The class of '68, part 2 ..... failing the 11 plus or Andrew and Samuel Pepys Secondary Modern School

The one sure certainty of failing the 11 plus was that you went to a secondary modern school.

Not of course that this over surprised me.  My mother had been told by my year 6 teacher back in the January of 1961 “that I was not academic material.”  A sentence that burned deeply into my mother and condemned my father and me to endless evenings of 11 plus tests by the kitchen stove.

All to no avail.  I failed.  But not before I along with all the other also runs had to endure the class interviews where the hopefuls destined for a bright grammar school future would give a presentation to the rest of us, which were really rehearsals for the real thing in front of the head teachers of the local grammar schools.

To this day I remember my first introduction to Vasco da Gamma that Portuguese sailor who boldly went where no European had sailed before.  Even then I wondered why the cabin boy and cook as well as the man steering the ship never got a look in through the entire talk.

Years later teaching year 8s the European voyages of discovery, plunder and much else I was always pulled up by the mention of the said captain and taken back the twelve years to the upstairs classroom of Edmund Waller Junior School and the talk given by Barry Whatshisname.

But enough of such bitter vituperation.  That was what the 11 plus was supposed to do.  Separate the elite from the rest of us, and while they went on to a bright academic environment we were destined for schools which specialized in more practical things, .......woodwork not Wordsworth, technical drawing not Tennyson and so much more.

Added to that our schools were not as well funded and led to one glorious episode where just before my O level history exam in 1966 we were given a world historical atlas published in 1938 which finished with the wonderfully optimistic comment that “it is hoped the leaders of Germany and Italy will see sense and rejoin the League of Nations in a profound desire to solve issues by peaceful means.”  Now today I can see the dark humour in that, but at the time I pondered how we had to use a thirty year old text book which added to everything else got the next ten years of European history so wrong.

But my secondary modern school and many others across the country strived not to give us a second class education.  They were fully aware that a rigid test at 11 did not mean that those who failed to pass were failures.  And so many of us were entered for 0 level exams that badge of so called academic excellence while class mates were given the practical skills which enabled them to become tradesmen in a whole range of occupations.

And these places attracted the talented and committed teachers.  I can remember many who I would have been happy to work beside when I started teaching in 1973.  Indeed in the years after I started I benefited from the advice, good humour and wisdom of those who had been at Oldwood Secondary School here in Manchester before it was merged with the local grammar school to form Poundswick High School.

But despite all their efforts secondary modern schools were just that.  They were a secondary form of education for those who judged unsuitable for the full academic experience.

Today as then selection at 11 has its supporters who in their advocacy of grammar schools focus on the poor records of some comprehensive schools and on a golden age of grammar school education in the late 1940s and 50s.

Now I can be both objective and generous in my recognition of the opportunities grammar schools gave to children of all classes particularly ones who like me came from a working class background.

But I was under no illusion at the time and since that what we who failed that 11 plus were offered was less than best. Not for us that heady excitement of preparing for a new educational world with like minded bright young things.  In the September of 1961 I assembled with the majority of my male ex classmates from junior school in the playground of Samuel Pepys, and apart from the uniform and an absence of girls there was little to mark this off as any different from what I had already experienced.

It would be five years before I had my opportunity to enter a school of all the talents where money and resources were on offer to all of us.   This was Crown Woods School in Eltham, one of three big shiny and exciting comprehensive schools and the place where I really began to feel valued and above all come to love learning.

Tomorrow, part 3 at the centre of something pretty good, ..........Crown Woods School

Pictures; Andrew Simpson aged 16, 1966, and the badge of Samuel Pepys School from the collection of Andrew Simpson, and Oldwood Secondary Modern School, 1956, courtesy of Manchester Libraries, Information and Archives, Manchester City Council m66278

Who remembers those long coach journeys out to Ewell for an afternoon’s sport?

Now if like me you grew up in one of the inner London boroughs the chances are that one afternoon a week you were bused out to Ewell in Surrey during term time.

I did four years and may have done a fifth although I rather think by the time I was in year 11 we could opt out.

And it was a mammoth undertaking, involving transporting a whole year group by coach from New Cross to the leafy outer suburbs which for me also meant a Saturday morning during the winter to play in the school rugby team.

It was not for me the highlight of the week, in fact it was an ordeal brought on by my inability to travel on buses, coaches and cars without feeling ill.

It began with the smell of those green coaches which the school hired which even now brings on that same uneasy feeling.

I suppose they were the newest of models and were pretty much the workhorse of the company ferrying school children to Ewell, works parties down to the sea coast and hired out to other companies.

