Burnley Grammar School

That Sunday Times article isn't wrong is it. Not so sure about the sugar and salt in food bit though. 15% obese in the 1970's and now 64%, really. So only 1 in 3 are okay weight nowadays.

How many noticeably overweight boys do you have in PE Nathan? Most old timers on here don't remember any in PE, which probably accounts for why bare chested PE is not seen as a problem from those years gone by.

But I know some quite overweight people with Apple watches and iPhones who use the health app to count their steps religiously but it makes no difference to them. We didn't need them 50 years ago and all these health apps are now out there and we're less healthy than ever.

With the warm weather in the UK at the moment I have observed numerous lads walking around in public with their shirts off. I doubt that these lads would be concerned about doing PE bare chested. I can understand concerns regarding the dangers of getting sunburnt if not wearing a shirt for outdoor PE but for indoor PE I cannot see the need for lads to have to wear a shirt.

The link to that article;

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/a73f16e8-023c-11ee-b730-2607a18701aa?shareToken=dcad56f883324f638a31f0f4e73294ac

Whilst I was in senior comprehensive school going to the gymnasium for PE included our entire class walking along from the changing room in our compulsory bare chests requirement of the time through the school walkways. We didn't take any tops along to gym at all with us from the age of twelve onwards. We could wear our plimsolls but once at the gym, a completely separate building set apart from the main school area, they often came off and were set aside also. Inside the gym we would then have to start a furious run from one side to the other, back and forth again until told to stop in order to warm up lasting a couple of minutes maximum, then wave our arms about for a further minute or so. This alone used to knacker some of us before we'd got stuck into anything else. I could never quite get the hang of jumping over a horse very well and clearing it. I couldn't even jump over a 4ft wooden gate very easily recently that I'd locked myself out of. All about the technique that I couldn't master.

Now whilst I had no complaints about doing the gym in a manner you'd expect to do so I did find going outside for PE without my top on to be less agreeable on many occasions. Other men here speak in particular of regular cross country running done without any top. This was also a common experience for me no matter which teacher took us out, they all did it at some point with us this way. The rationale for this, unlike gym itself, is less easy to explain when I found myself outside getting somewhat chilled out in the windswept open on days that didn't remotely seem to lend themselves to running outside with bare chests. Cross country was not a summer PE activity and only took place in autumn, winter and the first half of spring.

We had a quite nice small woodland forest/spinney area about a five minute drive away from school and if the school minibus was free to use we had a PE teacher who liked to get us into it and do the short hop there, park up and let us out to run there. The supreme irony of this was not lost on us because we could have easily just run to this place, around it and then back again but I think the reason was more about saving the teachers legs than our own. Sometimes we were left to run back towards school and our PE teacher drove off! The minibus was an old wreck, they should have been ashamed to have our school name plastered along both sides of it, it wouldn't start once and we ended up having to push start it to get going again. All part of PE exercise I guess.

I saw the comment from Tony McMahon about being herded like sheep into communal showers at school. That's right! I'm convinced that one or two of them used to think throwing a bunch of teenage boys naked into the showers was one of the most vital parts of their job!

Dukesberry School 1979-84.

Picking up on the points by both Lee and Shane here, kids actually like consistency and to have some certainty and what to expect. I think someone here already said they didn't like being unsure what they had to wear, what was your opinion Shane, did that lottery with your teachers cause you any problems?

I want to share this great piece from today's Times which I wholeheartedly agree with. You 70s (and 60s/80s/90s) schoolboys (and girls) were definitely fitter than your equivalents today.

This excellent article below;


WE SLURPED UP LOADS MORE SUGAR AND SALT IN THE SEVENTIES. SO WHY ARE WE FATTER NOW?
By Rod Liddle.
Sunday June 04 2023, 12.01am, The Sunday Times.

Every once in a while I get nostalgic for the 1970s and attempt to slake that longing by buying some food product that I greatly enjoyed back in the day and that is still available now. Heinz tomato soup, for example, or spaghetti hoops — or even Alpen, which hit the British supermarkets in 1971 and had us all convinced it was both healthy and slightly more chic than Coco Pops.

