The Farmer’s in his den,
The Farmer’s in his den,
E I de addy oh,
The Farmer’s in his den.
We never played these games with Mrs Raymond or Miss Corbett but Friday afternoon was always set aside for play, when we were allowed to bring in a toy from home.
I have two outstanding personal memories of Infants’ School. The first was when HM the Queen and Prince Philip undertook a six-month tour of the Commonwealth, starting in late 1953 after the Coronation. One morning in Assembly with the whole school present, Miss Taylor asked us if we knew where the Queen was at that moment. I was the only child in the whole school to put his hand up. ‘She’s crossing the Tasmanian Sea,’ I said. I think I must have heard this on the wireless before I left for school that morning, but, anyway, it was the correct answer and Miss Taylor was suitably impressed with my general knowledge. (This must have been the start of my quiz career that was to see me defeat C.J. in my head-to-head challenge on BBC TV’s Eggheads in 2007 and win £10,000 on ITV’s Tipping Point in 2013!)
The second was when Miss Taylor was casting for the school’s Christmas play. All I can remember about the play now is that it starred three pixies called Hop, Lol and Gig, who came across a little girl lost in the woods. The first line was spoken by Hop, who said, ‘Hello, little girl.’ I was given the part of Hop because I was the only boy in the school who could pronounce girl as it was written. Everyone else said, ‘’ello, little gel,’ except Bob Marriott, who was keen to show that he had learnt not to say ‘gel’ and said, ‘Hello, little gol,’ instead.
The Junior School was across the road from the Infants’ School and took up the whole block on Chatsworth Road between Rushmore Road and Rushmore Crescent. Whereas the Infants’ School was very straightforward, with all the classrooms being situated off the main hall, the Junior School was a maze of corridors, stairs and rooms that took me the four years I was there to get to know my way round. There were some strange doors that just seemed to lead nowhere and stairs you could see from the outside but couldn’t find on the inside; also a staircase with a door halfway up it, which took you on to an entirely different staircase, leading to the library. Hogwarts could well have been modelled on Rushmore Road Junior School.
My first class was 1A, which was on the ground floor and reached through a tunnel that led off the playground and into a small corridor, off which were three classrooms: one on the left, 4A, and two on the right, 1A and 1B. The hall was also off this corridor to the right, while the dining hall was off to the left. My teacher was Mr Moore. He was quite a pleasant sort, though he did have his off days when no one could do anything right, but these were fortunately quite rare. He was probably in his late twenties, though he seemed very old to me, as did all the teachers. Whereas in the Infants’ School we mainly learnt the three Rs, in the Junior School we now began to learn other subjects such as history, geography and nature study, all of which I found infinitely more interesting than English and arithmetic.
The normal school day was broken into several lessons, all of them, with the exception of music, taken by Mr Moore. We sat in blocks of six, with our desks pushed together. Our desks had a circular hole in the top at the front made for a porcelain inkwell as we were now expected to use pen and ink. We were all issued with a standard pen made up of a yellow wooden shaft with a small nib on the end. There was no ink reservoir, so we had to continually dip the nib into the inkwell, scratch out a few words and dip in again. The first thing we did with these pens was to learn ‘joined-up’ writing.
Classes were streamed by ability and, even within our class, Mr Moore streamed us by putting the top performers together on one table and so on down to the bottom end. The desks were arranged so that the top table was in the back right of the class and the bottom table at the lower left. There were three of us who were always on the top table: my friend Andy Shalders, Margaret Smith and me (the other occupants varied over the course of the four years). The only problem with being on the top table at the back of the class was that from about the age of ten onwards I couldn’t see the blackboard! I didn’t say anything about it as I thought it was normal and that no one else could see it from that distance. However, it was the first sign that I was actually short-sighted. Eventually, at the age of eleven, I started wearing glasses and things improved.
