A 1960s Childhood: From Thunderbirds to Beatlemania (Childhood Memories)

by Feeney, Paul

  Such teachers had the ability to provide a complete mix of education and to make schoolwork enjoyable. It was usually the same resourceful teacher that taught you how to read, write and do sums who then took you off to the local baths for swimming lessons, arranged needlework and dance classes for the girls and showed them how to play netball, and still found time to teach the boys how to play football and cricket properly. He or she would have been there when you were given your first tambourine, triangle or recorder to play as part of the enthusiastic but shambolic school orchestra. It was that same teacher who made sure that you were word perfect in the school play, organised the school choir and taught you all of those now familiar carols that you sang at the school’s Christmas carol concerts – proving that it really was possible for you to sing and breathe at the same time.

  On cold winter days, your teacher sat at the front of the class and bewitched you with readings from children’s fictional storybooks, or fascinated you with tales of British history; the ancient Egyptian mummies, the Battle of Hastings in 1066, King John and the Magna Carta of 1215. It made you feel warm inside and even though playtime was fast approaching you didn’t want the story to end.

  Your teacher took you on nature walks and taught you how to look after Joey the hamster; showed you how to mould plasticine and cover the moulding with gooey strips of newspaper to make papier mâché models. You were also taught a variety of crafts, from painting pictures and murals to making collages, and even basket weaving. In summer, your teacher would have been there on the school sports day to help prepare you for the sack race, the egg and spoon and wheelbarrow races; in winter, he or she would have been there to encourage you on those awful muddy cross-country runs.

  Why was it that you were always dragged out on the coldest and wettest winter’s day to do a cross-country run? And it always seemed to be cold and wet on the days you went to the swimming baths as well. Everyone was always shivering in those poolside changing huts, or cupboards more like!

  At Christmas time, having decorated the classroom and organised the school Christmas party, where you were taught how to play party games like pass the parcel, musical chairs and blind man’s buff, it was your class teacher who would bring in some of the latest pop records from home for you to sing and dance to.

  A selection from the 1960s Ladybird Key Words series of books for young children.

  Did you think I would leave you crying

  When there’s room on my horse for two

  Climb up here Jack and don’t be crying

  I can go just as fast with two

  When we grow up we’ll both be soldiers

  And our horses will not be toys

  And I wonder if we’ll remember

  When we were two little boys.

  (Words by Edward Madden, 1902)

  Rolf Harris’s version of Two Little Boys reached number one in the UK record charts in November 1969.

  From playing with small beanbags in the school hall to your first game of rounders in the playground, and even dressing up for a part in the Christmas nativity play, your primary school teacher showed you how to do it all – And still managed to teach you ‘the three Rs’!

  You will surely still have many memories of your time at primary school; remember queuing up in just your vest and pants to see the school doctor and the nit nurse? The playtime bell, the school tuck shop, the five-bob a week school dinner money, free school milk in those strange third-of-a-pint glass bottles, girls swapping beads they kept in tobacco tins and boys swapping cigarette cards; girls in miniskirts having dancing lessons and boys in tight-fitting shorts playing five-a-side football; the smell of coal dust in the school boiler room, looking at an eclipse of the sun through a photographic negative, walking home on dark winter evenings and struggling to get to school during the big freeze of 1963. And then there was the storeroom where the school caretaker kept all the old broken desks and chairs – why were they never thrown out?

  Eleven-Plus Exam

  Everything you learned at primary school was in preparation for the eleven-plus exams, which you took soon after your eleventh birthday. You were used to being given a set of sums to calculate, or a composition to write for English, but you had never before experienced such an examination. Your parents and teachers drummed into you the importance of the exam, and everyone got very nervous about it. The original purpose of the eleven-plus exam was for the authorities to use the results to place children into secondary schools that best suited their abilities, so their talents could be suitably developed for use in their future careers. Unfortunately, however well-intended the original plans were, the results of the eleven-plus examinations simply became a matter of passing or failing. This was a life-changing event for which you had sole responsibility, and sadly, the result could only go one of two ways – ‘pass’ and you were an academic success and going on to grammar school, or ‘fail’ and you were going to a secondary modern with every chance of leaving school at the age of 15 with little or no qualifications, unless you went on to college. Many kids had no real understanding of what the differences were between grammar and secondary modern schools. They were happy if they could go to the same school as their classmates and older siblings, preferably near to where they lived.

  On the morning of the exam, there was an air of importance and secrecy that you had never known before. You were told not to talk to anyone, pass messages or to look around at all until the examinations were over. That bit was easy because such restrictions were just part of the standard rules in any 1960s classroom, particularly when you did tests. However, you had never previously been given such a comprehensive test, and it had never before been so important for you to write neatly and get the answers right. The question papers were placed upside down on your desk in front of you and at the appointed hour, when the papers had all been distributed, you were told to turn them over and begin.

