The Bishop confirmed me on a bright Sunday at Mass. A photograph of me on the day shows a rather gangly, self-conscious boy of fourteen in a smart suit and white tie, posing outside the church with a parent on either side. I took the confirmation name of Benedict and was presented with a missal, a book of texts used in Catholic Mass, by Mum’s friend Mrs Gill, some black shiny rosary beads by Christine, money by my brothers and a large crimson-covered book illustrated in vivid colour called Stories from the Bible. Some years later, when I was a school inspector travelling round the schools of Yorkshire, I read from this large crimson-coloured volume given to me on the day of my confirmation.
‘This book was given to me when I was a boy by my mother and father,’ I told the children in a school assembly. ‘It is a very special book, full of wonderful stories which were told by a very special man. In the story I am about to read, which is called “The Story of the Lost Sheep”, Jesus tries to help us understand how we should feel about the poor and weak.’
I read the parable and then I explained how such stories taught us all how to lead better lives.
‘And what would you say to Jesus,’ I asked, holding high the red book like some preacher of old, ‘if he were to walk into the hall this morning?’
A boy on the front row thought for a moment, then raised his hand and said loudly, ‘I’d give ’im that book, Mester Phinn, and I’d say, “Jesus Christ – this is your life!” ’
Every third or fourth Saturday morning I went with my sister to Confession at St Bede’s. We would kneel outside the dark wooden wardrobe and wait our turn to tell the priest about our transgressions. ‘Pray Father, give me your blessing for I have sinned. It is three weeks since my last confession.’ I guess the sins of a small boy were tediously familiar to the faceless figure behind the grille. I would tell him the peccadilloes of childhood: I had been bad-tempered, forgotten to say my prayers, shouted at my brothers, not done as I was told – all pretty tame stuff. I sometimes thought of spicing it up a bit with, ‘I’ve had these impure thoughts’, but never dared. Imagine if he asked me to go into details. Father Hammond would be there on the altar the next day staring at me and knowing my innermost secrets. I certainly wasn’t giving too much away. I often wondered what he would say if I said I had pushed an old woman off the bridge or murdered our next-door neighbour, Mrs Evans, while she was hanging out those big blue bloomers on her washing line. I knew he couldn’t tell the police, he was bound by the confidentiality of the confessional. I’d seen it at the Regent Cinema, in an American film where the priest was bound to secrecy.
On one occasion the rectangle of wood that was slotted into a frame on the front of the confessional box, telling would-be penitents which priest was in residence, was different. Instead of announcing that Fr Hammond was at home, it said that Mgr Wheeler was in situ. The woman in the pew in front of my sister and before us in the confessional stakes was clearly unaware, as I was at the time, what the Mgr (Monsignor) stood for. She entered the box and said in a loud voice, ‘Bless me Mugger for I have sinned. It is four weeks since my last confession.’ The priest, I discovered later when he emerged stony-faced from the confessional, was an ancient Irishman with little outcrops of wispy white hair. He clearly was not prepared to have a list of bland, venial sins rattled off, for him to dispense the predictable penance of, ‘Say one Our Father and three Hail Marys.’ He asked her to slow down, speak up and provide more details. Those waiting in the queue were entertained by a most colourful and detailed description of the woman’s marital situation, how her over-demanding spouse would arrive home the worse for drink, expect his ‘conjungal rights’ and not leave her alone. She continued to tell the priest that she had six children and couldn’t cope with any more. We all waited in excited anticipation for the priest’s judgement, straining our ears. My sister still relates the story in vivid detail and how, all the way home, she would burst into fits of giggling but not tell me what was so amusing.
25
At seven I moved up from the Infants, where I had been very happy and made good progress in my work, and into the adjacent building of Broom Valley Junior School. My school reports, which my mother kept in a blue folder, show that I was ‘fairly good’ or ‘good’ in most things and rather better in English. Reading through them now, I get the impression that my teachers saw me as a decent enough boy but one of average intelligence and limited prospects. I am described in tones that strike me as deeply condescending, a way of saying I would not achieve much in life. As can be seen from my final Junior School report, my form teacher’s comments and the headteacher’s observations are far from extensive. Teachers these days, obliged to write detailed assessments of a child’s achievement, effort, progress and conduct which cover a good few pages, must view such an unforthcoming end of school report with a wry humour.
