Burnley Grammar School

I've just seen the question that was asked about anyone who took school showers before they reached senior high secondary/comprehensive level. I can vouch for that one in my case. I'll come to that at the end of what I'd like to say after I give a rough outline of my own school times.

This is going back to a middle school I started at in Sep '72 very shortly after my eighth birthday which was late August making me one of the youngest in class. I think the school roll was about 200 at the time with 8 classes, two per year group. I was there for four school years leaving in July '76.

In P.E we did lots of different stuff from football, swimming, running, long jumping high jumping and all kinds of athletics in a relaxed and not too competitive way. I remember rounders was always quite a populat choice as well. A few weeks ago a lot of people mentioned the Maypole and that's also something our school had and used from time to time also but I never relate to it as anything connected directly to P.E as such.

In the school hall we wore a plain t-shirt and shorts for P.E and our bare feet. The classes were always mixed. Outside we wore similar kit and plimsolls. Nobody seemed to wear what you would define as trainers nowadays. If the weather was good we would sometimes be allowed or even actually told to do our lesson without our tops on but this only ever happened when we had a man take us for it, not with any of the lady teachers. Normally this would happen when we were running circuits of our track.

Middle school was also where I was first introduced to the oh so familiar shirts and skins team games division of boys right from the age of eight, most often in our school hall indoors rather than outside. But it was never called shirts/skins or referred to like that and I didn't hear that term used until I reached comprehensive in the later 70's. It was always known as on's and off's.

The first time we did an on's and off's team game, I think it was something like volleyball or like that, we were allowed by our teacher to choose who was going to be what ourselves and it seemed to work out without much aggro. Unfortunately I remember the second time we did it and it didn't work out well at all and arguing broke out because some who had been off's last time were going to be again and didn't want to be, so that was the end of deciding for ourselves. That teacher blew her stack and from then on we simply got told who did which team, mostly by lining us up and going along pointing on and off at every other one of us.

Through my time at middle school I shared all my P.E lessons about half and half between a man and lady teacher. When we did class outside even though we were mixed lessons the boys and the girls would peel off and do separate things to themselves, almost like two classes within the one but being overseen by just one teacher most of the time.

The school had a very small pair of changing rooms for boys and girls separately of course. But the boys one was a real odd design because it had a couple of large ceiling to floor windows which were not even frosted in any way so anybody outside could look through and see who was in them and doing what without any effort. They must have been designed by a blind man or something. The other side was an open yard where anyone in school passed by. Absolutely no privacy, yet this room had clearly been designed as a school changing room without any doubt about it and had not had some kind of change of use.

So for my first couple of years we used these facilities and came and went as you'd expect. Then I remember us getting told that our school had been given a budget to make some big improvements, one was a complete new classroom to replace a prefab temporary thing, other minor alterations and also some new changing places. All this was going to take place while school was out across the summer hols, the ones in '74 I think it was. Infact before we went off for summer there was some work already starting.

By our return after six weeks or so in September it was all done, new classroom, no old prefab anymore, numerous other changes and we had some brand new changing rooms too, the old ones had been demolished and new ones built and extended. They were bright and clean, had lots of new sinks and water fountains and were completely private with no more unfrosted big window, just some higher up ones you'd need a step ladder to gaze into. It needed to be like that, because our new changing room also had a new inbuilt shower area inside it too, behind a tiled barrier about 5ft high. I remember we all looked at it but didn't think much or say anything about it.

I certainly didn't think we were going to use it and our teacher although mentioning our new build didn't draw attention to that part of it. Infact I thought it might just be some after school activities by other people or something. We did our usual lessons for a couple of weeks as we always had done and settled down into our new school year, not a lot different to the previous one really.

Later in the month on one of our P.E afternoons we sat down and before going home got given a note to take home for our parents with information about the forthcoming school academic year and within this it was telling our parents to start sending us to school with a towel on P.E days during the week. Bringing a towel wasn't a first as we'd done so on the very few days we went swimming anyway. I didn't even read the note, just folded it up and handed it over when I got home.

So I actually found out about school showers from my own parent when she read the note and told me about the towel/shower change. I'm sure I'd told her about our new buildings at school but probably never even mentioned the changing room had a shower in it. After all, at that age I didn't know anything about that kind of thing and didn't know you could do that inside school.

