by Pip Granger
John Carnera remembers that the standard punishment at St Patrick’s was ‘six of the best on the hand, with a cane. You had to rub your hands before you got the cane so you’d feel less pain. It was all hot. There were various techniques. It sounds terrible now, but to be honest I don’t think it did me any harm. If you did something wrong, you remembered it. It taught us values.’ Although St Patrick’s was a Catholic school, this time it was not members of the Church who were handing out the discipline. ‘All the teachers were laymen and women. We had some . . . interesting . . . characters there. There was a Spanish teacher, Mr Benitez. He was always very sharp on the [mimes a cane] and used to chuck chalk at you if he caught you talking while you were supposed to be listening to him, or creep up behind you and smack you on the shoulder with a ruler or something.’
Violent punishment was also meted out to very young children. Ronnie Mann was on the receiving end of some of it at St Clement Danes: ‘I remember Mr Jones, the headmaster, as a sadistic bully, but he may well not have been. One of his tricks was, if you talked in assembly, it didn’t matter how young you were, he used to pick you up by your hair, lift you off the ground and walk you down to the front, and then cane you. Excruciating pain. It was unbelievable. And one of the lady teachers had a “magic wand”, which was the cane. Bear in mind you’re dealing with young kids: five, six or seven. OK, we were probably disgusting little bastards if the truth is known, but if you had snot running down your nose you got walloped – and certainly I didn’t have a hanky. If you talked, you got walloped. If you got mucky fingerprints on stuff, you got caned.’
I remember the casual, institutional violence of my schooldays well, but when measured against today’s standards it seems appalling. Ronnie apparently took things in his stride, and came to the same sort of conclusion as John Carnera. ‘I felt that by the standards of the forties, St Clement’s was a good school. It taught you how to read and write. It didn’t give you a great deal other than that. I think they assumed that most of us kids would be leaving as soon as we could, for whatever reason. They tended to concentrate on the really clever kids. No one ever said to you, this is what you’ve got to do, because you had apprenticeships to fall back on. Most of the people there were expecting to be in menial jobs, that was the crux of it.’
Other pupils of St Clement Danes seemed to have only positive memories of the place. ‘St Clement Danes was lovely,’ Ann Lee told me. ‘When they put the new bells in St Clement Danes church, our class was standing around the bells on the floor singing “Oranges and Lemons” to christen the bells before they actually went up.’
Ann is one of many who went there from the Peabody Estate in Wild Street. Barbara Jones got to know many of the ‘Wild Street Brats’ – as the children from the Peabody and other local blocks of flats were colloquially known – at St Clement’s. ‘There were lots of children, big families, with no adult males at home and perhaps an elderly grandmother trying to hold things together. The boys had to take turns wearing the shoes so they could come to school. In the summer, the girls would wear just a bag-washed cotton dress and plimsolls. Socks – just forget it for everybody. I was seen as “posh” at St Clement Danes because I wore knickers, even in the summer!
‘We left for school all bandboxy, with hats and gloves matching, socks all pristine, hair perfectly groomed. By the time I’d finished playing football with the boys in the playground below, rather than tag on the roof with the girls, I’d lost one pigtail ribbon, my coat’s split, my socks are all dirty, my knees are probably all skinned, I’ve lost a glove, and now I’m walking home, and my mother’s been known to see me coming along the Strand and cross the road to miss me in case I meet the bosses. A lady went to school, and this urchin came back.’
‘Dad wouldn’t walk down the same side of the street as her,’ her sister, Pat, chimes in, laughing. ‘I went to school as a lady, and came back as a lady.’
St James’s and St Peter’s had an enclosed playground surrounded by tall buildings – including the Windmill Theatre. ‘The girls at the Windmill used to sit on their roof in the summer, just across the playground,’ Sonia Boulter remembers. ‘That could be distracting. We didn’t know the Windmill girls, didn’t talk to them, but they used to wave to us girls in the street.’
Sonia has nothing but affectionate memories of her schooldays. ‘My first teacher, in the reception class, used to wear all black and one of those Old Mother Riley hats, mob caps. She was lovely. We had a woman who used to look after us in the playground. She was very old-fashioned. She used to wear a hat with a bonnet that went up [sic] instead of a peaked cap, the peak was up here. It was great fun there. The school wasn’t barred in like it is now, with the tall gates there. You could just walk in.’