Broom Valley Primary School Rotherham School Report for Gervase Phinn July 25th, 1958 Class 4
Number in Class : 43
SUBJECT Maximum Marks Marks Obtained Comment
ENGLISH:
Reading …… 20 20 Very Good
Composition ….. 20 18 Good
Spelling …… 20 12 Needs care
Language and
Literature …… 20 15 Fair
Comprehension …….. 20 17 Quite Good
ARITHMETIC
Mental …… 20 11 Must try harder
Accuracy ….. 50 44 Good
Problems …… 30 25 Good
HISTORY 20 14 Very interested Disappointing result
GEOGRAPHY 20 17 Very Good
NATURE STUDY
SCIENCE 20 18 Very Good
NEEDLEWORK
CRAFTWORK Fair
MUSIC Fair
ART Fairly Good
PHYSICAL TRAINING AND GAMES Fairly Good
CONDUCT Very Good
PROGRESS Gervase is a steady worker, always trying his best. He shows an interest in all activities.
Head Teacher: ……… J. Leslie Morgan ……….
This is a revealing report, not because it tells you very much about the pupil’s attainment and progress, but because it indicates, in its paucity and restraint, the sort of information parents were likely to receive about their child’s education in the 1950s. It was perhaps thought by the teachers that it was not good for pupils to be too cocksure, so there was no fulsome praise or hearty congratulations. However, I should have thought that the full marks I achieved for English might have merited an ‘excellent’ and the 18 out of 20 for composition a ‘very good’.
The report indicates that I needed to try harder in mental arithmetic. I hated mental arithmetic because I was frightened of the large, craggy-faced teacher in the tweed jacket and shiny black shoes who smelt of tobacco and shouted. He would fire questions around the classroom like a Gatling gun and I would stutter or freeze when he got to me. It wasn’t that the teacher humiliated me or smacked me, as some teachers undoubtedly did in the 1950s, but he failed to inspire me.
Christine, my wife, loved arithmetic at school and the challenge of numbers. Her ‘party piece’ is adding up the prices of the items in the supermarket trolley as fast as the assistant at the till can enter them in the cash register. She then gives the exact money. ‘How do you do that?’ asks the person on the checkout. Richard, my eldest son and an accountant, as one might guess, loves figures and became fascinated with mathematics when his teacher at secondary school, the brilliant Mr Hopley, came into his life. He told them in that very first lesson: ‘I am going to show you the magic of mathematics.’ This enthusiast, with the smiling eyes of the dedicated teacher, generated in his students a real excitement for mathematics. Had I been taught by such a teacher I would undoubtedly have enjoyed the subject, perhaps performed better in the Eleven Plus examination and my life might have taken a completely different course.
I do remember the weekly elocution lesson that took place in the last term of the final year at the Juniors, when it was the teacher’s avowed aim to improve the way we spoke. I have an ide
a that the woman with the thin grey hair scraped savagely over her scalp and the steely grey eyes who appeared in the classroom was some sort of supernumerary brought in for the sole purpose of teaching us to speak ‘properly’ like the BBC announcers. When she spoke, she sounded to me as if she had a hot potato in her mouth or, as the woman in the tripe shop might have said, ‘a plum in her gob’. The idea of getting us to speak ‘properly’ no doubt was well-intentioned, but the poor woman was, of course, on a hiding to nothing. We were Yorkshire children growing up in a world where everyone seemed to drop their aitches and pepper their speech with ‘sithee’ (see thou), ‘’ey up’ (hello), ‘geeore’ (give over), ‘naaden’ (now then), ‘shurrup’ (shut up), ‘thawhat’ (pardon) and ‘gerron’ (get away with you).
Each Monday morning we would chant our sentences, and I have to admit I quite enjoyed the lessons and discovered I had something of a talent for mimicry.
