Burnley Grammar School

I just notice this site because on other site someone mentioend it. So I will tell about my experiance too. 14 here, east europe. we have no real kits and during sport lessons it's up to the guys what to wear. some safty rules for sure so sport in socks is no allowed. so most boys go barefoot some in trainers, some shirtless some in shirts. no biggie It's not much about choice but a matter of money or if it's important for yourself. so yes choice somehow lol. so the teacher isn't telling us to be. still not much a biggie. I'm one of those shirtless and bare feet boys. I don't know what most of the others think or feel about it. I just started to think about all this a few weeks ago.

Hello Graham.

I'm an old grammar school boy who grew up in the 1950's and 1960's. I started grammar back in '59, coincidentally the same year the picture on this site is from, and that was very much how my own gym appeared to be and how we were expected to dress for it, strictly no tops ever allowed in that place. I wasn't bothered.

But you asked about showering. It's a long time back now but we always took showers after gym, or any other activity where PE was involved. It was unthinkable not to do so. Nobody would consider not taking one when I was at school. I wasn't at all bothered by showering, much like I wasn't bothered by doing the gym stripped off above the waist. If I remember correctly I think I was remarkably relaxed and at ease with such things. This may in part be largely due to growing up in a quite big family where I had five other siblings, four brothers and a sister. This gave none of the children any private time in matters of personal hygiene for example. Even our sister had to muck in with her brothers when it came to the bathroom, and we all shared most things including the bathwater. The youngest ones would share and then the oldest, but not always. Even at 13 I remember sharing the tub with my youngest 7 year old brother sometimes. We even squeezed three of us into it at once on occasion. So doing this at home with brothers and a sister meant that going to school and being asked to shower with others didn't have an adverse effect on me or cause much anxiety, and my home life might have been the reason for this. We were lucky to have a large garden and at home we all played in the garden rather a lot without tops on, including my sister and our parents were keen photographers and left plenty of black and white memories of this kind of childhood. We happily ran around starkers with each other too even with friends around who did the same in our garden. Nowadays I'm certain nobody would dare allow their childrens friends to do that around their home when visiting them. Some people call those times over 60 years ago more innocent, that's as maybe but I tend to think they were more healthy of thought too and ironically less restrictive for the young, even if school itself was rigid and very formal.

If you came from a very small family or were perhaps an only child suddenly thrown into communal situations I can see how it might prove more of a difficult adjustment to accept. I've always considered that my own big family made me very sociable and accepting of sharing things with others.

My own three children all went to school in the 1970's and 1980's and much like me, I did not hear any major concerns about their own requirements either. They all showered at school, the boys and the girl, and I went to a sports day in their primary school once in the 1970's and the boys were all without tops on at the age of about 10. I took some pictures that day and have them at hand. The physical education the two boys did in the 1980's at their big state school was less transparent to parents and we were never invited to see anything there but I'm led to believe by both of them that they had a long standing requirement to remain shirtless during the PE lessons, and were always expected to shower like I was. My lot were purely academic and not greatly active when it came to sporting prowess but raised few objections I ever heard of and received nice comments from their teaching staff for trying hard.

School in the 1950's has this dark reputation in some people's minds but that's not my lived experience of it at all.

Yours Truly has mentioned PE showers at school, aka the communal showers. I can't believe Austin you had the luxury of individual cubicles even if you did share them. Your argument against them was very persuasive indeed and although they sound great in principle they obviously weren't in practice at school with large numbers that immediately want to shower at the same time and quickly get on with it, and offered no privacy anyway thus rendering the point of them useless.

I had to take my first school shower on my 12th birthday, my school's present to me as I saw it. What a way to celebrate your birthday. I was one of the oldest in class and developed fast.

I'm interested in this subject because I've never spoken about it to anyone before and have always wondered what other people were really thinking about these things. I remember in my school time looking around at everyone else as we all took our clothes off and headed to the showers like obedient little lambs and wondered what they were all thinking and if others might be thinking thoughts like me. Yours Truly you've described it like being cattle, that's correct in my view, I felt like we were herded animals sometimes being coerced into our pen, or in this case the showers.

I'm interested to tease out some thoughts on this subject. Do most of you on here remember the first time you had to shower at school after PE and how you felt about it? Someone I knew was so nervous about it that they didn't turn up for the PE lesson at all and threw a sickie. At our school, unlike you Yours Truly, we had to shower at the end of outdoor and indoor lessons. It made little difference. Not only was it the group nudity at issue here but space. It was very crowded and there was a total lack of personal space involved because our teachers had everyone in at the same time and out together too. There was a lot of unavoidable skin on skin contact.

I started secondary school on Wednesday 3rd September 1980, and my first PE lesson topped off at the end with a communal shower was the following week on the 8th, my birthday aged twelve. We hadn't been outside, we had just been doing some mat work in the school gym and rolling around on the ground a bit. Nothing too strenuous and nothing that worked up a great deal of BO. We were shirtless so any body odours would have been noted I think. Shirtless PE was a thing at my school like many others report. Not always, but nearly always when it came to the gym. We had all come with our towels, and as I packed my towel that day I was nervous just putting it in my schoolbag knowing what it meant.

