First School, 1959-1965

I was sent off to school aged four and a half in 1958. Lowerplace Primary School was about a quarter hour walk away from home and we followed the same route every morning, back home for dinner, back to school after dinner and back home after school finished. It's amazing how the mind has the capacity to remember details from such early life - I can name a commendable number of the class, though some surnames have dropped off I'm afraid.

The Head Teacher was Harry Whitehead - I'm standing in front of him. Our class teacher is Mrs Wormauld and the kids:
Back row: Geoff Hunter, Jimmy Tattersall, Timothy Bate, Thomas Clegg, Gareth Hunt, ?, Alan Telford, Geoffrey Thompson, ?, Graham Nutter
Middle row: John Burke (me), David Nutter, Peter Sinclair, David Hunt, ?, Judith ?, Gillian ?, Maurice Golding (or Goulding?), ?, Robert Brennan, David Clayton, Brett Robinson
Front row: Megan Brown, Pamela Courtauld, Suzanne ?, ?, Think this one began with a C but not sure!, ?, Susan Ashton, Katherine Clegg(?), Patricia(?) ?, ?

Well a few blanks but not bad for half a century on! One of the lads was the last in the school to wear clogs - there was a new parquet floor in the hall and I remember one of the teachers asking him to tell his mother to buy him some shoes as the clog irons damaged the wooden floor.

I found myself for a while in David Nutter's gang - though drifted off when I found with something of a shock that this apparently meant having to fight other gangs... I was brought up fairly gently and fighting, though necessary at times unless you were going to be unmercifully picked on, wasn't something I particularly enjoyed. (With my brother Frank it was a different matter I suppose...)

Particular friends were Brett Robinson, Ian Kilby (who must have been absent the day the photo was taken), Robert Brennan and Maurice Golding whose birthday was the day before mine. There were two reception classes. The teacher we didn't get was Miss Anstess - young apparently, though to a 4-year-old, anyone over 7 looks old... She impressed Dad though...! I can't remember the name of the teacher we had... Each year had a teacher who as far as I remember taught every subject.

I remember there being a sandpit in the class and besides buckets and spades there were all sorts of moulds that you could use to make sand starfish and the like. The building was a long corridor with two wings with classrooms off both sides and - this impressed me at the time - windows not only to the outside of the building but to the corridor as well! In the middle of the morning a crate of 1/3 pint bottles of milk would be brought in and you each got a bottle of milk and a straw. Straws at this time were waxed paper - plastic was not yet all that common, particularly for items where it needed to be so thin!

In common with all older generations, I learned my "times tables" up to the 12 times table by chanting them over and over, "one two is two, two twos are four, three twos are six..." up to "twelve twos are twenty four". Regardless of what they say now about kids learning the tune but not the words we all learned to count and multiply and add a shopping bill in our heads. Electronic calculators didn't exist as far as I knew until I had left school in 1972! The first one I saw was in college and was almost the size of 5 laptops stacked on top of each other. (I was going to say a typewriter but kids wouldn't know what that meant either...)

I would have loved to be good at drawing but in those days I'm afraid I was one of the messiest kids when the paints came out... Something always seemed to smudge! We had blocks of shaped wood that could be dipped in paint and then pressed on the page and I never learned the knack of lifting them off without smearing sideways first. I remember our teacher for one year was Mr Daly - who everyone was frightened of because he shouted quite a bit and I was desperate not to let him see the colourful mess I'd made. Thankfully once he had forcefully moved my encircling arm away and seen the sorry state of what I'd done he merely sighed...

Lowerplace Primary School led to Lowerplace Junior School and then they merged anyway so we still had Harry Whitehead as Headmaster. Our final year teacher was Mr Metcalfe which confused me as that was the name of Nanna and Grandad and how could someone else have the same name if they weren't part of the family? He was wonderful. Though somewhat scathing of the unrealistic exploits of the child heroes in Enid Blyton's books. I loved the Famouse Five and the Secret Seven and the Barney books but he read us "Martin Rattler" and "Children of the New Forest" and used his voice to make all the scenes and characters come alive. Thank you, that man - he awakened in me an unquenchable desire to read, without which my life would have been so much the poorer.

