Burnley Grammar School

Greg and Dan I know eactly what the pair of you mean.

It rather seem like I went to a school quite like yours Dan. I wish I'd kept a meticulous diary, oh the tales I would be able to tell, many long forgotten, but I remember more than enough still. Reading others lets my own memories flow back too.

I got on with nearly all my PE teachers at school and they got on with me, but that didn't stop me thinking one or two were quite demented!

Take the time I forgot football boots to school. My feet were a size seven but the PE teacher got a spare pair from lost property that were a couple of sizes too small for me and expected me to put them on a use them. He made me struggle to get my feet in them and by the end of PE I was in agony I could barely walk never mind run and my feet were blistered and scuffed raw but I was just told to stop moaning and shut up.

One teacher liked getting boys in headlocks and throwing us to the ground if there was any messing around. I did judo out of school unconnected to the school and was talking about it to him one day and he decided I should give a demonstration on the gym floor showing what I'd learnt against him. He was much bigger than me though so that was unfair in itself. How he thought I was going to chuck him about is anyone's guess, it felt weird as I wasn't in my usual judo white gear, just my PE shorts, no shirt, PE teacher in his joggy trousers, zip top and trainers, I was barefoot which judo was anyway. I was unable to really prove anything I'd learnt at judo as he proceeded to use the time to throw me all over the place quite badly and take the p*ss out of me in front of the rest of the guys in class which I think was the plan. I should have kept my mouth shut about judo. An absolute bloody nutter. This was all done on a hard floor without mats. It's funny how a couple of years later when I was the same size as him and a lot more competent at the judo I'd practiced that he didn't ask for a rematch or want one. I suggested it and he wasn't interested by the time I was closing on sixteen and had gained a few coloured belts.

I don't know why judo wasn't ever part of school PE. Some boys liked throwing each other around during breaks outside.

I could handle myself but I did get it bad at school for being shiny ginger with ginger eyebrows. You really don't want to know what I had to put up with in the school showers because of the colour of what grew lower down when it started appearing. I never understood the ginger fascination others had.

I used to feel sorry for boys in PE when I saw them all without tops on.

They would put girls in with the boys gym when I was at my senior school in Bristol where I began in the late seventies, there from 1977 through until 1983. This happened in our younger two or three years there, once a week.

I was what seemed like a rare girl in my class who actually liked PE, not many seemed to.

When I first went into PE with boys at my secondary school in the late 70's I couldn't believe it - they were all standing there and none of them was dressed like I thought they would be, they were all without shirts on, each and every one of them with totally bare tops. I felt so embarrassed to be amongst so many boys I knew like that, I didn't know where to look but was transfixed all the same. I'd never seen boys without shirts on before very close, I'd never even been swimming and they looked like they should be going swimming to me. I remember how I used to feel sorry for them because none of them ever wore tops in PE with us, they always arrived down at PE exactly the same with bare bodies and some boys didn't look confident like that I could tell easily as young as I was then.

Sometimes we had their male PE teacher, other times they had our female one.

I preferred when the girls did PE by ourselves because I think having boys around us was a distraction for us girls in PE and I know some of those boys looked uncomfortable when we were just waiting ready to do PE standing about. Our school gym was so cold sometimes it must have been unheated all year round. Our own gym PE kit was horrible clingy black leotards until we got a bit older.

Does anyone know what exactly was being referenced in the previous comment regards Redditch and a TV programme about school there forty years ago? I live in Alvechurch just a couple of miles up the A441 from there. Which school was this and what was the programme exactly?

Greg I thought that was a really nice and thoughtfully written post you wrote there, well worth responding to.

I can tell you exactly how I came by this place. It was 5 years ago when a girl I was in school with placed a barechested photo of me with my similarly looking classmates from sports day at our secondary in the early 80s on her personal facebook account much to my surprise. Although not on facebook myself I was tipped off and took a look and was able to see the photo and even my name written with many others, and even see a lot of the comments, mainly women actually, about us and what we looked like. A number of men also piped in on the level of shirtless goings on at our school during their time as well, I think one even called himself a "victim" of it. I had the photo myself but stuck away and hadn't looked or thought about any of this kind of thing in years, so this all rekindled what I can only assume were memories I'd buried quite deep. Once unleashed I found myself thinking quite a lot about schooldays, treatment, what went on and just about everything with a strong focus on PE in particular, and drama as I've mentioned numerous times also. Drama is also a very powerful memory for me like this in ways it may not be for others.

My initial reaction to seeing my shirtless teenage body at school being stuck online on someone's social media, even with others, was not being thrilled at it and wishing they hadn't without my permission. But after a short while I saw no real harm in it and was more relaxed. But if that was my reaction to a mere class barechested photograph I can only wonder what any of the boys who went to the middle school in Redditch just over 40 years ago would now feel if they saw themselves online nowadays being filmed stark naked washing in the showers and coming and going full frontal from the showers after PE on that schools TV programme that was placed on here previously some time ago.