St James’s and St Peter’s didn’t suit everyone, though. Andy Pullinger told me that, ‘After a couple of years at Great Windmill Street, I was transferred to St George’s in Mayfair. I think my mother felt that St James’s was a bit too rough.’
Angela Rashbrook’s mother agreed with Mrs Pullinger. ‘I went to St George’s Hanover Square,’ Angela recalls. ‘My mother considered the primary school in Great Windmill Street, the nearest to us, to be “too cosmopolitan”.’
St James’s and St Peter’s cosmopolitan nature was not exaggerated. ‘It was all nations,’ Janet Vance remembers. ‘You had the Italians, the Greeks, the Jews. You had the Catholic priest come in, the rabbi, the Church of England vicar and every morning they used to take us in a crocodile down to St James’s Church, Piccadilly. The Catholics would go to Warwick Street or, if the priest from St Patrick’s came in, to Soho Square, and the rabbi would come in and they would stay at the school.’
Jeff Sloneem was one of those who stayed at school with the rabbi – or, in his day, a Miss Klausner. ‘She was effectively paid by the synagogue to take the Hebrew class while the assembly was going on,’ Jeff remembers. ‘There were quite a lot of Jewish children there, actually. We were all sat around one table, but it was quite a long table. I should imagine there were about thirty, over all the years. I would think that St James’s was probably the first multinational school.’
Jeff may well have been right, but the same melting pot effect could be seen at other schools in the area. ‘All the races were mixed up in Soho,’ says Leo Zanelli. ‘Even though there were a lot of Irish and Italians there, one of my best friends at St Patrick’s was Paddy Nichopophoulos. We even had Gibraltarians, sent to get them out of harm’s way in the war.’
Ronnie Mann remembers that ‘The Catholic schools, like Macklin Street, were a bit uptight about you being a Catholic. St Clement’s, my school, was Church of England, but it took everybody. Protestants, Catholics, Jews, Greek Orthodox, Russian Orthodox, any old Orthodoxy, and they didn’t give a shit.’
Tricia Bryan found it was much the same at St Giles School. ‘One thing that stands out is that St Giles was a very multicultural school. I had classmates from Turkey, Greece and the Middle East. Most had families who ran restaurants in the area. One name that springs to mind is Lloyd Zokay, which seemed so exotic.’ Tricia embodies that multicultural background. ‘We’re Polish Jewish on my mother’s side, and my father’s family were Catholic. So my brother and I had a Catholic father, a Jewish mother, and went to a C of E school: we went to church every Wednesday.’
As with several of the other schools in the area, the links with the Church were real, but not stifling. ‘All the primary schools were affiliated to some religion or other,’ Tricia remembers. ‘The vicar at St Giles, the Reverend Taylor, had a big apartment in our school. He had two daughters, who went to a private school! St Giles was not a bad school at all, though. It may have been small, but the staff were all very dedicated. We were taken every week in a crocodile to the basement of the YWCA in Great Russell Street for swimming. Netball was in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, and we walked there. We walked everywhere, no school buses.’
‘Coram’s Fields for games, country dancing and everything,’ chips i
n her classmate, Jackie Trussler. ‘Always walking. We must have gone for the afternoon, then walked home from there.’
The school that Mrs Pullinger and Mrs Rashbrook chose for their children was a cut above St James’s and St Peter’s. St George’s (Hanover Square) had migrated from its original location down to a patch of land between handsome mansion blocks in South Street, just west of Berkeley Square, in the heart of Mayfair. As a council school in a very upmarket area, it attracted a particular type of child, as one of their number, Ray Constantine, remembered. ‘Many of the children had parents who were caretakers to embassies, and some VIPs in the Mayfair area. There was one girl whose father managed a pub in Whitehall. A small number had single mums who were call girls in the Shepherd Market area. There were two sisters whose father managed some part of the park, and lived in a lovely cottage near Hyde Park Corner. Their dad was using Italian POWs to maintain the park.’
