Hesketh Fletcher Gym Team

Andy,
I know what you mean about white shorts, particularly when they were wet. Years ago I remember watching my Ex's playing football in white shorts and it was obvious whether players were wearing jockstraps, briefs or no underwear!
Did you find it embarrassing that the girls, including your sister, knew about you lack of underwear?

Ellen and June,
From the postings, it would appear that some schools recommended jockstraps and others didn't allow anything. My Ex wore one from the age of 13 (in the 1970s).
By the time my son was at Secondary School, they just wore their normal underwear for PE. The only time he wore a jockstrap was with a box for cricket.

Pete, James ex navy, Mark C

It sounds that your medicals at school were more shall we say "open" than mine in having to stand naked in a line, at least I was in underpants or PE shorts, then removed or dropped them with the doctor, the one when I was 16 was a shock mainly because it was with another boy who was a stranger to me and at 16 I was perhaps a bit conscious of my body being seen naked, I wasn't overweight or anything out of the ordinary, just conscious.

The one at 18 was actually on my 18th birthday and it was for me to start on British Railways in the Motive Power Department as what was know as a "cleaner" a prequel to being a fireman and then of course an engine driver, my actual boyhood dream, I didn't have another one until I passed my exams to be a train driver and that was ten years later at 28, and the way a medical was conducted had changed.

You went and had an extensive vision and hearing test and then give a urine sample and undress in a cubicle to the waist and go and have an ECG, return to the cubicle and undress just to underpants and sit and wait for your name to be called.

The doctor did all the usual upper body tests and the agility ones and weight and height and blood pressure, before you were asked to remove your underpants and lay on the exam table and have a thorough chest and back exam now and finally the usual genital exam, all in all I was probably in there around 45 minutes to an hour.

The next was at age 40 and that followed a similar line as the one at 28 except the doctor was different and he was proud of a new exam table the had been installed which allowed him to adjust the height and and tip it forward or back and raise the middle which he did with me and then he pulled my underpants down and off and gave me a thorough genital and anal exam the latter being a prostate exam.

The next was at age 50 similar again but no prostate exam at all, just a quick testicle feel and off to get dressed.

What I didn't know then was that would be my last, sadly 2 years later I contracted prostate cancer and had a Radical Prostectomy which I am pleased to say caught all the cancer, subsequently took early retirement after being off work for 8 months.

Hugh. Thank you for that full explanation.

June

My husband wore a jockstrap for sport as did our boys just to support the valid point you made! And this was the period 1960 to 1980. And very common a practice it was too in independent schools (better known at this time as public schools.)

Josh H,

Before there was equalities legislation pre-employment medicals were pretty normal and in the public sector which is where I guess Eastern Gas was at the time you were first employed there?

The reasons were two fold.

The first was that companies public or private wanted to know they were employing someone who met physical fitness standards and was going to serve them well rather than be someone with chronic health problems who would spend a significant time off sick. When you remember how generous public sector sick pay is that in my opinion was reasonable.

The second was that you would at least in the public sector be enrolled in a pension scheme. While there was nothing available immediately in service death benefits were very generous and payable quite quickly after joining. Again they wanted to know you were not about to drop dead on them.

Even when I left the navy and moved to general practice I had to have a medical exam.

Larger companies like Eastern Gas probably had a doc come in once a week, often a GP on his free afternoon to do this work. Smaller companies wrote to the employee's GP asking them to do the examination. It was either way, pretty lucrative work and in our practice we had one contract with Thames Water and another with LEB. We also saw a number of patients every week who had been referred by a new, smaller employer.

Few companies specified exactly what they wanted other than to know the person was fit and healthy so I tended to examine men in the same way as I had in the navy because I was used to that and it was thorough. I didn't examine women because we had two female partners who did that.

You will have had your testicles examined simply because it's part of the most basic examination of a man. FWIW I would never have had a female nurse present though she would have done the preliminaries but I would have checked you for haemorrhoids both outside and in which I was always taught was part of the basic exam.

