Grammar School Boy: A Memoir of Personal and Social Development

By John Quicke

This memoir covers the first twenty years of the life of the author, a retired university professor, from when he was born in October 1941 during WW2 to when he went up to university in October 1961. It is a warts an’ all account of a 1940s’/early 1950s’ childhood through adolescence to 1960, when the family was struck by tragedy. 
The focus is on actions and events which shaped his personal, social and emotional development, with a particular emphasis on his experiences at a single-sex grammar school in the 1950s. The highly competitive, sports, drama and poetry loving pre-adolescent unsurprisingly took to life in the grammar school like ‘a duck to water.’ But this education had its downside as well as upside.
In the central section of the memoir the author takes a critical look at his own education and draws various conclusions. School was highly significant but it wasn’t the only source of influence. His membership of an evangelical organisation, church youth club and church choir also made an impact, as did elocution and drama classes and involvement as a young actor with the National Youth Theatre. The influence of mass media, the ‘rock n’ roll revolution’, films and books is also explored. One facet which the author finds intriguing relates to his transition from a highly conformist grammar school pupil to an anti-establishment university student. He argues that although the dominant school ethos was conservative, exclusive and hierarchical there was space for a certain creative and critical element. Experiences in what we would now call his ‘gap’ year were also salient in this respect, in particular his employment as an untrained teacher in a secondary modern school. 
Grammar School Boy is a unique critique of the grammar school system that will appeal to readers interested in education and the effect it has on child development.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Troubador Publishing Ltd
• Release date: Jan 24, 2018
• ISBN: 9781789019971

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Grammar School Boy

a memoir of personal and social development

1941-1961

John Quicke

Copyright © 2016 John Quicke

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study,

or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents

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concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers.

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ISBN 978 1789019 971

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Matador® is an imprint of Troubador Publishing Ltd

In loving memory of my parents

Contents

About the Author

Introduction

PART ONE

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

PART TWO

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

PART THREE

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Notes and References

Appendices

Acknowledgements

About the Author

John Quicke is the author of numerous articles and several books on education and psychology, including The Cautious Expert (Open University Press), Disability in Modern Children’s Fiction (Croom Helm), Challenging Prejudice through Education (Falmer), A Curriculum for Life (Open University Press) and Inclusion and Psychological Intervention in Schools (Springer). His first poetry collection, Political Ties, was published by Matador/Troubador. He was Professor of Education in the School of Education, University of Sheffield, and a local authority educational psychologist.

Introduction

This memoir covers the first twenty years of my life from when I was born in October 1941 to when I went up to university in October 1961. I have subtitled it ‘A Memoir of Personal and Social Development’ because I wanted to emphasise that the main focus was on the development of self and consciousness in a context of prevailing social and cultural influences. Not least amongst these was the influence of the secondary school I attended, Ealing Grammar School for Boys, where I was a pupil for over seven years, September 1953 to December 1960. Of all the formal institutions which impinged on my life at different times during the whole period, this was the one probably most responsible for the young person I was to become by the end of the 1950s; which is why I have called the memoir ‘Grammar School Boy’.

The memoir is divided into three sections. Part One, ‘Growing Up Post-war’, covers roughly the years between 1941 and 1953; Part Two, ‘Grammar School Boy’ my years at the school; and Part Three, ‘Transitions’, the period between leaving school and going to university (1960-61). However, there is some overlap between Parts One and Two. Where a particular set of events or activities went across periods, I have lumped together material which from a strict chronological point of view should have been included in different sections. This is in part a function of material in all three sections being organised thematically with each chapter heading identifying a different theme.

In terms of their overall structure, the sections have different characteristics. In ‘Growing Up Post-war’ a sense of place and locality is more evident, as I describe experiences of life in the family home and then move out to life in the neighbourhood, then in the wider locality and then even further afield. All this is intertwined with descriptions of family life from the early years to late childhood, both in the immediate and extended family. In the middle section, the focus is mainly on different facets of life in the grammar school but there is in addition material on other institutions like church and the media which also made an impact. The third section, ‘Transitions’, is in large part organised around themes identified in a daily journal I wrote at the time.

***

The late 1940 and early 1950s is often thought of as an Age of Austerity, a period of rationing, belt-tightening and uncomfortable, poorly resourced homes; in short a rather cheerless, drab, colourless time, as the black and white photos seem to testify. There’s no doubt for many life was hard, and I would include my parents here, even though they were better off than some. In the one-bedroomed flat we rented there was no running hot water, no bath, only one sink for all our needs, an outside loo, a minute kitchen, a very small gas cooker and inadequate heating. The weekly wash was a bit of a nightmare for my mother as was all forms of food preparation in such cramped conditions. My father had a steady job but wasn’t very well paid. He worked long hours at a light engineering works in Acton and used to come home tired and smelling of diesel.