We didn't start immediately after knowing all this and so it gave time to get anxious. It was a couiple of weeks before I was packed off to school with a very small hand towel in my bag on P.E day and began middle school group class showers at the age of 10 and one of the clearest things that comes to me from it is one of my friends asking who was going to be brave enough to be the first to do so and a really quiet and unassuming lad called Toby who never made a fuss about anything being the first to do so as we all watched before we quickly followed and did so too.

Half the time was a man and the other half was a lady teacher and it may seem remarkable now but back in middle school in the mid 70's she would be in our changing room making sure we were doing what we should be even as we took a shower, although she didn't stay watching like the man and when we were in the shower she couldn't actually see us directly, she just knew we were doing it. Different times indeed.

I worried about it, of course I did and boys I expected to worry a lot didn't seem to and some, friends among them who I thought wouldn't care much did seem to. That's just down to the normal range of personality type.

After that we always used the new shower after we'd been outside and most times inside too but if our teacher had given us a particularly light lesson inside then we left it out here and there. It ended up not bothering me one way ot the other and the adjustment didn't take too long for most of us I don't think. My other siblings would have used them from the age of eight, a brother and a sister.

Some might say I was lucky to be given such facilities that soon. My parents had nothing to say about it that I know of and the biggest deal with them was making sure I took the right towel and didn't lose it in school at that age, there was certainly not the slightest inclination that I know of where those kind of requirements at that age worried our parents.

I take an interest generally in mindfulness and people who've had or have PTSD if anyone's interested.

Describe your first sports jacket GBBGG and how you got it then. It must have been a good memorable one for you to mention it on here.

@ Gary: Contradict myself? Moi? Yes - I suppose so, but as Gandalf says in 'The Two Towers': "What? In riddles?" said Gandalf. "No! For I was talking aloud to myself. A habit of the old: they choose the wisest person present to speak to; the long explanations needed by the young are wearying.”

(I think what I was trying to say was that I agreed with Tom F's comment: I wore shorts regularly to school until I was ten or eleven unless it was cold. I literally have nothing more to say than that about it, because there is nothing worth saying about it.)

On the question of 'sartorial elegance' - do any of the guys remember getting their first 'Sports Jacket'? - That really was a sign of growing up.

Tanya, a nine-year-old is in their tenth year. Your first year ends on the day you reach one year old.

Let's have a "No, no underpants" rule on here maybe!

David you confused me with your middle school memory there and your birthday being late as you said it. It made no sense to me. What do you mean you entered middle school in your 10th year because that doesn't fit with middle school age entry. If you were born in September, early in the school year you'd be 9 on entry maybe, whereas August borns would have just turned 8.

I'd imagine suddenly showering in a middle school was a bit unexpected wasn't it.

Tom says - 'I wore shorts regularly to school until I was ten or eleven unless it was cold. I literally have nothing more to say than that about it, because there is nothing worth saying about it.'


Couldn't have put it better myself.

GBBGG after your post on 20th June your one on 21st June seems to contradict yourself a bit there. ;-)

Anyway, great link to We Are The Champions. A show I loved and really strange to say this but I watched a clip from one of the latest Kaleidoscope Presentation Vaults on You Tube only on Monday in which Ron Pickering Popped up briefly at something from 1982 called The British Meat Games, a strange titled athletics event.

On the Clitheroe thread there has been discussion of a school making everyone, boys as well, wear a T-shirt when they do swimming. Seeing this show reminded me of that as all the boys are in tops throughout the programme and always were as far as I can recall it, but obviously that was so that the various teams could easily be identified from each other and nothing more than that simple explanation unlike the school that has been discussed on that other thread.

What were Lodge Farm Middle School thinking of Robbie to give that kind of access. I like the way they thank them for all the help at the end. I bet.

Yes that was the one I was thinking of Robbie. That middle school was doing things more like a comprehensive to me. I wonder if it was chosen for that reason or maybe they just did that set up as a one off for the purposes of that show. Thanks David for your answer which suggests you had a similar set up at your own middle school.

Agree with Claire and the others on that other subject too.

On shorts - I wore shorts until part way through my 2nd year @ secondary school (c1961). this is how it just happened - not at the whim of parents or after protests ... its just how it was. (And my 'norm' for BST is still shorts).

Videos - there was a TV series back in the 80s called 'We are the Champions' - if anyone wants a 'memory burst' - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S_G9vMmeucs

Relating to your last paragraph Andre is this the video that you were referring to by any chance? An old ITV school show from the early 80s about health and fitness for primary school ages placed eight months ago on these pages here. I remembered seeing it put here last autumn so it was easy to trace back. It's quite amazing actually for obvious reasons that hardly need explaining especially if watched towards the end. The pupils in it look like they could have been early secondary students and some seem quite mature for their ages I thought but the credits make it clear it was only a middle school and they all shower together after their PE with absolutely no censorship whatsoever, infact quite the opposite, quite a jaw dropping intrusion of privacy if you ask me.