Pre-employment medicals died off in the mid nineties because you were not allowed in almost all cases to discriminate against someone on the grounds of physical fitness, if they said they were fit to do the job you had to give them a chance. There are and always will be some exceptions to that though including jobs where the safety of others is paramount so airline pilots, bus drivers, lorry drivers, train drivers and so on still have to pass a medical and in the case of pilots it's every six months. The NHS still send all new staff for a medical before appointments are confirmed too but for office jobs as you describe you would now be spared the experience.

With regards to medical examinations,apart from school, the next one for me was when I was still 16, and had applied for a job with what was then the Eastern Gas Board as a clerk in the offices. I had to go for an medical as a condition of employment. this was carried out at their offices and I was still at school. I was seen by the Company nurse and the usual strip to the waist for preliminary checks, and then moved onto the Doctor who was sitting nearby with the nurse present. After various checks came the normal order drop you trousers and pants. This was different to being at school and the nurse was in full view . I was a bit cagey about dropping them too far with her there, but the doctor abruptly said "right down" I could not refuse,and it was the cough test. To this day I do not know why I had to "drop them" and cough when I was going to work in an office with no physical work involved.

Keith - school medicals.

I had four, the first in primary school, the only one at which my mother was present. I remember being undressed to underpants and a doctor pulling the front open and looking down and he commented that all was in order. I don't remember much more about it.

The next three I had at grammar school - all boys school, one at eleven, another at fourteen and the last at seventeen at the beginning of upper sixth.

In all cases the drill was the same, they took place in the gym and for the day they took there was no PE in the gym. At the appointed time you reported to the changing room where you stripped to your underpants and made your way into the gym.

There you joined a line up to see the nurse who was in a cubicle made of screen partitions. In there she tested hearing and sight particularly I remember for colour blindness and she weighed you and checked your height. It was OK the first couple of times but I wasn't keen at eighteen on sitting in my underpants with a woman even if she was a nurse.

You exited the cubicle a different way between two rows of coat pegs and as you exited you had to take off your underpants and hang them on a peg and then join another line to see the doctor. There was always one of the PE teachers there, he had been a military PTI as he often told us and he used to insist we lined up at attention and as he always put it 'nuts to buts' and the line had to be straight. He always had a plimsoll ready for anyone who wasn't standing as required, up straight and hands at your sides.

Once in with the doctor he looked in your ears, in your mouth, listened to your heart and chest, asked about illnesses and felt your testicles then he asked you to pull back your foreskin. Mine moved easily but some lads were sent for circumcision.

In the sixth form only we were then told to turn around, stand with legs apart and bend over and he inspected between our buttocks. That was a bit of a shock as I wasn't expecting it but after that it was part of any medical I had usually accompanied by a probing finger.

You then had to retrieve your underpants and return to the changing room to get dressed. I guess from getting undressed to getting dressed the whole thing took fifteen to twenty minutes about half of which was standing around.

School medicals or for that matter any medical didn't bother me, I think those of us who remember communal showers and taking off underpants in a changing room are comfortable enough naked in front of other men.

Keith,

You ask about being naked for medical exams, I presume you mean for those who were not in the navy/military?

As I've posted, in the navy it was the norm.

At school medical exams were in the gym. We had to take off everything except our underpants in the changing room and line up in the gym. A nurse did some checks - sight and hearing and then you joined another line to see the doc. When you got to the front you had to take off your underpants before going behind the screen to see the doc.

It was all very orderly because there was always one of the PE masters there gently slapping a plimsoll against his hand and no doubt ready to slap it much harder against your bottom should he deem it necessary.

Pete W - yes, it might seem crazy but sometimes you would put on your T shirt, only to take it off a few minutes later. Quite often though, the teacher would announce at the end of the lesson "Same teams next time, lads." So then if I'd been a skin I knew not to bother bringing my top next time we did PE. In some ways it might have made more sense if we'd just been told our PE kit would be shorts and trainers, with every boy in skins and bibs supplied when necessary!

