Burnley Grammar School

Stuart K: Yes I read it, and I am afraid I don't agree with much of it. Nobody should ever be humiliated and for teachers to behave in the 1980s as if they were 1940s drill sargeants was appalling. I have recently seen some reruns of a terrible old comedy series from the 1970s called Get Some In, which was about a group of RAF recruits undergoing National Service in the mid 50s, and their pig of corporal played by the late Tony Selby. He used bullying, demeaning tactics, not for any reason of character building or improvement, but just because he was an unpleasant, insignificant little. man, belittled by his wife and despised by his superiors , and he knew it . It made him feel better to make others feel worse. That applied I think to many teachers, and probably still does, especially now they don't have the threat of corporal punishment to back them up.

Alan, did you read that excellent comment on 13th March 2023 at 03.13am by Harper last week by any chance, because after I read it for some reason many of your previous comments came to mind. I wonder if you think there is anything in what he said that you could agree with and use for your own evaluation of your time in school by any chance?

The section - "sometimes find yourself completely humiliated and sometimes feel proud of yourself quietly in a little way" was a lovely well written line in my opinion many of us will have related to quite easily.

Lucky you, Chad. I have said it before, but there is a lot of difference in choosing to do something of your own free will, and being FORCED to do it. Especially when you are in the difficult teenage years. I am all for free choice in everything, and though you might have preferred it otherwise, I am sure there were many lads at your school, who, for whatever reason, were glad they were not made to feel uncomfortable.

I'm struck by the irony of someone going to school in one of the nicest coastal seaside resort areas of the entire country where you could quite reasonably be expected to strut your stuff all summer long like you said you did but at the same time be perhaps one of a small minority of people to come on here and say your schools never went with any type of shirtless PE, quite unusual for the 1980's as that sounds to me.

Replying to Chad Estep,
It makes a refreshing change to hear from a guy who would have enjoyed being allowed to exercise shirtless at school. I did PE shirtless at Primary School so the shirtless PE rule at Senior School wasn’t an issue for me. There were a few lads who had been to Primary Schools outside the Borough and they had been used to wearing a top for PE. It was obvious for the first few lessons that they felt a bit awkward doing PE wearing only shorts and pumps. After a few lessons they appeared to be perfectly happy doing PE bare chested.
It seems to me that ‘fear of the unknown’ was the issue for many lads who’ve posted on here. At my school most lads were perfectly happy doing PE shirtless once they’d experienced it.

I'm now 50 and you couldn't do a shirtless PE lesson no matter how hard you tried to at my comprehensive, circa 1984-9.

Quite unlike so many on here who have written, I never went shirtless in any of the four schools I attended, an infants, two primaries and finally my comprehensive through to the age of sixteen. The comp was quite strict on the PE kit. You would actually be told off if you attempted to come to PE without a shirt on, I know this because I saw others not allowed to do a PE lesson because they did not have correct kit, including the PE shirts and having to sit it out fully dressed again including one time with two young guys in my class coming to gym ahead of the teacher not with a top on because they'd forgotten them and getting an almighty lecture on standards and sent packing.

I've found it quite funny really while reading through so many others who seem to be a similar age to me with a polar opposite experience in school PE to my one. Possible my school, a comp in Poole Dorset, was an outlier on that one.

Outside of school I'd often hang about with pals completely shirtless myself and sometimes the whole group of us, three or four as we went into town in Bournemouth and off to the beach and we'd leave and walk home or even catch a bus and not bother sticking anything on top when I was mid to late teens and while still at school even.

Yet no shirtless PE for me. I missed out big time there and would have embraced it enthusiastically.

It was much better to be a non swimmer or an unconfident swimmer, rather than a strong swimmer at school because the swimming lessons were so much nicer for those of us who were weaker in the water. I used to look across the pool and see how intense the other teacher treated the strong swimmers and it didn't look anything like as much fun, far too overly competitive when all I wanted to do was enjoy my time in the pool when I got a chance to go along in school time.

Swimming was far more enjoyable than straightforward gym in PE which was a drag half the time if it was something I hated. Jumping a horse served absolutely no purpose and had no practical meaning for me, stupid things. The gym horse and algebra go hand in hand as two of the most pointless things to learn in school for 99% of us.