The link is below and is from a long running series that went out on commercial television over many years during the 70s and 80s known as Good Health, many of these shows didn't pull their punches in other subjects either.

https://youtu.be/NRRw-k7cGJs

Claire, tedious is the kindest way of putting it. What also gets me is that when these subjects get their latest rehash for the umpteenth time they find enthusiastic responders quite fast yet in recent months we have had some teachers placing thoughtful and interesting observations on here amongst many things and they more or less get overlooked completely. What do you make of that?

I wore shorts regularly to school until I was ten or eleven unless it was cold. I literally have nothing more to say than that about it, because there is nothing worth saying about it.

Come on Tim you must have more interesting questions without igniting all that been there done that stuff yet again. For example I thought your other question on showering was reasonably decent and got you a great answer.

It's also being done to death on the Clitheroe Royal Grammar School thread as well. Tedious, isn't it.

I went to a middle school in the 1970's so can answer your last question Andre. You entered middle school in your 10th year, as my birthday was late I was nine for nearly the whole year. The middle school was quite new then and built on the same site as a high school so it shared the same PE block. We had to shower after every indoor PE lesson but outdoor games was always a double afternoon lesson and you could go straight home afterwards without changing and showering. In just about all ways middle school was more like high school than primary in the way it did things.

I agree with the latest posting from Christopher C.

It (and the wearing of shorts @ 13 or 14) has been 'done to death'.

I went to a middle school in the 1970's so can answer your last question Andre. You entered middle school in your 10th year, as my birthday was late I was nine for nearly the whole year. The middle school was quite new then and built on the same site as a high school so it shared the same PE block. We had to shower after every indoor PE lesson but outdoor games was always a double afternoon lesson and you could go straight home afterwards without changing and showering. In just about all ways middle school was more like high school than primary in the way it did things.

Dragging this back to a no underpants rule when there are over 120 pages to reference back at and the subject seems to have been dealt with from just about any angle anyone cares to mention. What's new to say about it, seriously. Some people did so, most didn't and all the explanations for the whys and wherefores have been comprehensively exhausted.

Is this meant to have been a traumatic experience for some on a par with shirtlessnesses and showering.

Tim,
We had to put up with the'no under pants rule' under our shorts at school.

Tim - depends what decade you're talking maybe on showers in school don't you think.

I can't imagine many of secondary age 11 - 16s who went to school back in the 1970s or 1980s having the luxury of deciding for themselves whether they fancied a shower or not after PE. It was all about compulsion wasn't it. You had to, sod what you thought about it, sod your privacy, sod being shy. Do it unquestioningly. Were these decades peak mandatory widespread school communal showers at close to 100% schools doing so like that?

It also makes quite a difference within those same decades whether you were a male or female in school. Boys seem like they had to shower more than girls and didn't teacher Robert recently write up a piece that suggested just this as fact. This in itself is interesting and one wonders why this difference existed as it collates to long held ancient views going far back that boys did not need to be concerned about modesty issues in any way at all, which in my opinion is a misguided broad brush old concept.

Clearly there has been something of a shift in attitude since those decades above, and the decades before those too, compared to the last couple or so. Some people who went to school back in those decades seem to look back and feel really hard done by now but I'm not sure they should feel that way.

As I think that teacher Robert said in his long piece, it is still government policy to this day that any place providing physical education to the over 11s must provide proper changing and showering facilities, which surely means that each and every senior school across the UK has workable showers to be used. Whether they do is another matter. Also, was it ever government policy in those older decades that schools should use compulsion regards showering after PE.

Didn't somebody a few months ago on here place a video link from an old programme that showed a school shower that was happening in a middle school not a secondary. That's an interesting question just how many middle schools did that because I always thought it was none at all even in the decades I've mentioned. Did anyone here ever really take showers in their middle school as young as just 8?