Looking back on it, I am sure that it was here that I first developed my love of history, which is something that has defined my whole life and career ever since. It was the Ancient Egyptians that did it. I found stories about mummies and pharaohs absolutely enthralling. Ancient Egypt was a completely different world, and as fascinating to me as any alien planet. One of the school history books described the life of the Ancient Egyptians through the eyes of a seven-year-old boy of the time and I was able to identify with him completely as I became fully absorbed in his world.
As well as these more academic subjects, we also had time for the arts, music and painting. Not that my painting was anything to write home about as I could never get the hang of drawing a human body properly and simply drew a big round circle for the body, a smaller one for the head just stuck on top (no neck) and four limbs sticking out at forty-five-degree angles. We used to do painting once a week when some of the better artists were chosen to paint a big picture that would be stuck up on the wall. I think in the four years I was in Junior School I was only once asked to paint a big picture and this was mainly because I had written a good story and Mr Moore thought I should have the chance of illustrating it. I seem to recall the picture was of a large green fire-breathing dragon, which had a big round circle for the body, a smaller one for the head, etc., etc.
At the end of playtime, the teacher on playground duty blew a whistle and we all had to line up in our classes – no talking – to wait for the signal to move off to our class. A few weeks after I started Junior School, we were lining up in the playground when Mr Brown, an ancient teacher with snow-white hair, appeared and led us up the stairs to a different classroom. ‘He’s made a mistake, he thinks our classroom is upstairs,’ I thought to myself. However, I soon discovered he wasn’t wrong as he took us into the music room; this was a room with a stepped floor. At the front of the room was a piano, at which Mr Brown sat, while the rest of us sat on the steps. His first act was to ask all the boys to sing a few notes individually. After listening, he proclaimed us either a ‘singer’ or a ‘growler’. I was designated a growler and had to sit with my fellow growlers on the front step. Growlers were never given a second chance, so I remained one all my Junior School life and was mostly ignored by Mr Brown as he felt we had no chance of ever being able to sing properly.
Most of our music lessons consisted of Mr Brown teaching us to sing Olde English folk songs such as ‘Barbara Allen’, ‘Sir Eglamore’ and ‘The British Grenadiers’. One of the first songs he taught us was ‘The Owl’, with words by Alfred, Lord Tennyson, which had the refrain: ‘Alone and warming his five wits, The white owl in the belfry sits.’ After we’d practised it a few times, Mr Brown felt that we were ready to sing it all the way through. As he struck the first chord on the piano, the boy sitting next to me, David Burt, whispered in my ear, ‘Come closer to me and listen to what I sing.’ He then sang his own adjustment to the refrain, ‘Alone and warming his five tits, The white owl in the belfry sits.’ He thought this was hilarious, but, having led a sheltered life myself, I didn’t understand what was so funny.
Mr Brown was very much an old-style teacher. He had been at Rushmore many years and was well known to my brother, who had left Rushmore Junior School three years earlier. In fact, my family all knew about Mr Brown because John had told us a story about him, some years previously. Apparently, one morning, just before school was due to start, one of the boys walked out of the playground intending to go to Willis’s sweet shop across the road. Mr Brown saw him leave and followed him. Just outside the school gate, he put his fingers down the back of the boy’s blazer and hauled him back, sayin
g, ‘Where are you going, cre-a-ture? Get back here!’ As befitted a teacher of the old school, Mr Brown was not above doling out corporal punishment on a frequent basis, most often a clip round the ear or a ruler across the knuckles. Sometimes, if it was serious enough, he would send the miscreant to the Headmaster to be caned and the misdeed written in the dreaded punishment book.
Of course, such behaviour would not be tolerated these days, but even worse was the game Mr Brown recommended we could play when we were outside school. He told us that when crossing the road we should wait until a car was fairly near and then run across in front of it. We could earn two points if it was really close and one point if it was not so close. Just writing this now makes me shudder to think a) what would have happened if there’d been an accident while we were playing this, and b) what would happen to him, had he said this to a class now. Mainly because of the fact he quite often resorted to corporal punishment, Mr Brown was feared and hated by all the pupils. Everyone avoided him if they could.
