(I'm indebted to Pat Nolan, Derek Lore and Doug Curson for
corrections and additions.)
By 1942 at the age of 12, I was soon enrolled at St Joseph's
College, Blackpool, a boys grammar school. I believe it was a "Grant
Aided" school supported with taxpayer funds. For sure, by the time of the
1944 Education Act, all secondary education was free to students. (Thanks to DL
and DC for clarification on this point -- DH).
(I remember that we had to buy our books but the war meant
that books were scarce so most were handed down from one class to the next -- PN)
From the Newton Drive entrance, you went up a mild incline
towards The House, which was off-limits to us boys. You turned left, past the
science lab and “the bogs” and into the playground. The school was a
brick-built three-storey affair and its main entrance was on your right from the
playground. (In 1941 we all had to wear "house shoes" inside the
school and each boy had his own pigeonhole in the main corridor to keep them -
it meant changing shoes every time you went in or out of the building. House
shoes went out quite early in the war when clothing became rationed and a ration
could not be spared for such niceties -- DC)
You then went up a few stone steps and turned left into a
long corridor with classrooms on the left, followed by the boarders’ day room
and changing rooms that led to the gym. There was a masochistic civilian gym
teacher who once made us hang from the top bar facing inwards with our legs out
at right angles—it was agony.
Straight ahead from the main entrance you went past the
master’s room on the left and Refectory on the right, (I remember how awful
the meals were! -- DC) and the boarder’s coat room and tuck shop just next to
the back entrance to the House.
This pattern of classrooms was duplicated on the next floor,
except that the Chapel was above the day room. I believe it was used only by the
seventy or so boarders out of maybe four hundred boys and of course by the
Brothers and a visiting priest from St Kentigern’s nearby. When I became a
boarder in my final year, I was inducted into the top floor where we had
bedrooms for six or more boys, and toilets and showers. I don’t recall taking
the cold showers traditionally recommended for teenage boys to repress their
raging hormones, but there was always a Brother prowling around the area on the
watch for any hanky-panky.
The school was run by the Irish Christian Brothers, a
Catholic teaching order based in Dublin. Students were mostly but not all
Catholics, who came from all over, some of whom were boarders from places like
the Isle of Man (e.g. John Frehe and Peter McAleer. -- DC)
The teaching staff were partly Brothers and partly civilians.
The Brothers had the ability to chastise delinquent boys with the aid of The
Strap, a foot-long thick leather job they kept secreted within the folds of
their intimidating black habit, but which they would bring forth at the
slightest provocation to give you a quick one-two on the hands, or worse,
"six of the best". Say the class was being questioned on some Latin
verbs; if you failed to answer correctly, you had to join the line at the side
of the class. At the end of the questions, the brother went down the line doling
out the punishment, a process that was quick, efficient and painful. (One day a
strap fell from a brother's pocket without him noticing. It was smartly spirited
away, cut into very small pieces, and distributed to the class. -- DC)
One of my teachers was Brother Coffey, a younger man with
orange coloured hair, who took us for Organic Chemistry in the Sixth Form. He
had “trouble wit his trees, as in Everybody, turn to page turdy tree.” He
also substituted one day in our Catechism Class and got in a tizzy when it came
to the question about taking care to avoid temptation from the irregular motions
of the flesh. I thought it was Oyston who had the temerity to ask, “Please
sir, what are the irregular motions of the flesh?” Poor Bro Coffey, he blushed
like a young girl and stammered his way through a very hesitant reply. Well,
stop sniggering, what would you have said?
Monsieur LeBrun was our French teacher; his face was long and
lugubrious, but he was a decent chap on the whole. There was a famous incident
when some brave boy brought one of the new steel DDT bombs to school. You shut
the windows and disinfected a room by breaking off a key whereupon the contents
sprayed out and filled the room in a few seconds. Well, this lad—I thought it
was Patrick Nolan, but he vigorously denied it sixty years later—thought it
would be a lark to let it off in the Master’s room, and so he opened the door
a bit, did the deed and promptly scarpered. At the next French lesson we enjoyed
the spectacle of poor M. LeBrun who had suffered from the spray practically
crying and declaring that he would resign. But he never did nor was the culprit
ever caught.
Another French teacher was Mr Callaghan. (He was a raving
lunatic who hated teaching!--DL) and (Callaghan handed out more physical
punishment than any of the Bros. I was in his "Foreign Legion" and had
to stand out at the start of a lesson and be caned, just to remind me that I was
stupid. -- PN)
My favourite teacher was Bro O’Leary, (mine too -- PN) who
took us for maths in the sixth form. He made it all sound so simple and
straightforward, and got us all through our exams. He once started in to our
first calculus lesson when he said, “Good Heavens! I just realized you boys
haven’t had Coordinate Geometry yet! And it’s a prerequisite to the
calculus…” and proceeded to spend the next few weeks on that instead. He
also took us for our religion class from 12 to 12:30 every day. Soon after I
revisited St Jo’s in 1970, and met with him again, “Josh” O’Leary died
from cancer. (Although Josh did not like me I thought he was a good guy and a
good teacher...he gave us some good advice which I took to heart..."The
most important move in your life was to gain your School Certificate and the
next most important decision will be your choice of a wife" -- DL) (When
asked by my parents to assess me he said: "Patrick is like a wild animal
that could become very docile but could also turn very savage -- PN)
I have a book entitled Arthur Mee’s Book of Everlasting
Things, inscribed First Prize IV.B — David Henry. It was so boring and I was
doubly incensed that someone else who won the Second Prize got a book about
Tanks in Wartime. They say what goes around comes around, and now Arthur Mee’s
book holds a pride of place on my bookshelf and gives me great pleasure from
time to time when I dip into its poetry and extracts from classical stories.
