Poulton Gig for Car Club

Saturday 8 December saw us out at Poulton Golf Club to play for the Christmas "do" of a local car club.

It was a superb night, the audience were cracking jokes with us and we got a lot of good feedback at the end of the night and afterwards. Miss Jeannie reached down to the bottom of the costume box to find the old Mexican sombreros we used to wear when playing "Dance the Night Away". So they made a reappearance!

Another surprise was bumping into an old friend from school! Janet Astley was one of the bunch of close friends from sixth form days. There was even a song or two she remembered from the old days when I was in a band called "Anacreon" and before that in the rather less nattily named "Heywood Senior High School Folk Group"...

David took this one of Jan and I behind Miss Franny and Miss Jeannie before we started playing. ...er... that is before the band started playing... Just so there's no confusion...!

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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First Day at Heywood Grammar School

This blog entry re-creates a page from my now defunct Nostalgia web site which I've been saying for ages I should transfer to here and which several other people (well mainly Jackie Waters, long time friend from that same school...) have been saying I should transfer to here. So here it is! Day one of a secondary school career that would see the transition of a boy to a man. Yes, alright - debateable, but I'll get round to it sooner or later!

Heywood Grammar School. I started there in September 1965 with a mixture of anticipation and apprehension. I'd been with the same gang of mates since starting school aged 4 until leaving Rochdale's Lowerplace Junior School aged 11. Now, because we had moved outside of the Rochdale Borough area, I would leave all my pals for a group of total strangers.

Also there was a new uniform, not just a blazer and cap but every item of outer clothing was specified! Adding to the sense of all things new was the fact that going to school entailed a coach trip from the pick up point in Milnrow, the village where we lived. The coaches were operated by the Rochdale firm of Yelloways and were, quite understandably, the older of their stock!

On the first morning's trip we learned two important things: one - the back seat was reserved for older pupils who looked (to an 11 year old) old enough to be running the country never mind going to school! Crumbs! The lads were cuddling girls for heaven's sake! Two: although the school rules required it, if you wore your cap then it was going to be snatched from your head and thrown about the coach...

We arrived at the school and were shuffled into lines and marched into the Assembly Hall. The headmaster was Colonel Farish, who was dressed in a suit with waistcoat, over which a long black academic gown flowed to floor level. The Deputy Headmaster and Headmistress, were Mr Thomas and Miss Wood. They also wore black gowns. Mr Thomas looked exactly like the teacher from the Bash Street Kids. Miss Wood wore her hair braided in two enormous Princess Leia cartwheels at the side of her head.

The first years were to be split into 4 classes, 1A to 1D, based purely on age. We would be split by ability at the end of that year. I ended up in class 1B and, together with those in class 1A, we were formed into pairs, lined up into a crocodile and marched off to our rooms which were a prefabricated building a few streets away.

Our form mistress was a pretty young woman called Mrs Pilkington. Sally Pilkington, we were soon told by second year pupils. We were asked our names; "John" I said.
"We call boys by their surname here..." For some reason that was a shock. So for the next 6 or 7 years I was Burke to the teachers and for 3 to 4 years Burkey or Burkey-Bean to my peers.

It solved some confusion - on the front row of the class I was sat between John Booth and John Butterworth! A few years ago I got an email from "Butty" - Mate, the longer I look at your photo, the more I'm convinced that you are the John Burke I sat next to in school..."

At break time on that first day we joined the kids in class 1A and got to know the people we were sat next to a bit more. At lunchtime we were formed into a crocodile again and joined a larger one that walked through the town to a canteen that served other schools at Bamford Road.

School dinners - ha! Some were brilliant, some were gross. No serving counters for us, the food went to each table in huge trays and dishes and someone was designated monitor and dished out portions for all on the table. Baked beans without tomato sauce were unbelievably bad... Semolina and tapioca were not exactly favourites.

Brussel sprouts were commandeered mainly by one of the fifth formers. If you liked them but he was on your table then hard luck... I can't remember his real name but his somewhat predictable nickname was Stinks... He was, despite this, popular. He wasn't above talking to younger pupils, he was very laid back and easy going and he protected kids from a spot of bullying every now and then.