Yet from my point of view, looking back, life did not seem at all dull and what deprivation there was didn’t seem to impinge much on my own wants, needs and their fulfilment. Like many children, even those worse off than me in material terms, I just accepted this was the way things were and got on with it. Obviously, however, I couldn’t have had such a happy childhood without the stable, loving and stimulating home provided by my parents, who were, of course, in turn greatly supported in this endeavour by the state, in particular those formal institutions of the Welfare State which were becoming firmly established in this period.

My parents, however, did undoubtedly have to make sacrifices for me to thrive so well. In Chapter 1 I identify some of these background factors which had much to do with their being so keen on my grasping the opportunities provided by the education system. There was also the small matter of the War to cope with; my father away for the first four years of my life and my mother being in effect a single parent for those years, living on a shoestring budget, coping with the Blitz and having to look after a dying mother as well as me. Most of my memories of this period are probably my mother’s memories, but there are some which are almost certainly not, like the Blitz related games I used to play on my own and with a friend.

In Chapters 2 and 3 I describe our housing conditions, relationships with friends and neighbours, and life in the immediate locality. This gives substance to the idea of our living in a socially mixed community in Ealing. Streets were safe places in which to play in those days because there were few cars around and we often played for hours before being ‘called in’. Street games were varied and mostly boy-dominated, reflecting how a certain mentality and attitude were nurtured and reinforced. I also give examples of mischievous behaviour, some none too pleasant, and other ‘silly’ behaviour in which we supposedly sensible and intelligent children often indulged. Much of this might be viewed as regressive as we ‘wobbled’ back and forth between one developmental stage and another. Some is less easy to explain, like throwing stones at cars and each other with intent to hurt; or the fear we had of bullies in the adjacent neighbourhoods and the plans we made to counter this mostly unrealised threat; or my own phobia about the milk horse. Some street games could be described as cooperative but that’s not the first word that springs to mind when thinking of the dour, intense, competitive struggles that counted as ‘playing marbles’ or ‘playing conkers’.

If street life was a rich mixture of the ‘good, the bad and the beautiful’, I’ve always thought of life in the wider community of Ealing as ‘the good life’, even though it also had its moments of menace and intrigue! Ealing after all was ‘The Queen of the Suburbs’, which for me meant easy access to a whole range of facilities – shops, public amenities, schools, churches, cinemas etc, but in particular to an abundance of green space which I exploited to the full especially when I graduated from three wheels to two, although even then the parks most frequented were the ones I walked to, namely Lammas and Walpole. I recall some of my experiences of ‘life in parks’ together with other activities in this wider context in Chapter 4, while in Chapter 5 the focus is on my early education in an infant and junior school in West Ealing; on my experience of doctors and health services; and on my involvement with St. John’s church, West Ealing – first as a Sunday school pupil and later as a choirboy, youth club member and a member of the Covenanters (an evangelical organisation attached to the church). My parents also paid for me to go to elocution and drama classes.

Then, of course, not far away in Brentford was the ground of a professional football team where my father and I regularly went to see matches (see Chapter 8). We were a sport mad family. I played football for the school and the church and was a good athlete, winning medals in the Ealing Borough Sports and numerous certificates on sports days at junior school. From a very young age I – thanks to my father – appreciated the value of ‘training’ for sport. This was a reflection of a mentality than went beyond sport but there is no doubt that my ‘stickability’, ruthless honesty about my competence in any field and understanding of the need to compensate for weaknesses was first nurtured on the training ground, if that’s an appropriate term for garden, street and park!

The role of the extended family is dealt with in Chapter 6. I was fortunate to have at least one grandparent who thought the world of me and spoilt me to death, as grandparents should, and one uncle who was brilliant at relating to children, knowing just how to interest them and capture their imaginations. The storytelling powers of my Uncle Len became legendary from my point of view, and to this day I adopt some of his strategies when trying to interest youngsters in something. My other uncle, Ken, was a rather than different character, but I always found his horsey exploits intriguing, in particular his involvement as a stunt rider in various films of the period.

It was during that period that the Great British Holiday was really taking off. My father had at least two weeks paid holiday every year and we used to love getting away as a family, usually to a resort on the south coast (see Chapter 7). Things did not always go smoothly but most of the difficulties were ironed out when we settled for caravan holidays, which were relatively cheap and did not involve landladies. I liked everything about a holiday – the various trips we used to make as well as playing cricket in the caravan field and larking about on the beach. I liked visiting old buildings, particularly castles, and going for walks in the countryside, with my father giving us tips on the country code.