Keith,

You ask about medical exams and being naked.

Yes, I had a couple where I was, both pre-employment ones with occupational health doctors, one in the NHS and one at a private hospital where I also worked.

It wasn't that I was told to strip completely but rather that I don't wear underpants so there was nothing to leave on. It didn't bother me and didn't bother the doc in either case.

I was one of six boys - one of the middle pair of three sets of twins and there were only four years between oldest and youngest so from an early age I was used to being naked around other boys. We had a large bedroom with three sets of bunk beds so we were all in together.

I grew up like many with tight white Ys as underpants and I never liked them. Going to school and being told to take off my underpants for sport was liberation for me, I felt more comfortable and that I ran and exercised better without them. Used to being naked with boys that and the communal showers didn't give me pause for thought, it just seemed normal.

I started to experiment and stopped wearing underpants with jeans and found that comfortable too and in summer never wore them with shorts. Soon I was only wearing them for school or with formal trousers.

Initially I kept wearing them for school (private boys grammar school) because when you made not infrequent visits to the headmaster for the cane you had to drop your trousers and he caned you over your underpants. At the end of the caning there was invariably a warning along the lines of 'you had better watch your p's and q's boy because if I see you again soon, I will cane your bare bottom'. It was a threat he always made but as far as I knew had never carried out.

The year I went into lower sixth I decided without thinking it through to give up on underpants for school. In the first half term I fell foul of a rule, I was late twice in a week and had to report to the headmaster. I will admit I was nervous but assumed that I would be sent to put on gym shorts when he saw I wasn't wearing underpants.

After the usual verbal dressing down, I was told to take off my blazer then drop my trousers and bend over the back of a chair. I did so very aware of my bare bottom covered by my shirt tail. I felt him flick my shirt tail back and waited expectantly to be told to go and put my gym shorts on.

He didn't say a word, there was a swish, a crack and a line of fire across my bottom followed by five more of the same. I was told to straighten up and make myself decent which I did and instead of the usual words about minding p’s and q’s I was told that the ‘dose could be stiffened in future’.

In the aftermath I remember reflecting that while the sting and bite of the cane on my bare bottom had been worse than over underpants not having to pull up tight white Ys and just have looser trousers instead was a lot less bad afterwards and there was less clothing keeping the heat in. Changing for rugby that afternoon and in the showers my spectacular set of marks were much admired in the way we did then.

I got the cane a few more times before I left school including twice where he ‘stiffened the dose’ and gave me eight, ‘two more for insolence boy’ when I didn’t appear contrite enough.

Once I went off to university, I never again wore underpants, for me it’s far more comfortable and I’m not bothered about being naked in front of another man be that a doctor or a man in a changing room. I spent most of my career working in operating theatres wearing scrubs which of course means you get changed at the beginning and end of every shift. It’s hot in theatres so you don’t want to be wearing much anyway. In order to avoid contamination, the rule is you take off your outdoor clothes and put them away and wash your hands or shower before you start to put on scrubs. It was normal that almost every man would take off his underpants there too as the last thing you want is to get hot and itchy.

My point in saying this is that staff working in healthcare are in the main not at all bothered by naked flesh, they see lots of it, so back to the beginning, no doctor would be bothered about a naked body one way or the other especially if it was same sex.

Pete W & Ben,
I can’t see the point of making lads get changed for PE and put on a t shirt and then ask them to take it off. It would have been so much more sensible to change the PE kit rules and make stripped to the waist required. My mum was happy not having to wash and iron PE t shirts for my brother and I and our dad thought that lads should do PE shirtless like he did at school.

Ben, our formal kit was for us to be stripped to the waist regardless of being indoors or out. I'm guessing from your post that you put a t-shirt on just for your teacher to tell you to strip off in the gym/outside?

