Burnley Grammar School

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.

Replying to Chris N re his post of 4th March 2023.
Hi Chris,
I was always topless for PE by default like you and I completely agree that the bibs were uncomfortable. It always seemed strange to me that the Head of PE wanted boys to do PE stripped to the waist but then covered up the chests of half of the lads with bibs to play basketball and other team games.

The bibs were scratchy and too tight for most of us by the age of 15. It got better when we got a new Head of PE who got rid of the bibs and replaced them with different coloured armbands for each team. The armbands were comfortable.

I can't see the point of showers without soap either. My school had soap, it was sort of optional I think. Nobody forced it, as long as you got stripped fully off and wet that was the main thing. Is it hygienic to share someone else's soap, because I did that a lot in PE showers with another lad and even shared his towel now and again when I couldn't be bothered to bring my own.

I don't know whether you mis-wrote that line about body odour Alan because in school I think all teenagers, certainly all boys definitely do have it if their hygiene isn't up to scratch and you don't need to have done a high energy PE lesson to give it off. I remember at about the age of 14 the initials B.O regularly getting thrown around as an insult actually. The last thing you wanted in school was an accusation you reeked of B.O.

Many years back there was one of those fly-on-the-wall style documentaries following raw army recruits into the British Army, it might have been Marine's or something like that. They got shown during training how to take a proper shower and had to stand around and watch their instructor, whatever rank he was, not many years older than them, get wet, lather up and wash himself while he told them what to pay special attention to, all the while this group of lads keeping completely straight faces as this guy tells them how to wash in the most intricate detail I don't need to spell out here.

A shame they didn't do that in school if it was a place to educate!

Andrew and Jim: There were far more "Edgar's" prowling round school gyms than will ever be admitted to, or even known about, because their colleagues decided to keep their mouths shut, and headmasters their eyes closed. I can't see the point of showers without soap because it will do nothing to expel the "B.O" that in reality most young lads do not suffer from.

Comment by: Matt Grahame on 6th March 2023 at 16:23

<they told us to use a handful of liquid soap straight from a dispenser at the showers entrance before going in, which I always used to throw straight down onto my groin first before rubbing it over the rest of me. Not using it meant getting sent straight back in again.>


There were two things to do with cleanliness they went big on at school in my time back throughout the 70's. One was making sure your hands were clean and washed for school dinners where we had to go and wash them at a sink in the classroom or out in the toilets, with soap before trotting along to the canteen where the lady at the entrance would make us hold our hands out to see if they were clean enough to enter for lunch.

The other was of course that school staple of the PE class, the going in the showers with your mates. At school we did the showers with no soap at all. Teachers told us we didn't have time for that when someone asked why we didn't. So it was just plain lukewarm water for a couple of minutes soak down. Not quite my idea of a proper wash, only useful for mucky legs now and again fresh from the playing field after rugger lessons in the main.

Dinner ladies endlessly checking hands before lunch and PE teachers over excessively watching over showering boys after PE both long lasting memories of cleanliness in school.

Perhaps not so much the going commando aspect of school PE shorts and no pants in itself the big problem here rather than one or two of the highly distasteful mentions that have been made of occasional PE teachers actively stretching shorts open to check down them. That is the really unacceptable part of the whole issue to me that tells me a lot about anyone who did so.

I agree with Matt, that dictating underwear "rules" is questionable in the extreme. On another topic, it is good to see that at last old "Edgar" has been named and shamed as he cowers in South Africa, trying to avoid deportation to the UK to face justice - but how sad that it took somebody famous to out him. I wonder how many Edgar's got away Scot free because the boys they chose to molest never became broadcasters?:

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11831999/Unmasked-Man-accused-Nicky-Campbell-paedophile-named-Iain-Wares-83.html

The whole not being allowed to wear your everyday pants/underwear beneath the PE shorts you would change into never fails to amuse and amaze me for it's sheer weirdness. Whose business should it be to tell anyone, even kids in school, whether they can or cannot wear underwear, unless they're walking into the school showers with their pants on, I'd agree they should take them off in that case. Some schools nowadays allow that I believe.