The exercise always ends in grave disappointment, because the products are not the same now as they were then. At first I thought it was my jaded, smoke-wrecked tastebuds that made the tomato soup taste anodyne. But no. It was Tony Blair.

Shortly after invading Iraq, the Labour government started bullying the food manufacturers to reduce the salt and sugar content in their products, and Heinz responded by reducing the salt and sugar in its tomato soup. Everyone else followed suit, and that’s why any attempt to recapture those better times is doomed. You are not allowed to experience the past again: it is both against the laws of physics and contrary to the diktat of the lefties who wish to abolish our history, or rewrite it so it is free of colonialism, white people and salt. Everything must succumb to the tyranny of now.

Perhaps this is why nobody eats that stuff any more. Not because it didn’t taste good then, but because it has been neutered. A new survey by British Lion Eggs has revealed that while everybody in the country adores eggs, of course, the appetite for those staples of 1970s teatimes is rapidly dwindling. According to the survey, 27 per cent of kids have never experienced Heinz tomato soup, for example, and only slightly fewer have been deprived of the joys of spaghetti hoops — which, for younger readers, consisted of gooey tori of faux pasta swimming in a magnificently sugary red broth and tasted great on toast. My suspicion is that if Heinz et al were to tell the government and all those gobby campaign groups — Action on Salt, Neasden Wimmin Against Men and Sugar, etc — to get stuffed and upped the sugar and salt back to the old levels, more people might eat their products. I think that the salt levels also did for my own favourite Seventies evening treat, Toast Toppers — which consisted entirely of salt embedded in a kind of greyish, lumpen mucus, like the expectoration of a very ill tramp, and was unspeakably delicious.

The kids today get “healthier” alternatives, especially avocado, which is even more environmentally damaging than eating polar bear steaks. Quite how healthy those alternatives really are is obviously a moot point, but the mugs think they are doing the right thing so one is tempted to let them get on with it.

What is beyond doubt is that the stuff we ate for tea — and that’s what I called it back then, even if I call it dinner now and for a brief while, when I was working at the BBC, “supper” (for which God forgive me) — was fabulously unhealthy. The 1970s was the first proper decade of convenience food, and so we gorged on deep-frozen pizzas whose bases seemed to be made from the foam that filled Toyota car seats, baked beans, fish fingers, Findus “crispy” pancakes and boil-in-the-bag cod in a prawn sauce so vibrantly pink it seemed to be suggesting that it wished to come out. Nobody could call 1970s food healthy. We shovelled the salt’n’sugar down inside us, day after day, borne aloft on this new idea that food shouldn’t take ages to prepare and that women could go to work and enjoy self-actualisation rather than be tied to the four-ring electric cooker preparing something that was actually nutritious.

And the point of this maudlin lament is the very obvious one. We were much, much healthier then. Since the 1970s diabetes, in tandem with its great friend morbid obesity, has increased enormously, so that it now constitutes a grave problem not just for those who suffer from it but for the economy as a whole. Type 2 diabetes more than doubled in British men between the 1970s and the 1990s and has since increased its grip on the population. The proportion of us who are overweight or obese has risen from 15 per cent in 1970 to a remarkable 64 per cent today. Some of those campaigners insisted, for a while, that our present obesity and diabetes rates are a consequence of our “learned eating behaviour” from the 1970s, but they cannot do that now. Not more than 50 years later.

The answer, I suspect, is that we ate less of everything in the 1970s and took more exercise. This is just a guess. Just as it is a guess that cramming avocados down your throat rather than spaghetti hoops will not reduce the obesity or diabetes rates one bit.

Shane, that wasn't a problem for us. Bare chests always indoors and outdoors vests were preferred over a shirt (my mum chose not to buy a PE shirt saying that they'd have us out in vests instead and she was right). A lot of the time the teachers would pick a team of skins so half the class were stripped off for whatever the activity was and everyone had vests off for cross country running. You could say our teachers were absolutely consistent!

