Don’t be fooled, however, by my behaviour because I received a full and thorough education. You could be forgiven for thinking, after getting so far into this memoir, that for me to proclaim such a thing comes as a bit of a shock, but this book isn’t a treatise on the wonders of Woolverstone’s curriculum: it is a documentary of how a boy did everything he could (often unknowingly) to look squarely into the mouth of the gift horse. I have told you of my approach to exams, but that is distinct from the process of getting me to them. Unquestionably, knowledge imparted to me had a struggle finding an unimpeded route into my consciousness, yet I was undoubtedly exposed to a quality of teaching that from time to time would break through the truculence. Woolverstone’s prospectus advertised the school as, “A boarding school for boys from the London area who are suitable for an academic education” and that is precisely what it gave prior to being turned into a comprehensive. I read an article, which quoted the school’s final headmaster, Richard Woollett, who said that of the sixty boys being admitted annually in later years, forty five of them would not have qualified for entry pre-1977.
Despite my attitude towards academia, I still recall enriching lessons by some of the brilliant teachers we had. I cannot hear mention of the town Hexham without recalling, almost verbatim, Jim Hyde’s geography lessons on the development of modern urban conurbations. My son, who studies geology, was shocked to discover, during a holiday in Greece, that I knew all about rock formations and screes; that was Jim Hyde again, and this was a teacher whose lessons we often spent firing spit-balls of paper from pen tubes into the back of Adebola’s head, or at the black, metal globe hanging from the ceiling. The point is, even as we behaved so miserably, we knew where Santiago was on the globe when we challenged each other to hit it with the sticky pellet. When Mr Shakeshaft, our explosive, floppy-fringed French master wasn’t erupting, he was drilling French verbs into us in compelling fashion and taught with an animated passion that means I can actually hold a moderate conversation in French when drunk. In history, John Morris led us to Culloden, Ypres and tremendously evocative projects on Tudor England.
You see, it wasn’t just the nature of the curriculum that gave Woolverstone educational potency, it was the quality of the teaching and the hugely talented and academic individuals who stood before us and delivered our educations in that old fashioned, in-front-of-the-blackboard method. They encouraged discussion, but they spoke to the classroom in a way that evoked images, and you absorbed, even against your will, what they said. How else do I recall the anatomy of plants as taught by Tony Watkins and Mr Hawes? Tony Watkins wrote copiously on the huge blackboard at the front of the biology lab in a beautiful hand, and I was often transfixed by that alone. I can recall the process of osmosis, photosynthesis and electromagnetic fields and I know verse from Yeats, Keats and Shakespeare.
It is important to remember that our home situations and our backgrounds were a secondary issue once we arrived at Woolverstone. The majority of boys there had been selected because they had passed the eleven plus exam and were considered bright, so that is generally how our teachers approached lessons. My education was vivid and eloquent, not delivered by text book alone or by individuals following a set script, but by people who were brilliant, often among the best in their fields. Of the thousands of hours of lessons I received, I only missed a couple of hundred of them whilst standing outside the room in disgrace, so I had plenty of time to absorb their instruction. Above all else, however, I believe I was taught how to learn so that when, post-school, I did finally wake up and look in the mirror, I knew where to begin again. Those lessons demonstrated, even to this reluctant scholar, that I had ability of a fashion, an enquiring mind and yes, even a Machiavellian, artful-dodger intelligence that could find more useful expression than just tricking someone. I knew, even as I turned my face against academic achievement, that there was space set aside for more knowledge than I had, and the processing power to understand and explore it.
Do schools today teach a child at a level where they might fail dismally at first, then improve and ultimately succeed after being dragged through the elevating stages of knowledge and culture? Or do they teach as little as they have to so they can fill a box on a government form once a year? Setting a bar so high that a child might at first fail is considered beyond unholy these days. There are grammar schools that claim to have higher aspirations, but such places, with their unseemly parental scramble every September, pick and choose from the glut of children who are often outwardly able only because they have been relentlessly coached in the eleven-plus exam. Yes, Woolverstone was selective, but it was a model of schooling that should have been adopted and taken forward and made available to as many as possible. If you have a talent – and Woolverstone believed that everyone did have one – then the school would find it and develop it. It seems to me that Woolverstone embodied an idea that took the concept of grammar education to another level. Poor kids sometimes get a chance to try out for the local grammar nowadays, but Woolverstone featured another layer of opportunity, it said that not only would the boy be pushed and elevated, but he would be given a further dimension of experience and facility; Woolverstone went the whole bloody hog.
