Burnley Grammar School

I have in front of me my old comprehensive school uniform list for the newbies, given to our parents ahead of our start date that September. It's dated 8th July 1977. I found it amongst my parents belongings when I was having a sort out for them.

BOYS P.E -
Indoor Boys - Black P.E shorts.
Indoor Girls - Black Leotard.


I remember the discussion I had with my folks about that. I think me and they both thought, what else is there though, as if there had to be more on the list for an indoor P.E lesson. But it was correct. You read between the lines with this kind of uniform list. It was what it didn't say that was worth knowing. These kind of lists didn't actually seem to want to say out loud or in written print that the school P.E lesson would be a shirtless/barechested one, not forgetting barefoot with it too. I wonder why they didn't feel able to state it categorically, rather than just the - Black P.E shorts.

It's also like the line I have in the same list that says -

ALL BOYS P.E
Make sure to bring a towel.


No actual mention anywhere of the school requirement to shower that we had. The word doesn't even crop up, like they didn't dare say it out loud for some reason. Okay so you can read between the lines and work it out but why not say so properly and clearly.

When I came home from my first P.E lesson at this school one of the first questions my mum asked me was did I have a shower at school that day. She knew I thought of it as a bit of a big deal.

There is something about the kind of schools that Carter here mentions going to that just seems to instill an almost automatic all round confidence in people in a way that the vast majority of usual state schools used to fail miserably at even if they weren't actually poor schools.

Carter, thank you for the reply and your perspective.

Three main PE teachers at my secondary school in the 70s/80s and the one thing I truly detested about PE was the regular cross country that all the boys had to do when all the various PE ability groups came together as one large grouping of runners.

We always ran the cross country totally bare chested. PE teachers aslways seemed very keen to get boys in school like this. Not even allowed any jewellery either, watches or neck chains, it all had to come off. The reason for this was once explained to us - because it would make us all run faster, and the less warm it was outside the faster we'd run. I took that as typical PE teacher sarcasm and not a genuine explanation. Never forgot it though.

Back inside the gym hall we actually wore vests roughly two out of every three classes.

I'm 29, and left school 11 years ago having been sent to an independent school in Durham.

Never even considered such things an issue until I took a look here. I wouldn't have wanted to go to a school which nannyed me against doing things. Being seen bare chested even had the effect of making me quite confident among girls which was a bonus. I definitely became a more confident person in part because of it. We always ended with a hot shower too. Some people just end up easier in their own skin than others I suppose.

Carter on 15th April, I was also surprised you were doing PE bare-chested relatively recently. Don't mind my asking, but in what part of the country did you go to school?

Comment by: Carter on 15th April 2023 at 14:18
They should be shirtless in PE. No questions about it. I'm in my 20s and was in school not that long ago. But the boys all had to just wear shorts and went the full bare chest. It really helped me embrace my body. Being bare chested makes your stance better it improves your social skills too in my opinion. Also the girls in class (we shared sometimes) were also made to be used to guys shirtless. It's a normal thing. I still to this day don't wear a shirt most of the time in the garden over summer and leave the house like it for short trips about nearby. We're men. Men are allowed to be shirtless.


Good post this. I like reading younger ones, although obviously a site like this lends itself to an older person just because of what it is. What's interesting too is that shirtless PE is still very much around. How does it improve social skills though exactly? That bit I didn't get.

I'm not a boxing fan at all. But if professionals and amateurs choose to do it then who am I to stop them and that's their decision. If there is a boxing club or something voluntary in a school and it interests you and your parents consent then that's reasonable with choice and consent. But when it comes to a PE teacher instigating boxing of any kind which involves physical beating with an entire class drawn into it regardless of personal choice and only at a teacher instruction then I do have an issue with that kind of thing. No PE teacher should have the right to be able to tell his class to start punching each other, even if he does say avoid the head.

I saw the comment about the need for teachers to take a psychiatric test or analysis of some kind to prove their fitness for the job. Unsure if the poster thinks that should apply to all teachers or whether he meant just the PE ones. But anyway maybe my old PE teacher who took me for a year during 1976/77 should be considered.

Along with all the usual stuff everyone did in gym we did some quite unique "sports". I had a teacher who brought in his own pair of boxing gloves, huge things they seemed. I was reminded of this when I took a look at the Birth Of A Nation film left on here a couple of weeks ago where the PE teacher put some boxing gloves on the poor kid an d said it would stop him playing with himself if I recall it right.

