Burnley Grammar School

Geoff - you are, of course, absolutely right though I think Jason knew there would be the one dissident voice. Indeed - the comment had already been made though not published!

Tanya, That's an ineresting question. Nowadays if a boy of 15, with practically nothing on, were held down by other boys of the same age and his genitals daubed with shoe polish it would count as peer on peer abuse. I'm glad nobody told me that because I might have worried about it, but the mindset in the 1960s was so different. Then it was regarded as high jinks, an initiation that was a bit of fun provided it didn't go too far. Thanks to the 1960s attitude and the fact that "blacking" is at the mild end of the abuse spectrum, it honestly didn't trouble me. On top of that, school and upbringing had inculcated in me the idea of taking things in your stride and not making a fuss, and that included some nudity at school.
A 15 year old today might be more likely to find such an initiation traumatic. There are plenty of resilient youngsters around but they live in a society in which (1) they are acutely conscious of their rights, (2) strident protest has become the norm and (3) stoicism is out of fashion.
I'm not suggesting that the past was better. In many ways it wasn't but I was better able to cope with my experience because of the prevailing attitudes of the time.
I am certainly not condoning what happened even though I laughed it off. The problem with that sort of pranks is that if a malevolent boy had been in the group it would have been easy to subject me to a serious assault. But it was over very quickly and nothing of the sort happened.
I hope that answers your question.

Mike, totally agree with your comment.

I have just had a glance at the website Nathan mentioned. In my opinion it fair whineys with fetishism, for example:


https://www.communalshowerassociation.com/how-tos/how-to-persuade-others-to-communal-shower

It reminds you of those people who used to advocate naturism. I frankly haven't got the interest or will to read all of the site, but this gives some indication of it's flavour

Comment by: Jason on 17th October 2023 at 17:40
Mike proving the voice of moderate common sense on here.
I think almost everyone will agree.....won't they?



Don't be so silly Jason, the one someone I thought would not agree came out the starting blocks like Usain Bolt on steroids.

Alan, you have focused yet again on your pet project here but has it not occurred to you that Mike was not actually trying to defend so called perverts and was talking in more general sensible terms?

@ Nathan - Thanks for the input on showers. I made a few comments in a post on the 6th October.
T

Mike proving the voice of moderate common sense on here.

I think almost everyone will agree.....won't they?

Just in and before I forget this I'm just going to add it here for you.

Did you know that there is something called the Communal Shower Association. No, me neither. It is based in the United States. I have no idea if there is a UK equivalent. They also have something going called a School Shower Study. I came across it during the weekend whilst I was doing some looking into the issue after having received a bit of a hard time on here.

Somebody (sorry I tried to find the post to name you) a few weeks ago asked about the history of such things. Well there is a very interesting explanation on this website that I think some of you might find fascinating even if it does come from an American perspective. It suggests the first communal shower appeared in 1900, and that they really took off in the 1920's with very widespread use from the 1940's to the 1990's in particular and notes 1995 as a watershed year. Very specific I thought.

Now I had no idea about any of this but found that my own general ideas matched quite closely with the timelines suggested here.

There is some very good reading if you follow the links. I'm sure it will provoke some further comments.

https://www.communalshowerassociation.com/school-shower-study

Comment by: Mike on 16th October 2023 at 23:04
We must get away from this overwhelming desire to rewrite the past in the image of the present.

Surely we don't want the generation of the 2070's and 2080's rewriting our present in their present in another half century from now.


This depends, Mike, on not giving school students from today and the future, the grounds for feeling angry or aggreived at being treated like cattle, or worse, doesn't it?. No boy or girl should have had to endure being taught by paedophiles whether that was the 1940s, to certainly the 1990s, as we have seen in numerous court cases, especially not in situations like PE where the teacher has seemingly unlimited access to those pupils in changing rooms and showers.

Some teachers treated the pupils they had under their control abominably. You can't rewrite history to accomodate perverts, however "nice" you want to be, and understanding their times. A predator remains a predator whether it was 1950. 1970 or 1990 and should be dealt with in the same way through the courts.