I remember being desperate to keep my birthday secret and not telling anyone it was on that day. I'd heard stories about how you could get treated at secondary school by others if they knew it was your birthday and I didn't want anything to happen to me, and having a shower after PE I thought might present some kind of opportunity for something. There was someone who knew my birthday but they said nothing. When I was having my first shower I tried hard not to face anyone directly at all, which was quite difficult and I certainly didn't want the teacher to see me but he stood at the exit and watched and looked us all up and down as we finished. What went through my mind when I was first made to shower in school was not embarrassment as such but more a feeling of disbelief in the moment that I was actually doing it and that they could make me do that, and that I would have to keep on doing it for quite some time to come.

I wonder if any of us really needed to shower at school quite so religiously as we did all the time. I get all the mud and outside issue but most of the PE I did resulted in no such need to remove mud from legs or elsewhere anyway. Younger boys who sweated less were made to shower more than much older boys who would sweat more. By the time I was in my O level final year and doing PE the teachers often turned a blind eye to anyone not showering at that point and I often walked away without bothering and I never gave off BO or noticed the classroom reeking badly of post PE odours!

Posting from NYC where I currently drop in as a cabin crew for BA.

Comment by: Matt C on 10th January 2025 at 23:18



"....One PE teacher everyone seems to agree was a little Hitler and another is frequently named as a peeping tom too much in the showers at school........"


For all those gullible people who think that PE masters (and other teachers) were pure as the driven snow they ought to listen to this:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m00272c5

The series, 'In Dark Corners@ is being transmitted on Radio 4 on Wednesday mornings, 0930-1000 on 8th, 15th, 22nd and 29th January and 5th & 12th February. It is then available on the BBC Player for a limited time., I think for 30 days after the original transmission


The Paedophile Information Exchange was a vile organisation that operated in Britain between 1974 and 1984 (and endorsed by a couple of famous politicians, believe it or not), some of their members advocated the age of consent be lowered to 4 (FOUR!). Plainly they were sick, and disgusting, but quite a number of their members were in the teaching and education sector.

In the above recording at approximately 14 minutes there is an especially egregious example of the actions of a P.E teacher, but for context, I would advise listening to the whole programme for context, despite that annoying practice of including dramatic "music" on the soundtrack.

As somebody in the programme says, it is surprising that nobody queried what sort of "information" they were exchanging. It is also surprising that such an organisation was allowed to exist for reasons of decency and child protection. I might mention that both the (women) politicians I have mentioned, then "advisers" to the National Council For Civil Liberties, are still alive and kicking, and both have recently been elevated to the House of Lords. (Patricia Hewitt and Harriet Harman)

Shirtless cross country running like I remember doing in school done by modern boys last year, 2024, so the current lot aren't too unhappy to go shirtless to run, although in this case I'd imagine they are doing so with free will to decide for themselves whereas the boys at my school and me had these kind of choices and free will removed from us and were told we must be shirtless to run the cross country in fair or foul weather. Teachers are probably more open to negotiation on things nowadays but in the past they didn't negotiate with us they just informed us what we were doing and wanted it done, even if it made someone very uncomfortable.

https://youtu.be/Ffg_mZnTR_Y?si=XU4rFMoPkY0ecYXO


A note about sports days as they got a mention.

Our secondary school had a number of these events and many boys took part shirtless. I was in school doing this at the turn of the 70s and start of the 80s. The school gym was always done shirtless in secondary school in those days and tops were hardly ever a feature in them at all from anyone, and that is roughly my gym memory from the age of eleven to fifteen. But like Danny mentioned, our sports day ended and we all just dribbled away. We didn't have to shower though, the one time we could just clear off at the end of the day, although proper PE last thing you had to shower before leaving or else, even bus children had to shower so often held up the coach home and had to explain to an unhappy driver why. Many of us at the end of sports day in summer would just pick up our stuff and walk home as we were, in some form of PE kit, as it was June and the weather was nearly always great on the day. Lots of boys used to just walk out the gates having collected their bags, slung them over their shoulders and gone home shirtless if they had been doing the afternoon that way. Even some of the bus guys I saw sat in the school coach this way. I can't remember whether sports day shirtless was compulsory, I think the rule was relaxed on that day because sometimes I wore a top, but it was a must to be shirtless in normal PE through the school week.

But on one occasion the day after sports day we got called into the assembly hall and the deputy head teacher had assembled just the boys and informed us all that he was most displeased that large numbers of boys had let the school image down by walking home 'half naked' as he put it, by which he meant shirtless. But we had all been given permission to leave for home in our PE kits, and shirtless was our boys PE kit! So if it wasn't okay for some pupils to walk home in PE kit shirtless on a nice day because it didn't keep up appearances for the school leadership, why was it okay for us to be compulsory shirtless in the school's PE lessons then? Such unbelievable hypocrisy at times, hidden behind the school gates they had no issue with what we looked like, outside of them some of us became a problem because we hadn't put a t-shirt over us to walk home in.

On my school facebook memory page for ex-pupils many talk of PE lessons and things like being forced to take showers together and shirtless PE as well as a few comments about what we really thought certain teachers were all about. One PE teacher everyone seems to agree was a little Hitler and another is frequently named as a peeping tom too much in the showers at school. People don't seem to forget school easily and can recite situations at the click of a mouse.

Hi Danny C,

I appreciate what you say. The more I read on this thread the more I have come to realise that I got off comparatively lightly in terms of school sports. If I sound constantly sour and negative about it, it is because I hated the whole secondary school experience and had a very bad experience of it, rather than PE and games specifically. I don't remember any activity where we were worked till we sweated like dogs like you and others have described, it was mostly just football and rounders with athletics in the summer months. The only truly challenging one was cross country which they only made us do once a term. I soon developed a strategy for football: loiter on the fringes of the pitch, run vaguely the same way the ball is going but don't go anywhere actually near it. Nobody was regarding me anyway because I was one of those nerdy, uncoordinated, unathletic kids that nobody wanted to have on their team (and I didn't want to be on their team anyway).

