andrews took many of my PE lessons throughout my time at his pleasure. He was affable enough but could turn in an instant into something quite different which was disconcerting, whereas the heads of the school and PE themselves who he deputised for were both more lenient and tolerant types of people. He was very much a disciplinarian and always needed to prove it. It may be for this reason he was never the number 1, always the number 2.
As a very senior member of school staff he demanded total respect but I'm not so sure he gave it back much unless it suited him.

If it wasn't bellowing out surnames it was more often just going with the word 'boy'. I lost count of the times I was called 'you boy' by him. He had two methods of serious punishment, a cane or a slipper, which I think was a plimsoll. The cane never took place anywhere other than the office. The slipper/plimsoll was on site in the gym or anywhere else we happened to be if needed. He must have thrashed the arses of half the boys in my PE class over those years. Even though he'd only ever do one very big smack, or two at most, it was enough to make those who got it yelp and a few watery red eyes. It used to happen for such trivial things, I'm sure he made up reasons out of thin air. Everything from talking too much, answering back, PE kit issues, being late, no effort, making silly mistakes, the list goes on. The gymnasium classes were generally speaking the going bare foot variety. We did have a white and black school vest but it only got used outside, along with a diagonal white and black striped shirt. Going into the school gymnasium we used to all shuffle along the corridor in our bare feet and chests and I always felt apprehensive about it. The shorts were jet black. We could wear our normal pants under them, but when Andrews got his slipper out on someone in PE he always pulled them down very quickly and smacked the bare arse before immediately lifting them back up again. I remember my father smacking me on the arse quite a few times as a kid, although not after the age of 13. Mr Andrews went one better than my dad there on a couple of occasions. I did tell my dad who just thought it was okay because he'd been caned about 20 times in his own schooldays and thought a slipper or plimsoll was nothing in comparison and that teachers only did it if we thoroughly deserved it. I beg to differ to this day about that. I got plimsolled for simply failing to control an amused snigger at someone falling off something and my god did he throw the thing at me and make my derriere sting for a bit. It was always intimidating to see that happen to someone else.

I don't really know why there had to be this slightly dehumanising trait that some teachers employed over youngsters with ever present threats hanging in the air and running around in PE in the least kit you could get away with.

The lessons themselves were always of a high standard and required a lot of energy and effort and everyone was expected to do well and not make excuses for not being able to do anything. We would run wall to wall and sometimes be almost collapsing from exhaustion, a favourite was getting us going faster and faster the longer we were doing it. I often ached and had heavy legs as I walked back to have a mandatory shower which I often felt was a welcome end to a particularly gruelling PE lesson and liked to feel clean and not sweaty but I do also remember there seemed a lot of boys who used to lay it on with heaps of excuses about why they couldn't shower on any given day or pretending they'd just had one and none of the excuses ever seemed to pay off.

The only sport, other than a bit of cycling or jogging, that many of the people I know do as mature adults is golf, and that never was, isn't and never will be on the school PE curriculum. Oh, and fishing.

Leo, interesting observations. I suppose that particular school encouraged barefoot running for the cross country team. Running barefoot through mud is actually quite a lot easier than wearing plimsolls or trainers and you don't have to worry about being bogged down in the wet mud.
I wonder if any other schools adopted barefoot Running as a result of seeing this schools xc team.

Ross I remember being at school in both the summers of 1975 and 1976 when I was a kid in early primary and we'd often sit in our normal classroom doing work at our desks shirtless in just our polished black shoes and dark grey trousers with our white shirt hanging off the back of the chair or in a nearby cloakroom. We were actually allowed to do that if it became very hot. PE at my primary was done shirtless anyway and so it was sort of normalised already. On a couple of hot PE days we finished doing PE and were allowed to just continue back to class as we were to keep comfortable, just sitting there like that. It seemed to be mainly afternoons when we did it, so we're talking two and a half hours or so max, and I think some of us walked home from school the same too. It was all so easy going it's incredible.

Now can you imagine walking into a class in a state of undress nowadays. There would be immediate suspicion about what was going on. Well actually nothing was going on.

When I was in sixth form I was a course marker for a cross country event that involved a number of schools in our district. It was quite early in the year and a damp, cloudy day in a week where there had been some rain making the ground soft. My part of the course was more or less a mud track, although other parts were grass or even bridleway type of small stones. So I was surprised to see a lot of people running past me from one of the other schools completely barefoot, or barefoot holding trainers as they ran which they'd clearly taken off along the course having started out with them on. This was both boys and girls by the way, as it was a mixed event for 14 to 16 year olds. I saw almost as many girls doing this as boys. You knew the school from the colours being worn. It was just this one school I noticed. Nobody said anything about it, it was just a quiet observation I made. That particular school must have had an interesting barefoot running ethic that had been encouraged in some way, although I don't think anyone was being made to run like that, they seemed to be choosing to do so.

Bernard is quite right running the crowd Country barefoot was actually far more pleasant than running the xc in plimsolls. We had free choice to run wearing either plimsolls or bare feet. I experienced running in plimsolls once and once was enough they were waterlogged and caked in mud afterwards and without anytime after the run to clean them I had to somehow carry them around with me. Ultimately they were too ruined to continue using and I binned them and did all PE in or out and the cross country in bare feet.