What I did in early 1990's PE seemed to depend entirely on who I got for the lesson. The same early afternoon PE lesson in the school gym with one teacher might mean we did it in full PE kit of trainers, socks, white shorts and a vest or a t-shirt but the next week if we got another teacher we would be in the gym completely barechested. It seemed to be quite a lottery, rather proving that it was not really anything to do with school rules as such but more like teacher rules alone. Another teacher I had was always insistent that we do gym barefooted in his class while another wanted trainers. The only thing that all teachers acted the same about was that we all must shower properly after PE - the strictest school rule of them all, other than being punctual.

That phrase takes me back to primary school in the early to mid 1980's with a class teacher I had called Mr Wharton who threw that phrase around at us a lot, every school trip we went on, and any after school club etc. He used it when we went swimming too. The primary made us all shower (without trunks on) after we came out the pool and I remember telling him my mum didn't think I needed to do that after swimming or needed to, a white lie of mine as she'd not said that, but Mr Wharton used his loco parentis line at me and explained the meaning and then told me to get on with it. I didn't argue after the explanation. I remember it very well and him asking me if I now understood and said yes. He then said yes what, I said yes Sir. So if mum had been genuine he'd have by definition overruled her opinion as a parent I suppose. The primary I was at 1982-86 used showers in the top two years after PE and I'm sure he used the loco parentis line around that issue too when there were a few school showers rebels at that tender age who didn't want to go into them. I never heard any other school teachers use the term verbally to any of us to ram home their authority over us although I think the word was written in some school trip letters home that I remember seeing on the return slip parents had to sign and we'd take back.

In the end you'd think parents have the final say about their own children in school and their view would be sovereign but if you take school lunch, a friend of mine not long ago had his children's lunchbox "assessed" and was told certain items would be confiscated if he brought them for lunch, despite the food all being balanced and healthy he packs for the child. An oat bar was deemed a banned item for instance. Quite outrageous. It's none of their business.

As far as I know it still does Tim. I left teaching in 2015.

If I might answer that question Tim, that isn't really a term that I've heard bandied about nowadays myself, although my career is less than ten years old anyway, but the principles of that term most certainly do apply, so yes absolutely.

I also agree with the words Graham wrote.

@ Graham Butterfield

Thanks for your comments. Does 'in loco parentis' still apply?

TimH quote - 'When one talks about PE teachers in showers - what about responsibility for the boys health? A boy with strange bruises - a victim of family abuse?'


A very good point here that I had intended to make on a much earlier post I placed but this gives me the opportunity to raise it now.

School showering without any clothing served a very good secondary purpose like Tim mentions and he's quite right, it gave us chances to observe anything unusual that we might see, such as bruising, cuts, grazes, burns or anything else that might not be accidental. Because not all youngsters come from good homes it's worth remembering. Now everyone has bumps and bruises from time to time and youngsters certainly do. They even happen in PE but if someone was seen to have frequent signs of bruising or cuts then that would be something to ask questions about. I often asked questions about how some had come to have bruises and scratches on them having seen them in the changing room, and the showers obviously gives a complete view of people. In my case nothing to report and all was satisfactory and explained. It was always something done with extreme caution and discretion if there were doubts that might need a bit more following up. There was a procedure to go through if there were any suspicions which was fairly similar in all the schools I worked at right up until less than ten years ago.

The last thing you wanted to do was accuse innocent parents of any physical wrongdoing.

I do remember at one school I worked at in around about 1993 where a boy aged I think about fourteen arrived at school one morning with two black eyes and other facial bruising and it transpired he'd been getting beaten up by his father for some unknown reason a number of times. His situation did not need a shower to discover in PE as the bruising was self evident all over his face the moment he came into school, he could not hide it. I think he was taken aside to the medical room and it was discovered he had further bruising elsewhere. It was a topic of discussion among many staff actually. I don't know the outcome or how that resolved but remember the father of this person from parents evenings.

Another time I remember a boy with a large bruise all down the back of one leg and he told me it had happened in an earlier PE lesson with another teacher. Other youngsters said this was true but I doubted it and so made a point of double checking the story out and it matched up and was straightforward and explained fine.

