Burnley Grammar School

Welcome Back!

To follow-up Ian - I pretty much agree about the film on Youtube. It depicts a performance by a 'Circus School' in the Netherlands - they're long established with a pretty impressive website & Facebook page.
Its old footage - but interesting (there are other films from them on the www).
The boys' trunks are what I would call 'continental style' - they cover all that needs covering - I've worn similar in younger days. I must admit I didn't notice the collars & arms & leg 'decorations' - I wouldn't read too much into it - its a 'performance' & this is just decoration.

What I would say, and it follows on Ian's second comment - on this very warm day I've seen boys/youths enjoying the last days of summer holidays, kicking footballs about, and the lads playing footy were pretty much all stripped to their shorts - a long summer with their friends has given them confidence in themselves and in their bodies. I suspect the same might well apply to these two Dutch lads - a summer working towards a goal at the 'school' and gaining the confidence in themselves to go and do things like this in 'public.

And Thanks to Nathan for his comments on the link to that totally gross film that someone put up last week

There are quite a few missing comments that were posted 30th August to 1st September on here aren't there.

It's nice to see the glitch sorted out.

Does anybody know of or use any other historical sites that talk about PE experiences in the same way this one does?

Forgot to say =

The lads bring it off with such confidence. Anything less would have been disastrous.

Welcome back after the server failure. Congratulations! A weekend without PE reminiscences (mine very like Pete 28 August – I had six years of disciplinarian PE).

Circuses have always featured scantily clad young men, as well as women. I saw a young male contortionist on “Cirque du Soleil” on TV at the weekend, where a young male contortionist performed wearing only a pair of lycra tights that left nothing to the imagination,

Gary's link looked fairly tame – intially, at least. A definite role reversal, scantily clad males instead of females, dating back to the 80's or 90's I guess. The trunks covers all that's needed – I'd have worn them when younger. But – and maybe it is a big but – the lads are wearing collars and bands around their arms and legs. Hints of bondage gear?

Youth drama has also a lot of instances of lads wearing very little, playing parts like “Puck” and “Ariel”. (A lot of my friends were Drama/English teachers and I've seen the production photos).

I can vaguely remember my involvement in school drama (I'm no actor!). Our drama teacher believed that just before the final rehearsals in costume, we had to get used to not wearing our uniforms – so he had us strip to PE shorts. A bit disconcerting, but the worst thing was getting black feet from the dust on the stage.

The double standards where stark back in the day.
The female authority figures in my youth simply believed lads did not require any privacy. My brother was into many sports. What our American friends might refer to as a 'jock'.
He loved the attention.
I greatly resented having no choice in the matter.

Strange times indeed.
Just imagine of the roles were exchanged. Female costume designer I'd imagine?

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=RNo6UJTGT9M&list=PLRyPvjVvfxor9KsBkT1EpQTIKeFaS9QJ0&index=2&pp=iAQB

Jeffrey comes from what is known as "The Silent Generation", that's why people such as he refuse to revel in victimhood.

Think of the current Spanish Kiss furore. What started as just an over zealous excitable but inappropriate smacker on the lips in the heat of a happy moment has now tried to be turned into a sexual assault which she walked away with a smile on her face from by the way, instead of slapping him. It's a good sporting case of trying to create a dramatic victim mentality for something that just needed an apology and end of, lack of judgement and nothing more.

I hope none of the men on here who claim awkwardness in school revolving around the unremarkable act of having to take some barechested PE or a mandatory naked shower amongst their peers and watched by teachers don't conflate their legitimate awkwardness of such things with trauma or any kind of abuse. One or two appear to attempt it in my view.

That's very good to know Jeffrey.

I wonder if Alan feels he could learn from the example of your last line.

Jeffrey - I'm very pleased to hear that you do not feel you have anything to get over but I can see why Tanya thought the opposite could be the case. In your first account of the incident you make it sound quite traumatic and this is echoed in your reply to Tanya. I think you are probably of an age that you do not feel the need to be a victim - sadly these days there are far too many who want to feel sorry for themselves and blame their failure in life on some form of abuse, either real or imaginary, in their dim and distant past. Some counsellors seem to want their patients to relive their traumas over and over so that they cannot possibly get over them thus adding to the already increasing demands on mental health services.

