charlie2all
From my time in 1947-56.....There are a few staff or fellow pupils that I remember with really positive respect and/or pleasure. Staff - Mr. Kershaw and R.O.Watson were prepared to treat a wimpish outsider as a human being and to be positive and helpful. I also remember Fred Hill for his willingness to leaven maths with humour. He escaped to Stand Grammar School, probably for promotion, and judging from their old boys website he was even more popular there. Among the pupils, Alec Singleton in my year (sadly no longer with us), Richard Fletcher in the year above, and eventually Michael Murgatroyd in my year are remembered as well-disposed.
My time at BGS was not a happy one though. In my earliest days I was a friendly little boy but obviously I must have been rewardingly sensitive to tease. So some fellow pupils became persistent in teasing and tormenting my early days into withdrawn misery from Transitus form to the Upper Third particularly. Much of this was after school, going home, for some reason. My performance in class went right down. I never entirely shook off the effects of this, although the worst passed by the time of the Fourth form.
In those far-off days, when the concept of pastoral care was basically unknown, staff simply saw those who they deemed underperformers as useless slackers, to be given a hard time at the least, and if possible punished. It wasn’t helped by the fact that I had won a Kay Scholarship in the better earlier days. Asquith in English was my prime bete-noir in this respect (with Mr. Carter a distant runner-up). Even my parents thought Asquith had a “down” on me! On one occasion I was sentenced to Saturday morning detention, by him as I remember.....and no-one bothered to tell me subsequently that detention period had been moved to another date so I turned up needlessly.
I remember the headmasters with distaste though they did not have personal animosity. My first, “Pots”, i.e. Mr. Chambers was obsessed with classics and being supposedly bright I was condemned to Latin and Greek, which were definitely not “me”. (Much later I found that my father had also thought it a good thing that I should be subjected to the classics even though he realized that I would be much more drawn to science). I failed both these subjects at O-level. I only escaped to the science side in the 6th form. I did re-take Latin but some nincompoop of a staff member who handled the entries managed to put me down for the wrong Latin - he entered me for a paper on Latin Mythology instead of Latin translation etc.! This was only discovered at the actual exam. - could I attempt the paper, I was asked. It just so happened that I did know something of the subject and I passed. I realise now it would have been better if I had failed as the teacher concerned and the school would have had some serious explaining to do.
My second head, Mr. Senior, even managed to convey to the assembly at his first Speech Day that he considered BGS as something of a come-down after his previous school. On one occasion I believe he recommended someone to apply to a particular Oxbridge college - which turned out not to exist! The aforementioned Michael Murgatroyd coined the name “Old Thrombo” for him - for a “A bloody clot in the system”. It is widely accepted (according to Dr Geoffrey Wandesforde-Smith, leaver year 1962) that under the headmasterships of J.R.M. Senior and C.L. Hall, Bury Grammar School went through trying times in the 1950s. Certainly no surprise with Senior at the helm!
Another person, looking back, must have had some hold on the school for it to keep him employed. That was Col. Turner, gym and swimming teacher and C.O. of the Cadet Force in my earlier days. In the gym he did have boys doing some desultory and undemanding activities, admittedly, but in the swimming periods he almost invariably just let us splash around and play at trying to swim, or not. It is my strong suspicion that he was really employed for his ex-army rank to command the Cadet Force, and was just given carte blanche to amuse himself with gym and swimming.
Mr. Grundy, woodwork, has been mentioned in a positive light by a couple of contributors. Well, I have different memories. I was absent sick for my few woodwork lessons and when I turned up he gave me a drawing and some wood, and I started on shaping the wood. At the end of term we had an exam - and he asked us to “describe how you would make a spade-cleaner”. I had no idea and gave in a blank paper. Later I found that the wood-shaping exercise I had been doing was - you’ve guessed it - making a spade-cleaner. But he hadn’t bothered to tell me at the time that I was making a specific item. The other boys in the form, incidentally, treated Grundy rather like an unexploded bomb. If you trod very warily in its vicinity you would be all right. He was repute to have a habit which I can only describe as dangerous – that if he spotted someone misusing a chisel he would just come up behind and give the unsuspecting boy a clip round the ear. It obviously didn’t bother him that a mishap might result. Rod Lomax’s piece “What a good shot he was” also shows this attitude of Grundy’s.