Before the reforms of the post-war Labour government, the distinction between primary – infant and junior – and secondary schools was not so clear-cut. Some children went to grammar schools, often, but not always, fee-paying, at eleven or thirteen, but the rest generally stayed at the same school. This wasn’t always a good idea. Although he later went to university, Leo Zanelli recalls that ‘I had virtually no teaching as a child. I stayed at St Patrick’s until I was fourteen, then left. No one was bothered. In the war, there were just two teachers for the whole school. There was Mr Rook, the head, who seemed to spend most of the time with his bookie, a nun, and a woman who married a Belgian. That was it for five or six classes. Most of the time, you sat on your own. They’d give you something to do, but most of the time we didn’t do it. Several kids never learned to read or write.’
John Carnera from a later generation of St Patrick’s pupils, fared a bit better. ‘I went to school there from seven until I was fifteen; got a basic education. There might have been 120 or 150 pupils. No more than that, fifteen or so in each year. We all did the eleven-plus. If you passed it, you went to other schools. Most of us just stayed on.
‘Ours was a very unusual school, in that it was more or less run by the Church. We used to start the day with Religious Affairs. That was from nine o’clock to half-past. They’d teach us the catechism, and the Bible, stuff like that, then ask us if we’d been to church, been to confession. If you hadn’t, you were frowned on, you know.’
Although some of the primary schools, such as St George’s and St Patrick’s, maintained an upper school, where children could continue after they had taken their eleven-plus, there was only one secondary modern school, St Martin-in-the-Fields, in the Soho and Covent Garden area. Grammar schools were even harder to find, so for some of those who did pass their eleven-plus success was a mixed blessing. A grammar school place meant a daily tube or bus ride to go to school. This could curtail your social life, as Mike O’Rouke remembers: ‘I passed my eleven-plus, and there was only a handful of us from St Joseph’s that did at that time. I went off to Shepherd’s Bush, to go to school there, right on the borders of Holland Park. You come home, do your homework, go to bed. I lost touch with a lot of the people I went to primary school with.’ Barbara Jones got in to the Greycoat School in Victoria, and others we spoke to went further afield still, to Primrose Hill or Chelsea.
St Martin’s got mixed reviews. Janet Vance, for example, turned down both St Martin’s and a secondary school at Millbank because, although they were closer than the school she eventually attended, ‘they had bad names’. Graham Jackson remembers, ‘I went to St Martin-in-the-Fields, and this curate took a fancy to me. He used to come on and say “Hello Graham”, put his arm around me. It was a joke, a standing joke. Anyway, there was a club there called Five Farthings – from the rhyme, St Martin’s five farthings. They used to do snooker, billiards, that sort of stuff, there was a coffee bar beneath – it was in the crypt. One day, the curate touched a guy who was bending over the table, and this kid’s turned round and hit him with his cue. He was from St Martin’s School, and of course there’s a big hoo-hah, and when he’s called in to see the headmaster, he’s said, “If you want to know what [the curate’s] like, ask Graham.”
‘So, I’m sitting in the class: “Graham Jackson out,” left-right, left-right, down to see the headmaster, and I’m saying, “What am I doing, what’s happening?”
‘And they ask, “Have you got a problem with this curate?”
‘And I’ve gone, “Well, yeah.”
‘They dismissed it. “You don’t know what you’re talking about. Rubbish. He’s a friendly bloke. We’ve had a word with him, and you’ve got the wrong idea.” It was all sort of passed off. Years later, you start thinking, they’re all the same. They cover things up by saying you don’t know what you’re talking about. ’Cause we’re, what, fourteen years old, it’s easy to get us to think we’re the ones that are in the wrong.’
Ann Lee first chose Millbank over St Martin’s, but ‘I was only there about a year and a half, and my mum took me out. A teacher there abused one of the children, who was my friend. We used to stay behind for music lessons, and this particular day I didn’t want to, so I made the excuse that I had to go to the dentist, and I left her on her own with him. The next day, when I went to school, she wasn’t there, and neither was he. When I got home that night, Mum had had a call from her mum saying that he’d abused her, and within weeks it was in all the newspapers. My mum decided to take us out, and we went to Starcross in Gray’s Inn Road, just off the Euston Road, and that’s where I stayed until I was fifteen.’