Talking of mud I can remember the senior games teacher, yes, that same old bastard again, having a go at me in front of everyone because he saw me rubbing the mud off my neck after I had taken a turn at shot-putting on a drizzly afternoon. I reiterate: I was a painfully shy, timid kid who tried to keep himself to himself but this one teacher seemingly couldn't contain his anger and contempt around me.

We had three weeks of rugby. Ever. This was third year, so coming up to our O level options, and I think the PE department had all these other sporting activities that they needed to cross of their checklist as having taught us. Suddenly, after two years of mostly football and rounders and gym activities we were doing all these other sports, but only ever for a week or two, as if we were sampling them. I employed the same strategy as for football and in those three weeks I didn't even get dirty. I wasn't going to throw myself into mud, risking possible injuries, diving for a ball that wasn't even shaped like a fucking ball. Fuck that one forever.

On sports days, we only ever had one the entire time I was at secondary school. Plenty of other kids complained about that but it was absolutely fine with me! I even managed to dodge out of getting involved in it at all. I don't think they were making the participants shower after it because I remember seeing half the kids busing it home still in their sports wear. I certainly would not have been okay doing a sports day stripped to nothing but a pair of shorts in front of girls who were permitted to wear way more, not to mention crowds of parents, the way you say you were. I think the discrimination of that was frankly disgusting.

Hi Austin,

I do have a real name but prefer to keep it to myself.

I appreciate your comment. There is always another perspective on things. And I do remember occasionally hearing of girls who hated and resented their shower set-up too.

I can remember some boys wrapping towels around themselves before setting off for the showers. That seemed nonsensical to me given that we all had to strip and shower in front of each other and there were bare balls and bums everywhere you looked. I favoured the 'get 'em out, get in there and get it over with' approach. The sooner you had showered, the sooner you were safe for another week.

One last detail I remember. We only had to shower after Games, which we did out on the playing fields. We never had to shower after PE, which we did in the gym. Evidently at my school the showers were there to wash the mud off, not sweat. Did anyone else have a similar rule?

Goings skins and shirts was very popular in my school years. The main gym teacher who took us would snap us to attention when we assembled down in the school gym and announce he wanted half the class to be skins and the other half shirts for the lesson ahead. It was up to us who. He would then turn around and face away from us all and give us 20 seconds to decide and place ourselves into either the skins side or the shirts side. The first couple of times he did this it all descended into arguing well past the 20 seconds when he turned around and lots of us hadn't agreed which to be, which was mainly resistance to being a skinny top bare chest shirtless one. I gravitated to being a shirt automatically. About three skins and shirts lessons into it he told us he wasn't going to tolerate any nonsense about deciding and we now had only 15 seconds to agree to pick our sides so I just jumped onto the skins side a few times after that just for a quiet life about it. He expected to turn around and see about 15 of us in each skins or shirts side. After a while it was obvious that the same boys were always being skins and the same others were being shirts in PE so one afternoon he turned around after we made our decision and he flipped it so everyone who had chosen to be skins became a shirt and those boys who chose to become shirts had to strip off shirtless, making all the boys who thought they were safely shirts forcibly remove their tops on the spot. After that we could never be sure if he would flip the decision, which he did now and again just to keep us on edge I think. Individual boys were often pulled aside by another teacher who took us and had their vest pulled over their head if they did something wrong or incompetent and would be the sole shirtless one in our class which was a sign you'd mucked up somehow. We had one black kid in our PE group and this happened to him a lot.

Danny C I was convinced the gym was deliberately kept cold and yes I remember that fresh blast of cold air when you walked in. Throughout the year we did at least one lesson a week outdoors with either all lads told to strip to shorts or occasionally with half the class in vests.

Yours Truly your comment - "And do you know what the stupidest thing was? During my first year in secondary the games lesson was scheduled as the last lesson on the Monday (as if Mondays weren't already bad enough)."


You think that was bad. In my first, second, third and fourth school years at secondary school my first lesson on a Monday morning was outside PE. Into school by 9am and often out freezing and in the filth by 9.20am Monday mornings, not great over winter and especially on those torrentially raining grotty days I long remember, and the associated mud, often it was football or cross country so much more than anything else.

All my PE was timetabled first period for years at school, three times a week. Wednesday and Friday was inside but although that sounds far better, going barechested in a cold unheated, at least I think it was unheated, gym in the middle of winter was a very fresh experience to say the very least and I remember the start of PE body goosebumps well, until we finally warmed up at this time of year. Meanwhile the PE teacher was in the long sleeved tracksuit top most times with likely his t-shirt under that too. It could take ages to warm up.

This is one poor thing about gym PE. The teachers rarely taught us the value of a proper warm up in PE lessons, and we would often get stuck straight into whatever we did. I found my body and various muscles like my biceps aching away for a day or two after some of these lessons in the gym often taken on colder days, probably due to a failure to warm ourselves up properly, and a barechested class full of us most definitely needed proper warming up techniques. You'd think any half decent PE teacher should know this and apply it properly.

