Family Britain, 1951-1957 (65 page)

The Last Night of the Proms on the 18th – four days after the Third Programme’s live broadcast from Venice of Benjamin Britten’s new opera
The Turn of the Screw
, with David Hemmings as Miles – as usual signalled the end of summer. The second half saw two traditions instantly created: live television coverage (introduced by Alvar Lidell) and a running order of ‘Land of Hope and Glory’, the ‘Sea Songs’ (in truncated form), ‘Rule Britannia!’ and ‘Jerusalem’. There was nothing contemporary included even in the first half, and Sir Malcolm Sargent in his annual ‘farewell speech’ asked living composers to bear in mind that the great works of art had always sprung from the heart and the affections, adding that ‘if your music be the food of love, play on’, but otherwise ‘shut up’. ‘Flash’ Sargent’s populism was unabashed – ‘if people can get as enthusiastic about music as about football,’ he also remarked, ‘that is all to the good’ – and over the years he would have no problems about the coming of the cameras encouraging the already raucous Promenaders to, in David Cannadine’s words, ‘wear ever more outlandish clothes, and to bring their union flags and streamers and bunting and umbrellas and funny hats’.
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But Melchester Rovers, in the end, always had the numbers.

On 15 September 1954, having passed his eleven-plus, Mike (as he still was) Jagger had his first day at Dartford Grammar School – and started to drift apart from his old schoolfriend, the much less middle-class Keith Richards, who went to the technical school in ill-favoured north Dartford. Not so far away that same week, between Blackheath and Eltham, there opened London’s first purpose-built comprehensive, Kidbrooke School. In a sense it was not yet truly a comprehensive – a mixture of ministerial and parental pressure had prevented it from incorporating Eltham Hill School, a girls’ grammar – but both physically and symbolically it made a considerable impact.

Kidbrooke ‘is a huge triangle of buildings of brick and glass and cedar-wood, with a low copper-covered hall in the middle of it, big enough to hold all two thousand girls at prayers every morning’, wrote Anthony Sampson some years later. ‘Inside there are rows of glassy, brightly painted classrooms, including a room of typing girls, a room of dressmakers, a row of model kitchens, a pottery, a model flat, laboratories, libraries and three gymnasia. It certainly has some of the appearance of mass-production . . .’ At the time, the
News Chronicle
called it ‘Britain’s new palace of educational varieties, a blaze of colour – crimson, yellow and blue’, while there was much focus on the headmistress, the tall, firm, humane Mary Green, who had run a grammar school in Bristol until becoming disenchanted by the arbitrary finality of the eleven-plus selection system. ‘Each “stream” will follow the same syllabus,’ she told the sceptical but not unfriendly local paper before the gates opened for the first time, reassuringly adding that ‘how much of any course each group takes and the way in which it is interpreted will depend on the girls’ aptitude and ability’. Moreover, the first year’s 15 forms would each be ‘of roughly equal ability’, based on Green’s own assessments and former heads’ reports. On Friday the 17th the Bishop of Woolwich held a service in the vast hall to launch Kidbrooke. Not once during his address, according to the local paper’s mole, did he mention the school itself, but instead ‘he urged the girls to build their lives on sound Christian principles and to pay attention to spiritual matters’.
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Even before Kidbrooke (starting at the same time as the first comprehensives in Bristol and Coventry), the debate was gathering momentum. ‘The battle for the survival of the grammar school is, in its implications, the most crucial political struggle that modern Britain has known,’ declared the historian Max Beloff in June at the end of an
Encounter
article arguing that ‘British democracy has been as successful as it has, largely because it has succeeded in being so undemocratic’, and stressing the dangers of egalitarianism to the survival of this uniquely effective formula. On the whole, though, the wind was starting by 1954 to blow the other way. In August an article in
Education
highlighted the parental predicament that summer in Nottingham, where 447 grammar places had been available, competed for by 2,716 out of the more than 4,400 children coming up for secondary school. Other telling signs were the Central Advisory Council for Education’s
Early Leaving
report, revealing the relatively poor academic performance – and high drop-out rate – among working-class children at grammars; P. E. Vernon in the
TES
publishing work that threw further doubt on the reliability of intelligence testing; and the academic impact of David Glass’s
Social Mobility in Britain
collection, finding a generally low level of mobility, with the young sociologist A. H. Halsey concluding that ‘the comprehensive school would provide an educational environment which, while catering for the variety of education needed in a technological society, might contribute also towards a greater social unity’. Most striking of all was a
Picture Post
article (‘A Hope for
Every
Child – Comprehensive Schools’) in December, in which Trevor Philpott went to inspect the Anglesey experience (going back to 1949) and concluded that it was the way ahead, the only alternative to a system in which children were ‘robbed savagely’ of their ‘opportunities’ before their 12th birthday. Earlier in the year, however, there had been an instructive Scottish experience for the Labour politician Richard Crossman. ‘His little girl Margaret is at Glasgow High School, where she pays £7 a term plus books and uniform in the Junior and will pay much more in the main school,’ he recorded after staying with the ‘keen, hard, absolutely materialistic, loyal, nice, dull’ Chief Convenor of the Albion motor-car works. ‘Blackwood is a Councillor, and I said how did this square with Comprehensive schools? He told me that other Councillors were very angry with him, but his little Margaret was going to have the best.’
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The human aspect of the eleven-plus system was undeniably cruel – and perhaps increasingly so, given its controversial nature. The following summer, a
New Statesman
piece by M. Lehmann described the overwrought girls in a junior school listening to their teacher (Lehmann herself?) read out the names of those who had passed. Bettie’s was not among them:

Bettie, of whom everyone had been so sure, whom her parents had called the brainy one of the family (having apparently little faith in the talents of their other three daughters), Bettie who was one of the best in the form. Bettie did not cry; she produced a smile on her white little face. Then Doris, always such a proud girl, began to sob, and Mary, too, disconsolately, because her parents had had her coached for six months and she knew how much it had cost them. And then Rachel began because her elder sister had managed to pass two years ago . . .

Then teacher said something comforting to the effect that what they had learnt was not wasted, that they would always be able to use it when they were grown-up. But they knew it was not true. Why and how should they ever be asked again to work out in exactly 24 seconds (not one more) how far it is round a square field whose side is three furlongs? And anyhow, now they had to go home, what would their parents think and say, or – most dreaded thing of all – the neighbours? That they were failures. Failures, ten years old, some ‘already’ eleven. And it all happened in the Year of Our Lord 1955.

The social hurt could cut the other way, as Kaye Winterbottom, brought up in Rochdale’s working-class Spotland district, found in 1954 after passing her eleven-plus and winning a place at Bury Grammar School for Girls:

I suddenly found that the children I knew and had been friends with all my life refused to play with me and said I was a snob. I was really upset and thought it was an injustice. A woman who lived nearby knocked at our front door and told my mother she’d come to let her know it was a waste of time sending girls to grammar schools . . . When I went to Bury I found it very difficult to adapt. When I started fighting the other girls just turned away as if in disgust. I found it very difficult to understand them. No one admired me for the things I was good at – fighting, rampaging, being wild. I broke a bottle of calamine lotion over a girl’s head and was threatened with expulsion. I was forever in trouble for one thing or another. They told me I was a disgrace. Girls from Prestwich and Whitefield were from a different culture from girls from Rochdale, and we were the minority.

‘The headmistress called us “gals”,’ she added, ‘and we had to wear a hat at all times. You couldn’t speak to boys wearing it; you couldn’t eat with it on; you couldn’t do anything. Of course, I hated it . . .’