So this PE teacher of mine was quite the fan of boxing but it wasn't really a part of PE at my school. By the way I'm another who took gym generally as standard while wearing only shorts, never needing our feet or tops covering unless instructed otherwise. So this teacher would pair boys up and hand his one boxing glove to one boy and another to the other in the pair, so one had a left handed and the other a right. We then had to fight each other in front of the other boys one handed boxing and could punch as hard as we liked but never at the head, just at anywhere else, mainly the body. No chance of a KO but we were scored on body punches to the torso and legs. We did it for a couple of minutes each, took the gloves off and another pair had a go and we watched.

I never really understood what the hell we were doing it for. I think our teacher got more enjoyment out of it than us. Some boys really went for it and I just pretended a bit. But even with just one glove on some of us took a fair beating and our chests came up red with a good punch and it was still easy to send someone over onto the floor. We did this on mats so any fall was broken and soft. It was just a made up "sport" that our PE teacher got us going at and seemed designed to bring out aggression. He also had us go at kickboxing in the gym one time after we did the one arm boxing, just encouraging us all across the gym to start launching our legs at various opponents with our bared feet. It worked up a bit of energy but I took some persuading it was doing me any favours and felt more traditional gym PE was preferable. The same PE teacher also took the school judo club as well so was involved and had a taste for all things directly physical between boys which I didn't share.

They should be shirtless in PE. No questions about it. I'm in my 20s and was in school not that long ago. But the boys all had to just wear shorts and went the full bare chest. It really helped me embrace my body. Being bare chested makes your stance better it improves your social skills too in my opinion. Also the girls in class (we shared sometimes) were also made to be used to guys shirtless. It's a normal thing. I still to this day don't wear a shirt most of the time in the garden over summer and leave the house like it for short trips about nearby. We're men. Men are allowed to be shirtless.

In answer to your question to me, Robbie, you might well be right, but they were not around at my dump, and these days teachers are not allowed to rule by fear and threats. Could I ask what decade you went to school in, and what sort of school it was (comp/grammar/whatever)?

To answer the question about earning respect, I should say you earn it through encouraging others to share your interest and your specialization, to remember that some people, hard though they might try, will never measure up to your own ability, and to have tolerance for that but still try to encourage ,and not go for condescending sarcasm, belittling others and by -to use an old expression - acting like a gentleman, not raising your voice or your hand and certainly not by threatening behaviour. I only had experience with school masters, not mistresses, though I am sure there were some tyrants amongst those as well.

Lads that feel bothered, scared or shy about taking their shirts off or showering in PE should maybe see a shrink too, eh Alan?

I'm serious. I remember our school had a child psychologist available on request.

As for you Graham, how does a PE teacher go about earning the respect of his pupils in a practical sense?

There is a big difference between teachers who demand respect and those who earn it. I like to think I was in the latter category myself. I'll leave it at that for now.

Rowan on 13th April 2023 at 22:16

There is an example of somebody who really should have been seen by a psychiatrist. The great problem with a number of teachers who "demand respect" is that they are too ignorant or narcissistic to realise that respect is earned and not demanded, and ruling by fear is exactly what people like Putin do. I really feel that today's pupils would not tolerate it in the way we were made to do, and your Mr Andrews would probably end up in A & E if he tried it today. I am not saying that is right, but that tyrants should be tamed.

I got caned in school for standing on the viewing platform of a squash court looking down at somebody I didn't like and gobbing on his head from above. The teacher caught me and carted me off pretty roughly by my collar to his office and after my parents were told I was back next day and given three strikes. If my parents had refused I'd have been suspended for a week. Massive argument at home that night, I wanted the week off school, they didn't. Such was grammar school life in 1965.

I can answer Leo here and provide a possible explanation.

I was always prone to blistering easily in running shoes, even one's that appeared to fit well. I didn't even have to run far for it to happen. I had to take my trainers off during a couple of school cross country runs and had a teacher look at my blisters. He blamed the trainers obviously, but another new pair did the same another time. So I took them off in those couple of instances and as running in socks kind of looked silly and rather ruined them I took the lot off and found it surprisingly okay to do skin on ground. Our feet are quite resilient and up to the job.

The deputy head teacher of the school I attended between 1969 and 1973 also doubled up as the deputy head of PE. Always the deputy, never the master as we used to say about him. Mr Andrews took many of my PE lessons throughout my time at his pleasure. He was affable enough but could turn in an instant into something quite different which was disconcerting, whereas the heads of the school and PE themselves who he deputised for were both more lenient and tolerant types of people. He was very much a disciplinarian and always needed to prove it. It may be for this reason he was never the number 1, always the number 2.
As a very senior member of school staff he demanded total respect but I'm not so sure he gave it back much unless it suited him.