I never had PE at the end of the day. Only sports day ended the day, and that was once a year, and we had to shower before we left school after that, even if our parents were waiting around to go home with us outside somewhere. Other than that, showertime at school for me was always about 10.30am to 10.40am three days a week, so mid morning at school is strongly associated to me with regular showers.

When I was just 12, I had a regular Sunday night bath night that my mum insisted upon much of the time and had done for years when younger. But within 12 hours of this home bath I'd be out in PE undoing all the cleaning and becoming quite filthy so much of the time, so it became quite pointless and not long after starting secondary school the old Sunday bath night before a week of school came to an end, although not for many months.

Comment by: Yours Truly on 7th January 2025 at 15:23
'I see that several recent posts have mentioned the dreaded school showers. I can still remember how that first Games lesson seemed like a date with doom, knowing that my miserable game of football was to be followed by my first ever communal shower with a load of other eleven-year-old boys most of whom I didn't know and some of whom were already zeroing in on me as a potential target for bullying. It felt dehumanising and depersonalising. And, sorry to harp on this, it was galling to know that the girls had shower stalls, that in a typically low-end, chronically underfunded 1980s comprehensive school yet the school still took the girls' dignity so seriously that they were prepared to fork out actual money to protect it, while we boys were treated, as a previous poster put it, like cattle.'




Hello Yours Truly (do you have a first name?)

I understand your attitude and frustration but on the subject of shower cubicles, the school I went to in the then 1970's (comprehensive educated 1975-80) had separated shower cubicles in our changing rooms. I'm sorry to dispel the myths about such things but it made little difference to issues on privacy and we were all still loitering around the changing room in each others faces with our willies wiggling about in front of everyone, if by privacy you mean the hiding of our genitalia in such situations, is that how others interpret privacy of the school changing/showers room, not exposing your vitals to an audience?

Our PE class was made up of at least 30 of us in that changing room in school when I was a teenager. There was no generalised open communal area as I would understand it, but a series of small compartments for our shower usage, which was not voluntary, very much mandatory almost always. I think there were about 10 of these compartments (cubicles). But there were 30 of us, so it was rare to get one to yourself, often you had to share with someone else together, two went in at a squeeze. Sharing with a very close friend meant you would rub some soap on their back and vice versa, which helped in a closed in space. But this still left others impatiently and nakedly waiting for their turn beside them. You couldn't take a towel into them, it would get wet, so you left it back with your stuff on the hook and bench across the room. The boys waiting were just hanging out naked in a small line while others showered in these cubicles, often as I said, two at a time. Even if you got one to yourself you were still coming and going from it across the changing room entirely naked, and very wet and dripping on the way out.

Infact I think it made things take a lot longer actually. If we'd had a communal shower like most schools seemed to have then we could all have been done together, and no waiting for others. Cubicles provided no privacy at all really, and the floor of the changing room used to get so wet that there was a mop in one corner and when we had all finished up someone was usually picked to wipe it and dry it off a bit into a bucket, or if the teacher was feeling generous he might do it the mop job to rid the floor of too much wetness off our dripping bodies coming out the shower cubicles. These things had no doors on them anyway, those waiting just watched you showering. All just needless hassle and time wasting that a communal shower would have avoided.

Don't get me wrong, the cubicles looked nice and in practice sound great, but in reality they were far from this. We all saw plenty of each other naked, hung about naked without towels on us, soaked the changing room floor, and probably took longer over it all and often had to wait about to shower while fully naked because we couldn't take a towel into the cubicle.

I've no idea how my own school, a modern build of its day, ended up with cubicles rather than open floor communal facilities but there is never going to be a school that can provide 30 or so individual shower cubicles for all the class so that everyone can have their own to themselves, practicality prevents it.

I've seen communal showers in stuff on TV and in films and that one from the school programme that was posted on here some while back and I'd have preferred going that way at school rather than the fiddling about and effort of cubicles just for some misguided idea about privacy that they didn't even manage to provide anyway.

So don't believe the myth, cubicles didn't provide any privacy in school with a class of 30 boys needing to get cleaned up, with time pressures on us. It's quite clear to me why communal was most popular.

I see that several recent posts have mentioned the dreaded school showers. I can still remember how that first Games lesson seemed like a date with doom, knowing that my miserable game of football was to be followed by my first ever communal shower with a load of other eleven-year-old boys most of whom I didn't know and some of whom were already zeroing in on me as a potential target for bullying. It felt dehumanising and depersonalising. And, sorry to harp on this, it was galling to know that the girls had shower stalls, that in a typically low-end, chronically underfunded 1980s comprehensive school yet the school still took the girls' dignity so seriously that they were prepared to fork out actual money to protect it, while we boys were treated, as a previous poster put it, like cattle. Another previous poster made the exceedingly incisive observation that the only other groups in Western societies that are compelled to undergo communal showering are army recruits and prison inmates. That first football lesson and the shower that followed it was one of the lowest points of my life so far. Yet some educational genius back in the day decided that communal nude showering was the ideal thing for young boys going through adolescence.

And do you know what the stupidest thing was? During my first year in secondary the games lesson was scheduled as the last lesson on the Monday (as if Mondays weren't already bad enough). Think about that. That meant we had our lesson, showered and then immediately hopped on the bus home. There was no actual need for us to shower at all since we could immediately have a shower or bath as soon as we got home! Utterly ludicrous and completely unnecessary.