Absorbing what you say here Jeffrey just makes me consider whether reading descriptions of such lessons and those 'family nights' is actually worse than the reality of doing it all in the end, like with so many things. At face value it reads quite extraordinary but many of us have an ability to overcome more than we realise even if we don't think so. When I think of the naked swimming there must have been boys who did so without a care in the world. Perhaps there are some comments out there from your generation who were told to do this and outright refused in a conscientious objector kind of way.

Thankyou for asking the question Tanya. I have never felt I have anything to get over. Placing my own direct experience in short essay form just adds my personal little bit to the historical record, and this is a history forum. I am an active 83 years of age now and the lessons I was given some 70 years ago have stood me in good stead for life. At the time my experiences took place the sensations could be deeply intense. Any young man at the time who may say he wasn't anxious, however short lived, is lying. We all were. In the early 50's boys were not expected to find our naked form at all concerning, even in front of the opposite sex but of course we did. Family night was the one night when the opposite sex, moms, grans and sisters could come and see us all perform. It gave me a strong constitution because I had to overcome any thoughts and in my case do my best to pretend it was any other time without them there looking down from on high. I think it was very difficult for boys once they reached the age of 14 to be doing this at a time in 1952 when boys that age were treated very much like young adults and in most cases looked like them too.

But I have nothing to get over and never have felt that way and am not in any sense resentful or suffering any long term trauma so thankyou for asking and allowing me to set the record straight.

To answer you Tanya on this whole naked swimming thing my take on it is that yes it was a real thing that happened for those people and must have been utterly hideous if you were shy, insecure and unconfident. It might have even been a big deal if you were confident and good looking too. But the trouble is that alongside the undoubted truth that all these men tell is a parallel narrative that looks to have also been created with what I can best say are extra embellishments to the core truthful facts of the time. I could be wrong, I wasn't about in the early 50's to know for sure and American culture compares dramatically different to British.

Do you mean this one Adam, I love this, how cool was that. You shouldn't have worried, I bet you looked just great without tops doing your stuff to this, you sure sounded it, someone at your school had a good vibe going there. That track went top ten in late 1974. If it had been my school we'd have done something to classical music going back a couple of centuries.

This tune also reminds me of something else in the past, just can't place it.

Peppers - Pepper Box

https://youtu.be/ZLWv8hwoBAk?feature=shared

"Comment by: Tanya on 28th August 2023 at 19:16"
(apropos) Comment by: Jeffrey on 24th August 2023 at 06:25



"....But just one question, you went all the way back to 1952 with that which means you must be a past the wrong side of 80 by now. Isn't it just time you finally got over it all? "

Tanya, whatever you do please never become a councillor. You remind me of the story of the man who went to a psychiatrist and told him that he thought he was a pair of curtains and the psychiatrist told him to pull himself together.

I can't match 70 or 80 years, but even you must realise for somebody still to have unhappy memories dating back that far they must have traumatic memories, which they can't just "get over".

Perhaps you were lucky enough to have schooldays reminiscent of Enid Blyton's heroes, (and good luck to you if you did) but not everybody has wonderful memories - some people have very traumatic ones, which they don't fully go into. And with such a trite, glib unsympathetic answers such as yours, perhaps that is no wonder

Last year I joined a local squash club and I ended up playing in the squash courts of my old school that I actually left twenty one years ago. Afterwards I even found myself standing in the exact same communal shower that I'd last used at about fifteen in PE, something that was unexpected. One of the men I was playing squash with in our foursome has a couple of lads that go to the school and I asked if they were still used in schooltime PE or just for the likes of adults such as us nowadays doing evening sports and he told me they still used them for his boys and he supported that fully. I hadn't used a communal shower in years and although I was only sharing with another three men I immediately felt perfectly at ease with the situation and comfortable in my own skin which was exactly how I used to feel at school as well when doing it.

Women are every bit as bad as men when it comes to boys in school and not allowing tops on but for some reason it always seems worse when women do it than when men do it.

