by Mike Brogden (1952 – 1959)
A Polemical View
This post caused a real stir when Mike Chew published it on the old website, and you will find several responses from other boys linked to it in later posts.
The New Boy
There’s a photo of me, taken just before my first day at the school in September 1952, wearing the regulation little peaked cap, short trousers and brown blazer and carrying a leather satchel.
I travelled on a number 1 bus from its terminus at “The Lamp” at Hockmore Street, Cowley, a few minutes’ walk from my home in Bartholomew Road, Cowley. My mother had arranged for me to be looked after on the first day by an older pupil from the next street and he was very glad to abandon me in the George Street playground where there were five dozen other brown-clad new boys.
I found myself talking to one of them, Michael King, but this was a short-lived friendship as, after we were given a pep-talk by Fred Lay (mostly about how to write our names on our lunch tickets), we were sent to either 1B, in my case, or 1A in Michael King’s.
The first task when we arrived in our form room was the allocation of jobs. These depended on alphabetical order: Barnes and Brogden were given the task of keeping the register and organising lunch tickets. As a result of this twice-daily repetition, I can still recite the names of the boys in 1B. From then on, form masters rarely turned up as Barnes and I dealt with the register for several years. Other boys got other jobs but Wellstead, Wood and Wyatt at the end of the alphabet, probably got nothing to do. When I went to teacher-training college, several fellow students had to attend remedial registration classes but my years of experience enabled me to pass the test.
Class War
The streaming into A and B forms, whose basis was never revealed, was what I think of in retrospect as an exercise in social selection: working class boys like me were in the B form; middle class boys like Michael King were in the A form. Some other process must have been at work with the Day twins: Michael was allocated to the A form; David to the B.
By the time we had completed our “O” levels in 1957, if I remember correctly, only one B form pupil from the 1952 intake remained to join the sixth form. That was me. Twenty nine others had left, some at the school leaving age of 15, others after the “O” level watershed. The 11+ selection procedure was supposed to identify those who would benefit from grammar schooling and the COHS made a big thing about university entrance, but at least 50% of my year of 60 boys did not join the sixth form. Did Fred Lay ever worry about this high failure rate?
COHS had been fee-charging, with a few scholarship boys paid for by Oxford City Council until the 1944 Education Act opened it up to a much wider intake via the 11+ examination. I suspect that the school resented this change and didn’t like the presence of the sons of car workers.
We in the B form were taught mostly by masters whose specialisms were reserved for the A form: maths by the music master; English by the PE master; history by the RE master whose technique was to read a chapter per lesson from Penguin history books. Some years later, and almost too late, we were given a taste of something better with Snoop Atkinson for Latin; the brilliant Jock Sutton for English; RR Coleman for chemistry and Titch Wright for French.
On several occasions there were complaints from these specialists about the gaps in our knowledge. It was a shock to discover that we were expected to speak French after years of written exercises. Another specialist who had the task of bringing us up to “O” level standard was George Wright. His strategy (when he turned up for lessons) was to give us cyclostyled model answers to learn by heart, with the promise that four of these were likely to turn up in the history exam. His prophases turned out to be right, perhaps because he was also an “O” level examiner. I did relatively well in history but it was hardly inspirational.
I presume that we were supposed to be motivated by Fred Lay’s appearance once a month when he read out the Merit Order. This resulted in our sitting in new positions with the top boy at the teacher’s right hand and the bottom boy at the left back. The threat for the left-back-boys was that at the end of the year, they could be required to repeat a year. Indeed, there were two of these miscreants in 1B who had not been allowed to join form 2B. They were very useful sources of information and mis-information to new boys about how things worked.
Another supposedly motivational activity was the weekly “Cap Parade” in the playground during which we rehearsed a few manoeuvres such as “Stand at Ease” and “Right Dress” whilst Fred Lay strutted up and down, perhaps reliving his days in the cavalry but missing the horses.
It didn’t help my dislike of the school that I hated games. Wednesday afternoons were to be dreaded. Fortunately, the system for avoiding football that I found useful at Rose Hill Junior School, also worked well at COHS. “Do that again and you’ll miss football,” was the promise at Rose Hill. More speaking out of turn resulted in the reward of staying in the classroom whilst the others got muddy. It was now harder to achieve as it required more disobedience and several after school detentions (good for getting on with homework) before a Wednesday afternoon detention was imposed. Swimming in Tumbling Bay from 1st May when it was freezing cold, was not so unpleasant, in my view, as rugby or cross country on the school playing fields, though if you didn’t turn up, no-one seemed to notice.
The lessons I most enjoyed in the first year did not carry on in subsequent years. We went to South Oxford School on Friday mornings to learn woodwork. Someone told us (probably one of the two boys who were repeating the first year) that we did woodwork so that if we were found unsuited to the grammar school and demoted to the secondary modern, we would not be behind the other boys in this subject. I also liked doing art with Basil Field, although he was a poor disciplinarian. He was good for my sports-avoiding strategy, however, as he could easily be provoked into giving out Wednesday afternoon detentions. He ran a lunch-time bookbinding club which I enjoyed and learned from. Indeed, it was bookbinding as well as skills with the register that helped me to get through teacher-training college a few years later.
The years went slowly by, brightened by three excursions: the Ashmolean Museum, rugby at Twickenham and King Lear (our “O” level text) at Stratford. My lack of interest in the school didn’t prevent me from scraping together enough “O” levels to join the sixth form. Fred Lay, somewhat patronisingly, told my mother that I might do better to get a job on the production line at the car factories but my wish to become a primary school teacher impressed him enough to allow me to stay on and gain three poor “A” levels. In those days, you only needed to gain about 30% to be awarded a pass. I even became a sub-prefect, in charge of pouring un-consumed school milk down the drain, not a skill I ever used in later life..
I don’t look back on my time at COHS with many fond memories but, for all its weaknesses, the system and the school enabled me to enter a profession and to spend nearly forty years in a most rewarding career in schools as a teacher and headteacher and as a local education authority adviser. And the bookbinding and register calling experience always served me well.
Editor Mike Chew’s footnote: As a child with a working class background, I never ever felt that there was social selection involved in the composition of the A and B forms. What was it like in your time? Write to me.