Okay so I've read a couple of the explanations for this practice but they really are pretty damned tenuous. Your pants don't even get that sweaty in the first place, nothing like enough to worry about like maybe a top would with armpit and sweat stains on the chest and back. Even if you do get a bit overheated down below we were all at the time straight into the showers after PE to rinse ourselves down, including any sweaty balls and came back out fairly freshened up. Well I did at my school anyway where they told us to use a handful of liquid soap straight from a dispenser at the showers entrance before going in, which I always used to throw straight down onto my groin first before rubbing it over the rest of me. Not using it meant getting sent straight back in again.

Tanya, That's a fair question. With jockstraps, unlike bras, there seem to be two quite different experiences. Some men went through secondary school never wearing anything under shorts, whereas others were encouraged to wear something supportive and find it hard to imagine how we who wore nothing managed. For me the only interesting question is when the change occurred, probably in the 1970s. I was at school in the '60s and never saw or heard of a jockstrap.

Why do some men obsess about wearing jockstraps exactly?

Women aren't coming on here talking about starting to wear bra's during school PE.

Just saying.

Chris G
I totally agree with your last sentence. I too have a couple that I have held onto to wear under shorts,

Re jockstraps:
I attended two secondary schools, aged 11-15 and 15-18 respectively. At both schools, we were free to wear what, if anything, we wore under our PE shorts. At the first, we generally went commando. After one incident in which one of the lads in my class got accidentally kicked in a tender region, the PE teacher advised us that we were probably getting to the stage of developmenet where we ought to think of wearing something supportive under our shorts. He mentioned a jock-strap, but none of us had any idea what one of these was. We did, however take his advice, and most of us took to wearing either our underpants or swimming trunks. At my second school, virtually everyone wore something under their shorts, briefs, swimming trunks or, in an increasing number of cases, actual jock-straps. Some lads took to wearing their jocks as everyday underwear or sleepwear. I was a boarder at that school, and I lost no time in getting my parents to buy me a couple (one on and one in the wash) and send them on to me. Sensible, i.e. classic narrow-waistband jock-straps are hard to come by these days, but I like to keep a few around for general summer wear, especially with shorts.

Hello David,

I was at school in the 1980s and nobody in PE talked about jockstraps at any point and some of the boys I was in PE with and shared changing rooms with by the time we were about 15 packed some decent chunky sized well developed adult looking appendages between the legs, I saw that up close, as we all did in those days of the compulsory regular naked close proximity showers with each other in almost all schools. But we always wore our underwear so that kept everything secure anyway. None of these can't wear your pants places.

Much the same goes for my own father who left school at the age of 15 back in 1960 (I left on the same date as my father 30 years later in 1990) who tells me nobody talked of jockstraps in his school either or made demands on removing pants under shorts. Neither of us have ever seen anyone wear one in school, or even talk of them.

I'm unsure what kind of actual PE kit my father actually had back in the late 50s but my own one in the 80s for gym was generally the barefoot variety on the gym floor, quite short shorts, with pants underneath and those with stark vibrant coloured pants often showed through easily as the shorts were mostly white. Tops (vests, T shirts or similar) of any kind were completely forbidden for PE inside the gym on the floor unless we played a team game in which case some flimsy bibs got handed out, which I wasn't a fan of and preferred not having one as they felt scratchy on direct skin. This was mainly for basketball. Because we were always topless by default in PE I would always have chosen to remain as the "skin" rather than bother with a bib when they were handed out.

Broadly agree with Jim's point here.

Sam, I went to a Mixed Secondary School from 1960 - 1966 & we were told not to wear anything under our pe shorts! which along with plimsols, is all we wore for pe. I had never heard of jockstraps until reading this forum . All the boys in my class were shorts only. No teacher mentioned jockstraps!