So having seen old school PE photo's turn up online I began just wondering how common or unusual my own school might have been compared to others and what the thoughts of people my age might now be looking back and stumbled over this history site in the process, discovering a number of people almost immediatley with identical viewpoints and I gained a couple of personal responses too. If honest I thought I'd stick a comment or two up and forget about the whole thing.

Over the years I'd had a couple of chances to go to school reunions and ignored them, not really interested, but subsequently have been to two over the past three years now. The most recent last November I printed out some of my early comments on here and handed them to both a PE teacher and a drama teacher of mine, with information about this site and even my email address. It would be hilarious if one of them suddenly wrote up on here too. Haven't noticed anything yet! I was promised an email response from a teacher with some old school stuff but he hasn't done so yet, maybe he will, maybe not, people say things to be polite.

Further to what you've said Greg, I found that when I began writing about some of my school experiences on here, and also privately with a couple of email contacts, I seemed to begin reliving those days all over again in quite a stark and immediate way, and as I wrote about things the memories just kept flooding back like a dam burst at me ever more, as did the exact sensations I felt at the time too, and I had a daily diary to aid me as well, every single day throughout my secondary school I wrote something down about life. I did this from age 12 to my 40's infact. Even people who think they've got a fantastic memory like me can open the pages of old diaries and re-discover things long forgotten or you don't ever even remember, but as they are in pen and ink on paper in your own handwriting they clearly happened as said. I wrote a fair amount at the end of each day laying on the bed. Sometimes when I had bad days I really didn't feel I wanted to do that but somehow found the discipline to do so every night. There were many great days too may I add.

Quite interestingly as I'm writing this I pulled out 1985 and this date 40 years ago and I have a school PE reference for Friday 15th February 1985. The ground was icy with old snow pack iced around school a hazard to walk on. We had PE in the sports hall that morning. We had to walk across from our changing room outside across an open courtyard area to get there. Our gym connected directly by corridor to the changing rooms but the sports hall did not. We had no trainers for that type of PE, just our leather shoes but because they were black soled we were not allowed them on the sports hall light coloured floor, so we legged it across barefoot on pack ice, no tops of course, just black shorts on. I mention everyone rubbing their cold feet in the sports hall only for us to be told to get running between the two far walls back and forth until told to stop - the warm up!

Every winter I was at secondary school from 1981 unti 1987 there seemed to be a decent severe snowfall period early in the year without fail. Proper snow and long lasting ice, and this was in the south of the country, I'm in Buckinghamshire.

I found Jeffrey's comments interesting and this point about not talking about certain things. Greg when I began at secondary the first time my mother knew I'd come back from a school day with a PE lesson the first thing she asked me was did I have a shower and the follow up was did my teacher come in with us! Not becuase she would have been mad at that, just that she was curious. She would not have been mad if he had. I would have been even if he had kept his shorts on. How times have changed on that so fast. I never ever told her of my first shower experience that I've relayed on here previous. I was very reluctant for a very long time to even tell my parents the extent to which we did barechested PE at school as I found it an embarrassing thing to admit to being forced into. I know it kind of sounds silly but this is a 12 year old's head here I'm relating as.

My school life and my home life after the age of 12 were so different. If my mum or dad had ever seen me at home without my shirt on after that age they would have been in deep shock I think. I think I last regularly did things like that when I was 9 before clamming right up as I got older and more aware and sensitive. I just didn't want my parents to know what school was dishing out. I took ages to finally speak of our barechested cross country runs to them for instance. They had no real reaction to it.

Of course you get used to it all, you cannot fail to, no matter your feelings when doing something a lot. It took me a number of months until I finally stopped the endless fretting about PE lessons, going shirtless so much and showering. Funnily enough I probably accepted the showers faster then never ending shirtless PE, work that one out? Having finally settled into it, I was hit with the public sports day and that re-ignited the whole thing with rocket boosters when told no shirts allowed for boys even on public event sports day afternoon.

So the upshot here Greg is that writing brings it all back very strongly almost in real time to me, the sights, the sounds, the smells even, just about everything in amazing detail. I suppose I've kind of bared my soul a little bit here like Alan did the other day, so forgive me a little indulgence and a long winded post.

Before I end, I'll leave it with this. None of my teachers, either in PE or drama or any other subjects, remember an unconfident boy at all. I was a grade A for effort PE pupil at school with good reports on most things except football. I managed to hide my discomfort remarkably well after a shaky start and effectively fool most of those teachers, as I suspect many others did.

Comment by: Jeffrey on 14th February 2025 at 15:28




Firstly Jeffrey I would like to say how sorry I am for your loss. A contemporary of mine died at the start of that horrible pandemic and it always seems an even worse shock when somebody fairly young succumbs to it. You will never get over something like that.

As regards your question, I think most lads would not discuss things that go on at school - in many cases because they realise that there is not much parents can do much to change things, and they don't want cause a fuss or cause worry. Also some parents (and I am not saying you were one such) would never dream of questioning authority, be it somebody important like a doctor or policeman, or a teacher.

In my view from even the past few days postings with comments about punishments overseen or encouraged by P.E. teachers, many of them are bullies and somewhat unbalanced - just because you can do a thing doesn't mean to say you should. It shows how protected they felt being able to do such things in full view of the public.

