Austerity Britain, 1945–51 (88 page)

The 20 years after the war were the heyday of the grammar school. The images from the male version remain particularly strong – the teachers (often Oxbridge-educated) in their long black gowns, the boys in their caps and blazers, the undeviating rigour of the whole performance – but possibly the best account we have is of Stockport High School for Girls, which the daughter of an engineering draughtsman, Joan Rowlands (later Bakewell), left in 1951 after seven moulding years:

I was overwhelmed by a body of women resolved to shape and instruct me in their shared world-view. They were a cohort of the army of self-improvement, steeped in the same entrenched, spinsterly values of learning, duty and obedience, tempered with a little laughter when exams weren’t too pressing. The school motto set the high-minded tone:

Self-reverence, self-knowledge, self-control,

These three alone lead life to sovereign power.

– lines taken from an obscure poem by Tennyson, ‘Oenone’, which no one could pronounce. The lines were engraved on the four all stained-glass windows along one wall of the assembly hall, and I fretted regularly about what they might mean . . .

The school was relentlessly competitive and selective. Even within its grammar-school framework we were streamed into A and B classes. (The As did Latin, the Bs domestic science.) The six houses [‘named after significant women of achievement’] competed for a silver cup awarded to ‘the most deserving house’, the winner arrived at by compiling exam results, with netball and tennis tournaments, house drama competitions and musical achievements. There were even awards for deportment – for anything that could be marked. We got hooked: it became a way of life – so much so that a gang of friends within the fifth form set up their own ratings system and subject schedules, marking charts, and fines. I know because I was their secretary . . .

The rules were remorseless, dragooning us in every particular of behaviour. Uniform even meant the same indoor shoes for every pupil; hair-ribbons had to be navy blue. The school hat had to be worn at all times to and from the school; girls caught without were in trouble. The heaviest burden was the no-talking rule: no talking on the stairs, in the classroom, in the corridors, in assembly – anywhere, in fact, except the playground. We were a silent school, shuffling noiselessly from class to class, to our lunch, to the cloakroom. Each whisper in the corridor, each hint of communication on the stairs was quashed, conduct marks apportioned and lines of Cicero copied out in detention . . .

Among this welter of disapproval – conduct marks, detentions and, finally, a severe talking-to by Miss Lambrick [the headmistress] – physical chastisement was unnecessary. We were cowed long before things became that bad. The cane in the headmistress’s room was redundant. When a girl got pregnant – the worst conceivable crime – she was expelled without fuss before she could contaminate the rest of us.

In Stockport as in most other towns or cities, there was considerable prestige attached to the grammar schools, which perhaps more than any other institution set the moral as well as the intellectual standards of the community, especially but not only among the middle class. And almost all their pupils were deeply imbued with a guilt-free sense of belonging to the present and future local elite.
^7.

Bakewell’s experience was, for all the constraints, broadly positive. It was different for a tailor’s son, the future playwright Steven Berkoff, who went to Raines Foundation Grammar School in Stepney in 1948:

The archaic form of punishment was to be given an ‘entry’ in the teacher’s book for some alleged misconduct. After three pencil entries you would have an
ink entry
, which was getting serious, and after three such entries, which could have been accumulated for nothing more than chatting in class, you would be thrashed with a cane by the PT master. I was the first in my class to suffer this humiliation. I was taken in front of the others and told to bend down. I could not believe the ferocity of the first strike across my tender cheeks. My breath was sucked out of me and I burst into a wail, but suffered two more and then sat down on my three stripes. The stripes became quite severe wheals on my backside. Mum was shocked, but thought it was something to do with grammar school discipline. You accepted your punishment since you always did what you were told.

A year or so later, on the Wirral, Glenda Jackson was starting to rebel at West Kirby Grammar School for Girls. ‘When I hit puberty at thirteen the genes kicked in and I became seriously uninterested in scholastic subjects,’ she recalled. ‘I became part of a group of girls who were less academic. There were cupboards in the classrooms and our great joke was to remove the shelves and sit inside. Then the door would be locked and the key hidden and during the course of the lesson rappings and noises would emanate mysteriously . . .’ In due course, she fell three subjects short of the necessary six for her School Certificate and left without going to the sixth form. Her parents were working-class; now in her mid-teens she found herself, despite having been to a grammar, working on one of the long mahogany counters of the local Boots Cash Chemist.

This theatrical trio is completed by a young teacher at Exeter Grammar School, telling his father in late 1949 about his experience at the chalkface. The school, he reported, was

fairly expensive, has most of the mannerisms of a really good school, and is fundamentally sloppy. The boys are like other grammar school boys, the little ones are very brisk and blasé, and the older ones either earnest or faintly hysterical with unused energy and waiting for jobs or conscription. The Common Room was awful, with an invidious atmosphere of comfort and mock responsibility.

The writer was Robert Bolt, who had just started a teaching diploma at Exeter University and whose vivid insights were admittedly the fruit of only a single day’s working visit. If he had been there longer, he would no doubt have highlighted also the snobbery that was so pervasive at grammar schools and was arguably their worst feature. It particularly took the form of aping public schools – not least on the playing fields, where rugby tended to be the socially acceptable, officially endorsed winter sport and football as often as not was accord-ed pariah status. ‘Have finished school until April 12th,’ noted a relieved Kenneth Preston at Keighley Grammar School, just before Easter 1951. ‘The School has had the usual exhortation from Head about not watching football matches.’
^8.