After the march back from the canteen we spent the rest of that first lunchtime in the main playground with the rest of the school. This entailed mainly second formers, giving you a long code number that they would return and demand from you after a while. Some unfortunates were swayed by the temptation to check out the "blue goldfish" in the bogs... Their hair dried out soon enough...

We learned a few nicknames of staff - Bill Thomas, the Deputy Head, was Tommy. Dorothy Wood was Daisy. The woodwork master was called Chisel and the frightening-sounding allegedly torture-loving chemistry master was known for good reason as Basher!

I might be wrong about this, but I think the first day was a tour around some of the classes we would be visiting for different subjects and meeting the teachers. We found we had Basher for chemistry... What in fact was chemistry? The room was a laboratory and had lots of glass bottles with what looked like water lined up on benches. There was strange equipment - bunsen burners, gas taps and test tubes - strange place! Basher's nickname was not ill-founded. His favourite trick was to make a fist with the middle knuckle extended and then rap the centre of your forehead with it. In a temper I once saw him pick a boy up by the ears...

He wasn't alone - the biology teacher, whose name I forget, shocked the whole class into silence by slapping very forcibly a boy called Stafford around the side of the head with his own exercise book. He had forgotten to do his homework. Taffy, the geography teacher, was an absolute sure shot with a heavy wooden board rubber! Every school had one of those but Taffy never ever missed, no matter how far back you were sitting!

We were to see a lot of David Miller, as he taught us not only French, but music. He was a young man with a sharp beak of a nose and spectacles, which he obviously used just for reading because he would whip them off when he wanted to glare at the class. He was a brilliant musician on the piano and had a real love of music. When French got too boring someone would say "Play something on the piano, Sir!" Every now and then it worked!

Mr Miller was choirmaster of the Heywood Grammar School Choir, a choir of good ability and reputation which used to sing for Evensong in St Luke's parish church in Heywood every Thursday night. I loved singing and enthusiastically joined the choir, putting up with wearing the cassock and surplice. I regret now, that I have no photos of the choir at all, nor have I found any on the Internet - anyone reading this who can help?

You could never accuse me of being religious I'm afraid but I loved the soaring voices when we sang the Magnificat - "My soul, my soul, doth sanctify the Lord..." Again if you recognise those words, someone tell me who wrote it and help me find a CD with it on!

Mr Miller was also the pianist for morning assembly. This included Christian worship in those days and I find it hard to understand now why the Government has been so scared of offending minorities that we don't teach our own religion in schools. It's no wonder that church attendance has fallen so much. Some of the hymns we sang in Assembly are still in my head - particularly:

He, who would valiant be, 'gainst all disaster
Let him in constancy follow the Master
There's no discouragement to make him once relent
His first avowed intent to be a pilgrim

Ah, shivers down the spine! That and "...for those in peril on the sea"!

We had a teacher called Mr Law for PE. He was dressed in a track suit and had a whistle and called our names out for the register then said "Green!" or "Red!" or "White!" or "Blue!" I hadn't a clue what that meant because I hadn't been listening properly. It dawned on me that he was allocating us to a "house", not taking the register and I had to go back and ask what mine was.
"Name?"
"Burke, Sir," I said. He looked at his list and sniffed.
"Hmm! You are a berk aren't you, boy? Blue!"

We were ushered into a physics lab - more strange equipment and a genial, even jolly, chap standing behind the teacher's bench who lined us up and demanded to know who our form teacher was.

"Mrs Pilkington, Sir". He considered this for a while.
"Oh yes... she's nice, Mrs Pilkington... pretty... nice figure... cooks a good breakfast...!"
"What's your name, Sir?" someone asked.
"Mister Pilkington!" he twinkled. "Anyone know what physics is?"

No one did. He picked up a jar and tipped some iron filings over a lit bunsen burner. They flared and shot up like a firework. We all went "Ooooooh!" with delight just as he had planned. Pilky was a born teacher - but his experiments always went haywire. "Well..." he would say, as what he had told us would happen stubbornly refused to, "take my word for it! Now try it for yourselves!"

Chisel, the woodwork teacher, had a huge workshop in the basement of the main school building. His nickname was due to his habit of standing at one end and saying to someone "Fetch me that chisel..." He would point to a bench with several chisels on it.
"Which one, Sir?"
"That one!" ...said without moving but with a finger outstretched which could have been pointing to any of the chisels!