By the time I arrived at end of my time in junior school I’d had a wealth of relevant experience both in and out of school which stood me in good stead for the next phase of my education. I’d developed all kinds of physical, mental and linguistic skills, but as indicated above my strength was my ‘stickability’. If I became immersed in an activity, it was difficult to drag me away; and this applied to my engagement with, say, an arithmetical problem as much as it did to a sporting activity. I was highly competitive and had been taught from a young age that you had to prepare for competition, not just assume because you’d won once you could do it again. Like everyone else I had what we would now regard as ‘blind spots’, as much to do with the ‘times’ as me personally, and I did have a nervous streak which meant I sometimes nearly let myself down, as in those moments of panic in the eleven plus which I write about in Chapter 9.

It’s easy of course to be wise after the event and hindsight is not always a wonderful thing but it’s difficult not to suggest those highly organised methods of trying to remember poems or the ‘expressive’ skills developed in elocution and drama lessons or all that effort to become top of the class in junior school or that ‘love’ of competitive street games and sporting activities or numerous other such experiences had a lot to do with the creation of a young person willing and able to engaged with the stiff tests and demands of life in a grammar school, which unsurprisingly I took to like a duck to water.

In Part Two the main focus is on my schooling at one of Ealing’s two single-sex state grammar schools, namely Ealing Grammar School for Boys (the other was the girls’ grammar school). In Chapter 10 I develop the ‘duck to water’ theme before going off on a rather different tack in subsequent chapters, where I’m mostly concerned with an evaluation of the grammar school experience. Chapter 11 applies the school (and indeed the Ealing Borough Council motto) Respice, Prospice to my own situation as a pupil in a school which was part of and gave expression to a particular educational tradition, namely the grammar school tradition in English education. I look at continuities – the curriculum, staffing, streaming, the house system, the prefect system – between the school in its early years (it was founded in 1913) and what it was like in the 1950s when I attended. With this background in mind, I develop a critique of the education I received, looking at what I now regard as its shortcomings as well as its strengths. I examine the role of the headmaster mostly via anecdotes about my own relationship with him (Chapter 13), and the role of the teaching staff ( Chapter 15), their functional and dysfunctional teaching styles, their dedication and enthusiasm, their ideologies and misdemeanours. I take a critical look at the school magazine (Chapter 14) of which I was sub-editor in the late 1950s, and ask the same question as I do of the curriculum and the teachers. To what extent was a modern liberal education actually realised in a school which was purportedly part of a tradition which aimed to do precisely that?

In addition to what was provided academically, there were copious opportunities to develop one’s interests and talents in other areas, of which I took full advantage, particularly in relation to drama and sport. The school put on a school play each year, which, for most of my time there, was always a Shakespearian play. I played female roles to begin with (not unusual in an all boys’ school) but graduated to male roles as I got older and played the lead in Macbeth when I was in the sixth form (see Chapter 16). In Chapter 17 I describe my involvement with the National Youth Theatre, an experience that would have been denied me had I not been a regular participant in school productions. On the sporting-front, I played in school cricket and football teams throughout my school career, and in later years was a member of the cross-country team (Chapter 18). I became junior athletics champion in 1955 and senior champion in 1957. In each of these chapters I draw on memories of humorous, salutary, shameful and confusing experiences and events which highlight different facets of my psychological development.

The same might be said of the chapters on social influences coming from outside the school. For years I was a member of the Covenanters which, whilst not as significant for my development as school, undoubtedly made an impact. As I explain in Chapter 19 the main socializing thrust of this was not at all at odds with the school. It involved a whole gamut of activities – regular church attendance, bible study and interpretation, sports, summer camps and sailing holidays – none of which took priority over school commitments and all of which ‘cogwheeled’ neatly with them. My ‘best’ friends were from church rather than school in part because they lived a lot nearer. In Chapter 20 I give details of my relationship with one boy with whom I whiled away much of my leisure time – cycling, going to the park, playing in church teams, competing intensely at indoor games and later, when we were older, going to church youth club and on long cycle trips and later still chasing girls and going to the pub for a drink and a smoke.