And then as the journey got underway the heat from the engine and the smell of the leather seats mixed with an overpowering scent was enough to set me off, made no easier by the knowledge that this was it for 40 minutes only to be repeated again later in the day.

I won’t have been alone in feeling like that and I guess it was a small price to pay to get us all out to participate in a range of sporting activities.

But it does point to that simple observation that if you went to an inner city secondary school there weren’t going to be acres of green fields surrounding the school.

Back on home base we had the asphalt playground and another on the roof of the new block and that was it.

It was another of those little things that marked secondary moderns off from grammar schools.

But in that brave post War era the LCC and the Inner London Education Authority set about offering us out at Ewell something others took for granted.

Looking back I can see the wisdom of their actions even if the experience was an ordeal.

Picture; from the collection of Andrew Simpson

Wondering about Michael, Philip and the cocoa factory on Kender Street

I wonder what happened to Michael Tickner, Philip Broome and Paul Driver.

They along with Jimmy O’Donnell, and John Cox were part of the class of ‘61 which started at Samuel Pepys in the September of that year.

There were 180 of us, drawn from a selection of junior schools and despite the diversity of our back grounds we all failed the 11 plus, that gold standard of excellence which guaranteed some a grammar school education and the rest of us something else.

I have never quite lost that sense of being judged second best and when I began teaching in the mid 1970s I was the only one from a Secondary Modern.

And for a time I was very hard on Samuel Pepys judging it against Crown Woods in Eltham where I went at 16.

Looking back that was unfair because like many other Secondary Moderns it did its best to offer us as good an education as the grammar school next door putting some of us in for “O” levels while recognising that for some their interests, skills and aptitudes lay elsewhere.

So I do wonder what happened to that cohort of ’61 partly because I am curious but also to prove that the 11 plus gold standard was not the fine measure of who we were or what we could become.

But if I am honest it is also because I am curious.

Some took the option and left at the end of the 4^th year and more in the Christmas of my last year.

By then I think from memory the year group had shrunk from seven forms down to two and fewer still stayed on for the sixth form.

For me the die had been cast in the March of 1963 when we left Lausanne Road for Eltham and slowly the familiar ebbed away and sometime around the beginning of 1965 the place I had grown up in just became a place to visit for school.

I guess that is pretty much how it is for all of us who move away.  In most cases the decades roll by with little thought of where it all started and when you do finally go back the landscape has altered out of all recognition.  

At best a few familiar old places still exist but even these look smaller and less inviting.

All of which makes me think about the people I knew. 

Most of the adults I have long forgotten although Mr Rhodes, Mr Payne, Mr Vaughan and Mr Twigg from Samuel Pepys still surface from time to time, as does Miss Prentice and Miss Reeves from Edmund Waller.

But with that passage of time I now do wonder about the lads I sat in class with.  Lads like Phillip Broome the class joker and Paul Driver who fell in the pool after a swimming lesson fully dressed and was for ever known as “Dribble.”

And then there was Michael who for a while at least none of us were kind to and for which I remain ashamed.

Of my closest friends I did make contact with Jimmy a few years ago.  He did fine, got married, raised a family and retired to the West Country.

Others like John I lost touch with and at least one from Edmund Waller I came across on a family history site just a few years ago and I am sorry to say he had lost none of the vain boasting which accompanied his time in Miss Reeves’s class.

I suppose most of when we think back that half century or more think of the buildings and the familiar places which time, the developer and the Council’s plans have done for and less of the friends and acquaintances we passed our youth with.

Pictures; from the collection of Andrew Simpson

My Peckham .............. nu 3 Samuel Pepy School

A short series of places I grew up with.  

Some have already appeared and others will be familiar because as iconic buildings they are well known.

Now pretty much every school I attended or taught at has been demolished and Samuel Pepy where I spent the years 1961-66 is no exception.

Adrian Parfitt sent me this picture which has particular significance as one of those classrooms was mine for two years.

On the other side of the corridor were the science labs and directly above us the history and geography rooms while opposite them were the art rooms.

All of which just left the playground on the roof and the staff room on ground floor.

I have no idea when the new block was built or when it finally came down, and would welcome news of what has replaced it.

Picture; supplied by Adrian Parfitt

As others remember .............. Barny and the coach trips to Ewell

The second of an occasional series contributed by readers who also grew up in south east London.

Here Barny remembers the school trips from Samuel Pepys to Ewell playing fields in the early 1960s

Who remembers you say??