When the authorities began to send far more troubled and troublesome boys to the school, it began a descent that ended with closure and acquisition by Ipswich School for Girls. After the doctrinaire conversion of Woolverstone to a comprehensive in 1977, the school shifted its criteria for selection, and by the time a “Forty minutes” TV documentary called ‘The poor man’s Eton’ was aired in 1987, the school was in a battle for survival. Woolverstone had essentially become a safe haven for at-risk boys from London, whose social risk profile, rather than their educational potential, appeared to be the primary consideration. Unquestionably, Woolverstone provided such boys with a rare opportunity, but the school was there in order that they could be removed to a place of safety in many cases. The costs spiralled and the educational cost/benefit ratio came under scrutiny from those at ILEA who resented the fact that only forty out of nineteen thousand annual secondary school starters got the chance to go to the school. It went wrong not because the boys they eventually sent there were less able – because this wasn’t even a factor for selection, and few seemed interested – but because they expected less of them, and allowed the structure of the school, its traditions and practices, to fall away. No doubt the environment enabled many of these boys to receive a better education than may have been possible if they were left in their home situations, but the target had been lowered.
The decline began when the principles of excellence were jettisoned. What the change to a comprehensive did was remove the core idea that those boys who had real promise, but who came from poor or deprived backgrounds would, from the first day of Woolverstone life, understand that they could indeed elevate themselves by the mere fact they had been selected. Eventually, Woolverstone selected boys for very different reasons, expected little of them, and consequently gave the officers at ILEA an out by being able to say that such troubled and threatened boys – by then “a mere forty of them” – could be educated at other facilities with whom the authority had arrangements. Had the school continued to blaze a path for excellence and achievement, as opposed to performing as a safe-haven, such cursory and dismissive financial pen-pushing would have been far harder to justify.
Public schools educate the wealthy and middle and upper classes, they ensure the status quo, but Woolverstone sought to turn that on its head. The people who ran ILEA when Woolverstone began its decline spitefully resented the notion that only certain children from the inner city were getting something they considered everyone in the inner city should get. Because they had neither the will, nor made available the means, to ensure more could benefit, they saw fit to guarantee that none would get it. They would tell you that every child deserves to consider itself able to achieve whatever they wanted, but they also shifted the level of expectation downwards again. And it continues t
oday; the same sorts of people tell working class children what it is they are allowed to experience or to achieve, they dictate what their cultural references should be, and ultimately, scandalously, what their station in life is expected to be. That’s what killed Woolverstone; envy, resentment, doctrine. In short, the same mindless ignorance that drives much of the modern education system today, killed a school that fearlessly broke the status quo for a few short decades.
There is a perversity to Woolverstone’s demise that it is hard to fathom. It was made comprehensive so that it would become egalitarian, a decision which itself failed to recognise the purity of the egalitarian principles the school’s creation embodied. Working class boys had, the thinking went, no right to consider themselves better than other working class boys, and neither should they be afforded greater opportunities. In washing away the bright colours of Woolverstone’s uniqueness, those in power at ILEA created a school that became a distillation of the problems they sought to prevent, and which the original school performed miracles in diverting. Having created the monster, ILEA soon realised they had to kill it. I find it hard to forgive them.
What Woolverstone showed was that if you expect great things of children, in everything that they do, then invariably they will deliver, rise to the challenge. You do not need to dress the curriculum in modern hip-hop clothes or draw pictures to accompany the spelling of words. Children, including those from impoverished backgrounds, have the facility and the capability to understand the tenets of Roman society, or the wonders of ancient Greece and the glory of Renaissance painting, or any number of things that seem to have been given only cursory presence in the classroom. If parents do not fill their child with the desire to learn, then the school and its teachers should do so, rather than dismiss all sense of responsibility for motivating their charges. Some children will always possess more intelligence or natural talent, some will always fight the system and some will always ‘fail’. But the journey is all-important. If you aim low, then they will lower their sights with you, guaranteed to fulfil the pessimistic prognosis.
Woolverstone forced us to participate in a regimen of discipline that probably helped us develop a sense of responsibility. The debate on corporal punishment I will leave aside for now, although it is clear to me that being slippered was the first time I ever fully knew what consequences felt like.
We must enable our young people to believe that their paths are not set from birth, that our world, with its class divisions, its prejudices and inherent injustices, has loopholes that all of us can exploit. If you believe the man who condemns you to ignorance, crime and social inactivity, then you will, as sure as eggs is eggs, fulfil his prophecy. Indirectly it is a tragedy to report that those who condemn today are our education system, our government and even our community leaders. The principle of education and cultural exposure for the pure, unalloyed pleasure of it is alien and rarely put into practice, and hopes for our children are lowering by the day in order that successive governments can claim their plaudits.
Nobody is fooled by it of course. Eye watering amounts of money is thrown at education in the form of consultancy, curriculum, sports buildings and fancy new ecological schools with windmills and Plexiglas canteens. We spend billions on it. But our school leavers are less literate, less numerate and a have a narrower cultural spectrum than ever before. Woolverstone was condemned as being too expensive, but how much does crime, income support and the consequences of ignorance cost us?
Self-confidence, self-belief and a refusal to succumb to the command that tells me which social pigeonhole I was going to fit into have been my determining influences since leaving school. I have had some luck, I came under the influence of good people at the right times and had enough sense to listen to at least some of what they taught me. It is also true that I could have done so much better in my professional life if I’d exploited more of what my school provided for me, but fifty percent of Woolverstone is exponentially better than none at all. I didn’t turn to crime, although the temptations were always there, and I thought it was beneath me anyway. Arrogance? Confidence? Does it matter? How was Woolverstone responsible for it? I honestly believe it may have been as simple as repeating the mantra that we were, could be, had to be the best. Eventually you start to believe it.