There was always that belief, widely held among teachers, that girls could be reasoned with whereas boys had to be kept firmly in their box. In an environment where corporal punishment was already disappearing - my school stopped administering it just before I got there - one of the main weapons left in the teacher's arsenal is to strip them of their dignity because that makes them feel more vulnerable and therefore less aggressive, and I suspect the showering regime was part and parcel of that.

To be fair I have heard a few women complain of communal showers with their teachers standing over them watching as well. But this seems to have been far less common for girls, not to mention all those schools that allowed girls not to shower at all while still forcing the boys to do so, which was blatant gender discrimination.

Another recent poster here, or more than one, has made reference to the eccentrics and the 'dubious' characters that everybody seems to remember from their schooldays. I have to absolutely fair and honest here: I never heard of any potentially sinister or ambiguous behaviour from teachers towards pupils at secondary school, not even the sour old bastard of a senior PE teacher that I have mentioned previously. Our PE teachers actually used to make a point of turning on the showers as soon as we came in off the playing fields an then immediately disappearing into their little office. before we had even undressed. I never experienced the standing over us and watching that so many others here, both men and women, have such bad memories of.

In fact the only example of potentially ambiguous behaviour I was ever aware of actually came from the girls' changing room, which must surely be somewhat unusual. There was one particular teacher who was a bit over-enthusiastic, full on and 'jolly hockysticks, as Enid Blyton might say. She could also be something of a bully and was at times known to overstep the mark. There was a longstanding rumour among the girls that she had at one time yanked the towel from around a girl emerging from the showers in an, I suppose, 'don't be so ridiculous and shy' kind of way. The story persisted for years, accompanied by the inevitable, malicious speculations as to her sexuality.

While as a boy I escaped her clutches I did have one unpleasant run-in with her. It was on the school's customary residential week-long trip, which I believe most schools did back then, although I have no idea if schools still offer the experience. There was a showering rule which I completely innocently, along with another boy, just failed to hear. Which meant we didn't do it. When the male teacher supervising the boys' dorm found out we hadn't showered he didn't make a big deal of it, he simply sent us down to shower on the spot.

On the way there we were intercepted by this woman teacher who proceeded to deal us a caustic earbashing which she concluded with the alarming threat, "If I hear again that you haven't showered I will personally drag you down to the showers and I will stand there and supervise you myself!"

It was over the top. It was unnecessary given that our male teacher had already dealt with us. Most of all that final threat was definitely overstepping the mark. Sadly, as a not-quite-twelve year-old, I hadn't yet come to realise that I had rights and teachers have boundaries. Otherwise my response could have been quite different.

On a lighter note though, I certainly remember the eccentrics and the barely-employables among the staff. Every school had their own little contingent of these, didn't they? There was the Physics teacher, a very amiable old boy, whose default vocal delivery was a low sussurant buzz, and whose lessons actually used to send people to sleep. There was the Music teacher, another very gentle old boy, who was sacked on the spot just a year or two shy of his retirement after he got blind drunk on the annual 3rd-year day-trip to France. There was the teacher who, so the girls claimed, was into 'kinky stuff'. (For some reason these rumours always seemed to generate among the girls.) If it was, hey, it was his own business, but after my sister gloatingly told me that I could never pass him in the corridors without experiencing a momentary mental image of him trussed up in one of those gimp-harnesses with a ball-gag in his mouth, which was unsettling to say the least. There was the stereotypical, 'liberal-leftie' teacher - this was the eighties, after all - exactly the type of teacher that used to keep the Daily Mail editorial team up at night grinding their teeth, and who was more concerned with coming across as cool and friendly than actually teaching anything. True to form, the kids in his O level class failed their O level left, right and centre.

Most of all I remember the craft section. Woodwork, Metalwork and Technical Drawing. They all looked like frazzled ex-hippies that had got kicked out of their ashram and after failing their interviews to become presenters on the BBC's Open University broadcasts, teaching was their last chance.

Danny - All I can think to say is thank god that was not my school. What were they thinking of?

I was at school a bit later than you, late 90's, and all we got was skins v shirts every couple of weeks. Funnily enough I feel sure I was a skin at that more often than not. Who got to be was unscientific and just a teacher pointing at you. I feel blessed that was all I had to do shirtless.

Comment by: Finn on 3rd January 2025 at 23:40
"Someone mentioned doing sports day shirtless with parental attendance. I had to do something similar in 1989."




I think you're referring to me.

You did it once, I did it 5 times, in July's of 1982, 1983, 1984, 1985 and 1986, and the temperature didn't have to be hot outside either, or sunny, although it was mostly, certainly in 1983-85. I remember each one quite well.

Although my Buckinghamshire school did barechested PE all year round in gym or sports hall, and all summer long outside, I was still surprised and taken aback when we were told the actual sports day afternoon would be the same for us like in normal lessons to ourselves. Although I'd had 9 or 10 months of barechested school PE by that time and had got used to it, I didn't really want or feel any enthusiasm to face sports day in front of onlookers including my family barechested. But the choice was not mine to make and there was no escaping it. The no shirt rule at school was simply unavoidable. I think I was more anxious the second year we had sports day as I was fully aware what was in store again so I had time to get nervy about being thrust publicly out amongst all comers in just my shorts/trunks, and that was by the time I'd been doing barechested PE at the school solidly for almost two years. School sports day was like a mega sized multi task PE lesson on steroids, 4 hours of everything with a onlookers everywhere and no hiding place from your embarrassing slip ups or failures to what you looked like doing it all.