Referring to the comment made by Fiona and the follow ups on that, those relies are sort of true. I never felt uncomfortable going to the pool with class and took to the water with ease, goggles and trunks on. The school gymnasium always made me feel less sure of myself, more so when we did it without t-shirts and went skins, mainly for team games but quite often the whole class went skins just because the respective teacher wanted it and I definitely felt very different doing that there compared to the pool so there is definitely something in this subtle difference that others allude to, no doubt about it.

Harper, I was a schoolgirl who used her bicycle to go to school from about the age of twelve onwards. It had a front basket for my bags. My journey was only a short five minute hop, but a quarter hour if walking. Actually I even used the same bicycle to turn up to my first menial office job in the year after leaving as well. Two sneaky girlfriends would have a quick drag of a shared cigarette in the lunch hour among the bicycles as I sat on my own saddle looking out.

I think you may be right though, mainly boys did this. Girls would like to walk to school in little groups of three or four and I'd often pass many of my friends like that, refusing to stop and carrying on as I got nearer school. Well there was no point stopping, getting off and then walking and wheeling along with them. I'd see enough of them throughout the day anyway.

Thankyou for the kind comments about my post. Yes my headspace was in the old school PE gym mindset when I recovered some of those thoughts and surnames were the thing of the old PE teachers were they not? Were anyone's gym teachers ever polite enough to address them on more friendly christian name terms in those days? I never heard any of them doing that within my earshot. I think they wished to create and maintain a very formal distance between them and us in complete contrast to others around school who wished to develop a close and friendly relationship if we were good at their own subjects.

In 1972 I got a wonderful raleigh racing bike for my birthday and would immediately begin to use it to get into school most days until I left three years later. It was a brilliant time saver. It was a ten minute trip in. I'd go home for lunch and bike back again so spent about forty minutes a day in four little ten minute trips commuting to and from school. The local roads were fine to navigate, and a few footpaths too. The only problem was how to carry my heavy schoolbag, heaviest on PE days with books and kit. Not many fancy lightweight rucksacks back then in evidence, I sat it across the drop handlebars and eventually did a work around so it hung off my back somehow and that way I could get my speed up on the way into school. My thirty to thirty five minute walk time was cut by two thirds at least. I already had a smaller and older less impressive bicycle that I would not have been prepared to come into school with for appearances sake. It's name escapes me but it was the same maker. You needed street cred by the age of thirteen even in the early 70's.

The school bike rack was huge and sat alongside the PE offices and one of the playing pitches. It was well used and always full with a lot of racing bikes. Very few girls seemed to ride bikes into school, it seemed a very boyish thing to do. I was impressed one day to see a bike with a speedo on it and a milometer saying it had done a couple of thousand miles. As soon as I saw it I wanted one too.

Each and every day I was getting a respectable forty minutes of cardiovascular exercise just by going to school before I got started with a PE lesson. Many of us who rode into school had even taken the cycling proficiency test at the time as well. What happened to that I wonder. I still have my little red styled triangular badge for passing it.

Brett Harper.

Bringing up your points Fiona. Not sure I agree entirely with what you say. Why do we get comments from men here who disliked the whole shirtless requirement asked of them in school PE but they don't for example mention the showering requirement they also had as an issue which on the face of it would be even more bothersome if you got anxious over just not having a shirt. Square that circle.

Apologies for the half written unfinished sentence at the end of my previous Fiona directed comment which I have just noticed now it has been placed up. Completed, it was meant to say,

I went on some school trips that involved overnight stays of two to seven days in dorms somewhere and all I can remember is we all wore proper night time clothing for our ages and no memory of anyone sleeping over on those trips without a top, it was all PJ shirts or the odd vest here and there. One thing I cannot remember is how much free choice we had on what we wore or whether we had rules to do so or whether it was how we all just automatically behaved without specific instruction.

I think your point is false equivalence Fiona. Just not comparable. But I'll let you off as you obviously cannot have experienced it yourself. ;-)

Haven't there been earlier comments on here that say some people who were awkward with the shirtless PE rules simultaneously being reasonably alright with going swimming because it felt different even though quite obviously both were performed in the same state of bare-chestedness. I'd agree, swimming did feel different and less self conscious than doing proper PE in class without our tops on when we did so. Been there and felt that. Don't tell me why it was, that needs a psychoanalyst perhaps to explain away.