None of which cut much ice with Sir David Eccles, the intelligent, ambitious, arrogant Wykehamist – ‘tall, sleek of head, handsome of visage’, in the historian Correlli Barnett’s words – who in November 1954 replaced the largely ineffectual Florence Horsbrugh as Minister of Education. ‘My colleagues and I,’ he flatly stated at the start of 1955, ‘will never agree to the assassination of the grammar schools.’ That spring, addressing the National Union of Teachers and unveiling the slogan ‘Selection for everybody’, he directly attacked the comprehensive school as an ‘untried and very costly experiment’, suitable only when ‘all the conditions are favourable, and no damage is done to any existing school’, which if strictly adhered to would in practice mean only in new housing estates and perhaps new towns. Later in the year, he was true to his word when he blocked attempts by the local authorities in Manchester and Swansea to open comprehensives. ‘A multilateral school,’ the Swansea delegation vainly told him, ‘was better suited to the needs of the pupils, who out of school did not ordinarily divide themselves into secondary modern and grammar groups. If there was to be a common culture, a common means of communication, it was necessary to plan for a system which did not strengthen and deepen such distinctions.’ Eccles responded by saying that the pro-comprehensive argument was fundamentally made on social, not educational grounds, and that as Minister of Education he would not countenance destroying any of Swansea’s four existing grammar schools. Admittedly he did sanction two comprehensives on Swansea’s new housing estates, but this was a concession only at the margins.
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What about the secondary moderns (educating seven out of every ten children in state secondary schools)? It could have been one of a thousand speech days all over the country when in July 1954 the Mayor of West Hartlepool, Councillor J. W. Miller, sought to soothe the parents at the Golden Flats County Primary School over the disappointment of their children not securing a grammar place:

Some parents think it is the end of the world. Don’t you believe it. I did not gain entry to a grammar school, but I claim that I have made a success of life. A secondary modern school education is as near as possible to that at a grammar school. We cannot all be academically minded or professional people and if your children get a good solid grounding in secondary modern school education they will benefit as much as a grammar school child does.

The following February, the
Economist
offered some hard-headed perspectives on the secondary moderns. ‘At first they had little idea where they were going,’ it reckoned about the immediate post-war years, whereas more recently ‘some of them have been rising in the world’. Specifically, in addition to ‘about one in four’ being ‘now housed in glittering new buildings’, they had found a sense of purpose: ‘For the most part this purpose is frankly vocational. Taking a leaf from the book of the secondary technical schools [of which there were relatively few], a number of modern schools have begun to offer to their older children “biased” courses, in which vocational instruction offers anything up to a third of the teaching time; and traditional subjects, in order to stimulate interest, are linked to vocational study as far as possible.’ As for the more strictly academic aspect, in terms of ‘provision for the average or above-average child’, the paper cautiously endorsed greater exposure of such pupils to public examinations. But whether vocationally or academically, the hard fact remained that ‘only about one in three or four of the modern schools’ were giving their pupils ‘something that they can get their teeth into’.

No one appreciated the need to make up this shortfall more clearly than Eccles, fully aware that, in the context of a growing challenge from the comprehensive model, the Achilles heel of the grammars was the poor reputation of the secondary moderns. ‘To allow 4 out of 5 of our children and their parents to feel that the children who go to the secondary school [ie the secondary modern] start life impoverished in education would be to sow the seed of discontent throughout their lives,’ he reflected in an April 1955 memo, soon afterwards in another memo observing that ‘the disappointment and jealousy felt by parents when their children failed to qualify for a grammar school’ had not only not disappeared, contrary to the hopes after the 1944 Education Act for ‘parity of esteem’ between the different types of school, but that ‘the resentment appears to be growing’. The policy implication was stark: ‘Selection for everybody means developing in each secondary modern school some special attraction and giving parents the widest possible scope.’ Accordingly, as early as July, the Ministry’s Circular 289 conceded that ‘boys and girls do not fall neatly into distinct types’ and that ‘the Minister therefore regards it as essential that no modern school pupil should be deprived of the opportunity of entering for the examination for the General Certificate of Education if his Head thinks that he has the necessary ability and persistence’.
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Could it work? Or, in terms of perceptions – and self-perceptions – was the sheer fact of the eleven-plus simply too divisive to allow the subsequent chasm to be bridged?