I also remember the headmaster walking around and no matter how hot it was on one of these days he was in his usual dark grey suit and highly polished black shoes with his neck tie done up perfectly, looking very important and watching everything.

What Finn says makes a whole lot of sense to me. If you're not shy and are body confident then you probably wonder what all the fuss is about. But if you are shy then things can become a major big deal, like school PE lessons in places where they made you strip right down to maybe just shorts in PE and forbade you putting tops on. Bare chests and shirtless are not for everyone. Boys in school would never dare admit it too loudly of course but many older people who've now left school far behind are able to do so from the safety of time and being adults a while and looking back evaluating things and sounding off online where they can find other likeminded people.

I don't consider myself shy at all, and I'm quite confident and think I was at school. I was athletic and fit and in good shape all through school years but I still had my moments with feelings of insecurity about myself and had all the nervousness that goes with being forced to shower at school and get naked with a lot of others. I was not bothered too much when I had to remove my top in various PE lessons, but full nudity in the school showers did create nervous tension for me, certainly in early days doing so. Most boys, whoever they are, whatever they look like, whatever they think, do not submit to school showers voluntary and do so under duress, we all knew that.

'Next to nothing on' Alan, they looked at us with nothing on, my PE teachers could probably recognise many of the class by just what was between our legs as much as above our neck!

There's not one member of my family that has seen with with nothing on since I was about 12, yet all my PE teachers did. Think about that for a moment, and it seems rather mad in so many ways.

Comment by: Finn on 3rd January 2025 at 23:40

"I was at state school in the eighties and used to get really weirded out about going shirtless for PE lessons and didn't like teachers telling me I couldn't wear the top that school provided. I always felt it should be my decision if I wished to be shirtless or not, that seemed quite a personal decision to me about myself that I didn't think anyone else had to the right to dictate....."

This is exactly my point, Finn, and especially now that you have pupils forced to stay on past 16. There is something very dubious about teachers desire to see young lads with next to nothing on, and when they loiter in changing rooms and showers.

I suspect some pupils who went to boarding or grammar schools enjoyed their subservience but the ordinary lad who goes to a state school, often much against their will at later ages, is not like that. What they wear should be their choice. I'd even extend that to school uniform (one of our local schools has a bottle green uniform which looks hideous)

I was at state school in the eighties and used to get really weirded out about going shirtless for PE lessons and didn't like teachers telling me I couldn't wear the top that school provided. I always felt it should be my decision if I wished to be shirtless or not, that seemed quite a personal decision to me about myself that I didn't think anyone else had to the right to dictate. Someone said to me back then that I must have a phobia about it. I was the same about being forced into showers with nothing on which I found an abomination that they had the right to do that with us, to strip us all naked when they said. But when someone suggested I had a phobia about being shirtless I didn't think I did, I just thought I was shy, that's all, and shyness isn't a phobia it's just a normal human condition as much as others who are greatly outgoing and carefree about themselves. I always hated being so shy about my body in those days. PE teachers didn't give a toss about any of that though. I did an enomrous amount of shirtless PE lessons. It was never essential that the boys were all shirtless in any of them, it was just a teacher choice that we did because they liked it that way and how we looked, nothing more. I'd have respected a few teachers who might have gone shirtless with us and taken the lead but none ever did this.

Someone mentioned doing sports day shirtless with parental attendance. I had to do something similar in 1989 and it was perhaps one of my most unfavourite days at that school, horrible teachers took us out like that because it was so hot on the day and decided we didn't need our PE vests and we'd be more comfortable shirtless. I tried to wear my vest and was told I had to remove it and get outside without it. I called the teacher that told me to do that every name under the sun under my breath. I hated taht I was so shy being around so many people shirtless but couldn't help the way I felt and thought everyone was looking at me like that, even though there were dozens of other boys just like me too.

Comment by: Will on 2nd January 2025 at 09:08


"I went to boarding school in the early 1970's and much of what Simon describes happened to us.....
....There was nothing unusual in all of this, it had gone on for ever."

Frankly, boarding schools are infamous for employing perverts - they have a freer run, so to speak, but with all due respect the 1970s are 50 years ago plus, surely it is time we updated our attitudes and behaviour to school students. What might have been "acceptable" back then (though, not to me and others who think like me) is not acceptable today.

I went to boarding school in the early 1970's and much of what Simon describes happened to us.

Indoor PE was always shorts only; hanging on the wall bars was common, first one to drop got more punishment (usually a run after school).

Every morning we had an early morning run, always stripped to the waist (so shorts, plimsols, no briefs, no socks).

There was nothing unusual in all of this, it had gone on for ever.

Comment by: Quentin on 1st January 2025 at 00:00


"Grammar school lads" often seem to experience Stockholm syndrome and seem to enjoy the humiliations they were subjected to, and, - with all due respect, Quentin (a really good grammar school name, that!), you seem to think that everybody should be treated as if they were in the military. Times change - it is 2025 now. Even the military has changed with the times. If this lack of empathy is typical it is a very good thing that grammar schools are on their way out.

Simon's comment from later yesterday shows just what sadistic bullies were allowed into the profession, and it is good that there is at least some protection against their abuse these days, though sadly there are still rotten apples at the bottom of the barrel.