How could I forget?

The memories come flooding back from purgatory...

(1) - The outgoing journey, New Cross to Ewell.

The smell of the dust from the old coach seats. Fighting for a back seat (essential for pulling faces and executing various hand gestures to anyone driving behind).

Ten minutes into the journey, that distinctive pong of vomit from those pupils who didn't travel well.

Outbreaks of skirmishes and bickering throughout the remainder of the trip.

(2) - Let the games begin.

Always Cross Country Running in the winter, so you had to suffer inhaling air at Absolute Zero. The pain!!

Hiding in a small wooded area, until joining the run on the last time around. Fag break!

Football, more like a medicine ball, kicked really hard against my soft skin. The agony!!

The abject boredom of being unpicked for a team and left goalkeeping.

Rugby, no fun at all if you're 8 stone (112 lbs or 50kg).

(3) - Cold Showers.

Oh! the joy. Towel flicking from horrible pupils, aimed at the soft parts of my body.

Five minutes to run the gauntlet through the ice cold showers. (time includes getting dried and dressed),

Getting dressed, almost impossible with wet skin and numb from the cold fingers, still covered in mud.

School duffle bag full of junk, deposited by some oiks whilst you were showering.

Pants or one sock missing. grrrr!

(4) - The home journey, Ewell to New Cross.

Fighting for a back seat again. Further skirmishes and bickering. The stink of Smiths Cheese & Onion crisps.
That vomit smell again.

Pupils comparing body parts and functionality, apparently!

Miscellaneous instances of irritating noise and diesel fumes.

It's no wonder that various rouses and schemes were devised in order to give Games a miss. My favourite and one that always worked well, was to leave a penny in one of your socks throughout the previous day.

Then, just before Games, you show the horrible looking bruise on you foot to a teacher, and viola! - excused!! Who remembers you say??

© Barny

Pictures; Banfield Coach, Leyland Tiger Cub, 1959

Woodwork lessons at Chorlton High in the spring of 1930

It is a scene that anyone growing up in the middle decades of the 20th century will recognise.

It’s a wood work lesson at Chorlton High sometime in the 1930s.  In my case our exploration of the joys of sawing, paining and gluing the stuff at Samuel Pepys Secondary Modern happened in the basement of the old 1880’s building while metalwork was in the new 1950’s annexe.

Now ours was an all boys school and similar practical lessons were in the neighbouring girls’ school where cooking was done over one of those solid fuel Rayburn ranges and needlework next door.

Of course so much hung on that difference between grammar school and secondary modern which might as well have been an ocean in distance...

In the grammar school the education was geared to what my Year 6 teacher said “were the academically advanced children” who had passed the 11 plus examination proving that they were fit for the thinking jobs and an education to deliver it.

The rest of us were destined for the secondary modern diet, which was more woodwork than, Wordsworth, and technical drawing rather than Tennyson

It’s a theme I have visited before so instead I will move on and over the next few weeks reflect on what it meant to go to school here in Chorlton in that great stretch of years from the late 19th century into the bright shiny decades of the 1940s and 50s.

Next “Cramming and paying”, the new Chorlton children chasing education opportunities 

Pictures; from The Lloyd collection

Rediscovering a lost adolescence ...... attending a secondary school in the September of 1961

It was early September 1961 and along with twenty or so others from Edmund Waller Junior School I was in the Annexe of Samuel Pepys Secondary Modern on Old James Street in Nunhead.

Now I can’t be sure but I don’t think I was shot through with anxiety as we stood in the playground on that September morning.

After all I walked up from Lausanne Road with my friends,  Jimmy O’Donnel and John Cox and were surrounded by lads who just six weeks earlier I had been with at Edmund Waller.

And that was pretty much it.  True we now had a uniform and the name of the school was different but otherwise that great shift to a secondary school didn’t amount to much.

We had exchanged one school for another, most of the people I had known had joined me along with about another 130 or so boys from neighbouring schools and the building looked just the same.

The only significant difference was that the girls had gone off to other single sex establishments and we were missing that small handful of hopefuls who had qualified for a grammar school.

We stood in the playground, our names were read out and we were allotted a class, a teacher and timetable.

None of which is at all remarkable and is the lot of thousands of young people every year.  Except we were the secondary modern boys marked out for an education which would be less well funded and would concentrate on technical not academic subjects.

As it was in the fullness of time we were given the chance to do “O” levels and made to feel that we were not second class.

Not that any of these things even entered my head all those years ago.

Back then it as just what you did.

And that first year has ranked low on my list of significant personal events.