  The exam was in three parts: arithmetic and problem solving, general English (including comprehension and an essay) and general knowledge. In the later 1960s, in an attempt to make the exam fairer, more emphasis was put on general knowledge questions. Try these two early eleven-plus exam questions:

  Q1. Subtract two-thirds of 834 from 23 times 185.

  Q2. Seven piles of bricks are placed side by side so that their tops form steps one brick high. If the lowest pile contains nine bricks, how many bricks are being used altogether?

  Remember this was for 11-year-olds, there were no calculators and you had to show all your workings-out on the paper, including crossings-out. It was before decimalisation and so questions to do with money were shown and calculated in the old pounds, shillings and pence (£ s d), and children were mainly taught to use fractions rather than decimals when doing calculations.

  A1. 3,699

  A2. 84 bricks

  Whether through exam nerves, borderline test results or something else, there is no doubt that failure was not restricted to the less brainy candidates. Many clever kids also failed the eleven-plus exam and found themselves shipped into what were often poor performing secondary modern schools. Such children seeking an academic future then frequently found that they had a mountain to climb in order to achieve their ambitions.

  Once the emotions of results day had calmed down, there was then the overwhelming realisation that friends were going to be split up and sent to different schools. Some that lived a distance apart might never see each other again. It broke up many long-term friendships, and in working-class areas the grammar school kids would often find themselves ostracised and branded as snobs by their old mates, who believed that they no longer had anything in common. Passing the eleven-plus did not in itself guarantee entry to secondary school, as all grammar schools and some secondary modern schools required applicants to attend selection interviews from which the school would pick the best of the bunch. The school interview was the second biggest life-changing occurrence in your young life over which you had influence. It would determine wheth
er or not you were to go to your school of choice.

  School Friend was just one of the many schoolgirl annuals that would be regularly swapped between schoolmates.

  Secondary School

  Whatever school you ended up in, you then had to come to terms with being one of the new kids – what a turn of events! After all, you had come from the comfortable and familiar surroundings of your primary school, which, after some seven years, had earned you position and respect as one of the ‘top dogs’ in the playground, and all of a sudden you find yourself relegated to the bottom of a new ladder, being among the smallest, weakest and dumbest in this strange and unfamiliar place. The whole ethos was different. You were now surrounded by huge spotty youths with attitude, whose main occupation during break times was to stand around in groups talking. Not only did you need to learn and adjust to the new school’s rules, but you also had to quickly familiarise yourself with the unwritten rules of the playground, such as the unmarked areas that, over time, had become reserved territory for certain groups of older students. There was also a pecking order for inheriting a particular area of playground when its previous occupiers were promoted to a better patch or left the school altogether. There was even a league for ‘best patch in the playground’, often where there was something to lean against, like a fence or a wall, and preferably out of sight of any teachers monitoring the playground. Many older schools still had outside toilet blocks and these were often used as hideaways for smokers rather than for their proper purpose. Teachers and prefects would regularly raid the toilet blocks to catch pupils smoking, and so innocent non-smokers would avoid going there in case they were wrongly caught up in a ‘smokers raid’. Unfortunately, judgements were often swift and there was no appeal – if in doubt, guilty! As a new and young first former, you were seen as an obvious target for general bullying and there were the usual initiation ceremonies to endure, like pushing your head down the toilet pan and flushing the cistern, and making you stand on a piping hot radiator in bare feet. Of course, not every school was like that; many kids went right through their schooldays and never came across any form of physical punishment or bullying. Every school was different, but the way that each school was run didn’t necessarily relate to how rough a school was; many of the best academic schools had some of the strictest rules and the harshest teachers. Whatever welcome you got at your new secondary school, you will have experienced an anxious settling-in period, but within days you would have regained your confidence and begun to feel much older and more distant from your primary school days. The childish games of old were soon erased from your mind as you adjusted to learning mathematics instead of ‘sums’, foreign languages and all those new specialist subjects like physics, chemistry, economics and Latin. There was an awful lot to take in, and some even had to deal with the disappointment of being placed in a singlesex school. And then there was all the homework!

  The method of learning was so different back then – everything came out of books. This was at a time when the word ‘computer’ wasn’t yet used in everyday language and even commercial computers, which were the size of a room, were quite new. Knowledge was gathered from schoolbooks and library reference books. There was no such thing as ‘copy and paste’ from web pages downloaded from the Internet. Even handheld pocket calculators hadn’t yet been invented, and all mathematical calculations were done using pen and paper with just the aid of your brain. From a very young age you were taught your times tables and were constantly tested on your ability to recite them and answer on-the-spot questions. Maths teachers would randomly point at individuals around the class and fire questions at them – Nine eights? Twelve sevens? Eleven fours?