Tim - I was at two secondary schools where we had dedicated PE kit, i.e. top and shorts. At the first, age 10 - 15, the requirement was minimal, white top, which most of us achieved by just keeping our underwear vests on, and shorts, colour immaterial, but generally black or white cotton. At the second, age 15 - 18, white t-shirts and black rugby shorts were specified, and enforced. At neither was there any rule regarding underwear. At the first school we tended to go commando. At one point we were advised to wear some form of protection, jock-straps being mentioned, but in our innocence, none of us knew what these were, and most of us carried on blithely risking the family jewels in the interests of comfort. At the second school, a mix of jock-straps and swimming trunks prevailed, particularly for Rugby, although some went commando

There is nothing liberal about this era Tim. Even the so called liberals are nothing of the sort and seem highly intolerant of anything that challenges their view of the world they live in. Like you, I noted the contrast in that entry between what was said about school in the 70's and now. They are suffocating children in school with endless irrelevant nonsense nowadays and not nurturing genuine individuality, despite the fact that many schools nowadays just love to put a boastful soundbite motto on their websites to make themselves sound so wonderful.

The calibre of some teaching staff today leaves a lot to be desired compared to what I experienced and some are without shame activists trying to indocrinate their pupils into set ideas with a personal agenda. This is abuse, every bit as much as any of our older days teachers who may have crossed the line physically at times or with demeaning put downs.

How common was the no-underpants rule for boys in PE classes?
This rule was never imposed on us at the schools I went to, either primary or secondary.

On the same subject, how common were compulsary showers after PE as against being optional?

Nigel,
I thought we were living in the liberal era, but when I read your post that boys and girls today are made to wear blazers in class no matter the temperature I am beginning to think otherwise.
Same with the other posters mentioning that some schools now require boys to swim with tops on.
Which makes me wonder, have we made progress concerning schools or was it better in the past in our days?

Comment by: Robby on 15th June 2022 at 04:13
Craig,
Don't you think it was unfair for the girls in your class that only the boys were allowed to take their shirts off in class during the heatwave, especially considering that it was just a primary school?
Or were the girls also allowed to take their shirts off?
I don't think that this would have been a big deal for the girls at 10 years old.
In some primary schools it was also common for both boys and girls to take PE classes together in just underpants.
We didn't have this custom at our primary school but I know that some schools did.

Replying to Robby's comments above;

No I don't think it was unfair at all. It would be a big deal even at 10. I've never even thought about it actually. Age 10 is far too old to suggest girls could do the same as boys and work at school in a heatwave without tops like that. Even if they were allowed I could never see a single one choosing to do so. There are differences between boys and girls despite what some lately try to maintain. It may be quite some time ago now but looking back to 1976 when I was at school and we did things like that when the weather was unusually hot for a long period of time it just seemed almost the expected normal thing to go and do if you were a boy and were given the chance to do so. Certainly no big deal.

I don't remember much about what girls in our class made of boys being given the chance to keep cool like that but it's ages ago I might have forgotten but nothing dramatic hits me.

Every single boy in my class seemed to willingly hang their shirt on the back of the chair for the day, but only because we were told we could. I remember being told I had to put it back on on to get my dinner at lunchtime while I sat down for 20 minutes or so but taking it off again afterwards until the end of the afternoon around about 3.30pm. Many of us also walked home without our top on and probably never put it back on for the rest of the day, went back to school next day and took them off for the day again by about 10.30am at mid morning playtime break.

I suppose it might raise a few eyebrows from some people nowadays if you saw a lot of ten year olds walking out the school gates at the end of the day minus their shirts even during a long heatwave but these are really quite fond memories for me and a lovely period in time.

After school I also used to walk half a mile to the local sweet shop and thought nothing of doing that at the time to get sweets, an ice cream or lolly with my friends with none of us wearing anything on top. Completely carefree and unbothered. A shame we can't stay our 10 year old selves isn't it.

You mentioned PE lessons where kids of both sexes wore no tops. I never did that at any age but up to the age of about 6 or 7 my parents used to go to a beauty spot near home with other parents who were friends and all the children, me included, boys and girls would paddle and splash about in a shallow stream without our tops on together and think nothing of it. We would also dry off and change afterwards briefly with nothing on in front of each other. I also know there were other people nearby unconnected to us. There was nothing like the hysteria that someone might see you like that back then and yet I don't think things have fundamentally changed except in some peoples heads nowadays with how they perceive the world around us.

Remembering school in the hot summer of 1976 like Rose & Craig have done.

Because of the hot weather a number of our usual P.E lessons got turned over into a swimming lesson instead which as far as I was concerned was brilliant news. We didn't need to book the public pool as school had already got a nice small pool of its own installed which wasn't that old and we had easy instant access when our P.E teachers wanted us to use it.