If it wasn't bellowing out surnames it was more often just going with the word 'boy'. I lost count of the times I was called 'you boy' by him. He had two methods of serious punishment, a cane or a slipper, which I think was a plimsoll. The cane never took place anywhere other than the office. The slipper/plimsoll was on site in the gym or anywhere else we happened to be if needed. He must have thrashed the arses of half the boys in my PE class over those years. Even though he'd only ever do one very big smack, or two at most, it was enough to make those who got it yelp and a few watery red eyes. It used to happen for such trivial things, I'm sure he made up reasons out of thin air. Everything from talking too much, answering back, PE kit issues, being late, no effort, making silly mistakes, the list goes on. The gymnasium classes were generally speaking the going bare foot variety. We did have a white and black school vest but it only got used outside, along with a diagonal white and black striped shirt. Going into the school gymnasium we used to all shuffle along the corridor in our bare feet and chests and I always felt apprehensive about it. The shorts were jet black. We could wear our normal pants under them, but when Andrews got his slipper out on someone in PE he always pulled them down very quickly and smacked the bare arse before immediately lifting them back up again. I remember my father smacking me on the arse quite a few times as a kid, although not after the age of 13. Mr Andrews went one better than my dad there on a couple of occasions. I did tell my dad who just thought it was okay because he'd been caned about 20 times in his own schooldays and thought a slipper or plimsoll was nothing in comparison and that teachers only did it if we thoroughly deserved it. I beg to differ to this day about that. I got plimsolled for simply failing to control an amused snigger at someone falling off something and my god did he throw the thing at me and make my derriere sting for a bit. It was always intimidating to see that happen to someone else.

I don't really know why there had to be this slightly dehumanising trait that some teachers employed over youngsters with ever present threats hanging in the air and running around in PE in the least kit you could get away with.

The lessons themselves were always of a high standard and required a lot of energy and effort and everyone was expected to do well and not make excuses for not being able to do anything. We would run wall to wall and sometimes be almost collapsing from exhaustion, a favourite was getting us going faster and faster the longer we were doing it. I often ached and had heavy legs as I walked back to have a mandatory shower which I often felt was a welcome end to a particularly gruelling PE lesson and liked to feel clean and not sweaty but I do also remember there seemed a lot of boys who used to lay it on with heaps of excuses about why they couldn't shower on any given day or pretending they'd just had one and none of the excuses ever seemed to pay off.

The only sport, other than a bit of cycling or jogging, that many of the people I know do as mature adults is golf, and that never was, isn't and never will be on the school PE curriculum. Oh, and fishing.

Leo, interesting observations. I suppose that particular school encouraged barefoot running for the cross country team. Running barefoot through mud is actually quite a lot easier than wearing plimsolls or trainers and you don't have to worry about being bogged down in the wet mud.
I wonder if any other schools adopted barefoot Running as a result of seeing this schools xc team.

Ross I remember being at school in both the summers of 1975 and 1976 when I was a kid in early primary and we'd often sit in our normal classroom doing work at our desks shirtless in just our polished black shoes and dark grey trousers with our white shirt hanging off the back of the chair or in a nearby cloakroom. We were actually allowed to do that if it became very hot. PE at my primary was done shirtless anyway and so it was sort of normalised already. On a couple of hot PE days we finished doing PE and were allowed to just continue back to class as we were to keep comfortable, just sitting there like that. It seemed to be mainly afternoons when we did it, so we're talking two and a half hours or so max, and I think some of us walked home from school the same too. It was all so easy going it's incredible.

Now can you imagine walking into a class in a state of undress nowadays. There would be immediate suspicion about what was going on. Well actually nothing was going on.

When I was in sixth form I was a course marker for a cross country event that involved a number of schools in our district. It was quite early in the year and a damp, cloudy day in a week where there had been some rain making the ground soft. My part of the course was more or less a mud track, although other parts were grass or even bridleway type of small stones. So I was surprised to see a lot of people running past me from one of the other schools completely barefoot, or barefoot holding trainers as they ran which they'd clearly taken off along the course having started out with them on. This was both boys and girls by the way, as it was a mixed event for 14 to 16 year olds. I saw almost as many girls doing this as boys. You knew the school from the colours being worn. It was just this one school I noticed. Nobody said anything about it, it was just a quiet observation I made. That particular school must have had an interesting barefoot running ethic that had been encouraged in some way, although I don't think anyone was being made to run like that, they seemed to be choosing to do so.

Bernard is quite right running the crowd Country barefoot was actually far more pleasant than running the xc in plimsolls. We had free choice to run wearing either plimsolls or bare feet. I experienced running in plimsolls once and once was enough they were waterlogged and caked in mud afterwards and without anytime after the run to clean them I had to somehow carry them around with me. Ultimately they were too ruined to continue using and I binned them and did all PE in or out and the cross country in bare feet.