Does anybody remember an old instrumental tune called Pepper Box quite well known from the 1970s by any chance?

I heard it playing in a shop recently and it reminds me of one of the most embarrassing days in my time at primary school in February 1975 when I was in my last year there. We went up a year later in my area than some other places and I was already 12 years old by then but still in primary.

All the boys in my class at the time had to do a synchronised dance routine at our school's half term concert alongside girls in our class and all the boys had to do this in our bare chests beside girls in normal PE kits for our mums and a few dads who could get off work in the afternoon. I can still just about see the enthusiasm with which the girls took to their task and the deep reluctance many of the boys felt about any of it.

We had a feisty pair of primary music and PE teachers who bossed us about all the while. We had to learn a 3 minute synchronised routine to show off to our nearest and dearest, using hoops and ribbons. When we practiced we stayed in our normal working school clothes but then our music teacher said she wanted a dress rehearsal and said that meant PE kit. The boys PE kit was not always a bare chest, only sometimes. We often wore any tee-shirt we came in with but when we did this to rehearse the teachers didn't like it for the concert so opted instead for boys to be bare chests and it's fair to say it was one mighty long time ago now but that feeling of complete powerlessness that hit me and scary feeling was a strong one. It had to go down as one of the longest two and a half minutes of my entire life, what made it worse was I was quite big (tall, not fat) for a 12 year old and stood out more beside everyone else and I was never as confident as I wished I could be. You were never allowed to say no to things like this in those days.

Pete, Sounds a little like our teachers. When we'd turned 13 our teachers started having us wear vests instead of rugby shirts outdoors. They'd always split the class into skins vs vests and picked out those to strip off. Cross country and indoor lessons were always performed stripped to the waist.

Comment by: Jeffrey on 24th August 2023 at 06:25


Quite an interesting read. It seems the longer comments often get completely overlooked in favour of the shorter ones.

But just one question, you went all the way back to 1952 with that which means you must be a past the wrong side of 80 by now. Isn't it just time you finally got over it all? It can't even be close to the worst thing that ever happened in your life surely?

I also don't really believe that they were forcing naked swimmers in school to face any girls other than accidentally.

Nothing that Neil Little stated actually surprises me. I don't know when you were at school but it largely fits in with some of my own recollections.

You can't really imagine the girls PE teacher actively wanting them to march back to get out of excessively muddied kit and wet through can you, whereas that was the norm going all the way through the winter season for boys. There was one thing in PE you didn't want to be seen as and that was a boy who was averse to a collecting up a bit of the earth on him, or getting wet. I remember forever spending time back home scraping bits of the school field off my boots, shin pads, and even clothes before they were even good enough to go in the wash. We had a machine where you lifted the lid and plonked all the washing into it and sprinkled ample washing powder and then used wooden tongues to poke at it to clean it. No tumble dryer when I was at school for a few years yet.

I used to laugh at some boys who pulled the 'my kit is in the wash' excuse time and again. I remember the same faces using this one and it was mostly when we had to go outside in the colder weather they did it. Even I never believed them so no chance any of our teachers must have done.

We had a new PE/games teacher at the start of year 3 (so aged 14).

Until then I had enjoyed PE, it being a mix of 5 a side, basketball etc, plus some exercises. Kit was "normal" (shorts, vest, plimsolls). XC country was weekly, and we were allowed rugby kit in the winter

Our new teacher had a totally different approach, he was much stricter, indoors we had to all strip to only our shorts, xc was shirtless all year. Additionally, lessons were non stop workouts - I hated it all - thus I "needed" discipline. I got it, of course, both slipper and hard canings over a gym horse.

I wasn't the old boy stretched over the gym horse !

The perfect way to judge the male/female double standard Greg2 is to be like me, a sixty year old man with a twin sister. We both went to the same schools but were always kept separate from each other, wasn't that always the way with brothers and sisters in school. There are quite a few double standards I can think of over the years, not just at school actually, but when it comes to school PE days then the two most obvious to me were that in our big school the boys always had to go out in all weathers for PE and come back in like drowned rats at the end of it, or freeze our bo**ocks off whilst the girls didn't have the must get sent out in all weathers rule for them and were ALWAYS able to switch inside for inclement conditions outside. Boys such as me didn't get that luxury and I think our PE teachers revelled in this out in all weather rule.