Comment by: Steven on 16th October 2023 at 18:59


You write in part......

"Where do we learn about our personal hygiene, well it's at home isn't it, and that's the right place for it to be, nowhere else and from nobody else than the family, or maybe a medical professional in some situations quite possibly.

The rigorous implementation of school showers always seemed strangely obsessive to me at school and actually quite draconian. I used to see boys at school who were never any bother to anyone around school find themselves getting a roasting from the PE teacher because of showering after PE.

I would actually go further and suggest that the real issue was not the actual showering itself but the manner it was done by many schools and the practices such as close checking you were wet enough on exiting and things like having to lift your arms up to check armpits and all that nonsense we put up with. "

I agree with everything you write here, Steven - especially the final paragraph. Some teachers took it upon themselves at playing at being corporals or square bashing sergeants. This was absurd since nobody has been forced to join the military now for 60 years or more. There was, and is, no need to treat every lad as if he were a potential squaddie, or the inmate of a borstal. . Didn't Shakespeare have it? "dressed in a little brief authority".

Some of them were pathetic little men, probably hen-pecked at home, possibly in unhappy marriages, and their only way of feeling "big" was to make their pupils feel small. Perhaps they acted that way because, psychologically they knew themselves to be failures? - after all - "those who can, - do. Those who can't teach" Still doesn't excuse their conduct though.

Simply - I completely agree with Mike.

We must get away from this overwhelming desire to rewrite the past in the image of the present.

Surely we don't want the generation of the 2070's and 2080's rewriting our present in their present in another half century from now.

Do you think that was an abuse of sorts William, looking back now, as you said you never gave it a second thought until a lot later.

Anthony - 'you filed towards them like sheep shorn of their fleeces.'

Nice turn of phrase that one. I liked that analogy.


Where do we learn about our personal hygiene, well it's at home isn't it, and that's the right place for it to be, nowhere else and from nobody else than the family, or maybe a medical professional in some situations quite possibly.

The rigorous implementation of school showers always seemed strangely obsessive to me at school and actually quite draconian. I used to see boys at school who were never any bother to anyone around school find themselves getting a roasting from the PE teacher because of showering after PE.

I would actually go further and suggest that the real issue was not the actual showering itself but the manner it was done by many schools and the practices such as close checking you were wet enough on exiting and things like having to lift your arms up to check armpits and all that nonsense we put up with. Steven

It all makes you wonder why they didn't teach this personal hygiene to us all at school when we were 12 in front of the showers, if school is where we are meant to learn! They just set the water going and you filed towards them like sheep shorn of their fleeces.

Rob can speak for himself. but perhaps he preferred to rely on the first-hand experience of someone who was taught by Mr Parry than on Alan's gloomy speculation.
I was "blacked" aged 15 as a first time cadet at summer camp. Our sergeant told us it would happen and said "just go along with it, it's nothing and happens to everyone." I can confirm that the worst part is removing shoe polish from pubic hair. We were two cadets to a room and both of us had to spend ages at the wash basin to make sure our pants weren't marked. I took the sergeant's advice and never gave it a second thought until decades later I read that former cadets who felt they had been abused were suing the MoD.
The first episode of the current television series "Soldier" shows young infantry recruits being instructed on personal hygiene.

Rob: Unless you were in Parry's mind how do you know my interpretation of his behaviour is erroneous?

Paul R: I didn't disbelieve Charlton - nothing surprises me of what goes on in some institutions, but I agree with Tanya, no normal young man, who has passed all the intelligence tests to getting into the Army needs to be taught such intimate matters Most of us know by ten or eleven at the oldest what we are supposed to do regarding personal hygiene.

James: Again not surprised, even though it is disgusting. The football clubs should be in the dock charged with facilitating sexual abuse, not just assault. Not a professional player, but during and after my schooldays I had a mate who was a keen amateur player, and sworn to secrecy, he told me of something that happened to him while at school, not just once either and, I am sad to say, that R was the instigator. given his behaviour in public, his private shenanigans were of no surprise. This was the best part of forty years ago now. As I have said before, we like to think these disgraceful events are a thing of the past - but are they?. Instituitions like the FA and Army seem to have inherited Nelson's bad eye.