Sam - A lot of people have talked about such experiences if you look further back. Last summer that subject came to a head amongst readers. Infact so many comments on that subject that it was getting ridiculous and started getting called out as there was literally nothing especially new or illuminating to say on the subject.

I agree with Jeff about wearing a jockstrap for PE and sport. I am surprised that others who attended school in the 60s and 70s have not spoken of their experiences with jockstraps. Our school in the late 60s made them compulsory for boys from about the age of 14. We had no regrets as they were very comfortable and supportive to wear.

Wayne that's not an unfamiliar cross country story. There must be another two or three along the same lines from others, you might have seen if you went back a while on here. What was it with PE teachers taking classes out like that past the school gates, I find that completely unreasonable of them. Self contained PE lessons such as in the photo that illustrates this forum topic are one thing but taking such a class out into the wider community just seems like a mickey take to me.

I wore a jockstrap at school (1970s) for pe running rugby etc. and continued to wear one for sports after school and college. I found that a jockstrap gave more support than underpants and so was my sports underwear of choice. Before getting a jockstrap when I was 13 nothing was worn under the shorts.

An interesting little treasure trove of school memories that I have just discovered on a Sunday evening having read through the last forty pages.

The overwhelming sense I've got is, wow I was not alone thinking and feeling like I did at secondary school (1975-81), so many others were too, especially on the no shirts rule we had in gym from the age of eleven onwards. I hated teachers could make us do that even though I was good at most PE and in shape because I remained highly self critical and touchy about my own body and fair to say was shy in that regards. Not everyone, as this site proves, is big on the no shirt look or feels confident like it and it was never strictly necessary during school PE was it. I think schools in my time went through a phase where PE was done like this a lot for some reason.

I also hated being forced to shower with nothing on when we weren't even grubby and the fact that PE teachers at my secondary school ran the lesson right up to 11.57am before calling a halt and allowing us to walk back to the changing room, by which time it was almost noon on the dot when we had to shower properly in what was our lunch hour own time. Lunch ran from noon to 1pm precisely, yet we would still be showering sometimes at 12.10pm and often a quarter of lunch hour was gone before we got out, dressed and showered. A real liberty that used to wind up the class that came before lunch.

I was a natural at sport, a good all rounder and because of this I always had high expectations from PE teachers who would give me a hard time if I didn't do well enough, bordering on quite intimidating at times. I'm sure they thought I was set for a sports career the way they never let up. Of course the vast majority of us are going to leave school and do nothing of the sort other than keep fit in our own time for our own self fulfilment.

A heads up to the guys on here who have written about cross country. While most of the time I was in school we ran with full kit, there was one school academic year during my time when we had a switch of teacher and every single time we went out running we'd group together on the football pitch ready for the off and have to remove all our shirts and stick or tie them beside the goalpost and get going, only to pick them up again on our way back in after running, sometimes up to a full hour later nearly. We would run through a small park and into the local industrial estate development and get one or two very sympathetic looks at times. I remember getting a very painful stitch one time and having to stop and sit kerbside alone for a minute or two only for someone from the nearby office to come out and ask me what I was doing sitting there like that!

Whilst it always seemed perfectly acceptable even long before many of us here were at school to cane boys on the backside or over the hands, I think if a school even in the dim and distant decades past had chosen to cane boys across the bottom of the feet then it would have been seen as beyond reasonable and not acceptable.

It raises a quite interesting question I've never thought of, that it's fine to strike across the bottom, the hands but not the feet and we all know it would instinctively feel very wrong to have done so without being able to explain why exactly. Possibly the rear or the hands seems like punishment while the feet looks more like torture.

Comment by: Eric on 23rd February 2023 at 21:08

Another world entirely there. But what a thing to get corporal punishment for like that. Violence gets a let off, a verucca gets the full whack. Kind of reminds me of modern days, Covid gets the harsh penalties (10K fines anyone?) but assaults a slap on the wrist, if you're even caught. Your school was ahead of its time.

Reading your piece Neal about your PE teacher and issues in PE surrounding feet reminds me of myself. PE teachers did go on a lot about such things at school and I learnt the hard way for my innocent mistake.