Mr Moore was not nearly so keen on corporal punishment as Mr Brown was, although he wasn’t entirely opposed to using it. I don’t remember anyone ever being sent to the Headmaster and his worst action was a sharp smack on the bottom or on the legs. But he only did this to boys; he wouldn’t touch girls. One day I heard him telling off one of the girls in our class for something she had done and he said to her, ‘If you were a boy, I’d give you a smack.’ This struck me as most unfair. Why should girls be able to get away with doing what they liked without fear of reprisal whereas boys couldn’t?
The other ‘old timer’ at the school was Mr Bristow, who had been John’s class teacher. Now retired, he came back every now and then to help out. He was quite a decent old boy and not like Mr Brown, whom everyone hated. The only other teacher who had been at Rushmore in John’s time was the Headmaster, Mr ‘Fatty’ Foreman. He, too, was a decent sort, though he never saw much of us as he mostly stayed in his office. I don’t remember him ever doing any actual teaching.
Most of the other teachers were fairly young like Mr Moore. The two I saw most were Mr Wills and Mr Evans. Mr Wills taught the ‘B’ stream and was responsible for destroying my illusion that teachers knew everything. One day, when I was about nine years old, he came into our classroom and said loudly to Mr Moore, ‘What’s the speed of light? Someone’s just asked me and I can’t remember.’ I couldn’t believe it, a teacher not knowing something! Impossible. Even with Mr Moore’s immediate response, ‘186,000 miles per second,’ I was still left in a state of shock that Mr Wills didn’t know this.
Mr Evans was my favourite teacher. The sporty one, he did all the things we liked. He took us for games and also held drama classes after school, which I loved. His only failing was not recognising in me the great footballer I considered myself to be, but I put this down to the fact that the school employed one of the parents, Mr Hart, as an outside coach. I played at centre-half, which, sadly, was the favoured position of Mr Hart’s son, John. Guess who he chose for the school team?
We got on better with cricket, though here again I never quite made the team except on one occasion when I came on as a substitute. However, I did manage to become the school’s official scorer, so I went to every match. In those days, the school cricket team took part in a properly structured league with all the other local primary schools. Our home ground was on North Millfields, next to the children’s playground. I became scorer by accident when the boy who was doing it was off sick one day. Mr Evans asked me if I’d like to do it. As it happened, I had a cold myself that day, and my parents had told me to come straight home after school. To make matters worse, the sky was very dark, threatening an impending storm; so, naturally, I said yes. Bob Marriott, who lived near me and passed my prefab on his way home, asked if he should tell my parents I would be late. I don’t know why but I told him not to tell them. So off I went to score my first match as Rushmore’s official scorer. The rain held off for most of the match but then started to pour down and I faced the walk home with my cold in the pouring rain. When I got home, I explained where I’d been. Immediately they forgot their worries about what might have happened to me: Dad, who loved cricket, was so proud of me becoming the official scorer that was all he could talk about.
That first time I scored was also the first time I heard the same joke that every opposition scorer made. When we arrived, the two scorers got together to let the other know the names of his team members. Our opening bat was Alan Oakley, but we always just gave initials, so it was A. Oakley. I don’t think there was one boy who didn’t make some joke to the effect that we had Annie Oakley opening our batting and think it was a) highly amusing and b) original. I continued as Rushmore’s official scorer until I left school.
The only sporting event I didn’t enjoy with Mr Evans was swimming. On Friday afternoons, he took our class to Hackney Baths in Lower Clapton Road but he never really bothered to teach us how to swim. Because I couldn’t swim, he used to leave me, along with the other non-swimmers, in the shallow end just playing around, while he concentrated on the swimmers and helping them get their 50-and 100-yards certificates. For me, the best part of the afternoon was going into the sweet shop next door to the baths to buy a piece of honeycomb, which I took home to share with Mum. She looked forward to this treat as much as I did. My friends Andy and Terry always came back with me and we’d sit down to watch Jungle Jim, starring former Olympic swimming champion Johnny Weissmuller, on television.