The other important non-school influences were those promoted by TV and radio programmes, in particular comedy shows like Hancock’s Half Hour, which is the main topic of discussion in Chapter 21. Hancock was important for several reasons, not least because he reflected the changing zeitgeist of the times and pre-figured some aspects of the cultural shifts of the 1960s and 70s. And then, of course, there was the rock ‘n’ roll revolution which kicked off when I was in my mid-teens and facilitated my engagement with popular culture and connection to life as a ‘teenager’, although in my case a rather pale shadow of the real thing (see Chapter 22).

***

As indicated above most of Part Three is organised around themes identified in a daily journal I wrote for three months between December 22, 1960, the day I left school, and February 28, 1961. The rest is written from my memory of events later in the year before I went up to university in October. In the introduction to the journal I acknowledge that the death of my mother several months previously had much to do with my wanting to analyse myself during this period. She died suddenly at Easter 1960 a few weeks before I took A-level. My father and various friends and relatives advised me to carry on with my revision and take the exams on the grounds that that’s what she would have wanted but looking back I’m not sure I made the correct decision. I discuss her death and her writings in Chapter 23, a chapter I found very difficult write, even after this length of time. We had been very close from my birth onwards and to say her death came as a shock is an understatement.

Although I managed to pass all three A-level subjects, my results were below the levels anticipated on the basis of my outstanding O-level scores. In the journal I question whether or not this had anything to do with my mother’s death which others assumed was self-evidently the case. In the event, I decided not to repeat A-levels but to spend my time in the third year sixth preparing for Oxbridge entrance exams, which is one of the tension points referred to in the journal, where I note that life’s problems and responsibilities are piling up on every side.

Another one of the problems piling up was to do with the situation at home (see Chapter 24). My father had always been very supportive of my school career but in my final term he began to nag about where it was all leading. A number of things came together which made our relationship fractious. First, the priority given to my time spent studying had meant I made a minimal contribution to the domestic economy both financially and in terms of labour e.g. household chores. Second, he developed a certain lack of confidence in my abilities, particularly my practical abilities in day-to-day life. Third, it is also possible that I harboured resentment about his relationships with other women, though there is no clear evidence of this in my accounts of the inter-family meetings that these liaisons gave rise to. The financial issues were largely resolved by my obtaining a temporary teaching job at a secondary modern school, which I discuss in Chapter 25.

In addition to family relations and teaching experience, one can tease out at least three other themes in the journal, all of which involve ‘transitions’ of one kind or another (see Chapter 26). ‘Encounters with opposite sex’ might be identified as one such theme (a theme also taken up in Chapter 27), ‘the demise of my religious belief’ another. The third theme is more difficult to pin down but has something to do with the significance of art, in particular film, in broadening my outlook. For the writer of a memoir, it’s a bonus that the evidence for such developments is right there on the pages of a journal written at the time. However, I would not want to exaggerate the significance of this phase or these themes for my overall development, which was ongoing and not, as far as I am aware, characterised by abrupt psychological changes.

The theme of work and gainful employment alluded to in Chapter 24 is picked up again in Chapter 28. In addition to school teaching, the other two highlights of what we would now call my ‘gap’ year were a walking holiday in the Lake District and working on a pig farm in Herefordshire, both of which contained pivotal moments in my progress from adolescence to young adulthood.

***

Chapter 29 is mostly concerned with life in Ealing just before I went up to Leeds University in October 1961. I was accepted originally to read history but various developments led me to change this to psychology/sociology. That wasn’t a straightforward thing to do and I went through a period of uncertainty when I thought I might have scuppered my chances of going to university altogether. But I felt it was worth the risk because by that time I had developed certain vocational commitments and had a clearer idea of what I wanted to do when I left university. Much of this derived from changes in my general outlook, which were heavily influenced by my emerging cultural and political interests.

Looking back, the period between leaving school and going to university represented a transition from the conformist grammar school boy to the anti-establishment university student I became. This was in all probability a function of the ‘changing times’ but specific aspects of my school experience undoubtedly played a part. The dominant school ethos of Ealing Grammar School was conservative and conformist, but, as I suggest in Part Two, there was space for the development of a certain creative and critical element. In exploring that further in Chapter 30, I analyse some data which I obtained from a special edition of the school magazine produced to mark the occasion of a reunion.

PART ONE

Growing Up Post-War

Chapter One

War Child

I was born on October 16th 1941 in Perivale Maternity Hospital in the borough of Ealing in the County of Middlesex. It was war time and my father was still on active service in the Far East. By then the conflict seemed to have reached a turning point. Although air raids continued, the period of sustained bombing of the UK by Germany, ‘the Blitz’, was over, the last major attack on London being in May 1941. It looked as though the threat of an invasion of England had passed as Hitler now turned his attention to Russia. On the December 7th 1941 the Japanese sank the pride of the American fleet at Pearl Harbour which precipitated US entry into the war.