June,
The rules may well have been arbitrary but they were enforced nevertheless and from the accounts of many contributors to this forum were widespread from the 1950s to the 1980s in the UK.

Andrea
She never told me how she actually knew, I always suspected that for some reason or another their teachers told them we weren't allowed to wear any. I remember mid first year after a PE lesson while queuing for the next class girls suddenly asking us if it was true we wore nothing under our shorts, they only saw us fleetingly in kit and while they may have worked it out from seeing us in our white shorts (it was obvious if you knew) it felt like they had been told.

John,
I know my Ex said that they were quite relived when they were allowed to start wearing jockstraps at the start of their third year at secondary school, especially who had started to mature early.

Andy,
Did your sister say how she knew the boys weren't allowed to wear anything under their shorts? I went to an all girls secondary school, so never came across this myself.
However, during our last year at primary school, I do recall the boys taking an interest in the few girls that were starting to 'develop'.

Agree Pete W, sometimes it could get confusing as to who was on your team but we managed! Was your PE kit always as shown in the photo? For us it varied - the actual kit did also include a white T shirt but a lot of the time you'd end up taking it off almost immediately. Can't say I know much about boys' PE nowadays but it seems a shame if it's changed as much as you suggest...

Keith,
Yes I guess that by age 13 lads don't want their mums around when their 'bits and bobs' are being examined!

Ian. I can certainly confirm that in my years at senior school we were fit, from my recollection we had two sessions of PE a week and after end of term exams we had more on the run up to the holiday break, one PE teacher we had ran the city schoolboys football teams and I and also some more boys from my school were picked for the squad and we trained after school for that as well.

In my time I was a pretty nippy right winger, I modelled myself on the late Sir Stanley Matthews, who I met on one occasion when he came to see us training.

As stated in lots of posts on here boys were bare chested in PE, same for us,, but in cross country we did have the opportunity to wear a vest, just your normal underwear vest though, I didn't as I liked being bare chested, like most of my classmates, our run was around 5 miles in all and culminated in the last couple of miles being along the canal towpath and then across scrub land the the back of our school and then around into the side gate, mostly the only people we saw were fishing in the canal and they used to give us encouragement, the PE teacher ran with us as well, so there was no slacking off unless you picked up an injury, you just ran through the "stitch"

I was so grateful for the shower after as the towpath was often very muddy and it was an incentive to be in the leading pack to get in the showers first as it wasn't a big shower room, only accommodating about a dozen boys unless you shared a shower head, impatient boys just washed the mud of their legs and splashed water on their chests at the sinks if it was the last lesson of the day.

Did any who have posted about medical exams ever have naked exams at school or for work, other than the one I had at 16, I had one other when I was 18 and changed jobs and then I was alone and asked if I minded undressing completely, it was mostly conducted with me on an exam table though.

John - that seems unnecessarily arbitrary not allowing boys to wear a jockstrap under their shorts, and especially for older boys who would require genital support. My husband and boys weren't subjected to such stupid practices luckily.

Ben, Pete W
Skins vs skins was great fun. The black shorts and white shorts sounds a good way to differentiate teams and it was good that all lads got to play shirtless at some point during the games period. From reading comments on this forum it seems that some lads disliked being selected for the ‘Skins’
Team and being made to take their shirts off. Skins vs skins team games are the best way of making lads become body confident and to be happy to take off their shirts and be seen in public. Skins vs skins team games does away with any perceived unfairness by making all lads strip to the waist.

Ben, We did exactly the same but 7 a side. Skins vs skins was great fun and you had to think about just who was on your team. The photo really reflected PE/Games lessons, each lad stripped off to the waist and proud to show their upper bodies off. Wonder what they'd make of todays "lessons" no skins, no sweat,no fun....

Keith,
One reason we can see immediately that these lads look fit is because they are shirtless. It was one of the reasons our PE teacher gave for it.
Also I have heard doctors say that having a lad completely naked for a medical allows them to make a quick assessment.