‘We have a nice hice in the country, you know.’
Of course I would never use this affected voice when I was outside the classroom, unless it was in the playground to entertain my peers. That would have meant certain ridicule at best and severe bullying at worst.
Recently I discovered the grey-covered exercise book in which I had copied out the various ‘Speech Exercises’ all those years ago, and smiled at the memory of sitting behind a hard wooden desk chanting the silly sentences and doggerel with forty or so other children.
Gertie Gordon grew a gross of gaudy gay gladioli.
Careful Katy cut and cooked a crisp and crunchy lettuce.
They thought they fought to defend the fort.
It was Harry Harding’s habit to help his uncle in the haberdashers.
Down the path and across the grass,
The little children run,
To see the bird bath by the bower
And the tall trees in the sun.
In the book I have copied down some notes from the blackboard and have added a small drawing. The illustration shows a man in a top hat and another in a flat cap. Between them, like a fence, stands a great capital ‘H’. Underneath is the caption: ‘When is an H not an H?’ The notes that follow explain how important it is not to ‘drop the aitch in speech.’
H is what we call the aspirate or breath sound and is often left out where it ought to be put in and put in where it is not supposed to be there. The H in the sounding of a word separates the well-educated from the less educated. Anyone who hopes to speak correctly must know when and when not to use it.
Then there were exercises to practise:
Henry Hall hops on his heels.
What an odd habit.
How horrid it feels.
Hopping on his heels
Is not hopping at all,
So why not hop properly, Henry Hall?
Harry went to Hampstead,
Harry lost his hat,
Harry’s mother said to Harry,
‘Harry, where’s your hat?’
Harry said he’d lost it.
It wasn’t true at all.
For Harry’s hat was hanging
On the hatstand in the hall.
He hit him on his head
With a hard and heavy hammer
And it made him howl horribly.
I can just imagine the children of Rotherham practising their aspirates on their way home.
I was once told a story by a former headteacher that when he was a child living in Huddersfield there was the feared visit of the school inspector. He was a stickler for ‘correct English’ was this dark-suited, sour-faced individual from the Ministry of Education in London, and was dismayed to find that the children spoke in a strong regional accent. Having watched a lesson, the inspector observed that the young pupils were deficient in their speech and that the teacher must try to eradicate the use of dialect. He had noted, for example, that many of the children used the word ‘putten’ instead of ‘put’: ‘I’ve putten it down’ instead of ‘I have put it down.’ He suggested that remedial work was needed in this area. The teacher complied, and when the inspector made a return visit some weeks later assured him that the offending ‘putten’ had been eliminated from the children’s vocabulary. To demonstrate this the teacher wrote on the blackboard the sentence: ‘I’ve putten the apple on the desk.’
‘Now children,’ he said, facing the class, ‘what is wrong with the sentence on the blackboard?’
One bright spark raised a hand and replied: ‘Tha’s gone and putten putten when tha should have putten put.’
Alban, a friend of mine who farms near Whitby, when a child, once asked his father which was the correct pronunciation of ‘either’. Was it pronounced ‘eether’ or ‘eyether?’ His father replied, ‘Owther’ll do.’
The former school inspector Leonard Clarke described a visit to a Yorkshire School in the 1950s. The headteacher asked him if he wanted to hear the children sing and the inspector soon found himself in the school hall where the senior choir were assembled to perform for him. He enquired of the music teacher what the children were going to sing.
‘ “Wetherby Socks”,’ replied the teacher, a large, bluff Yorkshireman.
‘I don’t know that particular tune,’ said the inspector. ‘Is it a local folk song?’
‘Nay,’ replied the teacher, looking at him as if he were not quite right in the head, ‘it’s very famous. ’Asn’t thy ’eard of it?’
‘I can’t say I have,’ replied the inspector.
The music teacher turned to the choir, which then gave an enthusiastic rendering of ‘Where the Bee Sucks’.