Jay on 12th April 2023 at 17:07


It was on the backside, Jay. Mr. B was far too canny to leave marks where they could be seen. I was the only one on the receiving end that day, but other lads got in on other occasions for equally petty reasons. You didn't tell your parents you had got the cane because it was something to feel ashamed about, even if it was administered for nothing.

Reading Ross's comment about having to take your clothes off to do a quiz in a classroom for example, is the reason I think all teachers, but especially PE teachers, should be made to undergo a psychiatric examination before they are employed, and if their behaviour continues to be the same, each time they are employed in another school or LEA. They were just able to continue to (at best) display their Adolf tendencies, or at worst to take their prurient "interests" with them.

Chess Boxing? Ugh, that sounds very Alan Partridge. I hope a few know what I mean by that here.

In respect of your comments Bernard, shoeless running is actually a bit of a thing, there are numerous videos out there online, on YT for instance, of people, almost all of them male, who really rate it as something positive. But these are adults who are doing it freely. I'm not so sure about adults forcing children to run outside like that if they don't wish to. I'm almost certain your teacher Bernard never practiced what he preached did he, and wore trainers and a top. They were all like that in the past, do what I say, not what I do. One of the things about teachers that used to wind me up.

Tanya - our kit did seem like the most sensible option - I would have hated having to stop to dig plimsolls out of the mud only to put them on feet that had probably been put down in the mud. I think I would have hated even more having to try to clean the plimsolls later at home.
We had to clean off what we could on the grass before we entered the school building but the showers did get very messy.
You're right - most of us didn't really mind getting very muddy and a wet shirt would not have kept us warm.

New to a PE lesson near you - Chess Boxing.

https://www.huckmag.com/outdoor/sport-outdoor/chessboxing-the-new-craze-where-brain-meets-brawn/

Chess sounds like it was suited to a lunchtime chess club or something for those who made it known they showed an interest in it, rather than dumped on everyone for part of their timetabled PE session. I can get why a PE teacher would be somewhat annoyed by someone else telling him he had to do that. Chess may well be a defined sport but it sure isn't physical education, more like ME, mental education.
I think the teacher in your case Joe sounds a bit petulant but as you didn't do an entire lesson playing chess and did actually do some proper PE then it doesn't seem completely weird, as it would have done if he'd known about and you'd done a whole lesson of chess and he'd made you go that kit style, no shirts no footwear for that and that alone.

You were all just a bunch of pawns really weren't you. The whole thing conjures up one strange image I must say.

Peter and Mike,
I went to secondary school in the eighties, an old-fashioned comprehensive. I wrote about it on this forum a few weeks ago.
The idea to introduce us to chess must have been someone else's. I remember that our PE teacher was quite angry because 'they' had made him give up his valuable lesson time for what he considered to be a waste of time. I suppose making us strip to the waist for chess and giving us a hard time at the end of the lesson was his way of getting his own back. Alternatively, you could say that he just took his anger out on us.

Joe's comments reminded me of the very rare but occasional times when the weather was deemed too extreme to go and do the lesson outside and when the indoor Gym and sports hall were in use we'd all be then marched off to a classroom often at the other end of school and all us lads shirtless and barefoot just to sit a room to do a sporting quiz or put in groups for chess or board games. Quite why we had to change into our indoor PE kit for that I've no idea.

It could have been worse Joe.

He could have got you playing chess in the pool;

https://www.alamy.com/stock-photo-budapest-hungary-playing-chess-in-an-outdoor-pool-of-the-szechenyi-59879006.html


You didn't say how far back that was but a crazy one I agree.

What an extraordinary story you have there Joe. That's certainly a first. Your teacher sounded like the bloody minded type. What a prat.

Chess is actually a game that takes a bit of time and concentration, it would certainly eat up an hour no problem. What a strange thing to invite a chess club to do that and factor it into a PE period like that, but then make you do actual PE just before you played some chess and then afterwards too. I can imagine the chess members really did look on in bemusement, I think I would have done. Yes, it's a sport of sorts but you don't wear the same thing for all sports anyway. Some people think fox hunting is a sport too, wouldn't wear a PE kit to do that would you.

Like has been said so many times on here before, some people love the power tripping their job gives them over others, we can all name various occupations it happens in and teaching, and within teaching PE teachers have a special place of their own.

Perhaps the saddest part is your admitting failing to share your enthusiasm openly to the chess visitors just because you worried more about your own teachers reaction if you had.

I'd be more than interested to hear more of your experiences if this one is anything to go by.