If I am honest there were even times when I wondered just how much of it I remembered or how relevant it was to me later in my life.

But of course it was and was so in many different ways.

I suppose the first is that it points yet again to the baby boomer generation which put great pressure on the system as we passed through it.

Samuel Pepys had expanded to cope with the increase in pupil numbers, building a new building beside the old LCC school and farming out the year 7s to Nunhead which was some distance away from Telegraph Hill and the rest of the school.

Equally it is how with the passage of time you begin to question bits of that younger life, and so it was with the school annexe.  Did we really walk a good 20 minutes in the opposite direction to the main school to Nunhead?  Was the building still standing and what of the surrounding area?

Rye Oak School, 2006, © Tim Wardle

Well, the building is still there although now it is Rye Oak Primary School but some of the places I knew have gone, like the little sweet shop at the opposite side of Old James Street, run by a little old lady called Kay.

Here from memory was a place which hadn’t changed in three decades.

With an eye to her potential profits she sold all sorts of cheap sweets including paper cones of lemon ice for a penny.

Before and after school for a brief twenty minutes the place would be full after which I guess it settled down with just the occasional customer.

It was the sort of place we all felt quite at home in and was replicated by scores of similar tiny shops closer to home.

And in the same way the Annexe was very little different from my Junior school which is not surprising.  It was built in 1887 and the Annexe three years earlier.

Edmund Waller School, 2009, © Colin Fitzpatrick

These were the Board Schools, built of brick with high windows and were warm in winter and cool in summer unlike their 1950s successors which with those walls of glass were the very reverse.

I took them for granted but looking back they were a high point in school architecture.

These were solid and sound, meant not only to last but announced to everyone that inside the serious and exciting business of education was offered up.

How different from their modern counterparts, which with a change of name and purpose could be a set of offices, or even a supermarket.

All perhaps a long way from that playground in the September of 1961, but perhaps not so for.

I started off thinking about a school I attended and remarkably I find it still there as I left it and still doing the business.

Pictures; from the collection of Andrew Simpson, Rye Oak Primary School Tim Wardle, Victorian Schools in London, 1870-1914, http://www.victorianschoolslondon.org.uk/Schools.htmx?schoolid=402 & Edmund Waller, courtesy of Colin Fitzpatrick

The class of '61 that talented bunch from a secondary modern

Now when you spend your time digging deep into other people’s lives it is easy to neglect your own and those that have shaped the way you look at the world.

I was reminded of this during a long conversation with someone I last met in the July of 1966.

This was the year I left Samuel Pepys Secondary Modern School.

I was part of the class of ’61 which had left junior school having failed the eleven plus and was destined for an alternative education to the one offered to students who went to the grammar school.

There had been 180 of us back in the September of 1961 which had fallen way to just fifty or so by the beginning of our final year in what was then the fifth year .

Those that had left had taken advantage of the early school leaving policy which meant that could you say good bye to the playground, the books and morning assembly at the age of 15.

All of this was in keeping with the ethos of the secondary modern school which as its name suggests was a secondary or alternate route for those who had been judged nonacademic by that formal set of tests given out to all English and Welsh children in their final year in Junior School.

Not that any of us at the time I think felt that we were failures, that for me came much later.

At the time you just accepted this was your lot.  You left the junior school in the July and except for a hand full of the “gifted” turned up six weeks later in a uniform and joined another 150 or so youngsters.

Now over the years I was hard both on secondary schools and in particular Samuel Pepys, but on reflection they did a grand job with less resources than were allocated to the grammar schools and by the time I left were offering the same range of public examinations as their elite competitors.

So my conversation with Les was timely.

We began as you do remembering shared class mates and exploring the different paths our lives had taken.

And what came out was that simple truth that we were a talented bunch.  Some had gone on to become successful in business and public service while others had really only blossomed much later.

Les I discovered had been part of a band which had played support to the very best groups of the late 60s and early 70s and gone on to have a successful career in the city.

It was a salutatory lesson in confronting that inferiority complex which had dogged my years as a teacher.

Surrounded entirely by staff who came from grammar schools I suffered from being the only “secondary school boy” and while it may have been a self induced feeling of  inferiority it was real enough.

Real enough to make me wonder when the moment would come when I would be discovered masquerading as something I was not and shown the door.

All of which is a nonsense I know but is still there just under the surface, so I thank Les for reminding me that us secondary modern boys were not the also runs.

And in time I trust there will be more stories of the class of ’61.

Pictures, from the collection of Andrew Simpson