I was actually caned for turning up in PE and not reporting that I had a verucca on one of my feet. I didn't even realise what I had. It didn't feel like much or hurt. It was only noticed when we kneeled along a bench and our PE teacher went along and looked at all our feet in the changing room, something that happened about three times a year, roughly each term. A somewhat degrading experience I thought. I was sent to the school doctor's office first to be looked at where she confirmed it.

It was a right bawling out and then off to the head's office where I was given two sharp and painful strokes of a cane on each hand by the head almost instantly, and it hurt for ages. Another PE teacher watched and as we left he told me if it had been up to him he would have done it across my feet not my hands. I'd also been called stupid, a fool and had the infectious guilt trip thrown at me. I hadn't done it on purpose but that didn't save me from being punished, mainly for risking spreading what I had. I was fourteen years old at the time, it was sometime in 1969.

In the same year I think it was, someone actually punched somebody else square in the face deliberately during a lesson, cutting his lip badly and was sent back to the changing room to cool off and calm down rather than off to the head's office for what would surely have been a corporal punishment offence.

I know that I am continuing with the "off P E " topic but I certainly remember one particular teacher who took us for English Literature. this was in Secondary school circa 1962/66. He introduced our class to the stories of Rider Haggard. I remember in particular how he read out Kings Solomon's Mines putting expression into all the different characters an making it extremely interesting. I think the majority of the class look forward to his lessons and of course we retained the story when it came to exams.
Back to P E shorts and no pants plimsolls and no socks. As I have previously just got on with it.

Answering your question Tim, and back in the 80s we had one summer holiday where I felt seriously short changed because we broke up on 22nd July and went back on 1st September, not even managing to get the proper six weeks in full. Having a school night in August felt so wrong. Very rarely did anyone return to school after summer on a Monday or early in the week, it always seemed to be late in the week, many times a Wednesday or Thursday. I remember at my primary school during the summer holidays for a couple of week period they would open school grounds and there was what was a holiday club involving adults, although no teachers seemed to be present, where we would be able to pull out all the PE stuff and use it under supervision in a casual relaxed manner all morning. We could do things inside or outside but because the weather was generally good it was outside. I think there was an element of parental involvement in this as I used to be taken by a good friend's mum along with him for a couple of summer holiday mornings in our shorts and t-shirts. I wasn't really a fan of showing up in school like that during the long school holiday though because I was more than able to make enough of my own spare time doing my own thing either alone, with friends or family.

Answering Neal. Didn't every teacher bring a taste of their own self into lessons. That was the days when they were probably freer to do so rather than be constrained tightly by the straightjacket of the curriculum. On the very specific issue you talked about I think it was interesting to say the least but some people can get very touchy about certain things they see as highly personal about the self and feet are definitely one of those, many people hate their feet don't they. I remember many haters of doing PE without any footwear when we did it like that. So many people in school PE lessons and even as adults have hang ups about various parts of themselves and showing certain things but don't say too much because they think nobody else could possibly feel the same as them and they are unique when they are not actually.

Answering Darren about fat and thin shaming. Yes this was definitely a thing I can attest as an observer of it happening to others I knew. My best friend in school was actually a very chubby lad compared to everyone else in the days when chubby lads stood out. By today's standard he wasn't even that bad because I've got a photo of him and it's just what you'd call a little bit of puppy fat. This was enough for him to get singled out constantly and because of the way he looked he was treated as if he must be a lazy kid which was unfair. I remember him getting called 'fatty' by PE teachers who should have known better than using the language of playground kids, but there you go. Meanwhile I was fairly slim and didn't seem to have great strength in my arms at one stage while I was developing and this was drawn to my attention in a less than encouraging way. I was always happiest wearing long sleeves or a tee-shirt doing PE and hiding my arms but so much of it involved vests or no tops. So like Alan says, PE teachers in my opinion often crossed the line between legitimate concerns and encouragement into outright over-focussing on the normal range of so called 'shortcomings' as they saw it. You only have to google up some stock phrases to find many people given life long hang ups by PE lesson treatment who now mention it in other forums. Some comments last a lifetime.