Speaking for myself, as the world has got so much more accommodating (at least in Britain) so more touchy-feely, so much more understanding and friendly, and a realisation that everyone is an individual, I was shocked when I first come on here a few years ago to see things that were taken as normal back in my day are still going on - I had the impression that even the educational world had moved on. Clearly it hasn't and now many pupils have to endure being ordered about till they are 18.

It would be interesting to know how Gen Z, who need and get safe spaces and mus'nt be upset, cope with school today. I would like it if some of them would come on here and tell us.

Terry, thank you for your kind words on 30th January
Jeffrey, so sorry for your sad news on 14th February

Below is a link to an unusual boys’ race event from long ago. It shows a short film that records a boys’ 3 mile walking race which took place in Aberystwyth in 1922. An ‘exercise from the past’ contrast, to all the routine shirtless school gym and games memories.

I have always found it fascinating to look through old films and photographs, with Documentary eventually becoming my profession of work. It was how I found this site, (I often wonder how such a variety of posters find this site) and long before finding myself contributing to discussions here, which happened subsequently, mainly because I was always a sporty kid at school. But, I found that when rekindling memories from those times and then writing about them, somehow your innermost feelings can come flooding back about who you really were, and how you felt, about your experiences at that young age.

I sometimes find that these same feelings can connect up again when I study some footage or still photographs from the past. We’re reminded that we all have our own time, which is equally valid whenever or wherever this might have been. We’re, all of us, able to do no more than to try to accommodate our world and social conditions and expectations we find ourselves within during our young days, and all these first conscious experiences have to be dealt with during the early years of our own childhood.

I do realise as I watch this valuable documentary footage, that all the people captured here will no longer be with us. But I find this just adds a poignancy, serving as an important reminder that all anyone ever has, is that same 24 hours of each day, whenever it was lived. L. P. Hartley did once write that the past is a foreign country, but I believe it’s equally important to remember that during that very same past, every individual’s day to day human consciousness was much the same as it is for us in our present time.

This old film records a boys’ walking race from long ago, with what appears to be a staggered start based on age groups, and with no girls taking place. No shirtless lads here, but the race did take place on Boxing Day! No sports clothes would be readily available to them at that time, and certainly no sporting trainers of any sort to help young feet on that 3 mile quickly paced trek over hard cobbles. I expect they wore their only pair of probably ill fitting shoes or hard boots, which probably left their feet a little sore following the completion of their race. Shoes would have been an expensive commodity and still out of reach for some struggling families during those years, with children still to be seen without shoes in many old films of that same time. I wonder if most had enjoyed the usual Christmas meal to sustain them the day before the race? Possibly not all, and some boys certainly do look tired at the end of it.

https://player.bfi.org.uk/free/film/watch-boys-walking-races-1922-online

To draw a couple of points together, on the subject of outside barechested PE at a less than appropriate time of year and also the subject of women teachers.

I've got a diary entry written on Monday 28th November 1983 which mentions a PE lesson I had that morning first thing outside. I was 14 at the time. It was a football lesson in murky weather. I noted that our PE teacher had become annoyed that we were not putting much effort into the football game, not surprising as I hated the game and many of my friends did too, it was never my idea of fun first thing on Monday morning. So he stopped the match we were playing and gathered us around and told us all to immediatley take our shirts off and leave them in the goal mouth on the ground and to immediatley start running the school field perimeter instead, barechested. I don't even need a diary to remember this, it's easy to recall. I remember the anger this was done with and some of the protests about the cold. It was basically a case of get running fast and you'll warm up quicker. When we had done that and returned to the goalmouth after what must have been 15 minutes of lapping the field we got told to lay on the ground and do some push ups. He also made some boys do this in a filthy goalmouth in a satuared area. This was clearly some kind of a shirtless punishment to make us also feel cold and move ourselves, but most PE was barechested anyway so the effect in terms of simply being shirtless was minimal at our school. I wrote the temperature in my diary that day as about 10 celsius but this was early morning not even 10am so was probably colder than it ended up later in the day. So our "punishment" dished out for lack of effort during football was to be seen and made cold, barechested, dirty and rather knackered, watched over by a very warm looking, fully sports dressed teacher who remained quite inactive himself throughout.

On the women teachers thing, I'm reminded of my switch from my male drama teacher after a couple of years to a rather boring and uncharismatic middle aged woman who took me and didn't look like a drama teacher at all. I expected things to change with her. My male drama teacher had made us spend half his lessons barechested, he was also a relief PE teacher too. But when I began with this woman, so boring I cannot even remember her name without checking the report slips tucked away, I thought lessons would be quite different under her but we soon got a surprise when quite quickly she was at it the same as our previous male teacher and telling boys we had to remove shirts and ties in drama and sit about doing stuff shirtless just like before. My previous teacher was the head of drama and I strongly suspect he may have encouraged her to do this thinking back now, rather than it being her own decision, but she certainly did it with just as much relish. It may have been a situation like the lady mentioned who had a strike and spoke with the PE teacher who advised her to instruct boys to remove shirts for control purposes and added discipline. Maybe my lady drama teacher was told the same thing.