If the unique selling proposition of the grammar schools was their adherence to traditional values, the secondary moderns (which in 1950 educated three times as many 13-year-olds) were supposed to be something entirely fresh and different. ‘In the idealistic period of the 1940s,’ recalled a leading educational sociologist two decades later, ‘it was hoped that in the new schools, freed from the constraint of external examinations, there would be the opportunity to develop a new type of education, enjoying parity of esteem with the academic and specialised curriculum of the grammar school, but of a completely different kind.’ A curriculum that was ‘essentially experimental rather than traditional, general rather than specialised, practical rather than academic’ – that was the ambitious aim. It did not work out. Even by the late 1940s, secondary moderns were under pressure to raise their academic game. The labour market was demanding higher levels of skill, and it was already apparent that the notion that the secondary moderns would achieve ‘parity of esteem’ by being somehow different yet equal cut little ice with the world in general, where the criteria of success turned on external examinations and the provision of specialised courses. ‘Before they can hope to attract children of higher ability they must produce results worthy of comparison with those obtained in grammar schools, and they must do this with the children available to the modern schools here and now,’ observed one educationist, John Mander, as early as 1948. Three years later, the introduction of the General Certificate of Education (GCE) O level for 16-year-olds – involving a pass standard set appreciably above the pass mark of the old School Certificate – made the chances of obtaining those results significantly less.
^9.

Indeed, it was a contest that took place not only on grammar-school terms but on an almost systemically sloping playing field. The intake at secondary moderns comprised 11-plus failures from a predominantly working-class background, with an additional bias towards the semi-skilled and unskilled; the teachers were academically less well qualified than at grammars and were paid less; overall financial resources per pupil head were similarly inferior; the overwhelming majority of pupils left as soon as they could – ie at the end of the term in which they became 15; and the jobs they went to were in general of much lower socio-economic status than those to which grammar-school leavers went in due course. Bravely enough, not everyone threw in the towel. ‘There are now no limits of opportunity for the Secondary Modern School, given enough initiative and encouragement,’ declared one optimistic headmistress in 1951. ‘Prejudice does still remain, and the social value of the selective school is still uppermost in the minds of too many parents. Much has been done, however, to break down this prejudice, and before long it may completely disappear.’ John Prescott – five years in the top stream at the Grange Secondary Modern School in Ellesmere Port but leaving without any academic qualifications – would, for one, take some convincing.
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In 1994, half a century after the Butler Act, John Hamilton evoked on television his teaching experience at another secondary modern in Cheshire:

Well, I can well remember when we were taking the classes, some of which were not really interested in education at all. And we had in those days just after the war gardens and vegetable patches, because of food growing, and so we used to take these lads out and just tell them to go and plant things like rhubarb, rhubarb was the best, because they couldn’t do any damage to rhubarb. We were happy to let them get on with that quietly. The teacher would go off and have his quiet smoke, and not put too much pressure on them to work hard. They were filling in time, as it were, until the end of their school days.

Children realised that they were failures, and that was embedded in their thinking . . . The teachers too had that sort of limited vision for their pupils. And all that produced a sort of defeatism.

Another young teacher, the future Tory politician Rhodes Boyson (at this stage strongly pro-Labour), went in 1951 to teach English at Rams-bottom Secondary Modern School in Lancashire – ‘run-of-the-mill, healthy and cheerful, with no airs and graces and little idea of what it was supposed to achieve’. Several times a week he endured double periods with 4C in a dilapidated laboratory, which ‘contained more illiterates, semi-illiterates and lesson resisters than would normally have been found in a whole township’. In his first lesson he tried reading aloud the latest cricket report by Neville Cardus in the
Manchester
Guardian
, but ‘within seconds, water and gas taps were turned on and all kinds of Olympic wrestling began to take place on the floor’. Eventually, he gained a measure of control, but at the same time he became increasingly depressed by what he saw as the unwillingness of the school – and indeed of politicians and education officers more generally – to make a real effort to raise academic standards and address the blight of low expectations. ‘The secondary modern schools were a government confidence trick which led inevitably to the campaign for comprehensive schools’ would be his conclusion some 40 years later. ‘They were so general that no one knew what their purpose was.’ Clearly, then, there were limits to the new academic zeal of the secondary moderns; just as clearly, there was a lack of focus about any alternative strategy.

Boyson’s experiences were mild compared with those of Edward Blishen, who in 1950 started teaching at Archway Secondary Modern School in north London, where he became art master on account of his long hair. Five years later, he published an unflinchingly realistic autobiographical novel,
Roaring Boys
– ‘the story,’ as the paperback blurb put it, ‘of a young teacher who finds himself plunged into a maelstrom of adolescent violence – a naïve idealist shocked by the brutality around him and finally forced to compromise his beliefs.’ During Blishen’s barely survivable first term, Class 5 were the worst:

They were a backward third-year class who inhabited a room peculiarly difficult to teach in. The desks were long ones, rising in tiers. This had the effect that most boys were higher than the teacher, who prowled about in a pit below them. It also meant that the larger part of the class was inaccessible, being cosily tucked away in the hinterland of the long desks. Never was the torment of a raw teacher made more possible. I had them for an odd period of English: ‘Spelling, perhaps,’ the headmaster had said with hurried vagueness. I would stand before them aware only that I had to secure their interest in an accomplishment that plainly was the last in the world they wanted to acquire . . . I would stand before them. That, on the whole, was all I ever did. I taught nothing. It was always half an hour of crazy fury.