Family Britain, 1951-1957 (19 page)

These japes at a minor public school hit the screen just as the sheep-and-goats selection system for state secondary education came for the first time under serious, dispassionate scrutiny. Philip Vernon, professor of Educational Psychology at London University’s Institute of Education, published in the
Times Educational Supplement
in early 1952 a two-part investigation of ‘Intelligence Testing’, based on experiments carried out under his direction. His key finding was that ‘systematic coaching’ made a significant difference to a child’s chances in the eleven-plus exam, and for several weeks the
TES
was flooded with letters, one of which – from James Hemming in Isleworth – castigated the prevailing system as ‘unscientific, uneducational, wasteful, unjust, and brutal’. The
TES
itself, in a measured editorial, noted how intelligence tests, as set in the eleven-plus, had ‘seemed a heaven-sent technique for approximating to that “equality of opportunity” which the nation is pledged to offer its children’, in that ‘the tests, it was declared, measured potentialities that were proof against the accidents of birth and early fortune’. The paper did not call, though, for their abolition as such, but rather for more emphasis in selection to be placed on ‘attainment tests’ (in English and maths) and what it called ‘scaled teachers’ estimates’. The controversy eventually reached
Picture Post
, though its reporter, Fyfe Robertson, embodiment of Scottish common sense, somewhat evasively concluded that ‘when we can manage to give every child the best schooling we can devise, life will do the selecting better than any mathematically-minded educational psychologist’.14

In the early 1950s it was not just Labour Party policy that was hostile to tripartism (grammars, secondary moderns and thin-on-the-ground technical schools), but a gathering mood on the left as a whole. Typical was Wilfred Fienburgh, who argued in the
New Statesman
in March 1953 that there had been no advance in equal opportunity since Butler’s 1944 Act – largely because the system was too ‘chancy’, though he also emphasised the continuing existence of private education. Added to the chanciness, he declared, was an inherent cruelty: ‘We grade our material at the age of eleven when it is acutely conscious of itself as a person, is aware that parents are anxious, and is, above all, very alive to the chances of success or failure.’ Accordingly, ‘what we need are schools catering for all the children in a neighbourhood regardless of wealth
or
ability’. In similar vein, he called for public schools to be turned into ‘national residential sixth forms’ available to all.

An editorial in the same issue, describing the British school system as ‘the outstanding example in the Western world of educational privilege’, supported only the first half of Fienburgh’s prescription and demanded the end of the eleven-plus: ‘It is socially pernicious. Taking the Grammar school cap is a more potent emblem of privilege than the old school tie. Public school snobbery affects a few children. The snobbery of the local Grammar school sets the tone in every city and country.’ Accordingly, the comprehensive school – of which there were precious few yet in existence – was the answer. Many Labour-controlled local education authorities (LEAs) were in fact still doubtful, even in some cases hostile, but not so the Labour majority on the education committee of the London County Council. ‘It aims neither at levelling up nor levelling down, but at giving every child full opportunity to develop according to its own ability,’ declared (in April 1952) Helen Bentwich, until recently chairman of the committee, about the LCC’s ambitious plan for comprehensives. ‘The understanding between workers by hand and brain which must exist when they are educated in the same schools is the best of all preparations for the socialist society. The comprehensive schools, as planned by the L.C.C., will be schools of which any community may rightly be proud.’

The defence of grammars came partly from the left – ‘it’s part of the folklore of the old Labour Party that the great thing was to give our boys a chance to go to grammar schools,’ the sociologist A. H. Halsey would recall with some exasperation – but inevitably mainly from the right. A key figure was the new Education Minister, Florence Horsbrugh. Generally ineffective at resisting Treasury pressure to squeeze education spending (a particularly ill-timed squeeze given that the ‘bulge’ babies were just starting to enter the school system), she was not helped by her exclusion from the Cabinet for almost two years. Even so, for all her lack of clout and charisma, she was recognised as a conscientious minister, and in October 1952 she unambiguously told the Conservative Party Conference that she saw ‘no educational advantage in the comprehensive schools that could possibly outweigh the disadvantages in connection with their enormous size’. A motion deploring any attempt to replace tripartism with comprehensive schools was duly passed, with only one dissenter.15

The spring-term edition of
Spur
, the magazine of Raynes Park County Grammar School in Surrey, offers a nice glimpse of a grammar in 1952. ‘House Notes’, written by the respective house captains, had all the usual phrases – ‘most encouraging . . . to be congratulated . . . untiring work . . . steady effort . . . cups not won by one boy alone, however brilliant he may be . . .’ – but it is the Chess Club notes, written by a teacher, that take the eye:

There is a regrettable tendency among juniors towards playing too much chess. The problems of playing in form rooms were partially solved by including two lunch-time meetings during the week, besides the normal Friday evening meeting. But this for some was not enough, for I have found people playing chess at any odd moment during the day in any odd corner. I welcome their enthusiasm but it must yield not only to School discipline, but also to the discipline of good chess playing. If the standard of chess in the School is to improve, players must learn from previous errors or miscalculations, and the only way to do this is to employ the discipline of thinking before you move, and that means both thinking before you make your move and thinking of what your opponent is planning. And the atmosphere of the ‘odd moment’ is not conducive to this sort of planning.

The same teacher also regretted ‘a continued lack of original verse’ being volunteered at meetings of the Poetry Society. ‘The Society may show outward forms of prosperity,’ he reflected, ‘but the lack of original verse is a sign of serious decay.’