As a quite well behaved boy at school who didn't get into trouble for anything much, all I can think in my own case is that being barechested very reluctantly against my will just made me a little bit more subdued than I might otherwise have been, especially in drama class with our full form present both genders.

At my old (mixed) grammar school in the 1960s I often had to remove my plain white t-shirt to be one of the "skins" during games or P.E.

The decision as to who was made by the teacher to differentiate the teams, in an entirely random manner; often simply according to where in the gym one happened to be standing at that moment.

I never had the slightest notion of being 'subjugated' or feeling embarrassment at displaying my upper torso on any of these occasions, and, so far as I could determine, neither had any of the other boys.

Then as now, I regarded my chest as one of the most uninteresting sights in the world, and would be beyond surprised if anyone ever thought otherwise.

My main concern was at the end of the session, in recovering the correct t-shirt from the 15 or so identical garments thrown into a pile in one corner of the gym.

I've never forgotten the day back in January 1979 when I was walking the family dog through a cold snap with freshly laid snow and walking near my son's school at the time where you could see the whole playing field in vision through a wire fence quite easily. I suddenly saw a collection of boys running in the distance, not thinking a great deal about it until they got slightly closer and I did a double take, knowing they were not wearing the normal navy blue school top I knew my own son had for PE. What they were wearing was much lighter. I stopped with the dog for a moment and when they all got much closer I did a double take because not one of them was in any top of any colour, they were all, it must have been about twenty boys, were stripped down to their bare skin topless and one of them was my own fourteen and a half year old son. I remember waving at him but although he looked at me he pretended not to see me and didn't seem to react much through typical teenage boy embarrassment in front of a parent. I then just carried on my dog walk off and away.

Later that evening when he was back home I asked what that was all about and he told me the PE teacher had decided to give them all a bracing two or three laps of the sports field before putting their navy PE sports shirts back on, and he told me I hadn't seen the best bit when they stopped and the teacher had told them all to do a rolling exercise on the ground in a few inches of snow. Is he bloody mad I said, does he want to put a whole class out of school for a fortnight having gone down with flu or something, if you fall ill in the next few days I'll be having words.

I remember asking how common this was and it turned out to be something done regularly, although not in such severe conditions. I was a regular dog walker at the time on a certain day in the week as I worked weekends and had a weekday off, but didn't normally route myself past the school too often, so I hadn't seen much else. So if the weather was a bit miserable on my weekday dog walk I'd sometimes re-route and see if I caught anything again similar and about three or four months later it was a bit wet and cold and I did see the same thing again at the same point in the day, my son not part of that one.

That summer I did also see a lot of athletics taking place where most if not all boys were without any tops on.

I will be completely honest here with you and say that I never even thought to question my own son about his feelings when it came to doing things like stripping to a bare skin topless in PE and he never drew attention to it himself or commented openly. He wasn't a young man who I saw very much of around the house without being dressed properly with his favourite tops on and liked his bathroom privacy, always locking the door. Unfortunately I lost him suddenly at the age of 56 to covid so am unable to speak with him anymore like I would dearly wish to. We never spoke much about his schooldays after he left and so I'm left wondering if he might have had any of the thoughts that some of you gentleman on here elucidate now who would be his age today.

There is a caricature vision of a sadistic PE teacher. I had one who liberally thrashed boys for trivial matters with plimsolls, belts and a stick just for not being able to do something like vault to an acceptable standard, a bit like jockeys whipping the horse furiously to get it over the line first. That's clear cut, but then there is such as I described seeing on my dog walking days which is less so and blurs the lines a bit more.

When I had been at school 65 or more yeras ago now I had always worn a quite smart white t-shirt in the gym or for any athletics, and long sleeved shirts for winter. I myself did no PE at school, even in the gym, without a t-shirt on. Obviously we were all made to shower together afterwards with no clothes on though, that went with the territory always and was compulsory to do.

I started teaching in the late 70s and early 80s, my first job was the only one to have older-style kit like this. Classes were mainly gender segregated but then we started to combine, not the best decision in my view. I mainly taught girls' classes before they combined.

Uniform was strict, the standard t-shirt and shorts for most indoor classes, for boys and girls. But for gymnastics girls had leotard-style gym suits, while boys had to wear just shorts, as they also did for fitness drills.

I don't recall widespread issues with the older-style uniform, until classes became mixed when sometimes boys would ask to wear t shirts, but in general they just got on with it. We did discontinue the leotards at that stage though as they were unpopular with the girls in front of boys.

Jon W (12th Feb): So you played Murderball regularly as part of normal Games lessons? Wow - please tell us more! We only played very occasionally - usually as an end-of-term "treat" - from the second year in secondary, I think - when we thought we were a bit old for Pirates and enjoyed something a bit more exciting and risky. From what I remember, there was far more punching than slapping when we played, and although there were no officially imposed rules, there seemed to be an implicitly understood set of what was acceptable and what wasn't - there was never any hair pulling, grabbing hold of each others shorts, or hitting below the belt, for example.