John, we sometimes had to play skins vs skins football, although this was six a side and with no bibs involved. What happened was that each boy whose surname was in the first half of the alphabet had to bring black shorts for PE, the boys in the second half were told to wear white. Then both groups were divided into shirts and skins to make four teams and we played a round robin, with the final round of games involving black shorts against white shorts. Might have been easier with bibs but it seemed to work!

Nick, Andy,
I wasn’t allowed to wear underwear underneath my PE shorts either. I had no issue with doing PE topless but we should have been allowed to wear a jockstrap underneath our shorts. The school rule was stripped to the waist for boys for indoor PE but some PE teachers made us play football skins vs skins outdoors with each team wearing different colored bibs.

Nick
I remember my older sister who was at the same school telling me I wouldn't be allowed anything under my shorts, I thought she was joking until the first lesson.
I thought the rule had been dropped by the 90s so that teacher must have been one of the old guard, at least when you had other teachers the rules where less stringent - I wouldn't have wanted to be in any class that came across him in later years, particularly if it was their first time being taught by him.

Hi Andy, no we didn't have any prior warning about how strict the new teacher would be. I think he had been at the school the previous year but I didn't know anyone he'd taught. So it all came a bit out of the blue at that first PE lesson! We were 13 at the time so some of us were more developed than other boys, but I think we all got used to the new teacher's rules before long. However I made my brother, who was two years younger, aware of what to expect when his class were timetabled with that teacher, so at least he knew he'd be doing PE topless and with nothing under his shorts.

James - ex navy - thank you for your comment and question.

Yes, I was at Dartmouth both in training and later on the medical team when I was there for about a year. I also worked at Haslar and of course at sea though on a short service commission I didn't spend as much time at sea as other medics.

I think the medical exams were thorough, the way they were carried out lent themselves to that and as the doc you were totally focussed on what you were doing.

You ask about officer and rating exams. They were exactly the same, carried out in the same room - but of course never at the same time - and the procedure was identical in all regards. The examine don't explain philosophy held good for both groups. I guess the only difference was once you reached a degree of seniority you would have been examined by a suitably senior medic, probably in private but I was never that senior a medic.

Yes, for most lads and young men, the rectal exam was probably a first. For whatever reason the navy had an obsession with haemorrhoids possibly because they can be made worse by physical work and in any event they are uncomfortable which is why the rectal exam was a feature of every physical exam.

The advantage of the line up again was that doing thirty of the same exams one after the other allowed you to do them with speed but I recall being on the receiving end did make you gasp and in my case it made my eyes water. Wise to what was coming when my turn came in future I made sure my feet were well apart and I was bent as tightly as I could be just to optimise my physique for what I knew was coming.

Josh H,I wore shorts for school at the same age as yourself and I was given no explanation by my parents as to why I had to remain in shorts at that age.
Rather than defying my parents and objecting to wear shorts I tried to wear them with dignity and humility.
Most teachers at my school thoroughly approved of boys wearing shorts through school even though they were very brief and trim.

Mike G, John
I was coming up to my 10th birthday, and we were experiencing a minor heat-wave, when Mum and Dad suggested that I might be more comfortable sleeping shirtless. I was, and although I reverted to PJ tops when the colder weather arrived, by the following Spring I was sleeping topless again. Over the next couple of years, my topless periods got longer and longer, and by the time I was 13, I was sleeping shirtless all year round, much to Mum's surprise. I went to a boarding school for my 6th form years.s. Although the boarders clothing list specified pyjamas, which didn't please me at all, I found on my first night that everyone in my dormitory slept topless as a matter of course, and some brave spirits stripped off completely.

Mike G,
Please accept my apologies, I meant to type ‘ your dad was right to make you start sleeping shirtless on your ninth birthday’ (Not 12th birthday, my error)
I really wish my dad had made me start sleeping shirtless on my 9th birthday.