If you ever saw the girls doing PE at our school they always looked well turned out, tidy and clean. It looked to me like their teachers wanted to make sure it stayed that way while ours went in the opposite direction so many times. I have memories of standing about cold and very wet on school pitches where my boots were sinking into the ground in places. I actually recall a time when I handed the schoolbag washing over for washing at home and being asked me why I couldn't keep mine as clean as my sister's washing. The other double standard was that we showered and the girls didn't have to. When I came in with my washing on school PE days I always had to put the towel in the wash after just one use in school. My sister never did this.

Another one from inside the school gym was the ropes. We used to have rope races between boys in gym to see who could climb to the top the fastest out of the half dozen or so dangling ropes we had. Now I was quite good at this. My sister told me they'd never used the ropes in gym. I couldn't believe it.

Jeffrey 24th, August 2023.

I’ve alway hated the gender double standards, which I’m sure most men will be able to remember from childhood, if they admit truth and try hard enough. I certainly remember many situations that bothered me at the time, things that happened, and what I had to put up with that girls would never experience. But, being made to swim and parade around naked publicly, that would have been on another level.

I read some time ago, on what turned out to be a rather strange site, many accounts similar to what you describe, Jeffrey. Lots about forced boyhood nudity, and all the ensuing humiliation, and often while being watched by same age girls you knew. There were also many accounts of boys having to take part in swimming galas, obviously while forced to be naked and not wanting to be. All this while being watched by your friends’ parents and sisters, same age girl classmates etc. Like yours Jeffrey, such vividly descriptive accounts of situations you hated frequently seemed to end up with the maximum humiliation imaginable for you during this discomfort: having to then stand outside the water right in front of these very people for several minutes, and right up there on the tri-level podium, because you also won your swimming contest. So, the ultimate, maximum embarrassment for you then. Always in the USA it seems, and with more description of how you by then appeared to everyone observing while you were cold. So detailed and vivid for a situation that you never wanted to be in in the first place, and so would rather forget…I might add that also on that site were frequent writings about adult females, or often maiden aunts who looked after children. They’d always end up taking them to some beach, or friend’s pool, completely undress the usually one boy in their charge, so that he would have to run and slash around all day with the several, always fully costumed, similar aged girls for them to observe.

I’m afraid I discovered on this site that are certain people that seem to get a kick out of forced humiliation, and I think that therefore most of such accounts might be fantasy. There were often comments to read about the writings on that site, which sometimes linked to more reliable fact checked news outlets, or just more accurate and reliable recollections. It seems no one could ever remember having to take part naked in a swimming gala that was open to family of general public to attend, saying this was the only time they would wear swimming attire. During their usual naked swimming lessons in the USA, they were strictly single sex and held at different times to the girl’s sessions. In fact none remembered female coaches either, which was another frequent memory, together with detailed body reactions of the many writers on that site.

Now, I do know that many UK public schools also had naked swimming lessons for boys, as I had a friend at such a school at the time who confirmed this. He never liked it, but it was the convention, and all boys together, so he just got on with it. He also had a sister who was a border at a girls’ school, but she said she never had to do this. I remember thinking then that I was glad I didn’t have my swimming lessons like this, and thinking back, perhaps it is this that started my dislike for the many double standards that I noticed during my own growing up, many I’ve always remembered, and which made me uncomfortable at the time.