May 5, 1945 was V E-Day, the end of the war in Europe, and
memorable because we were given a measly half day off. We soon heard that
Pablo’s Ice Cream Shop was giving away free ice-cream, so we headed downtown
only to find a queue about a half mile long leading to the shop. Nothing
daunted, we queued up and after being served, ran back to the end of the line
for a second double vanilla cone. (Yes! I have forgotten this...I was also in
the queue that day. -- DL)
End-of-term exams were a stressful three days or so, and we
would spend long homework hours "swotting up" for them. My reports
from St Josephs were on the whole pretty good, and were prepared by Bro
O’Carroll and later by Bro S. F. O’Leary. They were countersigned in turn by
headmasters J.Q. Moran, J.D. Goulding and T. D. Woodhouse.
Bro. Goulding (he was head when I joined the school in '39
and then returned or appeared from "The House" sometime later -- PN)
once stood in as a substitute teacher during our religion period and that was
when I first became aware of his rather messy habit, I thought, of taking snuff.
He would produce a small box from somewhere inside his habit, open it, and
extract a pinch of the stuff which he then proceeded to apply to a nostril and
sniff it noisily up his nose. Because some of it dropped on his chest, he would
then tried to brush it off with his sleeve, leaving a prominent brown stain on
his black habit. He otherwise seemed a rather harmless chap with a soft voice. I
learned recently that he had been headmaster once before for a few years during
the twenties, and I wondered what that was all about.
Woodhouse was reportedly the best educated and most capable
of all the Brothers. (I'm quite sure he was head and shoulders above the rest --
DC) He took us for Latin, and there
was once a famous exam he conducted that shows his determination. We used to
have the exam questions reproduced in purple ink by one of those messy rotary
Gestetner (?) machines. It seems that either the machine malfunctioned or they
ran out of supplies, but whatever the reason, there were no exam papers for us
that day; I think it was a trial run for School Cert Latin. When he announced
this to us, a rustle of excitement ran through the class, quickly stifled by
him. “Don’t think you’ll get away without taking the exam,” said he, and
proceeded to write out the exam questions in small script on the blackboard. On
two boards in fact, as some of them were lengthy passages that had to be
translated. We groaned internally, but it was still wartime, and we just had to
“grin and bear it.” It must have been even tougher for those at the back of
the class…
The aim of the academic program was to get us through the
School Certificate, taken at age 16 (15 in my case). It consisted of exams set
by Cambridge University (No. The exams were generally Northern Universities
Joint Matriculation Board Exams. In the Sixth Form, if you were good enough, you
might be encouraged also to take the Oxford and Cambridge Scholarship Papers --
DC) and marked under their control. It was three weeks before I had to take
these exams in 1945 when I decided to climb a tree in our back garden. Well, the
bough broke and I crashed to the ground, breaking my right wrist. Once the cast
was put on it was clear I couldn’t write my exams the normal way. The only
alternative was to write left handed and backward with the aid of a mirror,
which I taught myself to do and became reasonably proficient at it. There must
have been some very understanding markers of our test papers, because I did OK.
There were no multiple choice questions in those days; your
answers were expected to be in good English sentences and essays. There were
grades of Excellent (No. Distinctions -- DC), Good (No. Credits -- DC), Fair,
Pass and Fail. (DC is right. I was quoting the marking system used in the
school's reports. -- DH) For example, I scored E in History and G in my other 8
subjects: English Language, English Literature, Maths, French, Latin, Chemistry,
Physics and Religion (I think). Of these subjects my favourites were Arithmetic,
Algebra and Geometry in Maths, and the two languages French and Latin. I was
capable of turning in a decent essay, but intensely disliked learning poetry and
speeches from Shakespeare and worst of all that jumble of facts in English
History. I was amazed then, and still now, that History was my best result in
the School Cert exam and that my later specialty Physics was OK but no better
than any other subject. The message appears to be that I responded best to
logical structures, rules and procedures with predictable outcomes. (I got six
"credits" and two "passes"in my school cert are you sure of
the 'good' and 'fair'? Maybe it was changed in your year. -- DL)
I was immensely proud of the one-upmanship implicit on
joining the Sixth Form with its privilege of working in the library instead of a
mere classroom with its rows of desks. There was a massive table with big legs,
and we sat around it in chairs, with arms I think. The walls were lined with
glass-fronted bookcases, referred to by the Brothers as "presses". I'm
pretty sure that we never used any of those books, as the room didn't in fact
function as a library. Another
valued privilege was the occasional private study period, that I'm afraid we
tended to abuse rather badly and sometimes very noisily. For example, in one
corner there stood an upright piano and I well remember when one of the chaps
played boogie-woogie on it, with an impressive left hand as I recall.