I went on some school trips that involved overnight stays of two or three days in dorms somewhere

Following on to Harper's post & subsequent comments, the following appeared in a national newspaper last autumn. I've made a couple of deletions.

We had a wonderful athletics coach, x-x, who had set the record for running from one side of America to the other in 60 days. He was immensely influential on my life because he got us out training. We would spend a lot of time on wet, windswept days on the Wiltshire Downs, building up our endurance, running longer and longer distances, taking part in county competitions and races, all of which taught me a lot about endurance and sustainability for the long haul.

The thing I liked most about y-y was the open-air stuff – the connection with the countryside. Back then, we were encouraged to have bicycles, and one day I cycled all the way down to Warminster and back – 90 miles – which was a big deal when you were 16. Also, I did a lot of cross-country running, which I enjoyed immensely: the freedom – and I say this ironically, given I now use a wheelchair – of being able to stretch your legs out and feel the miles of endless rolling hills and lonely copses flying under your feet was fantastic.

The author is Frank Gardner, the BBC Security Correspondent - the last few words of the first paragraph say a lot.

And by extension, I wonder how many of those same lads who complained about bare-chested PE were quite happy to sleep bare-chested in communal situations such as sleepovers, school trips or boarding school.

I too thought that Harper’s post was excellent.

With regards to being made to do PE lessons shirtless I wonder how many guys that have complained on this forum about their dislike as lads of their shirtless PE experiences have as adults removed their shirts or vests whilst exercising because they had become too hot?.
I still think that exercising shirtless is more comfortable than having a hot sweaty vest stuck to your back. I regard my PE teachers as being decent people that wanted us to be fit and healthy, be comfortable exercising and to ensure good hygiene by making us shower naked afterwards.

These young guys give quite a good explanation of what Greg describes doing for anyone who has never heard of them. When discussing how you take one of these onsen things there is a bit of modern day awkwardness even with three close young men on their travels and one even says - from 1m 50s to 2m 00s - he finds getting naked with the other two "a bit weird". I personally found that comment a bit weird really and a shame with guys who are close friends, open minded and travellers around the world.


Hot Springs in Japan: How To Have The Best Naked Onsen Experience.

https://youtu.be/I63STvrhNRE

Jason on 12th March 2023 at 02:10

What you are talking about there is something called an 'onsen', which is their word for a hot steaming public deep bath which could be either inside or outside. You cannot wear any item of clothing in one at all. Brits would simply think of a hot tub but onsen is far better than that.

When I was on my gap year in 1981 I spent that year's summer traveling around Japan with another gap year friend of mine, paid for by my parents, and taking in all the country had to offer. I made frequent use of onsen's and never a problem, very nervous at first but never needed to be. Everyone had impeccable polite manners. You actually clean yourself before you step into it at most of them. My view at the time and still would be there's no point going to these places for a prolonged period of time and not taking in all a different culture has to offer. It was a great way to relax when you leave our Brit ways at the door and temporarily adopt the place you visit. We used to find one late in the day to unwind for as long as we wanted, typically anything from 30 to 60 minutes.

As this is a school forum I would not have wanted to be a child at school in that country because they really do work children in school extremely hard indeed and have long school days with lots of work and incredibly high standards are expected of everyone academically. Quite what their physical education system was like over there I have not got a clue but I would expect it is equally demanding just like the academic side. But the place has virtually no unemployment as far as I know and a very low crime rate and I remember feeling very safe and only worrying about the ground moving, there was a bit of a tremor one day I was there.

TimH you got in before me because I was going to say the very same thing about the Harper post and agree with you, that was really rather well said, especially as Harper (first or surname used there?) admits he wasn't the greatest fan of PE at the time. If only we could all have hindsight in the present moment.

I thought Giles stuck something quite readable on here too about Worcester Grammar School and the foreign teacher and I always enjoy reading the night time missive's from Robbie who talks so much sense too. This forum has proved very readable in recent months, long may it continue.

Harper - simply: Well Said!

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

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

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

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

Giles snippet from 11th March caught my eye.

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Peter on 9th March 2023 at 16:59

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

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

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

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