As I attended an all boys secondary school, I did not get to experience the fun (or misery?) of doing PE shirtless regularly in front of girls. That being said, we had a fair number of female teachers at my school who wouldn't hesitate to have you strip to the waist for PE activities, or even unrelated rule-breaking. Once in a while though, we got to go on cross country runs through the town and nearby park, usually with our shirts off. I recall passing by the girls' school and if they were outside having PE lessons of their own, we'd hear them giggling and calling out to us as we ran on by. No doubt the sight of a bunch of sweaty shirtless teenage boys would have been the highlight of their day. I don't doubt a few boys were mortified by the experience but I know more than a few of us would have loved to hang around a little while longer and chat them up while dressed like that.

Just the other day I went for a shirtless run around my local track wanting to recapture feeling of those carefree days but it just isn't the same. You can never go back!

Hi Alan,

To be fair to Deborah she found a mild-mannered way of asserting her authority over those boys and it worked. (Of course it's perfectly possible that a different woman teacher might have felt uncomfortable taking a class of half-naked teenage boys running on testosterone and attitude.)

Her male colleague's suggestion is the baldest admission I have come across that making boys do PE bare-chested was really about subjugation rather than any about practical reason to do with the activity itself. It was always the way, and no doubt it persists today in more covert and subtle forms, that teachers of both genders felt that girls could be 'worked with' but boys had to be 'worked on'.

In fact there was a post on here, quite a while back now, telling how the poster had a female PE teacher stand in on their lessons for several weeks. He said that although the girls had said that she was kind and approachable she was an absolute tyrant to the boys, running their classes as if they were borstal inmates, keeping up a very gruelling pace with constant barked commands, using a whistle and even sometimes making them take the lesson outside, in November, in nothing but shorts. Given that their kit was already as minimal as it could get she found a different way of humiliating them. Like seemingly a lot of schools used to do, there was a 'no underwear' rule, although he said the male teachers never bothered to enforce it. This woman used to start every lesson by having the boys stand at attention while she went down the line pulling out the front of each boy's shorts in turn - not the back - to check that this rule was being kept to.

It may well have been that her whole sergeant-major persona was because she felt the need to defend herself by undermining the boys. But this was a glaring case of overstepping the mark. Even forty-odd years ago and as a woman I am very surprised she got away with this. Those boys should have complained to their parents or the head teacher and she should have faced a disciplinary hearing.

As I have stated before, I see no convincing reason why any school should have a mandatory PE kit anyway. It is merely taking the uniform thing too far. In the school gym or out on the playing fields they are away from the public gaze, so this argument about uniform 'representing the school' is invalid anyway. Surely the point of school sports sessions is to get them moving and their cardiovascular systems working? Any kit that allows full freedom of movement and does not infringe health and safety rules is surely appropriate? If this or that boy is happy to do the lesson without a top that is fine but it isn't a reason to inflict the same condition on other shyer boys.

Deborah that PE teachers comment to you probably comes as no surprise to many of us who were in gym classes under teachers who instructed us to do their lessons shirtless. I was in one such school with a number of PE teachers who did this, at a guess I'd say easily the majority of my gym at school was done while stripped from the waist up. This method of dress for PE was never down to one's own personal preference and was always imposed.

I can see why some boys may feel punished by such demands and why teachers think like that. For me I didn't give a toss if my shirt was on or off and nothing a PE teacher was going to say or do to me was going to get under my skin for long.

Your replies make me realise how lucky I was to go to a school in the 1960s where the headteacher had a firm grip on his staff.

PE was awful for this non-sporting person, but bullying and abuse by staff members were, so far as I knew, minimal.

I remember the head saying that if you had to raise your voice or resort to violence you have already lost the argument.

Working in the courts a few years ago I was reminded of this by a district judge who had absolute control of her courtroom without ever raising her voice.

Hi Deborah,

I think it is certainly true that teachers have to prove that they can be tough and women teachers have to do it more so, especially with boys. Otherwise the consequences can be severe. There is a tacit rule, understood by all concerned, that you can start out nasty and become nice but you can't start out nice and become nasty, because the kids just won't believe you that way round.

One of my sisters' friends became a teacher and her very first morning in class she heard someone mutter "She's young . . . " She said she felt a moment of pure cold terror before she just cracked on. She ended up being a popular, well-liked teacher, but I think she could be tough when she had to be.

In our third year we got a new Biology teacher. As well as being quite cute, in a kind of Sheena Easton-type way (if you're under fifty you'll have to google her) she was quite petite, standing barely taller than us as a class of thirteen-year-olds. The first lesson started out like a gestapo interrogation and within the first half hour she had dished out several detentions. We got the message. Over the following several weeks, as she came to feel reassured that we weren't actually going to eat her alive, she eased up and actually turned out to be a personable and engaging teacher, but it was a definite case of first impressions lasting.