I see that Mr. James, music, is mentioned in a couple of other letters. Yes, he was quite popular with the boys from the beginning, so much so that there was something of a mutiny when there was a rumour that the higher authorities in the school were trying to get rid of him. This even made the pages of the Telegraph, I believe. Mr. James stayed......
Classics teachers could be interesting. I remember Mr. Shaw teaching the odd lesson with fly-buttons undone. As for Mr. Voss, my strongest recollection is the way he travelled to and from school on those old Manchester-Bury electric trains. For much of the time I remember he travelled in solitary splendour in the first-class accommodation! I presume that the other masters who commuted by train were deemed Inferior Beings. I don’t remember much of his lessons as I totally gave up on Greek and often passed the time with a magnifying glass. I used it to watch the minute hand of my watch slowly crawl round.
School dinners…..these were terrible. Particularly memorable were the thin hard Twiglet-like sausages, and the tinned apple dessert that tasted as much of the tin as the apple. Some time in my upper third years my mother couldn’t help noticing that I ate like a starving horse when I came home in the afternoon and realised I just wasn’t eating much at school dinner. So I was made to go home for lunch thereafter. At a later stage, when my mother was not well, my parents still remembered my reaction to school dinners and I was kept away from them - given money to use in the café of the nearby cinema instead.
The last idiosyncrasy I remember was my time in the 6th form when I commuted to the school on a bike or the train. In the 6th form we were allowed to use the main entrance just over the bike shed (rather than the rear entrance). I learned that entering there, if I timed the bike ride just right, or caught the train which arrived too late for normal school time, I could miss the supposedly compulsory assembly entirely and just meld with the boys coming out of it at the end. I was never reproved for this - surely some master noticed, or were they that thick? Or just didn’t really care? It did reinforce in me the value of ignoring useless regulations, anyway…..I had actually been introduced to this concept in the Lower Third many years before by Michael Kiernan when he came up with the idea of escaping way out of bounds during lunch time and we went off to the banks of the Irwell (phew!), the mill his mother worked at, the Temperance Bar, a local scrapyard, and the railway bridges for a few instances. Oddly enough there was a momentous railway sighting while we were totally within bounds on the playing field one lunch time! The very last LNWR Claughton, 6004, still in faded maroon LMS livery, came clanking by pulling a humble goods train in the very last months of its life in 1948. Amazingly, looking back, Kiernan actually knew what it was. I had no idea and had to look it up later.
“Charlie” Charlton
My time at BGS was not a happy one though. In my earliest days I was a friendly little boy but obviously I must have been rewardingly sensitive to tease. So some fellow pupils became persistent in teasing and tormenting my early days into withdrawn misery from Transitus form to the Upper Third particularly. Much of this was after school, going home, for some reason. My performance in class went right down. I never entirely shook off the effects of this, although the worst passed by the time of the Fourth form.
In those far-off days, when the concept of pastoral care was basically unknown, staff simply saw those who they deemed underperformers as useless slackers, to be given a hard time at the least, and if possible punished. It wasn’t helped by the fact that I had won a Kay Scholarship in the better earlier days. Asquith in English was my prime bete-noir in this respect (with Mr. Carter a distant runner-up). Even my parents thought Asquith had a “down” on me! On one occasion I was sentenced to Saturday morning detention, by him as I remember.....and no-one bothered to tell me subsequently that detention period had been moved to another date so I turned up needlessly.
I remember the headmasters with distaste though they did not have personal animosity. My first, “Pots”, i.e. Mr. Chambers was obsessed with classics and being supposedly bright I was condemned to Latin and Greek, which were definitely not “me”. (Much later I found that my father had also thought it a good thing that I should be subjected to the classics even though he realized that I would be much more drawn to science). I failed both these subjects at O-level. I only escaped to the science side in the 6th form. I did re-take Latin but some nincompoop of a staff member who handled the entries managed to put me down for the wrong Latin - he entered me for a paper on Latin Mythology instead of Latin translation etc.! This was only discovered at the actual exam. - could I attempt the paper, I was asked. It just so happened that I did know something of the subject and I passed. I realise now it would have been better if I had failed as the teacher concerned and the school would have had some serious explaining to do.