My school was standard bare chest and bare feet in the gym in the 70s here in the UK. I had one old bastard of a PE teacher who liked hanging the class by the high up wall bars along one side of the gym if we weren't up to scratch for some reason and he would single various boys out for attention by throwing a football straight at out bare stomachs while we hung there, sometimes aching in pain with our arms outstretched above our heads. It was a form of borderline abuse. Many of us used to be very unhappy and dread this kind of casual low level, what I can only describe as violence, against us because when a grown man aims a leather football straight at your exposed body it hurts when it hits you. If he hit you and the ball made you lose your grip and fall off the bars you were in even bigger trouble.

We used to run the cross country with the same man in 1975 and that was done shirtless, white shorts and black football boots, not ideal running shoes other than on soft ground. If you slowed up he'd physically kick you up the backside and very hard. I lost count of how many times I saw this happen on cross country for the boys who struggled with it, and they wonder why so many people have such poor memories and dislike for school physical activities.

All boys should be made to do PE shirtless from an early age, and certainly by the time they are ten or eleven. It's a perfectly normal and healthy way to do physical exercise, the most normal way of the lot. Those of you that did so are the lucky ones, not hard done by.

I was a grammar lad in the 60s and did nothing but PE this way. No alternative was allowed.

Further to many of these comments about schools and going bare chested, I didn't have any brothers so didn't get any feedback like others did.

But I remember very well that I knew going to the comprehensive (1980) involved doing PE in a bare chest a lot. But I don't know how I knew this so well. I had no brothers who could tell me, no other family at my school and knew of no friends with older brothers who said anything. But I just seemed to know this, but can't account for how I would know this before actually attending the place and finding out for myself.

I had a babysitter when I was about 8 to 10 years old who came and looked after me regularly who was at my school, I think she was about 14 or 15 at the time and I do remember asking her lots of questions about the school and she told me that they always gave the youngest couple of years there the most homework and you got less the older you got.

I definitely thought ahead about what a comprehensive school would be like when I finally got there. I'd never done any bare chested PE at any of my previous schools ever, and I remember the thought of maybe doing PE lessons at the bigger school in a bare chest seemed quite a big deal indeed at the time. It seemed quite daring and bold when I actually came to do it for real quite quickly after starting the comprehensive at the age of 11. I was far more nervous about it when it happened than I thought I would be. My comprehensive was actually mandatory bare chests in gym, although I think by the final year when boys were hitting their 16th birthdays some of us were by then wearing mixed style T- shirts of our own, but I carried on regardless much the same. The teachers seemed far harder on the younger boys, I felt they mellowed as I got older.

Going bare chested for PE was ultimately alright after a while, once everyone has got the awkward out of the way, and nothing said awkward as much as mandatory showers at comprehensive school. These made me incredibly nervous. In my new class in 1980 there was someone who cried uncontrollably because the teacher was trying to make him shower and he didn't want to do it. I still remember this poor boy crying away as he was made to remove all his clothes and get in the showers. Nobody was laughing at him, we all felt so sorry for him, except our PE teacher didn't. It all seems so cruel and unnecessary now doesn't it.

The school booklet I have from 1980 details the uniforms needed for the boys and the girls, girls even had to wear ties at my school and I never thought girls suited wearing ties like the boys. In the PE uniform for boys it says that we are required to shower and must bring a towel into school on PE days but under the girls it details no such requirement for them. I don't think the girls had to shower like the boys did at my school. Unfortunately I never had a sister either, and never thought to ask the babysitter this piece of information!

I went to school 15 years before Baz, but exactly the same experience.

We had a number of PE/games teacher over my time at the school, but none allowed anything other than shorts in the gym.

Maybe because I had an older brother at the school, but I never expected anything different - in fact with my first PE lesson, all Mum packed was a pair of shorts and a towel !

We did a cross country run weekly, and again this was always shirtless. Not only did I know what happened from my brother, but it was common to see groups of boys out running in the town, and they all were always stripped to the waist (both my eventual school and other local secondary schools).

We didn't think anything of it to be honest, it was "normal".

Just thinking back through all the PE teachers I had at secondary school back in the early nineties, I can immediately count six different men and know their names off the top of my head and I think there were also a couple of others too.

Each and every one of these teachers I had for school PE had us in the secondary sports hall twice a week bare chested, the whole lot of us. We did everything in that school sports hall in our bare chests and nobody was exempt from that. Actually I can't even remember any kind of PE top inside the school sports hall, only what we wore outdoors. When we did team games we put a ribbon across one shoulder and underneath the other arm to mark us apart. I just don't remember boys like me ever wearing tops in our sports hall at secondary, just a lot of bare chests all over the place all the time.

I don't think there was anything I know of written down in that time that said we had to be bare chests in PE there at that school, although I think I sort of knew on arrival that PE would be bare chests because that was what secondary schools seemed to do lots then. But all those teachers did the same with us all and I'm sure they were not all of suspect character in telling us we must strip to bare chests in those lessons.

If I'm honest I never really gave my own bare chested state much thought at the time, I just did it. I don't even remember anyone telling us to do this, we just showed up and took our uniforms off and nothing went on our top half and out we went.

I remember the showers very well though. We always had them and were getting told to use them. I remember one poor lad who was so shy his hand seemed to be permanently glued to his groin to cover himself when he did this, so it was obviously a bit hard for some to do these things.

I don't think it's terribly unreasonable to go bare chested in a school gym, even though I've been there done it myself without a choice in the matter. People are always looking at others in some way and making judgements. The trick is not to care.

Comment by: James on 27th December 2024 at 23:00


......" A good barechested PE education provides more positives than negatives."

James, forgive me, but you come out with a ridiculous statement like that, without even bothering to explain why you think that way.