I would never stand in a changing room, look at a boy with a bruise anywhere on his body and ignore it. I'd ask every time. The same for a noticeable cut or graze.

There was one other problematic area with this - school based physical bullying by other pupils. Even the best schools have pockets of this. I once discovered the bruising on the legs of a boy had been caused by someone else in his class during a lunch hour. The culprit was dealt with swiftly and very seriously indeed. That was discovered in the school changing room while the boy changed for PE, his assailant actually bragged about it in front of others. Not nice but very unusual in my experience over 40 years.

Thankyou Tim for reminding me and giving me a good opportunity to make this point. The school shower has had a bad image problem over the years that is not really all that fair.

Replying to Mikes posting on 29/05/23 - yes - I agree - we are all individuals, in our own 'time bubbles' and can really only comment on our own experiences. I attended a Boys Technical Grammar School in a not overly large city in the East Midlands from 1960 to 1967. I honestly can't remember things like enforced cold showers or shouting and sarcasm from PE teachers (although with hindsight the classes might have been better organised). Were there any sadists amongst the teachers? I don't think so - some were certainly stricter than others, but not what I would describe as sadistic. (There undoubtedly were some sadists out there, but then there were also bullies amongst the boys).

Thinking back and trying to look at things on a broad perspective, its easy to look at school as individual classes which it wasn't. In the 60s managerial staff from the foundries in town would be looking for likely lads to offer jobs or apprenticeships to - skills in technical drawing or metalwork, for example (The fact that the foundries would be closing down within ten years or so wasn't thought about). Similarly, mention has been made of boys with football skills - the club scouts would be out talking to PE teachers to see who might be suitable. When one talks about PE teachers in showers - what about responsibility for the boys health? A boy with strange bruises - a victim of family abuse?
Its all a broad field.

1976 - a good year? Mmmm ... my first car - an Austin 1300. Doing a job I enjoyed, on a 'fair' salary. 1976 - a hot summer - trips to Air Shows & railtours. Camping in the Lake District. Parents both in good health, although they were in their mid-60s. Yes - those were pretty good years.

Yet another seventies senior school attendee here - started Sept 1975, left June 1979, the gym horror show years as I think of them.

Looking over your comments Tony I well remember the aggression of one teacher in particular but never encountered any foul language in school from any of them at all. That seemed to be a line that was never ever crossed. Nobody much talks about teachers of PE using bad language so it plainly wasn't something very common at any point in time.

You asked the question why was physical education so bad back then. There was a month at school when three people fractured or broke their arms in one man's gym class at my school and nothing happened. I was in his class and he was quite prepared to make unconfident boys climb frames and ropes higher than they were happy to do, or jump from apparatus onto hard floors rather than mats from quite a height. I hated heights. Injury was just brushed casually off.

I myself remember intense PE classes where we were totally exhausted and breathless and still expected to do more and more and if we couldn't manage it received highly sarcastic comments bordering on insults.

Many of the men on here talk of shirtless physical education. Yes, again here that's the way much of it got done at school with me between the age of 12 and 15 in particular. Boys at those ages aren't meant to feel any fear about doing so but it was always obvious to me that lots just didn't feel they wanted the PE teacher making them take their tops fully off in school PE and the size and shape of anyone's body didn't seem to have much to do with it. My top was always off quite quickly when I got changed and I took to shirtless PE quite well but the boy who used to be next to me was a timid and quiet well behaved fellow who you just looked at and knew the whole PE thing was an absolute uncomfortable endurance for from beginning to end.

The fixation with gym apparatus is well made. I hated being in the actual gym yet liked going outside and being part of team games. The two different lessons made a huge difference to me.

My views match that post written by Tony McMahon two days ago and it will resonate strongly with the majority of regular average 1970s schoolboys - and possibly the majority from other nearby decades surrounding the 70s too. I'm an early 80s secondary schoolkid and boy does that spell out everything about PE that I was put through.