Answering Matt, nobody I know ever did a PE lesson without their underwear beneath their shorts, and I never wore or saw anyone at any age wear a jockstrap either. Both alien concepts to me there but could not agree more with your take on how contradictory that whole thing seems.

From memory we had about 6 weeks summer holiday, starting late July and returning to school during the first week of September.

At a tangent from the usual here ...

Can anyone remember when their school summer holidays began & ended? In the 50s & 60s, when many cities had big industries ('foundries', car plants, etc.) these would close for two weeks in summer for maintenance and the majority of the workforce would go on holiday. Different cities had different holiday weeks.

In my home city the two holiday weeks were August Bank holiday week (bearing in mind that August Bank Holiday Monday was then the first Monday in August) and the week before that. My recollection is that we 'broke up' on the Thursday before that.

(FWIW, in Scotland the Autumn half-term was the 'potato picking holiday' where youngster went into the fields to pick 'tatties' - and I think this applied in other places, too, and in the South whole streets would go 'Hopping Down in Kent')

Any comments?

I had one very strident PE teacher during my teenage years who held personal views which he imposed religiously on me and my class. Bare feet and bare chests in PE were his thing for us. I never enjoyed his lessons because of this. He had a firm belief that the only way to do PE was having nothing at all on your feet. This was because he insisted, and he was fond of saying it over and over, that going barefoot aided balance and all round posture, as well as being good for wellbeing in some way I never quite understood. In his classes none of us were ever allowed to wear the trainers we were allowed to bring for PE. He did this outside for us a lot too, even on a somewhat gravelly all weather ground where we would run hurdles barefoot, which proved more than painful on a number of occasions when my feet, and a fair few others, hit the hurdles instead of clearing them. The ground felt rough too. But it was beneficial according to him. I found no benefit for my balance or posture or anything else in that kind of circumstance and I don't think anyone else did. He was such a fanatic like this that he could often be seen walking around school even in lunch hour's without his shoes or socks on and quite frankly most of us thought he was an eccentric idiot. He seemed to have well weathered feet with thick skin whereas mine and others were more sensitive and far less hardened. Quite the oddball. I was always of the opinion that feet are best protected and covered appropriately for the terrain they are on and what you are doing. Basic gym stuff was okay just about. He even used to give us advice in PE lessons about how to look after our feet properly to keep them healthy and avoid problems which was quite funny in its own way because a couple of the early problems I had were actually caused by being in his lessons or in general PE, like walking on the gravelly all weather getting broken skin from a small flinty piece on the ground or developing a verruca wart from the changing room. We had one quite faintly ridiculous day in PE when he sat massaging away at his own feet and we had to observe and do the same to ours for a couple of minutes to release our tension he said. Well it was a bit different I suppose.
He also held the view that most PE is best done wearing no top and went big on this one too, citing wellbeing yet again and the increased confidence it would bring with it. My own memory in his lessons was that it didn't do any such thing. My own mother used to say something very similar to me at home in the summer months telling me to take my top off because it will make me feel much better. I never understood why it would and I don't think she probably did either but she thought her boys should air their bodies as much as possible when conditions allowed and fully approved of my oddball PE teacher back in school on that one.
The two other teachers of PE I had through my teenage years seemed far more typical and regular to the point of boringly ordinary infact.

I was born back in 1967.

For the first few years at grammar school we were told not to wear our underpants for PE for hygiene reasons (them getting dirty and sweaty).

Then when we were about 13 or so our PE teacher advised us to purchase a 'litesome supporter' (jockstrap) as we required support now that we were maturing. A couple of boys did buy jockstraps, but most of us stated to wear our swimming trunks under out PE shorts instead.

We did indoor PE shirtless, but always wore a rugby shirt for outdoor games (rugby, hockey and cross country).