A good swimmer herself, Mum was disappointed by my lack of progress so she wrote a letter to the school, telling them that she was not going to let me go to any more swimming lessons and she would teach me herself. It never struck me as strange at the time but just writing this makes me wonder why the school agreed to this. However, agree they did and once under Mum’s tuition I quickly learnt the rudiments of the breaststroke. My big breakthrough came one summer when we were on holiday and, on my return to school, I was allowed back to Mr Evans and his lessons. I joined the swimmers and quickly gained my 50-yards certificate. However, I have to say to this day I have never really been that keen on swimming.
Apart from sport, Mr Evans’ other contribution to the life of the school was drama. As well as organising the annual Christmas play, he also ran a voluntary drama class after school. He taught me a lot about theatre techniques, both acting and technical. The best acting tip I can remember was his telling us that comedy acting was best done seriously. He got about seven or eight of us to stand in line and asked how we would march if he told us to make it funny. Some of the boys started doing exaggerated movements and making wild gestures as they were marching. He stopped us and got us to line up again, this time behind each other but as close as we could get, before saying, ‘Turn left and march in line without trying to be funny.’ The result was hilarious as we marched in step so close together, trying not to bump into each other. It looked really comical but we were trying to do it seriously without the exaggeration and silly gestures. Lesson learnt.
Mr Evans was also the first person in authority I came across who didn’t try to persuade us that the new musical craze for rock’n’roll was rubbish. Everyone else, parents and teachers and so on, thought it was a bad influence and did all they could to dissuade us from listening to it. But Mr Evans actually brought in records to the after-school classes and got us to loosen up by doing a bit of jiving. His favourite for getting us going was the theme from The Man with the Golden Arm, which in itself was a bit controversial as the film, released in 1955, was one of the first to deal with drug addiction, though, of course, none of us knew anything about this at the time.
With the arrival of rock’n’roll, youngsters had their own music for the first time; it was music generally reviled by adults, and it was that which made it so attractive… well, that and the excitement of the music itself, of course. Until then, popular music could be and was enjoyed by all generations. The popular singers were mainly crooners such as Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra and Perry C
omo. But the first sign of youngster-specific music came when Johnnie Ray hit the big time with songs like ‘Cry’, ‘The Little White Cloud That Cried’ and ‘Such a Night’. Though not full-blown rock’n’roll by any means, Ray attracted a younger audience with his exaggerated movements and voice intonation, but it was when Bill Haley & His Comets hit the scene that young people (the word ‘teenager’ was still a new word in those days) discovered they had music of their very own that was hated by their parents and other authority figures. There was outrage in Hackney when our nearest cinema, The Castle in Brooksby’s Walk, showed Rock Around the Clock and teenagers actually got up out of their seats and danced in the aisles.
A new era had begun. And things got better (or worse, according to your point of view) when Elvis Presley arrived on the scene. His singing was electrifying, but what the older generation found really offensive were his overtly sexual dance moves that earned him the nickname of ‘Elvis the Pelvis’. In America, after a show in Wisconsin, the local Catholic Church sent an urgent message to the FBI director J. Edgar Hoover warning that ‘Presley is a definite danger to the security of the United States. … [His] actions and motions were such as to rouse the sexual passions of teenaged youth. …’ American youth, meanwhile, took a different view. After the show, more than a thousand teenagers tried to get into Presley’s room at the auditorium. Youth culture had arrived and led to a whole new way of life, not just in music but in everything, especially clothes.
Until the 1950s, youngsters followed their parents’ fashions, but, with the birth of rock’n’roll, this changed forever. Teenagers were no longer younger copies of their parents, but became people in their own right with their own fashions, language and identity, of which the Teddy Boys were the most extreme example. At school, the first signs of this came when many of the boys stopped wearing school uniform. It had never actually been compulsory, although most wore it but in the late 1950s there was a big fashion for leather jackets, something our parents would never dream of wearing. Most boys had black jackets, a few had red ones, but even then, although I wanted to take part in this rebellion, I still wanted to show my individuality and so I persuaded Mum and Dad to buy me a green leather jacket. I was the only boy at school to have a green one.
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