Answering Tony and Jet - I don't think it was an act, there were really some very vicious men (and I suppose women, though we had none) teaching who were really unsuited for the profession - if these days there are too many sociologists and bleeding heart liberals, back then there were too many who saw the job as an extension of a police, army or prison officer role. They didn't have to undergo "anger management " classes, because they were allowed to get away with bad behaviour, usually with the connivence of a weak head teacher, who just wanted a quiet easy life. Certainly we had two teachers, one the PE master and the other a science/TD master who were, I am sure insane - certainly the science master was off the latch. I suppose they would be kind and call him neurotic these days.

The problem was a lot of these teachers took their 1940/50s attitudes into the 70s and 80s and never adapted. They would just be unable to cope in the world of 2023, certainly in the classroom, and as they now often have to cope with adults of 17/18 that is just as well.

The question asked about the 1970's teachers is something hard to know isn't it. We are all only at school in our own little time bubbles and so can only know what we ourselves did at the time we did it and not another time.

There was an article once that said 1976 was the best year in the UK to be alive. I suppose that depends what age you were. Only last week another person on the news said that the country now had the feel of run down Britain in 1977-78. So very conflicting views of more or less the same time in this country.

Great piece by Tony, speaking the language of my own time in a comprehensive school from 1971 to 1976. Was there something uniquely different about 70s teachers of PE then. There was plenty of uncalled for aggression at the time and I lost count of the amount of clouts around the head I got from a specific teacher at the time.

Tanya's comment posted on 26th May is very silly.

Comment by: Geoff on 27th May 2023 at 19:34
Surely barechested physical education is a completely harmless activity.


It is as far as I'm concerned. But some people clearly gained a huge level of anxiety over it which to me is a great shame.

I wrote the following on my blog which may be of interest to readers. There is also plenty of other good reading available to check out. More than happy to receive some feedback either through History World or the blog, link below;

https://the70s80s90s.com/2021/05/16/school-gym-1970s/

On a Facebook page for my old school, somebody posted a picture of one side of the old school gym. The wall covered in wooden climbing bars with ropes dangling down that could slide out on pulleys across the gym. I was transported back to P.E. lessons in the 1970s and I’m sure like many of you, there are very mixed memories of those days.

What was it with P.E. teachers in the 70s? The ability to maintain that level of sadistic aggression must have taken incredible effort. About ten years ago, I told my millennial gym trainer what a P.E. teacher, from the Welsh valleys, screamed at me after my javelin throwing on the school field had been below par: “McMahon you s—–c, if you had to hunt for your food, you’d f——g starve!”

My trainer was about twenty years younger than me. And he was so taken by this that he used to repeat this appalling insult when I reached my limit on the bench press. For him, it was a hilarious eye opener on the 1970s school gym. For me, it was like a voice from the deepest reaches of hell.

Why was physical education made so awful back then?

Admit it, fellow baby boomer, you shudder occasionally to remember P.E. classes. There was the old-style trampet set at an angle off which we had to launch ourselves over a horsebox, arms outstretched, to hopefully be caught by the P.E. teacher. The murder-ball-style games played with a large, unevenly-shaped, leathery sphere known for some reason as the medicine ball. Why it was called that I have no idea. It was more likely to cause injury than cure you of anything.

Then there was the 1970s gym obsession with gymnastics. Because God knows, we all had an inner Olga Korbut struggling to break out. For younger readers, Korbut was a Soviet gymnast who wowed the world with her 1972 Olympics performance. We poor school kids were then expected to emulate this and failure to do so would result in a severe tongue lashing or worse from our P.E. overlords.

If, for whatever reason, you ‘forgot’ your gym kit in an attempt to avoid 40 minutes of gymnastic hell, the changing room had a box full of mysteriously waylaid kit – completely filthy – that you were forced to wear. We called these disgusting items the “VD shorts” – VD being the acronym for STDs back then (venereal disease). Nobody knew the provenance of the discarded shorts and tops nor why their owners had never claimed them back. They just sat there, festering in the corner.