My mother and I lived in a ground floor flat in Lancaster Gardens, West Ealing. The first two years of my life were relatively quiet but early in 1944 the bombing of London resumed in earnest with the launching of ‘secret weapons’ –the V1 flying-bombs (the ‘doodle-bugs’)¹ and the V2 rockets. Known as the ‘Little’ or ‘Baby’ Blitz, the bombs were fewer but much larger. A V2 landed not far away in Chiswick to devastating effect, and in July of that year a bomb landed on the Uxbridge Road between Drayton Green and Harlington Roads, only a quarter of a mile or so from where we lived, destroying five shops and causing heavy casualties.² I was too young to actually remember this but I recall people talking about it after the war.

In our small garden, we had an Anderson shelter, a corrugated iron construction half buried in the soil, which could accommodate four people in bunk beds. We were joined in the shelter by the old Scottish couple who lived upstairs, Mr and Mrs Duff, and occasionally by our friend and neighbour, Auntie Connie, and her daughter, Brenda. My mother told me I was often sick in the shelter and that together with Mr. Duff’s hacking cough, to say nothing of the jangling nerves every time we heard the engine of a ‘doodle-bug’ stop, could not have made for a very pleasant atmosphere.

I remember playing two Blitz-related games right at the end of the war and in the first years of peace. The first was with Brenda, my sweetheart, as my mother and Connie used to call her. The game was called chance. If we were playing in the road or garden, one of us used to shout chance, chance…get to the chance, whereupon we’d run into the house and hide under the table, cuddling each other, waiting for the bombs to drop. For some reason we used to pronounce chance with an American accent. The other game was bombs. Never a good sleeper at that age, I often played in bed with the light out for quite a while before falling asleep. I used to sing, head bang, pray then drop bombs on the Germans. The latter involved the imaginary packing of a large box with all sorts of horrible things – snakes, acid, pee, plops, dead rats, poisoned food – which I would then, with great effort, tip over the side of the bed and watch it float down on a parachute to land on an unsuspecting family.

***

My father returned home in late December 1945. Relative to others, he’d had a fairly easy war. A gunner in the Royal Artillery, he was initially posted to Burma, then quickly moved to Ceylon (as Sri Lanka was then called) where he said he never fired a shot in anger. Only one attack on Ceylon took place when a Japanese aircraft carrier moved into the Indian Ocean in April 1942.

He had been abroad for the first four years of my life. His war records show that he’d been inoculated against Typhoid-Paratyphoid (TAB) and Tetanus in 1940 and against Cholera in 1944 when he also received booster TAB and Tetanus jabs. Although he had various periods of leave – eight days in 1942, seven in 1943 and ten in 1944 – , it was not possible for troops in that theatre to come back to the UK. In an airgraph letter ³ he wrote to my maternal grandmother on April 27th 1942 (the letters to my mother have been lost) he said how pleased he was she liked the Ceylon tea he had sent her and thanks her for her letter which apparently took six months to arrive. In the same letter he refers to a photograph of me he’d recently received which, if it also took six months, meant I must still have been a babe in arms, only a month or two old.

He brought home a whole stack of black and white photos of his time in this outpost of the British Empire; some are official group photos, but most are ‘snaps’ probably taken by a fellow soldier. They seem to suggest he was having a whale of a time – riding on elephants, visiting temples, going on sightseeing trips by train, being carted about on rickshaws, swimming in the sea, having a few beers with his mates – and he always has a grin on his face. But the reality must have been different. In the above mentioned letter he writes that the house in which he was billeted had recently been de-bugged. The heat alone would have been crippling to say nothing of the boredom of the daily routines of looking after a gun and keeping fit; and, of course, never knowing for certain if and when the Japanese were going to turn up again.

I can’t remember any major emotional problems attendant on his homecoming. Some ‘war babies’ are said to have wondered who that strange man was in mummy’s bed! Soldiers themselves have spoken of the time it took to settle down to life in civvy street, particularly if they had been living for several years in a strange culture with such a different climate. There was one incident well after the war ended and my father was back at work which may have suggested things were not all that hunky-dory from my point of view. Every evening when he came home from work he used to greet me with Hello, folks!, a catch phrase from some comedy show on the radio. It used to irritate the egocentric me no end, particularly if I was otherwise occupied. One evening I was sitting in an armchair (the comfy one which was really ‘his’ chair), either drawing a picture or writing, when he arrived home and interrupted me (yet again!) with the usual grin and greeting. As he bent over me, I let out a yell and stabbed him