My second head, Mr. Senior, even managed to convey to the assembly at his first Speech Day that he considered BGS as something of a come-down after his previous school. On one occasion I believe he recommended someone to apply to a particular Oxbridge college - which turned out not to exist! The aforementioned Michael Murgatroyd coined the name “Old Thrombo” for him - for a “A bloody clot in the system”. It is widely accepted (according to Dr Geoffrey Wandesforde-Smith, leaver year 1962) that under the headmasterships of J.R.M. Senior and C.L. Hall, Bury Grammar School went through trying times in the 1950s. Certainly no surprise with Senior at the helm!
Another person, looking back, must have had some hold on the school for it to keep him employed. That was Col. Turner, gym and swimming teacher and C.O. of the Cadet Force in my earlier days. In the gym he did have boys doing some desultory and undemanding activities, admittedly, but in the swimming periods he almost invariably just let us splash around and play at trying to swim, or not. It is my strong suspicion that he was really employed for his ex-army rank to command the Cadet Force, and was just given carte blanche to amuse himself with gym and swimming.
Mr. Grundy, woodwork, has been mentioned in a positive light by a couple of contributors. Well, I have different memories. I was absent sick for my few woodwork lessons and when I turned up he gave me a drawing and some wood, and I started on shaping the wood. At the end of term we had an exam - and he asked us to “describe how you would make a spade-cleaner”. I had no idea and gave in a blank paper. Later I found that the wood-shaping exercise I had been doing was - you’ve guessed it - making a spade-cleaner. But he hadn’t bothered to tell me at the time that I was making a specific item. The other boys in the form, incidentally, treated Grundy rather like an unexploded bomb. If you trod very warily in its vicinity you would be all right. He was repute to have a habit which I can only describe as dangerous – that if he spotted someone misusing a chisel he would just come up behind and give the unsuspecting boy a clip round the ear. It obviously didn’t bother him that a mishap might result. Rod Lomax’s piece “What a good shot he was” also shows this attitude of Grundy’s.
I see that Mr. James, music, is mentioned in a couple of other letters. Yes, he was quite popular with the boys from the beginning, so much so that there was something of a mutiny when there was a rumour that the higher authorities in the school were trying to get rid of him. This even made the pages of the Telegraph, I believe. Mr. James stayed......
Classics teachers could be interesting. I remember Mr. Shaw teaching the odd lesson with fly-buttons undone. As for Mr. Voss, my strongest recollection is the way he travelled to and from school on those old Manchester-Bury electric trains. For much of the time I remember he travelled in solitary splendour in the first-class accommodation! I presume that the other masters who commuted by train were deemed Inferior Beings. I don’t remember much of his lessons as I totally gave up on Greek and often passed the time with a magnifying glass. I used it to watch the minute hand of my watch slowly crawl round.
School dinners…..these were terrible. Particularly memorable were the thin hard Twiglet-like sausages, and the tinned apple dessert that tasted as much of the tin as the apple. Some time in my upper third years my mother couldn’t help noticing that I ate like a starving horse when I came home in the afternoon and realised I just wasn’t eating much at school dinner. So I was made to go home for lunch thereafter. At a later stage, when my mother was not well, my parents still remembered my reaction to school dinners and I was kept away from them - given money to use in the café of the nearby cinema instead.
The last idiosyncrasy I remember was my time in the 6th form when I commuted to the school on a bike or the train. In the 6th form we were allowed to use the main entrance just over the bike shed (rather than the rear entrance). I learned that entering there, if I timed the bike ride just right, or caught the train which arrived too late for normal school time, I could miss the supposedly compulsory assembly entirely and just meld with the boys coming out of it at the end. I was never reproved for this - surely some master noticed, or were they that thick? Or just didn’t really care? It did reinforce in me the value of ignoring useless regulations, anyway…..I had actually been introduced to this concept in the Lower Third many years before by Michael Kiernan when he came up with the idea of escaping way out of bounds during lunch time and we went off to the banks of the Irwell (phew!), the mill his mother worked at, the Temperance Bar, a local scrapyard, and the railway bridges for a few instances. Oddly enough there was a momentous railway sighting while we were totally within bounds on the playing field one lunch time! The very last LNWR Claughton, 6004, still in faded maroon LMS livery, came clanking by pulling a humble goods train in the very last months of its life in 1948. Amazingly, looking back, Kiernan actually knew what it was. I had no idea and had to look it up later.
“Charlie” Charlton