Now, I also was a ‘handsome child’ and it amazes me thinking back how I always had childish ‘girlfriends’ from such an early junior school age because of this. Without going into unnecessary detail, I was always bodily self-conscious with girls at that age, unlike it seemed most boys seemed to be that I knew as friends at the time. Perhaps this is why girls were more curious about me, I’m not sure. I was certainly no girly boy, despite how I looked. I was a slim and sporty kid, and frequently for whatever reason, in fights with other boys. I really enjoyed gym and games lessons -which, seemingly strangely were never bare chested- and I was always picked for most school teams. But, I always hated swimming. If I’d been made to appear naked in front of all and sundry at a swimming gala at that age, this would have been just hell for me. I didn’t even like wearing those skimpy swimming trunks we wore during junior school swimming lessons in front of my girl classmates. I can even remember trying to rearrange myself ‘down there’ to try to make myself less conspicuous, which I find astonishing thinking back now. I might add that I was a very average boy in that department, so there was nothing really to rearrange, and I probably made things look even worse. But to have had to appear naked in front of everyone…I would have rather died.

Others might disagree, but to force boys to do that in mixed attendance, if indeed it ever did happen, I feel would certainly be a form of totally disrespecting and disregarding child abuse.

Mike: I can't reprint the Washington Post article as I don't have access to it, but here is a precise from another site:

https://witness2fashion.wordpress.com/tag/topless-mens-swimsuits-illegal-at-some-beaches-1920s-1930s/

Simon "back of the bus" - I know what you mean about trips on caches but I was using it in the context of the American Civil Rights Movement: "back of the bus" referred to those states where people of colour were segregated and had to occupy the rear of the vehicle, as they were considered "inferior" especially in the South. I think they coined the term after the Rosa Parks debacle in the 1950s

The way we are going it wouldn't surprise me if it became illegal here for men to go barechested in public by 2034.

Up until not long ago I used to go about quite frequently even walking the dog or jogging minus any top coverage. Without really thinking about it I don't feel as inclined to do so as much anymore and do feel less assured about the whole thing. I'm 44 and my body still looks much the same as when I was 24.

Although it's not really relevant to the UK school and physical education scene as most of us knew and went through it, after reading Jeffrey's 'essay' I have gone and seen some of the comments from the older men who were made to swim without anything on and it's fair to say that rather a lot of them disliked it quite a lot, and I don't blame them. It seems like many of them were just quietly cringing to themselves with embarrassment even back in the 60s and 70s in the latter years of that practice and many were just bewildered about why they were doing it. In my own world back here I was not fazed by the demands PE placed on me like it did with others, the shirtlessness or the showering involved, but I would have been one of those boys cringing if I'd ever been told I had no choice but to get in the pool at school without a stitch on at all. Instituting it just feels wrong doesn't it, compared to say some consensual skinny dipping with a few mates down by the pond or something. The two are psychologically very different.

Mike, If you want the facts about the widespread practice of nude swimming for boys in the US, search for Swimming in the Frank Answers blog. Frank is a retired Lutheran pastor who swam nude as a youngster and has written about the subject at length.

Alan quote - "Yet another example where boys and young men were given the back of the bus treatment."


This comment reminds me of school trips and the race for seats on the coach.

Boys loved the back of the bus, it was the seats we ran to grab first.

You obviously have an account with the Washington Post Alan. For the rest of us who don't unfortunately we can't read that story as it's hidden behind their paywall, and it is an article that I was very keen to read to find out the facts. That must have been one particular area at one particular time, not across the whole nation as an all encompassing rule for all men. Maybe you can actually paste the words directly here.

Paul R and Jeffrey. I always thought Britain was the home of double standards and hypocrisy, but it seems America can beat us, even at that. While bus were being treated in such an undignified manner (and it was immodest and indecent whenever it happened), I wonder how many American's know that until 1934 it was illegal for men to be bare-chested in public, even at the beach:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2019/01/05/men-were-once-arrested-baring-their-chests-beach/

Yet another example where boys and young men were given the back of the bus treatment.

Michael - your experience of p.e. sounds much like mine and, I'm sure, many, many others. Unfortunately, sites like this attract people who had unusual experiences or, in a few cases, vivid imaginations. Normal, boring experiences are not noteworthy and often not mentioned because of that.
Lisa - I agree with you but nothing will change in that direction, I'm afraid. It is a very sad fact of life these days that even partial nudity seems to be linked to sex when there is often no justification. Also, the inability of some people to distinguish between gays/lesbians and pedophiles is disturbing although I think some "pride" events have a lot to answer for in that respect.