He had a habit of banging a wooden mallet on a workbench close to your hand - you would jump out of your skin! He also used to throw a hammer in the air, whack it with his hand so that it spun, catch it and put it down. Then he would leave the room. When he came back half of us would have rapped our own knuckles trying to do the same thing...

My best mate from 6th form days, Alex Dyson, contributes this memory: I couldn't wait to drop woodwork in the fourth form even though it meant another two years of art. We used to get a crack from Chisel with a piece of wood for even looking in the wrong place, yet when we were boiling the glue kettle one day and I set fire to a pile of wood shavings when he went out, he never even noticed. I was crapping myself because it really took hold and the air was thick with smoke when he came back, but he must have been preoccupied with some really important matter, like someone holding a pencil in the wrong way...

Priceless!

The end of the school day came and we paraded back to where the coach had dropped us off. There were 5 coaches! A moment's panic, then I found the right one and we set off back. The M62 didn't yet exist, so the coaches took us through Heywood and through countryside to Sudden, in Rochdale, turning right up to Castleton past the end of our old street (yet to be covered here in an entry about gruesome ailments) and then along Queensway, past all the mills that had contributed to my Dad's bad chest, along Kingsway and then back to Milnrow where I got off, the coach ending its journey in Newhey.

Yelloways were using their 1952 "Seagull" model coaches for the Heywood run. The photo is of the same model but a different coach firm. They had no seatbelts, nor would coaches have passenger seatbelts for many years to come, and had a large metal handrail across the back of each seat as a grab rail to help people sitting behind get up out of their seats. If the coach stopped suddenly the metal rail was just at tooth height...

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HMS Pinafore

All sorts of memories come back when you start scanning old photographs.

As I flicked through the old albums of stored black and white negatives I came a cross a set of photographs from December 1971. At the time I was in the Upper 6th Form at Heywood Senior High School - now called Siddal Moor I believe.

The music teacher, Gerald Fish, had suggested the school stage a Gilbert and Sullivan light opera, HMS Pinafore. It was the first musical production I can remember. Before that productions were plays - I remember watching Sheridan's The Rivals one year as a young boy in the lower forms and thinking how grown up the 6th formers looked...

The school was only around 3 years old, having been a merger of Heywood Grammar School and some other schools when secondary schools went comprehensive. For us grammar school pupils it meant being subjected to fire alarms and fire extinguishers being set off every now and then. Our japes had been a touch more intellectual. A bit more of your serious pursuit of scientific knowledge in the laboratories to make fireworks, rockets and such... The fact that they burnt all the paint off the window sill and ended up having to be jettisoned out of the second storey window didn't detract from the intellectual nature of it...

Anyway Gerald wanted me to play the male romantic lead. I was a bit aghast at this as the female lead was taller than me... So to his disappointment (and in retrospect to mine probably) I refused and ended up helping with the lighting and special effects which consisted of a thunderflash in a metal dustbin in the gymnasium behind the stage. A bit of magnesium powder in the cannon made a flash and the gigantic KABOOM! of the thunderflash meant that it was a wise decision to have St Johns Ambulance on hand as it took the audience a good 5 minutes to settle down after that went off!

The school gained some musical instruments out of the production, bought specially for the orchestra, some of which were pupils augmented by some of Gerald's contacts from the musical world.

I remember him particularly for the tremendous support he gave me at the time as a guitarist, encouraging, prompting me to try lead runs that challenged and stretched me, giving a few of us the confidence to go out and sing in front of an audience for the first time.

I remember many of the people shown here but can only remember names of those from my year or of those who I had regular contact with.

The full set of 27 photos, which were taken at the dress rehearsal, can be viewed up to 1440x900 pixels at this Flickr set. If you are featured, or you know any of the names I either never knew or have forgotten, please add a comment to the relevant photo.

Dandelion and Burdock

I've mentioned sarsparilla before on this blog but not the other great taste of childhood.

For me, either of the two could knock Coca-Cola or Pepsi for six. Dandelion and Burdock, despite sounding as though you should throw up on hearing the name, never mind tasting it, is a rich dark wonderfully tasty drink. It immediately brings back memories of being 12 and skipping school dinners to go to the local chippy eating room.