(There were two doors to the sixth form common room, one from
the passageway and one that led into a large room with a snooker table, the
boarders common room. Next to the second door there were a couple of loose
floorboards that could be lifted and a descent made under the floor, I suppose
that I must have been instrumental in either finding this or leading the
exploration of the space below because I had the nickname 'Chad' (after the wall
drawing, known to the Yanks as 'Kilroy', with the bubble "Wot No....?) At
first we used candles or torches when visiting the area below but later we had
electric bulbs with a lead plugged in behind one of the 'presses'. I did have
photographs of various people sticking their heads out of the entrance. Below we
had a collection of 'Men Only' magazines and various things. I do not remember
the teaching staff finding this hide-hole during my time. -- PN)
If you wanted to continue your education, you stayed on in
the Sixth for another two years and typically studied three or four subjects in
a science or arts specialization. I was persuaded to study Physics, Pure Maths,
Applied Maths and Chemistry in order to take the Higher School Certificate, used
by Universities as a screening exam for prospective entrants. Your results were
also taken into account when applying for a scholarship, exhibition or bursary.
When I look back, I'm amazed at how lightly and cavalierly
the very important decision was taken of what subjects to study. There was no
such thing as "career counselling" or "aptitude testing". It
was simply that my physics teacher Mr Slater ("Smiley") took a shine
to my work, and said of course I should take science subjects. (I remember he
smoked like a chimney and wore a gown which stank of tobacco - he lived I
believe in Galgate and drove a black saloon car -- DC) After passing my HSC, the
same thing happened, more or less automatically; I would study physics at
university, according to Mr Slater. Well he would, wouldn't he? He was probably
rated on the number of his students who went to University in physics. That was
it. I don't even think there was much if any discussion about this at home.
(That led naturally to a Bachelor's Degree in Science and later on a Masters
Degree in Nuclear Physics. If I had my "druthers" over again, I would
have felt much more comfortable taking an engineering degree rather than being
shoehorned into the physics that I just wasn't brilliant enough to shine at.)
Sports were pushed pretty strongly at St Jo's, principally
rugby—that I was no good at—and cricket, which I was quite good at and
finished my last year of school as captain of the First XI. The sports fields
were on the side of Layton Mount and so were divided into two terraced sections.
The rugby pitch was on the lower section while the upper half had the cricket
pitch and athletics oval.
Perhaps the only extra-curricular activity we were obliged to
take part in was the School Play, performed in the Jubilee Theatre in downtown
Blackpool. My first experience was when I was cast as Lucius, servant to Brutus
in a big production of Shakespeare’s "Julius Caesar". My mother had
to make a costume for me, and did so out of some old striped curtain material. I
was so embarrassed and totally mortified by how I looked in it. Things became
worse when I suffered severe stage fright that caused me to stumble over the
three simple lines I had to deliver.
The next year—my final year—I had a principal part, that
of Duke Orlando in "As You Like It". When I look over that play now,
nearly sixty years on, I find it hard to believe I acted such a major role, as
my memory never was my strongest skill. However I recall quite well the scene in
which I, a Duke, had to wrestle with and defeat Jacques, a wrestler, played by
Pete Tracy. He was a well set up lad and we rehearsed the "fight"
where I had to throw him to the ground, strongly aided by his big leap over my
back. I have a copy of the School Magazine for 1948 (a great year for St Jo’s)
with several photos of me in this play.
That same Magazine indicates I was made the Assistant Editor.
Perhaps that was why my article entitled Science Survey II—X-Rays was given
two pages. Re-reading this nearly sixty years later, I must say I’m quite
impressed at the clarity of the exposition, written in good flowing English.
In the Upper Sixth, Bro. O’Leary instituted formal debates
from time to time, and that magazine reported on several of them where I
acquitted myself adequately as either a lead speaker or second.
Being an all boys school, where we were kept busy all the
time, St Jo's didn't offer much opportunity to become aware of girls. Of course
there was much sniggering at the dirty photos and jokes we managed to smuggle in
and swap with each other. In the Upper Sixth form, I was elected to be secretary
of the ATU. The guys had printed up a membership card for all the sixth formers,
with my signature on it! It wasn't until I got my own card that I found out I
had been scammed: ATU was replaced in large letters by the Anti-Teachers Union,
or was it the Anti-Twanking Union!
Looking at one of those old panoramic photos taken of all the
boys in the school in 1946, I recognise few names and fewer faces. Nolan, Wade,
Cookson, Curson, McConville, Moran, Carman. Not even me...