My second- and third-year Maths teacher was a well-intentioned and conscientious teacher who was prepared to go the extra mile to make sure her class understood her subject. Predictably, she was shown no mercy. For some reason she would never dish out detentions or send unruly pupils out of class and her usual sanction was to make people move places. Her lessons used to be like an unceasing game of musical chairs as she moved pupils - usually boys - around the classroom.

But at least she escaped the experience I heard happened to another woman Maths teacher at another school in that same era. This woman turned round from writing on the blackboard to find a twelve-year-old boy standing behind her, exposing himself to her. She was so shocked she burst into tears. She got no sympathy from the rest of the class, who started pelting her with biros and balled-up bits of paper, and she just had to get out of the room for her own safety and sanity. 'Tween'-age kids can have a killer instinct. (And, believe it or not, this school was one of the 'better' schools in my home town!)

Bullying is always irrational. Most people can probably remember from their own school days the fat kid who was bullied. Quite a lot of them might also remember the fat kid who was a bully. There was no logic to how victims were singled out. I can think of other teachers who were just as mild-mannered as my Maths teacher but who never had a problem from their class. I can also recall one male music teacher who was very tall, quite overweight and had an explosive temper. His lessons were a running battle as various boys (again, not girls) inexorably wound him up to the point where he would bellow and scream at them. Physically, he was a very threatening man, tall, bulky and with a temper that you just knew you didn't want to tinker with out of school hours and away from witnesses. None of this saved him.

The thing was, he used to turn purple in the face when he really lost it. What he was never aware of was that there was an experiment going on among several of the nastier boys to see if they could, by winding him up, induce him to have a heart attack.

This was all back in the 1980s. I really don't know how teachers cope in the era of Gen Z.

I'm reminded of a time early in 1982 when there was a teaching strike interrupting the smooth running of the school I was then working at as an English teacher. Many staff had walked out leaving the school to be run by a skeleton cut back group of non union staff members, one of which was myself. Some lessons were cancelled but most went ahead with stand in staff. The head teacher at the time was determined to keep the school open and running as close to normal as he could for all pupils there. Other schools actually shut or finished early.

Before I left for home at the end of one working school day, the night before the first of a series of strikes, I was informed I would have to stand in on a PE lesson for one of the male staff members in his lesson next day, which I was happy to do although a bit nervous.

I was 32 years old at the time but looked much younger than my age and was worried about controlling a class of energetic teenage boys effectively doing something I was unfamiliar with. In the staff room among all the chatter I asked their teacher for some lesson information and about any potential pitfalls I may encounter as a young looking female outsider teacher who didn't really know what she was doing with these boys.

His response to me was to - Get their shirts off their backs, that will show them who's boss, we call it skins in PE. This was not what I expected to hear and I think I laughed. I wondered if it was normal to do such a thing and he told me it was.

So in the morning I was assigned to the school sports hall to look after two consecutive boys PE classes, after I had been given a basic outline of what to do with them. When I appeared for the first class of the morning I could tell I might face a few issues almost immediately so put the instruction into action on the floor of the sports hall, and told them they were to be skins that day and asked them to take off their top. I remember there being a few oohs and ahhs and even wolf whistles, some showing off behaviour and 'she's strict' comments at first but they all did it and seemed to settle down fast after that. These were early teenage boys. An almost identical situation happened with the second lesson of the morning that I stood in for.

When it came to the changing room I obviously had to stay stood outside the door just listening. I'd been told to make sure they took a shower so all I could do was ask someone to put it on and listen to the sound of the water and hope they were doing as they were told. As I stood there on the second lesson another male colleague appeared and threw the door open to check for me. He told me it was safe to enter if I wanted to, like a fool I did this and it wasn't safe to do so at all. Sometimes the staff could act like big kids themselves.

All in a days school work.

We had a great PE teacher and I still see him around my hometown sometimes and he had the best way of dishing out punishment without doing it himself. During games lessons we would play a game called murder ball ( basically no rules rugby). you would know if you upset him or his fellow teachers that weeks as you would be in the team wearing skins ( bare chests) then during rucks, mauls, scrums as you would call them now, the kids would slap you as hard as possible across your back, chest, arms etc etc at every oppurtunity....payback was a bitch if you was in skins the following week. That PE teacher loved dividing up our class in to skins boys and shirts boys and not just for teams, just for the hell of it and was always doing this every week. You could see the fear on some boys faces if they didn't want to be skins and became one for that lesson and the aww do I have to be again type. He definitely thought bare chests were a good sanction against some boys.

Me and a friend who's a teaching assistant at a school in a 'run down area' were only on about a lack of discipline in schools and her's in particular these days, the other day. She told me of children as young as 7 telling her to f... off and refusing to do as they are told with one even saying "If you talk to me like that again I'll sue you". We compared this to my secondary school's PE teacher in the 1970's who let you join his 'red hand gang' if you wanted. His words were "If you want to join just simply upset me". When you joined he smacked you as hard as possible on your bare back with his flat hand or even the front of your bare chest, leaving a glowing red hand mark. Me being a bit of a teenage rebellious young male "joined" his 'red hand gang' more than once, including being smacked so hard on my stomach that he winded me quite badly as well as his red hand mark standing out on my white skin. Her was legendary in our school for this in all his PE classes, smacking shirtless boys across their body with his hand. Imagine getting away with that these days.