The marine looked like he was enjoying his hygiene instruction far too much.

Of course grown men don't need to be told how to wash themselves. Kids often do though, but that's the parents job, I wouldn't suggest they do that in school. Infact my school showers were nothing but slightly warm water, so not exactly a lesson in proper hygiene if you ask me.

What the hell was it about the 1970's and 1980's.

This article ends with - "You Couldn't Be Shy Or You'd Be Crucified"

This is in professional football at the time.


Even in such a macho sport as football, the punishment ritual inflicted on apprentices who were judged to have failed in their work at one top First Division club in the early 1980s was an extraordinary one. The word or a nod would be given and the victim would be ordered to walk to the shower room beside the naked team captain, holding that individual’s genitals.

Other players from the 1970s and 1980s era will respond with a shudder to the word “blacking” – the pinning down of young apprentices while their testicles were daubed with black boot polish. “It took you three weeks to get it off,” says one former Liverpool player, whose account of those days reveals the damage done to those who failed football’s survival of fittest test. “I remember one player was left with a stutter,” he says. “Others never played football again. It was mental and physical abuse on a daily basis.”

All of that pales in comparison to the testimony given at Preston County Court in the past two weeks by George Blackstock, the former Stoke City apprentice claiming damages for allegedly being subjected to a ritual known as the “The Glove” and “The Finger”, in which goalkeeper Peter Fox allegedly daubed his glove in Raljex and inserted it up the 16-year-old’s backside while he was pinned to the treatment bench. Several witnesses have testified to Blackstock getting “The Teapot” – in which the hot receptacle was held to his backside. Blackstock’s transgressions included serving lukewarm tea and making a line decision against a first-team player in a training game. Stoke and Fox deny the allegations.

Football awaits with trepidation Judge Philip Butler’s decision, due in the New Year, on whether to give Blackstock leave to sue Stoke and Fox for an estimated £5,000 damages. The court heard from Stoke defence barrister Nicholas Fewtrell on Tuesday that other players are “waiting in the wings” for possible legal action and the Independent on Sunday understands that several other ex-Stoke apprentices have consulted no-win, no-fee lawyers about “blacking” incidents.

The Professional Footballers’ Association chief executive, Gordon Taylor, declined to discuss the case ahead of the judge’s ruling, but there is a sense of dismay in the game that 1980s practices might provoke a spate of litigation. The Blackstock claims are grim – the court heard that former players George Berry, Carl Saunders and Steve Parkin allegedly held down the Northern Irishman while Fox applied the glove, though the alleged incident is far removed from the kind of sexual abuse from that period which the Jimmy Savile case brought to light, and which also led to the former Celtic Boys Club manager, Jim Torbett, being jailed for 30 months in 1998. Torbett was convicted of shameless indecency for abusing boys, including the future Scotland international Alan Brazil, between 1968 and 1974.

At Stoke, Berry, Saunders, Parkin all deny the allegations and Judge Butler’s response has so far revealed reservations about the quality of some of the evidence.

One of the witnesses to Blackstock receiving “The Glove”, former apprentice and now serving Staffordshire Police officer Justin Edwards, was heavily censured in court by the judge for testifying in one statement that he himself had been abused, whilst not mentioning this in another statement during the force’s 2008 investigation into the allegations. Edwards was asked to explain why he did not inform his force of the abuse when he became a serving officer, if he knew of it. Edwards felt at the time that it wasn’t something worthy of a criminal investigation.

The decision of Blackstock to go to The Sun with his story, after it allegedly became clear that Stoke were unwilling to pay compensation, has led to a financial motive being discussed at length in court. “They go to Stoke with the allegations, who deny it. So they go to The Sun,” Fox’s barrister John McNeill said this week. Judge Butler seemed to acknowledge that the case had significance beyond football, in sports where punishments come with the territory.


“If you have got a university rugby team on their way home from a match, you may say they are all consenting adults,” he said. “The victim may go along with the idea that if they have ‘failed’ with a pass, he might have to take [punishment].”