So can Woolverstone be replicated today? Well that is a silly question because there are hundreds of private schools that operate along similar lines. What is different is their raw material, but only because those who attend can afford the fees. Which brings us back to the very reason Woolverstone was created. Promise, intelligence and achievement – none of it has anything to do with how wealthy you might be. And discipline comes not come only from the whack of a slipper or a cane, it comes from the collective desire to achieve and it becomes selfpolicing.
I recently read of schools being set up in central New York that have very strict regulations. They are getting remarkable results with poor, urban children. But it is not control that makes a child want to fulfil their potential – or at least believe they have some potential to fulfil in the first place. No, it’s the aspirations that their teachers have for them that do it. And to be perfectly frank, that has nothing to do with money, does it? If you teach a child about Spot the Dog, and they succeed in the simple task you set for them, they will be comfortable with their lot. If you set them something more challenging and they struggle, but you persist with them, lead them through it to enlightenment, then that child’s self-esteem will grow with the additional understanding and knowledge that he or she has acquired. It’s not rocket science.
Enough of this rant.
I was spectacularly, ungratefully and magnificently lucky to attend Woolverstone. This is no rags to riches story for sure, because I was never in rags and I am certainly not rich. But my school, with its weird customs and otherworldliness, ensured I had a choice. My friendships today, the closest and most meaningful, were made and nurtured at Woolverstone, our collective experience no doubt being a glue of sorts.
My children have shared in the writing of this volume. Leanora, my eldest daughter, possessed of a dedication to learning that surpasses mine in light years of measurement, has rendered her parents proud by graduating from Oxford in English literature. My son Gianluca, who, when small, giggled at my behaviour as reported herein, has grown into a fine musician and performer. I have been able to point (usually with red-faced shame) to chapters featuring my failures and misdemeanours and he has often been brought up short by the harshness of the outcomes. Woolverstone has, then, played a role in his upbringing too, even though I feel forever pained that he could not experience a childhood like it. Now my youngest daughter, Fiora, named after the main character in L’amore dei tre Re, excitedly asks her Daddy to tell her stories of his school days. I keep it clean, but already I see the value of explaining what it all meant.
WHATEVER HAPPENED TO ... ?
To those of us who went there, Woolverstone is soaked into our being. The the same applies to many of my ex-masters, some of whom I have had contact with during the writing of this volume. More than one has expressed the almost misty eyed sentiment that Woolverstone was, for them, a remarkable experience also, and virtually all seem utterly depressed by the fate that befell it.
When I telephone a master after some thirty-four years of no contact, it is with trepidation and squeamish hesitancy, and I am astounded that not only do they recall me, but most at least affect the attitude that they do so fondly. One spoke quite gravely of his regrets that at times he felt he’d been a little vindictive to some boys, which produced a frisson of “I told you so!”, a mental fist pump in celebration of the confirmation that I hadn’t always imagined the persecution. John Morris, who went on to become headmaster of Hymer’s College, was the call I found the most nerve-wracking, but I needn’t have worried, because he didn’t recall me as a particularly recalcitrant boy. Dave Morgan, the housemaster who followed Morris, was equally soothing, so was Barry Salmon, the remarkable
music teacher, and David Hudson the deputy head who delivered the awful news about Paddy Richardson. I asked David if he recalled us laughing when he told the assembled school the news; he didn’t and I was relieved.
I have kept in most regular touch with Neil Clayton since leaving Woolverstone and he still calls me a fool, still has a theatrical humour to his conversation and often gives me withering judgement. I continue to cringe at the almost criminal contrast in my dealings with him now and whilst at school.
Above all, this recent contact with ex-masters has given me some pause to contemplate the idea that perhaps I wasn’t as bad as I thought I was. I think I was a compassionate, if robustly abrasive, young man, but I would be lying if I didn’t admit to a sneaky resentment that I hadn’t made quite the impression I thought I had. As ever, behaviour of the kind I report herein tends to affect most profoundly the person who is delivering it, but boys like me need an audience to work through our confusions, and the chaos we create gives validation.
Today, when we gather together, my friends and I revert to type: as with fame, which dictates that a person remains at the age he was when he found it, we Woolverstonians appear to be as silly and as childish as we were in the common room, or on the bus to Felixstowe. And we talk about the school a great deal, apparently aware of what we may have become had we not been caught in its embrace. This common emotional attachment runs very deep in all of us and one can’t easily define why that should be so. Our experiences there were both joyous and traumatic, so perhaps we believe we had survived Woolverstone, as well as benefitted from it? Whatever it is, we have bonds that are unbreakable, we understand each other, never judge one another and we never, ever, tolerate boastfulness, no matter what the success.
Noisy at the Wrong Times Page 24