Ronnie Mann learned several things at St Martin’s. One of them was that, just because you were getting older, they didn’t stop hitting you. ‘At St Martin’s,’ he remembers, ‘discipline was strong. When the whistle went, you stopped; if you didn’t, you got the cane. There was no arguing. If you talked in class, you got the cane. If you swore at a teacher, you got the cane; second time, you got expelled. Simple as that. There was no half-measures.’
Yet there was something about this regime that Ronnie found liberating. ‘At St Martin’s, it was a totally different concept from St Clement’s. I think that the headmaster, Mr Tomlinson, although at the time I didn’t appreciate him, was really far-reaching. I don’t think I started learning until I was about twelve and a half, thirteen. I fully deserved to fail my eleven-plus, because I had no concept of nouns, verbs, adjectives, no concept of anything. I was great at maths, but that was about it.’
As well as schoolwork, there were social lessons to be learned, and put in to practice. ‘It was a mixed school. You didn’t sit next to the girls, because that would have been too effeminate, but certainly they sat in front of you, or behind you, and we had dance lessons together. When you got to thirteen, on a Friday evening there was an hour where they taught you the basics of ballroom dancing, if you wanted to. Bear in mind this was around the advent of rock ’n’ roll, Bill Haley was just coming in, but you still learned the basics, and by the time I left we’d already advanced to jiving. It was great for me.’
Anyone educated in the fifties remembers harsh discipline, lots of learning by rote and endless hours spent copying work, with one’s right hand, preferably, from the blackboard. It seems, however, that most young West Enders didn’t resent the system that much and one thing is for certain, a West End education prepared the young learners to live in harmony with cultural, religious and racial diversity – a very useful lesson that anticipated the world we live in today.
6
The Market
Few parts of the West End have changed their character quite as much as the Piazza in Covent Garden. Today, it’s a tourist trap, full of shops, cafés, restaurants and street entertainers, while dominating the whole thing is the new Royal Opera House. When I was growing up in the fifties, the buildings that now house boutiques, antiques and flea markets, the London Transport Museum and the Theatre Museum were home to a wholesale fruit and vegetable market, the largest in the country.
The contra
st between the old Covent Garden and the new is startling. I remember a noisy, incredibly crowded place with porters dashing about with stacks of boxes and baskets on their heads, roll-ups hanging from their lips and language riper than the fruit on sale. Incomprehensible (to me, anyway) shouts filled the air as wholesalers and punters haggled over prices in a variety of accents from nasal cockney, through all the regional variations and on to Italian, French, Yiddish, Chinese or Greek, and everything between. It depended on who was selling, who was buying and who was delivering. It really was an extraordinary cacophony, but somehow, with much gesticulating, understanding was reached and business done. Some of the hand signals were reminiscent of the tick-tack men that bookies used on the racecourses, a private language that could only be read by those in the know.
The surrounding streets were just as confused. Locally crafted barrows* teetered with boxes, baskets and sacks either coming or going. Horses still shackled to their carts waited patiently, snuffling in nosebags full of oats. Some had their heads down, foraging for stray apples, turnips and carrots, or slurped water from a battered old bucket as they were loaded up with the morning’s haul. The gutters ran with water – horse, flower and rain – and the cobbles were strewn with dung, bruised fruit, battered spuds, broken blooms, straw and bits of cabbage, while horses and traders alike waded through it all.
When trading was done for the day, the mess would be cleaned up, to be replaced the following day with more of the same, but before the cleaning squad arrived, the pickers darted in to salvage anything worth eating, flogging or popping in a vase. I have often wondered what happened to the daily piles left by the horses at the market. Elsewhere in the country, people nipped out with a bucket and spade to collect any offerings left by horses pulling wagons delivering bread, milk or coal – it was so good for their gardens. Due to the scarcity of petrol, horse power was much in demand in the forties and early fifties, and there was always a plentiful supply of fresh manure in those narrow Covent Garden streets. Perhaps it went to the London parks, for their roses.