  Enid Blyton’s St Clare’s series of books was always popular reading for young girls.

  At school you did loads of physical education and sports, with hard-working PE sessions two or three days a week, and typically there would be a weekly games afternoon for competition sports like football, rugby, cricket, rounders, tennis, hockey, netball and athletics. There was also extra training after school, and school league competitions were held on Saturdays. Just to be sure that you used up every spare ounce of energy, some schools even taught and competed in additional sports like boxing, judo and weightlifting.

  Everything was so different at secondary school; with your new friends and a much heavier workload, you just didn’t have time to look back at your primary school days. You were gradually leaving your childhood behind and moving ever closer to becoming a moody teenager.

  School Uniform

  Most kids growing up in the ultra trendy sixties hated having to wear a school uniform. It was considered very ‘uncool’ to be seen wearing your uniform outside school. It was even worse for those with brightly coloured blazers and embarrassing hats. This was the first generation of pre-teenage schoolchildren to get bitten by the fashion bug, wanting to be as trendy as only older teenagers had been before. Young boys and girls began ditching their old traditional leather satchels in favour of large holdall bags, big enough for them to stuff their blazer and tie into as soon as they were far enough away from the school gates. Kids that had a long journey home would even pull on a fashionable casual top to cover up their regulation school shirt or blouse – anything to make them look more stylish and older than they really were. But even the super-cool action of puffing on a cigarette didn’t convince anyone; the regulation ‘fish box’ school shoes were always a dead giveaway. With all the other stuff that was crammed into their school bags, there was barely enough room left to accommodate the latest New Musical Express newspaper, let alone a huge pair of ‘fish box’ shoes. Then there was the risk of getting caught travelling home without proper school uniform, which could mean a severe punishment at school the next day and the possibility of a letter being sent to your parents.

  School Photo

  Why was it that so many individual school photos looked so awful? Why were they always taken when your hair looked at its worse, all greasy and matted, and on the very day that an enormous red carbuncle had sprouted from the side of your nose? And why didn’t they tell you that the knot of your school tie had slipped sideways and was halfway under your collar? To make matters worse, for the first time ever, the school had arranged for the photographs to be taken using Kodachrome colour film, and so you would get a brilliantly clear colour image of the mountainous range of red spots and yellow heads emblazoned across your forehead. And your proud mum has already said that she wants a large size print to go in a frame on the mantelpiece! As well as the individual school photos, many secondary schools had a professional photograph taken of the whole school each year using a rotating panoramic camera that slowly panned around the assembled group of students and teachers. There were always stories of someone posing for the photograph at one end and then running around the back to get into the photo again at the other end, but many such claims were myths. Although someone would always say they were going to do it, or brag that they had done it, there was rarely any evidence of it actually being done. With the long group photograph, even though you were tightly wedged between hundreds of other students and you occupied a very small part of the overall picture, you were still convinced that your spotty forehead would shine out like a beacon.

  Discipline

  There was a firm code of discipline in all schools, but each school was left to decide what type of punishment would be given to a child that broke any of its rules. This meant that there was an enormous disparity in the severity of punishments dished out at different schools, particularly for boys. At some schools, a boy might be made to pick up litter in the playground as a punishment for poor schoolwork or wrongdoing, but many preferred to use physical punishment, which was still legal back then. There was unlikely to be any litter in the playground at any all-boys school where physical punishment was practised because the boys wouldn’t dare create it in the first place, for fear of a caning.

  In primary schools, it was quite common for a teacher to slap a ch
ild across the back of the legs or hit them on the hand with a wooden ruler for misbehaving. The cane, slipper or tawse (in Scotland) was used in primary schools, but they were usually reserved for the older boys. You did hear stories of girls being caned or slapped with a slipper, but most beatings (corporal punishment) were inflicted on boys of secondary school age, and while the fear of a caning did keep unruly boys in check, a number of cruel and cowardly teachers undeniably relished the task of inflicting pain on small boys. Some all-boys secondary schools, particularly grammar and public schools, had a designated ‘punishment room’ where boys would be sent to be caned at lunchtimes or after school, and in typically British fashion, boys would form an orderly queue outside the door to wait their turn. The head or deputy head teacher would sometimes perform the wicked deed, but quite often another more willing teacher would be given the task and put in charge of the ‘punishment room’. Surprisingly, the authorities never questioned the motives of these eager participants, but the boys did. Schools were supposed to keep records of any corporal punishment they dished out in what were called ‘punishment books’, but the rule was not adhered to because punishments would often be meted out on the spur of the moment in the classroom, and sometimes at random, with the teacher not knowing who was being beaten, or even losing count of the number of strokes being landed on target. Clouts across the back of the head for not paying attention were commonplace and there was an unending supply of chalk, blackboard dusters and other missiles thrown across the classroom as instant recognition of someone’s misbehaviour.