Then we were herded like sheep into the showers. At one of my secondary schools – I went to two – this area was a communal room. Overhead was a row of nozzles spouting boiling or freezing water – never anything in between. The gym teacher would strip off and join us…..yeah, about that. Mid-shower, he’d turn round to us eleven-year-olds barking: “Pass the buttermilk soap!” Small bars of soap that dissolved at a rapid rate.

On one occasion we’d had to abandon a rugby match because it was raining so hard. Well, the sadist-in-chief made us play for what seemed like an eternity until two of my fellow pupils collapsed deliriously on to the swampy pitch and started chucking mud at each other. Back in the changing room, after we’d spent a few minutes passing the buttermilk soap around in the showers, the same P.E. teacher produced a trainer and gave one of the kids an almighty “slippering”. This meant touching your toes while your arse was thwacked very hard.

Despite the best efforts of certain P.E teachers I kept up sporting activity throughout my life and I still weight train today. But really, that is DESPITE and not BECAUSE of my experience of the 1970s school gym. Sadly I have many friends who were permanently put off any kind of organised sporting activity for the rest of their lives. I rather hope today it’s a more humane regime for schools kids than it was for us in the 1970s school gym.

A lot of kids used to complain at school about doing algebra because it wasn't going to have any meaningful application in their adult lives after leaving school. Looking at the gym picture from Burnley School in 1959 accompanying this thread I was looking at the boy being held upside down on the horse by the PE teacher and wondering if that isn't the PE equivalent of algebra. Who needs to learn how to hold themselves upside down at arms length exactly? Where is doing that going to prove useful later on? Serious point.

It looks just about identical to PE lessons I was doing in school at that age in 1985. Shirtless most definitely. The gym was not a place I enjoyed at all. Nothing I did in it went any further. I swim, cycle and walk and that keeps me more than fit. Gym and PE played no part in any of that.

I'm one of those who thinks school PE put more people off keeping fit than encouraged them.

Chris G - Whenever I was out in summer with my friends I always wore my polo top or a tee-shirt with shorts and would never dream of going shirtless and was very particular how I dressed and looked even when very young. This contrasted with school, especially secondary but had a bit of it in primary too, where the general gym rule was bare chests whole class to fifth form in the academic year we reached sixteen. This wasn't really my thing at all. But just because me and the friends from school had seen each other in PE like (and full nude mandated showers of course - who can ever forget those) that didn't make me think okay then I'll do it in my own time out with them around our homes, street or park. Yet one of my friends at primary school when we were about 10 years old who lived near me would come outside a lot without putting on any top or any footwear and walked the streets in his very dirty bare feet and his bare chest which I found a bit embarrassing at the time because it made him look a bit uncared for compared to the others. Although it's now over 45 years since I've seen this boy from my own childhood the way he used to roam the street is the thing about him I still remember the most.

I also have a lot of strong recollections about PE and certain teachers of the subject. I had a lady at primary who would make the boys in class (1974) dress completely down to just the underpants to do movement and music based PE with girls in just knickers and top. Didn't like her much. That was eight and nine years old. A right old dragon she was.

My secondary year book for 1979 lays boys gym out quite clearly using the term - bare chests for boys. There is also - towel for showering. We wore our own dark shorts of choice. On the latter part I did give that quite a lot of thought at the time and thought it wasn't something that would happen very much and only if any of us got particularly unclean through a lot of sweat or dirt. But I was proven wrong when we did so every PE lesson without fail irrespective of actual genuine need in what to me seemed like a going through the motions rigmarole.

Not being the most confident boy in school I nonetheless took part in PE without complaint, discovering my strengths and weaknesses along the way. I lacked confidence in my appearance and was not keen on taking my top off for PE many times.

So you can imagine my thoughts when I was in my late twenties and working for a major sports retailer on the High Street in the late 90s who sent a collection of their management teams on one of those away day team building weekends together and I found myself suddenly hearing the words 'shirts off lads'. It was an instant throwback to school as we did a childish water and paint gun task and got messed up. I remember making a comment saying 'am I back at school here then' and putting my foot down to be met with the boss pulling rank telling me I was getting paid well to have fun and me backing down but quietly seething like mad over it all.