Even in recent years, the apprentice footballer’s environment has remained forbidding. A player at one leading Premier League club had his nose broken when a towel was flicked at him because he refused to cooperate with the initiation ceremony of standing on a chair to sing.

But the brutality of the punishment culture began tapering off in the mid-1990s. “It began to change with the Academy systems, the arrival of foreign players and maybe the recognition that these were not much more than children. It changed with the change in attitudes,” said one Academy coach.

“It’s a lot different,” a 20-year-old Liverpool player told the Independent on Sunday. “Standing up and singing in front of Jamie Carragher, which I had to do at my first Christmas party, was a challenge. But it was just sharp banter and that’s good for those of us coming in.”

But the Stoke case does raise the question of how many young talents fell by the wayside because they could not run this gauntlet of abuse. “It helped if you were tough in the first place,” said one witness to events at the time. “You couldn’t be shy or you’d be crucified.”

The Independent - 15th December 2013.

https://www.independent.co.uk/sport/football/news/grime-and-punishment-dark-tales-of-ritual-abuse-in-bootrooms-could-spark-a-wave-of-legal-claims-against-clubs-9005494.html

I can't believe that any young man needs another man to tell him how to wash himself thoroughly, especially his prize asset.

Comment by: Jim on 13th October 2023 at 00:48
Based on the exchange between Alan and Charlton I felt sure I'd once seen what Charlton described on one of those reality fly on the wall shows but haven't found anything.


Comment by: Charlton on 12th October 2023 at 01:18
We used to get 20 minutes each morning for what they called a sh*t, shower and a shave. That is not very long when sharing with a lot of others. They even show new privates how to wash their privates in the army, well they did in the eighties when I joined.


FOUND IT!

It looks like I have found what you might have been looking for Jim and what Charlton described in the 1980s. Looks like it was still happening 20 years later. This was 2007 according to the end credit.

https://youtu.be/dYF-qDopam0?feature=shared&t=646

Yet another assumption from Alan proved incorrect and rectified by Burnley boy Rupert here.

I liked the final line of your post Dean, so much more positive.

Comment by: Steve on 14th October 2023 at 21:29


You have clearly led a very sheltered life Steve and clearly never had a Mr R. watching you, or any of the recently convicted or named men who behaved with conduct unbecoming.

I am very happy for you. However, I bet that Nathan as a teacher in 2023 would not conduct himself in the way Parry did. He has a lock on his school shower door.

Daz1970 and William.

Correct on all counts in my opinion.

I remember being at Glastonbury in June 1997 and seeing some groups of naked men just sitting around chilling out in one of the far areas of the venue. It was the year of the big washout and a lot of mud and rain and there was a lot of that kind of thing going on and some naked men and topless women with knickers making fun in the mud sliding and kicking about in it, possibly loosened up with drink or drugs. This sticks with me as much as seeing Sting, Van Morrison, Prodigy and Ray Davies of the Kinks that year.

When I was at school group nudity was simply unavoidable. As a non consenting child it was all the while but as a consenting adult I have never again been in a position where I have been naked among a group of others.

Whether the net effect of being thrown into communal nudity and school showering was a positive or negative is anybody's guess. I don't think there is anything wrong with it but weighing it up I think I prefer such things to be consensual rather than by mandate.

What can be better in life though than if you are completely comfortable in your own skin and unabashed. I'm not quite there but it's worth aiming for.

I wish to comment on this Alan quote below.

"Rupert: Could Parry not have conducted his little homilies when you were all dressed?"


This take on things literally amazed me and left me open mouthed with the implied insinuation against the teacher.

Daz1970, That's an interesting point in your last paragraph (13th Oct at 21.31) about non-sexual male nudity. It may well be a bonding experience - to a small degree it was at school between the more confident boys but more so in institutions such as sports teams and the armed forces. In newspapers in the 1960s there used to be photographs of professional footballers celebrating a win in the team bath. The photos were discreet but no-one imagined they were wearing swimming trunks. And the Imperial War Museum archive has photographs of nude servicemen relaxing (swimming in the sea off Gallipoli, for example) and generally larking about away from the front line,

Time never flew when we were at school during the day though did it. It could really drag. But it did fly when we were on school holidays. You missed the creme eggs for Easter that go on sale the day after Christmas too by the way, although I used to think they sold those things all year around until about five years back.