It's 2024 - nearly 2025, not 1940. Perhaps you are one of those people who think music sounds far better if the musician wears a tuxedo. The quality of the music depends on the person playing it, not what they are wearing.

There is also the question - raised more than once on here - of those P.E. teachers who enjoy watching boys showering. Now that kids have to stay on at school till they are adults, there is something highly questionable about that practice.

CRB checks or no, there are still rotten apples falling through the system. Teachers should be set limits and made to stick to them.

Len, I entirely agree. With teachers being CRB checked as far as possible now boys doing barechested PE shouldn't need to be an issue. My elder son's school has recently introduced barechested basketball for 2 sessions a month which according to my son have been popular and added something different and more of a competitive edge during games. The boys are told the week before if they're expected to remove their shirts. A good barechested PE education provides more positives than negatives.

Going back in time to my own schooldays in the 70's there's a lot of commonality with my own experience and some recent musings here, although I don't think I have ever read anything as dispiriting about old schooldays as the comments of yours here Alan and I don't think for a minute that your own school represents the normality of most schools at that time.

But I don't have to try too hard to think of one or two people who probably would have been better employed elsewhere at my own school. We had a geography teacher who dressed and looked like a tramp, grotty looking ill fitting clothing, always wore the same stuff, often brown, shirts with grubby curled up collars, and an unkempt wild beard that looked like a birds nest. This didn't stop him calling us out on the most minor infractions of our smart uniform rules however, a tie slightly undone or top button. But he got away with anything.

I had a PE teacher who always hung about shirtless in lessons and he would force anyone in his classes to remove their upper kit too and be shirtless. He even walked about school between lessons without a top on sometimes, but with a trackie jacket hung over one shoulder. He looked fat too, made the boys in his class look like prime specimens. When we went out on cross countries with him he'd actually have trouble keeping up with most of us and be out of puff. He was a heavy smoker, I saw him having a drag in his office one day with Benson & Hedges on the desk, a lighter and an ash tray. It was said he offered a sly fag to some older boys once in a while, for unspecified favours. What these favours were or how innocent no one seemed to know but his love of being around boys with bare chests in PE was well known by us kids. Other PE teachers didn't insists on shirtless PE anything like as much.

Comment by: Christine Sanderson on 23rd December 2024 at 20:39



Christine, you ask:

"Was anyone here administered a form of late corporal punishment in the 1980's, if so what was the reason for what was a drastic sanction by that time?"

Clearly you haven't read what I have written in the past (why should you?). I went to a very run down East London school that had long been scheduled for closure - from long before I went to it. As a result the only teaching staff it attracted were the elderly,ánd the dregs. More than one had "drink problems". No amount of Polo mints could disguise the fact. One poor old bugger gave off the permanent whiff of leaky incontinent old age. None of them displayed much awareness of personal freshness, (crumbs in hre beard, the same shirt worn all week) even the shower loving paedo P.E teacher, who by common consent was homosexual.. Not one teacher was under 50, and one or two were virtually hanging on for retirement, and resented the fact they had to drag themselves in every day. As a result the most minor matter could be greeted with a flying chalkboard eraser, a slipper or the cane - whatever came to their elderly gnarled hands first. They loathed children, especially teenage boys, which was a problem because that was all they had to teach.

You could get the cane for almost anything - even getting a smudge on your technical drawing paper - a crossing out was a very serious caning matter. Sadly the teacher concerned was a pervert, who revelled in his reputation with the cane. The sad thing was it was about the only subject I enjoyed and was good at, but you never got a word of encouragement.

I think it fair to say that our borough was not exactly noted for academic excellence, (it's what happens when a council is run by the same party decade after decade, and a load of old hangers-on stick to positions of authority like dirty glue) but remarkably our school, certainly, seemed to have no outside inspection. Our headmaster was an elderly weak man who, it was clear even to young lads was seriously ill, and so he delegated his duties to his deputy who also had a reputation for what he regarded as "toughness" but was cowardly bullying of boys. There was a famous occasion when the father of one 15 year old boy came up to the school to discuss an especially egregious example of aggression from the teacher and Mr S. hid in the playground lavatory till the boy's father was mollified by speaking to the headmaster who assured him would take action (mere words of course). The lad concerned was at pains to point out to the teacher, and anybody who would listen that his dad was a very fit triathlete, with a great interest in martial arts.

Had the school been subjected to an inspection, they would no doubt have been warned in advance, so it would have been an otiose exercise in futility. As it was, they virtually marked their own homework, and rubber stamped by a headmaster that made Joe Biden look like Tyson Fury.

I have always felt that any teacher, male or female, ought to be made to undergo vigorous psychological testing before placement at any school they worked at. At least two of ours needed psychiatric help I am sure, the others were just indifferent old hacks, hoping retirement got them before death.

It will be interesting to see if school students will be treated better in the future, since the Prime Minister's latest crackpot scheme is to give the vote to 16 year olds. Will this lead to the attitudes and behaviour of schools being modified, or will it still be us and them?.

I think doing school physical education bare chested is good because it helps promote body acceptance and our differences. I think the practice should be encouraged as widely as possible. My own twin sons used to come down to the breakfast table together and sit in bare chests eating as a family before I went to work and they went to school in their teenage years. I was always pleased by their inner confidence about who they were and never wished to discourage it. They attended a school that provided hard core physical education and much was done in bare chests according to them, now in their 30s.