So my question to the men here who promote the whole shirtless at school ethos is would you have had the same feeling as an adult in the workplace if your actual boss had pulled the same ask on you that your former PE teacher had done.

Comment by: John on 27th May 2023 at 02:21
John, I'm with you on this one. Up Until I was about 12 or 13, we wore vests, gnerally our everyday underwear ones, for PE, except on a few rare ocasions when we were outside in summer, and the PE teacher suggested we might like to go topless, which did, virtually without exception. When topless PE was introduced in my third year at secondary school, there wasn;t a single word of protest, in my class anyway. We all took to it like the proverbial ducks - not surprising really given that most of us had spent a large part of the immediately previous summer holiday playing out minus any shirt or vest.

That's the thing with getting into trouble in school. If you had responsible parents the chances were you would be in a type of double jeopardy, getting punished by the school and then back at home by your parents for getting into trouble in the first place.

I remember a Saturday afternoon summer fete at our primary school where the headmaster ended up in the stocks and we were allowed to throw wet sponges at him and smack him straight in the face. He was a sport like that, no youngster either at the time, close to retirement. I thought it would be a good way to punish naughty kids in school like any bullies for example, because it would be humiliating and I think people fear humiliation far more than a short sharp pain. I think the Dennis cool down is driven more by a humiliation factor, and there's already an admittance that someone would prefer a short quick cane than a cold shower. The one thing I never wanted to feel at school, was humiliation in front of anyone.

Comment by: Dennis on 28th May 2023 at 01:23


I think, Dennis, this proved that the headmaster (who was probably as bad) knew the PE teacher was a sadist. The only consolation is that if a teacher/headteacher had the audacity to do this today, he/they would find themselves in court charged with assault. But they should never have been allowed to "get away with it"

Good evening David.

My memory remains quite strong. I was just thirteen years old at the time. I had no notice period when this happened to myself. It was straight along to the headmasters office, sent there by the teacher of the subject I was doing, English Lit I think, immediately he'd had enough of me. Then the headmaster spoke with me and I had to explain myself alone without the teacher who had sent me, who then appeared quite briefly to confirm everything and then disappeared. I was not given any options. The headmaster then made his decision and a PE teacher came along, was given instructions what to do with me and I then had to follow him and afterwards be returned to the headmasters office and from there back to class. Memory suggests the whole thing leaving class to returning to my seat was possibly a half hour, which I then had to catch up with too in my own time as that lesson was almost over by that time anyway. As I said, it was five minutes under the cold water, timed exactly by a stopwatch. Nothing on whatsoever, no pants, just naked, same as after real PE, my back to the teacher as I did so. What I remember of this is that the five minutes seemed never ending but also that after about a minute or two the water no longer seemed as cold and was easier to deal with, so anything more than a couple of minutes was rather diminishing returns as I didn't feel colder the longer I stood there which may seem surprising.

At the time I thought it was a really stupid thing to do. It didn't hurt after all and I have no clue why that was given to me rather than something more traditional out of the corporal punishment handbook. I knew boys who had taken some corporal punishment with the headmaster for other things. I believe others received the "cool down" but its very hard to know how much this kind of thing went on. The PE teacher blamed me for wasting his time when he did this with me, rather than the headmaster for summoning him to do it.

I was given a typed note to take home for my parents to read and sign and bring back but never showed it to them and signed it and gave it back myself. That never got found out and I got away with it. My parents would have certainly sided with the school in that situation so I saw no reason to show the note and quite possibly find myself grounded for a week if I did.

It's quite surprising that cold showers haven't been brought up much on here before that I know of. They must be a bit of a schooldays myth then and everyone must have had nice warm ones after PE.

If you were going to lay yourself open to getting a cool off style sanction from the head teacher like the one described from long ago best make sure you get mouthy with the teacher on a hot and humid sticky day then it won't feel like a punishment more like a pleasure. It seems an odd choice to do rather than just the normal strike of a belt or something.