I stopped off at a petrol station shop today while filling up and saw mince pies piled high in festive boxes all dated best before Hallowe'en on 31st of this month, so you can't stock up on them early because they'll be out of date by two months by Christmas anyway. If you're scoffing mince pies and other festive goodies in October where's the treat a couple of months from now?

All that indulgence will take a lot of physical exercise to work off. We probably all used to come back to school in early January having put a couple of pounds on after all those selection boxes had been devoured.

Thankyou Peter for your comment. It appeared quite prominently just by typing the school name into the internet. It must be more than 20 years since I'd last done that.

Concluding gym Mr Parry would sometimes speak with us while we were dressed. He'd hold us back to chat after we'd changed in most instances. Quite frankly I would not have cared either way. Nothing inappropriate ever happened thankyou very much. I only have many happy and rather good memories of him and others from a time in school when discipline, respect and hard work went without question and were not seen as something to look down on.

The photograph could not be a more perfect presentation of how school PE used to be for me and I'm sure so many others.

Hi Mike. thanks for your comment. It is just happenstance. I don't live in the same borough now and I very rarely have to venture there (if I do it sonly for work purposes), but I haven't been there now in about 7 years. The dump was pulled down many years ago now, and for once in my life I was glad to see Tesco's. I I'ie in a neighbouring borough because when I started my business it was convenient and relatively cheap, and had commitments. Like nearly everybody these days, business has never really recovered from Covid and all it bought with it. For choice if I had to live in this country it would be the West Country - another country - somewhere warm.

While we are having a friendly conversation a few days ago somebody mentioned why it was time seems to go quicker these days. I think there are two reasons - it does seem to happen after you get to 35, and also it is the way people wish time away. In August the supermarkets were getting out the Halloween stuff, in September the Xmas stuff and now the 2024diaries and calendars form the main display in W.H. Smith.

Thanks again Mike - I think some people just can't believe there were such bad and poor schools before education became quite as politicised as it is now.

Alan - I don't think anybody actually doubts that what you have said about your school is true. Your accounts strike me as deeply authentic, although I will not pretend to agree with everything you say with your wider opinions.

I think I would have chosen to leave an area that I held such negative feelings about. You sound like you remain close by to this day.

Good to see another old Burnley Grammar boy appear here.

How did you discover this place out of interest?

Mark: I can assure you I went to a secondary school when I was 11, it happened to be, in a VERY run down area in East London, and though, the EA naturally allocated resources to bigger - and frankly, better -schools, with more gifted pupils, we were, as I have said, quite small - we were a sort of overspill school (and I can assure those who don't like me, it was not an approved school!. As far as I am aware only one of my ex school attendees went to prison, that for GBH when he was 21).
Despite the grandiose claims of politcians the GLC wasn't all about "Nuclear Free Zones" (which I am sure China or Russia would have strictly observed!) or the North Islington Lesbians Street Theatre for Peace Group. There were (and indeed, are still) run down areas in parts of London which have not yet been gentrified with luxury flats and gated communities. It was a very rough area - and still is.

I wish other men who had been to schools like mine would write on here.I assure you what I have told you is true.

As regards all this gung -ho talk of nudity I am reminded of some lines in "Carry On Camping"where Sid James takes his girlfriend Joan Sims to the cinema to see a film about a naturist camp:

Joan: It's disgusting!

Sid: What do yo mean disgusting? - it's perfectly natural and healthy - you wouldn't think anything of it if we went round like that all the time

Joan: Oh, yes - I suppose you'd rather we all sat here stark naked?

Sid: It wouldn't bother me

Joan: It would if your ice lolly felli in your lap.


Rupert: Could Parry not have conducted his little homilies when you were all dressed?