Then we'd go to the sweets shop which had big bottles of Ben Shaws drinks, every flavour imaginable. They had a huge stock of plastic glasses and you could buy a glass of your favourite pop for 3d. Some kids went for cream soda, some went for ginger beer, but I would always go for one of my favourite two, or on those days when I simply couldn't make my mind up, I'd get all giddy and have a half-and-half!

And now Asda, at least, have brought back this great taste for me to enjoy again. Thank you Asda!

Heywood Grammar School Reunion

Last night after work I drove over to Heywood for a school reunion. Jackie was away at a bluegrass concert but Alex turned up right behind me and we met up with a few faces we hadn't seen in - what? - 36 years?!?

I learned a valuable lesson - even if your phone has a 5 megapixel camera, don't assume it will take photos! I should have taken a camera! Anyway it was great to catch up and chat with Brigid, Andrew (alias Sid), Jackie, Anne (both of them!), Jayne, Dave, Elaine and a few others.

There were a few teachers scattered about the room too and there must easily have been over a hundred people there.

Mike Law, our ex-Games teacher made a short speech and asked "Would you like another reunion in four years?" which prompted a few mutterings of "Blimey, I might not still be here in four years!

School Prom Night

Monday night saw David and I playing at a junior school prom.

I think that an apt description of the audience would be "wildly enthusiastic"! In fact so loud we could hardly hear the music ourselves. We'd had to turn the speakers away to avoid feedback, it was cranked up louder than we'd ever had it before just to cut above the noise from the kids.

They weren't particularly running wild or anything, they were singing along, cheering, in fact giving us an amazing reception. Thank you to the kids and teachers at Blackpool's St John Vianney. We finished off an exuberant night with the Blackpool Football Team's anthem - the old Dave Clark Five hit, Glad All Over and I think everyone was!

As David said afterwards, "I can cope with 11,000 coming through the gate at Liverpool but that was scary!!!" An excellent night!

Class Reunion

Ah, I'm full of well-being today. We've arranged a bit of a school reunion. Only a bit as there's likely only to be three of us but we may perchance admit a bit of table space if any other old geezers of the old gang want to join in! Leave a comment here or email me if anyone does happen to see this drivel...er...blog...

Jackie, Alex and I are meeting up in Rochdale next week on Wednesday (Boss, if you're reading this I will put in a request for leave, honest...)

All the rest of the crowd are a bit far-flung. Jan's fairly close but is going hiking up and down mountains - sheesh, if you just want to prove to yourself that you're as old as the rest of us then it's easier to sit and natter and realise how much has changed since 1971!

So, anyway, Alex having agreed a time sent an email mentioning "High Noon" and it got me thinking about something or other, which came more-or-less to a focus when reading an article about chess in the movies (huh? no I don't know either - it's the way my brain works these days...)

They show chess as it's the only way to show a character is brainy apparently. What a load of cods - I used to just thrash in with a bit trying to annihilate the pieces of my opponent. Preferably by lifting mine to shoulder height and then swooping it down making an aeroplane noise...

The other strategy game we used to play (yes, I knew if I wrote for long enough there'd be a link!) was Risk, which was an army game about conquering the world. In the early 1970s the entire family would gather to play and Alex would join in if we happened to be at my house.

There were some strange rules I remember - whoever was knocked out first was labelled the punkah-waller and had to go and brew up for everyone else. Much better game than chess - at least there was writing on the board so you could tell if it was the right way up...

Junior School Prom

Do you want to know what real fear is?

We played Croxteth one year when 12,000 came through the gates, but that was nothing!

Real fear is the build up to a Junior School Prom! Knowing that there will be a room full of hyper 11-year-olds expecting the equivalent of the Pussycat Dolls or McFly and getting two guys old enough to be their grandads!

But the truth is, those worries were all for nothing and what a brilliant night we had. And we were home for 10 o'clock!

The main thing is that both the prom-goers and the teaching staff thought it a good night! It was hot, it was lively, they were indeed hyper! It was absolutely great!

We also bumped into two friends from way back whose daughter was at the prom. We last saw her when she was knee high to a grasshopper! Tracey and Bill it was good to see you again - keep in touch!