The boys at my school were used to doing P.E topless generally away from the pool already because gym stipulated either a simple white vest or nothing. Most of the time we wore nothing on top.

I do also like others have said definitely know we did some lessons outside in that weather because inside was just so stuffy and that many boys, and some girls would be loosening up the regular uniform and boys allowed to completely undo the buttons on the front of our light blue shirts so they hung completely open as we worked. I am quite certain that some took them off completely for a short while too.

None of this seemed to create any problems and just seemed an obvious thing to do. I don't even remember it creating any distractions.

Nowadays this same school expects everyone to wear full blazers in the classroom and you have to ask permisssion to even take the blazer off while you work which seems excessively demanding. When I was told this by a fifteen year old daughter of a friend a couple of months ago I was astonished at the lack of freedom they are now given.

Ron: For what it's worth, our local town centre was full of shirtless bra-topped women of all ages and sizes yesterday, with not a sign of "safety-shirts" anywhere. And some of them were "randomly" tattooed in various places. Again, a sight you wouldn't have seen in the 1960s/70s.

Autre temps, autre moeurs, a they say.

In reply to John about how many people are out and about shirtless nowadays.

Well I was out this morning, in a short sleeved polo top I might add, and walked into my local co-op store behind two lads in their 20s, neither had tops on or were even carrying one in their hand incase they should need to wear one. Our local co-op fires up the air conditioning a treat in hot weather and today was no exception, so when I bumped into these two guys on my way around I heard one saying how nippy and fresh he was feeling to his mate. I had to chuckle and one noticed I think. Who in their right mind goes out like that with the intention to walk into a supermarket for pity's sake. You'd never have seen that once upon a time in say the 60s/70s. When I came out and crossed over to my local Nationwide branch there was yet another in scruffy shorts and his bare upper body with associated random tattooing across a huge stomach on view to the rest of us.

I was coming to the end of the 4th form in 1976 and Rose is accurate. Me and my mates just wore shorts as soon as we got in from school and in the holidays later in the summer. It becaame the norm for a few weeks. I remember it being just too hot to do much really active PE outdoors as well. One thing I do remember was that we actually wanted cold showers afterwards and got them too but the water in the pipes had been warmed up so much that what came out didn't even feel that cold but lukewarm. It was the same at home when we ran a bath to cool down that even the cold water seemed fairly lukewarm, but we didn't waste too much as I'm sure there was a neighbourhood standpipe near to my street at the time and there must have been some kind of water ration going on at one point. But it didn't stop school giving us cold showers though. I also remember our school gym which was often freezing cold in winter but that summer was dreadfully hot and you couldn't open the windows as much as you'd want to because of the design. Just standing about you'd be sweating and glistening over your body or drenching your top through.

Craig, I remember the summer of 1976 very well. It was my last term at Primary School, the weather was absolutely torrid for the last few weeks of term and all uniform regulations were suspended for the duration. I don't think we ever took desks and chairs outside, and we didn't have an official shirts-off policy, but we did spend more time than usual out of doors as our playground had a large grassy field with a row of mature trees along one side providing shade for lessons which didn't need desks.

Teachers on playground duty generally turned blind eyes to boys going shirt-less at break and lunch-times, but the nearest we girls came to that was either tying up the bottoms of button-front shirts in film-star mode or, for the more daring, repurposing long-abandoned cotton vests by tye-dying in school colours and then either wearing them with the hem turned up as far as we could get away with, or cutting the bottom off ditto.

Outside school, more practical rules applied. Almost all of us playing out in the estate where we lived (me included) went topless, or nearly so, from the time we got home from school until bedtime, and often until school the next morning, with almost everyone in swimwear or the shortest possible shorts. Inside the house, Mum and Dad rarely wore more than shorts, Mum adding a bra or sometimes a t-shirt. Bedding was reduced to just a cotton sheet, often only used in the cooler early hours of the morning.

It was often uncomfortable while it lasted, but fun to look back on from a distance.

Paul how many people were at this cafe where you stated that 9 out of 10 of them were not even wearing shirts today? It seems a very high percentage even accounting for such hot conditions.

I've never actually thought about that question John posed and now it will be raising my awareness in the next couple of days and through the summer. I wonder if it is true.



The boys in school always used to come out onto the playing fields for PE without shirts on in this kind of hot weather. I would be lying if I said I like to see a nice looking well maintained chap out in this weather like that maybe at a park or in the street because it means they have a high degree of self confidence which is nice in itself. I would not expect to see anyone turn up at the local library, in an office or at the shops like it though.