Irrespective of a certain narrowness and joylessness in their pursuit of excellence, as well as making their own sheep-and-goats division at an early stage, the grammar schools were still the generally favoured destination – if only for negative reasons. ‘Teachers themselves, and particularly middle-class parents, would do almost anything to stop their children from having to go to secondary modern schools,’ D. S. Morris of the National Foundation for Education Research starkly told a meeting of the Notts Federation of Parent-Teacher Associations in April 1953. ‘As things are arranged at the moment, and speaking as a parent, I don’t blame them.’ Rosalind Delmar was one of many children for whom the pressure was truly on. In 1952 in her final year at a junior school near Redcar, mainly for the children of steelworkers, she had a mother not only soured by the experience of not having been allowed to go to secondary school herself, but also clinging to ‘her hope for a schoolteacher daughter who would look after her in her old age’. Moreover, in the school itself, ‘work was geared towards the eleven-plus with weekly tests in spelling, maths, grammar’. In the event, only four (including Delmar) passed. So too at a London primary, where in the early 1950s a young, progressively minded black teacher, Beryl Gilroy, encountered a martinet of the old school. ‘Mrs Burleigh thought I was endangering the children’s eleven-plus potential and wanted the five-year-olds streamed into good, bad and indifferent,’ she recalled in her remarkable memoir,
Black Teacher
(1976). ‘Her mind was hermetically sealed.’

The chances are that most primaries had a Mrs Burleigh or two – someone who ‘disliked most children’ and in remembrance stood out ‘like some figure in a stern, admonitory religious painting’. Gilroy ‘often saw the Devil in Mrs Burleigh’s face and frequently heard him in her voice’:

She never once treated me as a colleague and credited me with any kind of teaching know-how. This didn’t worry me a bit. As far as her teaching ideas were concerned, they reminded me of a donkey-christening back home [British Guiana].

The poor donkey was tethered to a post by three or four feet of stout rope. Each time its name was shouted it was whacked with a stick. After a dozen or so blows, the donkey reacted to the sound, and it was assumed that it understood its name. In like manner these children were verbally tethered to their seats and punished by smacks, jibes and sneers for breaking Mrs Burleigh’s rules. No parent, as far as I knew, ever protested. Like their children they accepted the punishment as an act of God. Some parents even praised her strictness but to me she was simply a bullying adult.

Moreover, with or without a Mrs Burleigh, most schools tended to be authoritarian places that seldom encouraged parental involvement, let alone interference or criticism. There is a strikingly nervous, even apprehensive tone to a May 1952 diary entry by Judy Haines in Chingford. ‘Ione [aged five] forgot her skipping rope and was tearful,’ she recorded one hot Thursday:

I promised to bring it at playtime and since Pamela [her younger daughter, not yet at school] had a fruit pop and it is a scorching day, took Ione one. I felt very guilty being in playground and worse when I caught echo of a grown-up’s remark, ‘You’ve just had your milk. What will teacher say?’ I hung around and felt better when I saw from the park Ione go back into school quite confidently. Pamela and I went to meet her though, as if there had been any bother I wanted to apologise and clear the air. But Ione had just dumped the fruit pop before returning from play (she said she knew I wouldn’t want her to eat before dinner and couldn’t find a cool place) and all was well. I bought them another one each and was so relieved.16

‘A dirty red street of huddled little houses jammed together in the bricky wastes of Oldham,’ was how Blanche Street struck the
Daily Mirror
’s William Connor (aka ‘Cassandra’) in June 1952. Living at no. 7 with his wife and two sons was the 39-year-old Frank Benson, a cotton spinner in the Royton Mill, but working only three days a fortnight. ‘All my points for last month’s sweet ration were unused,’ explained Mrs Benson about the sharp drop in their standard of living as a result of the slump in the Lancashire cotton industry. ‘The kids ask for them, but I simply cannot afford sweets. Eggs we will soon have to do without, although I managed to get six last week. We have had to cut out biscuits and cakes or things like jellies and fruit which the children are especially fond of.’ Connor then asked her husband what he did with his time:

He was sitting there looking strangely tired and the question seemed at first to puzzle him.

‘What did you do
yesterday
morning, for instance?’

‘Well, I read the paper.’

‘Did you help with the washing up?’

His wife laughed a little and said: ‘I haven’t let him do that yet!’

‘Well, what DID you do?’

‘I helped her with washing the clothes – the heavier stuff, you know.’

‘Anything else?’

Benson looked around gloomily and then said brightly: ‘Oh, yes. I mended the step-ladders.’

Their plight was not unusual, for that summer 33 per cent of spinning operatives in Lancashire, and 22 per cent of weaving operatives, were either unemployed or on short time. ‘Widespread unemployment, but amazing cheerfulness,’ another visiting journalist remarked to a union leader, Archie Robertson of the Oldham Cardroom Association. ‘Cheerfulness?’ Robertson replied. ‘And what were you expecting then? When did you hear of Lancashire folk not being cheerful?’

A young researcher, Peter Townsend, paid a more protracted visit – probably in September, not long before the situation started to

ease – and found that ‘relatively few of the unemployed in Lancashire have applied for national assistance’. This was partly due to ‘ignorance or misunderstanding about the regulations’, but also reflected ‘a

strong reluctance on the part of many people to apply for “charity”, as they still tend to regard it’. He attached some revealing case-study notes:

Parent-family in no position to help her, and her savings were sufficient only to help her in the first month of unemployment. Obviously a little ashamed to go to public authorities for help because of her two illegitimate children.
(Unemployed woman, late twenties)

She now receives national assistance, about 40s a week but delayed seeking it and feels ashamed that she has to have it. ‘As soon as I start work fully I’m going to start paying insurance contributions. You have to tell the public assistance people so much of your affairs. It’s like charity too.’ She has reduced spending on the meat ration, on clothes, coal and household incidentals. She has stopped her former practice of going to the cinema three or four times a week but refuses to stop going to local football matches (costing her 1s 9d a visit plus fares).
(Woman on short time, two daughters)