Playing out meant hide and seek, playing catch, tig, hopscotch. Hide and seek wasn't much cop because you couldn't leave the playground and there were only so many corners to hide behind! As we moved up the school we played cricket and football and "Muggins in the Middle" - playing catch with someone in the middle trying to get the ball before it was caught by the one at the other end. By the very end of junior school, talking to girls started to become popular... Up until the last year they were something to be avoided as they giggled a lot and cried too easily - apart from a gypsy girl who joined us for a couple of months and flattened a couple of the fighters in the class with a somewhat more scientific knowledge of fist fighting that completely outclassed them...

When winter came - and in the late 1950s and 1960s that meant snow and ice and lots of it - we made huge long slides by running at a patch of ice then leaping onto it to slide as far as we could. All the repeated goes left a long shiny totally resistance-free slide that would stretch as much as 20 feet or more. The trick was to turn sideways and flex the knees! Great fun, some pain and scabbed knees and elbows but great fun. No one got sued, no one thought it too dangerous to allow. We had to learn - kids don't do that now, they get "looked after" and still expect it as adults. We learned to take responsibility for what we did. Nowadays people sue for damages because they slipped on a spilt drink in a MacDonalds that their own kid threw down in a tantrum. Ridiculous! Don't get me started!

Punishments - well there was having to sit with your hands on your head, sometimes an individual, many times the entire class because we had been noisy. Individuals had to stand in the corner facing the wall. We were smacked, on the thigh normally - wearing long trousers was unknown until you were in your teens. Mostly it was the hand that smacked but if you had been particularly naughty you might get the "pump". Trainers hadn't been invented. For sport we wore plimsoles - rubber soled canvas shoes known as "pumps" that were extremely flexible. When swung they flexed like a whip - being whacked with one of those hurt. Being whacked on the backside six times really hurt. Or you could be whacked with one on the palm of your hand - "Hold your hand out and put the other one beneath it!"

On the hand you could also receive the strap - a two inch wide leather strop that the teacher would swing after wrapping one end around his hand. It wasn't nice and you didn't want it to happen again so most people didn't repeat whatever had led to it. Some teachers got rattled at you and you were likely to get a more informal slap around the head - "having your ears boxed" it was called. Again, no one got sued - if you told your parents, you were likely to get your ears boxed by them too for having gotten into trouble at school. If you were asked to stand up in disgrace and didn't then a teacher would grasp an ear and pull you up! This was nothing compared to what would happen later at secondary school!

School dinners were a shilling a day (5p). I'll say more about them on the secondary school page - to be honest I can remember very little about them at Lowerplace though I stayed for school dinners for two or three years.

Here is the final year class - we would now be 11 years old. Lots of the same faces as before but joined by a few newcomers - Ian Kilby stands next to Harry Whitehead at the top. In front of him is another great mate from those days, Martin Davenport. Immediately to the left of him Alan Telford had become a very good friend too. He lived next door to a great mate of my brother Frank, they were in the year below us, so we spent a lot of time together the four of us.

Mr Metcalfe, one of that great breed of teachers who helped shape us into what we became stands at the left. I am fourth from the left on the front row with a prefect's badge pinned on my shirt. We had moved out of Rochdale to a village, Milnrow during the last year, but we stayed on at Lowerplace School until we left to go to secondary school. Unfortunately as we had moved out of the borough, this meant that for me it would be a different school than all my mates.

We sat our 11 plus - I remember it as being far easier than I had thought, though only a few thought the same as me. Apparently it had a pass rate of only about 10%. I passed and would be going to a grammar school. Those who didn't pass would go to a secondary modern school. What the difference was, I didn't have a clue at that time. Mum and Dad took me to visit Chadderton Boys Grammar School and Heywood Grammar School. They both looked terrifying to me. I was to end up at Heywood Grammar School and - ripples of both excitement and concern - it was so far away we had to go on a coach!

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