In the aftermath of the Second World War a high proportion of children had school dinners but our response to them was not one of gratitude. School dinners at Broom Valley Juniors were dire: thin cuts of pale meat with thick rims of white fat and pieces of gristle, lumpy gravy, lukewarm mashed potatoes, over-boiled carrots, watery cabbage, to be followed by insipid semolina, tapioca (frogspawn) or rice pudding with a splodge of raspberry jam in the middle. Sometimes dessert would be a rock-hard chocolate sponge square covered in sickly pink custard. In the playground, out of the teachers’ hearing, of course, we would chant:
Splishy, splashy custard,
Dead dogs’ eyes,
All mixed together with giblet pies.
See it on the dinner plate, nice and thick,
And swallow it down with a bucketful of sick.
In those days there were no salads, fresh fruit, yoghurts or squeezed orange juice on the menu at school, just the same old fare served from large shiny tin containers by a dinner lady who, if we complained, told us we should think ourselves lucky because there were people starving in Africa who would be glad of it.
I recall one of my friends saying sotto voce that ‘the Africans were welcome to it’, and he was sent to Mr Morgan and had to stand outside the headteacher’s room all dinner time for being ungrateful.
One memory of the Junior school was being forced to sit through school lunch while the lumpy gravy and fried parsnips slowly congealed on my plate.
‘Come along,’ said the dinner lady sharply, standing over me with her arms folded underneath her bosom. ‘Get it eaten or you’ll be sent to Mr Morgan.’
I thought of a wonderful ruse. ‘I’m a Catholic,’ I told her.
‘What?’
‘It’s against my religion to eat parsnips on a Holy Day of Obligation. It’s like not eating meat on Fridays.’
The plate was cleared away, much to my satisfaction. I decided that this would be one lie I would not be admitting next time I went to Confession.
I got my first real glimpse of a world of unimaginable privilege when, as a child of ten in 1956, I came upon Wentworth House. Our class of forty plus pupils was bussed out one bright sunny Monday morning from Broom Valley Juniors to Wentworth Woodhouse, a village twixt Rotherham and Barnsley, so that the female students training there to be P.E. mistresses could ‘practise on us’.
Wentworth House was once the palatial residence o
f the Earls Fitzwilliam. Built in the 1720s for Thomas Wentworth, later Marquess of Rockingham, this vast, imposing stately home, with its 600-foot-long Palladian east front, the largest façade of any building in Europe, with its five miles of passageways and a room for every day of the year, took over sixteen years to complete. The surrounding park had upwards of 1,500 acres of vast lawns and majestic woods, ornamented by temples, columns and picturesque water features. After a colourful catalogue of family indiscretions, endless arguments, forbidden loves, contentious court cases, feuds and financial setbacks, the residence became a white elephant, too big and expensive to manage.
The redoubtable Lady Mabel Smith, sister of the sixth Earl Fitzwilliam, with the keen social conscience of the more liberally minded aristocrat, suggested turning Wentworth into a school, and in 1947 she used her not inconsiderable eloquence and influence to get the West Riding County Council to take on the house on a fifty-year lease.
This historic mansion subsequently became a training college for female P.E. teachers and was named the Lady Mabel College in her honour. In 1979, when the maintenance costs proved too prohibitive, the college closed, and nine years later Lady Elizabeth Hastings, the tenth Earl’s granddaughter and beneficiary, put the house up for sale. Today the vast building stands in its lonely acres, stark and shuttered, the home of a recluse, its great iron gates closed to the public.
So in 1956 I got my first sighting of Wentworth. I had read about such buildings in the history books but had never seen such an immense edifice. I recall climbing down from the bus in my P.E. kit of white vest and black shorts and plimsolls (which we called pumps), to see what looked like a huge cardboard cut-out. It was breathtaking. I marvelled at the great stone pillars, ornate pediments, porticos and domed pavilions (although I had no idea what these were called at the time), and the many hundreds of windows. Of course, we small urchins were not allowed to ascend the flight of steep stone steps and enter into this palace. We were lined up on the lawns to the front of the house ready to be ‘practised on’.
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