Does anyone here have any somewhat diffewrent or unusual thoughts on their physical education years?

For example, I had one PE teacher who used to take us for football and rugby in some right old rough weather out on the playing fields of my school who would inspect our PE (football) kit before we went out, make sure our shorts were correct, our socks were pulled up to the same length and our boots were clean. I remember Mr Whishaw as an unusual teacher of the subject because he seemed to have a thing about cleanliness. When we played football he used to get quite annoyed if he saw any deliberate diving which got us muddy. Even when we very occasionally played rugby he was a bit like that, which is funny when that's a part of rugby. Actually I don't think he even liked rugby but had to do it with us sometimes.

I remember him being a very polite man, and quietly spoken, which was not like the other PE teachers I had. His entire persona seemed very different, almost rather classy. When we used to come in from the playing fields after a really wet afternoon's play out there, he would even help some of us remove our football boots just pulling them off our feet on outstretched legs, pull off our wet socks or even pull our soaked clinging tops over our heads! He made us all take showers like all PE teachers did but he never stood guard closely looking in at us but did encourage us to clean properly and to take time and not rush.

Mr Whishaw also had no time for bullying behaviour and made this very clear one day in our changing room about the need for respecting each other. He was kind, thoughtful, clearly educated yet was far from a soft touch.

He used to keep the boys watches in a bum bag during PE, we were not allowed to wear them. He accidentally sat on his bum bag one day on a changing room bench when it was full of our watches and cracked the screen, it was a fairly basic analogie Timex of the time at the beginning of the eighties. He instantly offered to replace it for me and asked what type of watches I liked. Well I said I was hoping for one of these new fangled snazzy digital watches for my next one, and within two days I was at school and asked to pop along to his office and he handed me a lovely new boxed Casio digital watch that cost a lot more than the one he had sat on and cracked. I was absolutely thrilled and even wrote him a thankyou letter.

So let's hear it for some bloody great PE teachers out there. They m ay have forced you to play football you disliked, to go skins in basketball when you wanted to be a shirt, to do gym in bare chests all the time, or made you go into nude showers against your wishes, but some, infact many, were still thoroughly decent guys and doing a job that was harder and more skilled than many of us probably understand that needed a lot of patience with some of us.

Danny C, I remember our teachers making similar comments while having us barechested along with "making men out of you" and especially "lads don't need vests on" Even though games tops were for outdoor use both teachers preferred us out in vests but we were usually made to strip off Both my parents always fully supported the teachers decisions have me strip off both in the gym and outside saying it would benefit me. I've got to say I've never actually regretted being put through such a rigid barechested regime and also felt every lad respected each other more with us all going through the same thing. It made me feel more confident that my rather slim frame really did fit in

This BBC story on icy cold water swimming aiding the immune system rather reminds me of the PE teacher I caught up with three months ago at a reunion of my old "Class of 84" school year. We got talking about the whole barechested PE issue which my own school was notorious for, and especially the liking for my PE teachers, including him, to take our large group of boys out on cross country runs barechested in the 80's minus any tops on even on quite unbelievably cool days in autumn, and he mentioned running barechested in those conditions as being healthy, especially for the immune system. I remember at one point we spoke of cold water swimming and the wild swimming that some people now do and he maintained it was also very healthy as an option. I asked if he did any of this and he said no, so he talked a good game but didn't back it up by doing any of it himself. I remember saying to him, if you think it was so good for us why did I never see you whip your shirt off and lead by example on these barechested PE lesson cross country's. He just laughed.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cx2m8d44v4go#:~:text=%22There%20is%20no%20evidence%20that,fewer%20colds%20or%20fewer%20infections.%22


Yes Robert I relate easily to you running where you say you did. Although our cross country runs were primarily in quiet areas and lakeside places and trails, we did have to use a public road and street many times if entering back into school through the front rather than back through the rear. I can't claim to have noticed anyone ogling us through the windows though! But I do remember running into a couple of my mums lady friends one day the other side of the road and seeing their broad grins looking right at me. I couldn't believe the timing. This was quite early in my secondary schooling and I hadn't even told her I ran cross country like that. I think I felt ashamed to admit a teacher was making me do that or something, even though it wasn't my choice. She wasn't bothered anyway, even when I did tell her, and she knew I was the rather self conscious type. Our parents in the 80's allowed our teachers to just get on with it even when they made us strip shirtless and run down the road in schooltime on fresh October days!

James you've asked about any schooldays photos, especially related to PE. It's fine to ask in my opinion, and yes is the answer, all my photos and those of my brother are from school sports days in primary and secondary, mainly the 80's. The primary ones are quite inoffensive and tame really, but both me and my brother have entire class barechested photos to camera from age 13 upwards on sports days. I have 5 such photos out there somewhere but am only in possession of the one from when I was 13 at the moment. I recently discovered my brother has a couple of his too. I'm also in the process of trying to find anyone with any other good photos of my own school days, with the emphasis on the PE sports days as some others I recently aquainted with at the reunion are also keen to find any lost gems from the 80's out there using various social media pages like school facebook memory boards and such like. My own PE photo, with 40 or so barechested boys and me has already resurfaced with an ex female classmate who had a brother in it, along with a variety of comments by now fifty something women about who they liked the look of the most at the time. It was the same three months back at the reunion when a couple of these kind of barechested PE group photos were on a memory board attracting comment - 40 years later, I can still remember the comments I got from some of them at the time!

I certainly feel it is nice to see the photographic and video archives of schooldays. I admired the secondary school boys in the British Film Institute video. I looked at them and wondered just how capable I might have been at such strict choreography and movement synchronisation within a large group like that. Although my own PE lessons were just like those boys, I have no recollection of ever having to do anything choreographed like they did. Did anyone do anything like that?

It's a disturbing feature of footage from before the 1990's, the scarcity of noticeably overweight people. It's alarming how the change in eating habits (according to a recent study the amount we eat & our level of physical activity today is about the same as it was in 1970s) has seen the situation almost reverse with 'normal' bodyweight steadily becoming the exception rather than the rule.

Has PE failed a generation or two. Possibly.

My own schools were both compulsory bare chests in the gym, both at primary and at secondary, so that was about 7 or 8 years worth of PE. We all got well used to this. Boys such as myself (in the eighties) were made to confront our bodies and those of others and it made us think about how we looked. We might not have liked our bare chested state being ordered on us by school rules (I knew some who got very agitated by it) but I do think on balance it might have been more positive than not if it made sure none of us would easily start getting a bit podgy at a young age. And if you are a little bit overweight and have to do such lessons hopefully it acts as an incentive not to make things worse or even to return to a good weight. Many tubby lads in school will lose it later anyway, as someone has already mentioned they did.

Do I think slightly overweight or even fat kids should have been given a pass on PE lessons done without tops on, well no, because all that would do is emphasise to them that they should be ashamed of their bodies and so covering them up would actually be the act of body shaming, not the expectation of them to be bare chested like the other boys in a class.

The power these teachers had over us to tell us to strip off (shirtless/naked) came with responsibility in my view and should have been used respectfully. I don't think boys should have ever been singled out as lone shirtless members of a class for instance, or sent into areas beyond the PE remit, such as being sent to get things in other parts of school in such a state like someone mentioned with the teacher's whistle. I will just about make an allowance for my own PE teachers who took boys out running without our shirts along the surrounding domestic roads surrounding our secondary school. I can actually remember seeing net curtains twitching as we went past, from bored housewives I always imagined them to be getting sight of two dozen fairly fit fourteen and fifteen year olds.

Comment by: James on 9th February 2025 at 20:41



"....... such things should not be seen or used presumably extends to the very black and white photograph that is used to accompany this discussion too doesn't it?..........

I think the use of a still photograph for illustrative purposes is OK as it does conjure up those awful times for those who were not around, but it is like seeing a photograph of a bomb site as compared to seeing a film of the carnage which caused it.


",,,,,If I had any record of my time in school doing PE like that I would be quite pleased to see it and proud of myself if I looked and did what the boys of 1936 did.....".

I don't know how to break this to you, James, but if you had been one of those boys from 1936, I don't think you would be feeling anything, as you would be dead. 89 years ago, - say the youngest boy there is 11 - he would now be 100, and though it is not a pleasant thing to think about, a five year war three years later might well have terminated some of those young lives.

".......Out of interest while on this line of thought, does anyone actually have any photographic or film record of their own schooldays, especially physical education related?"

One word, one question - WHY?

(This site is text based and has no capacity for including photographic or filmed material)


Comment by: Terry on 9th February 2025 at 21:25




".......That seems unusual, did your school not have its own sports field, meaning you had to walk the streets like that? I'm surprised your teacher didn't just factor in a cross country run to get down to that place if you were in kit! ......"

To be fair to my school, we were in a run down part of East London, Terry, not leafy Kent or Surrey so no we didn't. It was a Victorian building. When it was knocked down to make way for a bomb site not long after I left, it was rebuilt as a Tesco store.

You have to bear in mind, that not only was our teacher a sadistic old sod, he was also quite lazy. If we had run - he would have been forced to as well, and he much preferred to swagger about in his tracksuit and bark orders. He didn't feel the need to do any actual exercises, except "supervise" the changing area and showers for the older boys.

As regards East London then, as compared to now, where old factories on the Thames have been remodelled as "Loft apartments" ("luxury" of course), this piece of film might give some idea for those who don't know it. This was filmed in Brixton, which is in South London, but it is very similar to East London of the times, and is contemporary:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lpMBcnbFAzc

Comment by: Alan on 9th February 2025 at 17:17
'all Wednesday afternoon was "sport" often in in the park, quite often involving a degrading walk down the high street, being drilled by our loudmouthed teacher, usually kicking footballs about when we got there.'



That seems unusual, did your school not have its own sports field, meaning you had to walk the streets like that? I'm surprised your teacher didn't just factor in a cross country run to get down to that place if you were in kit! Why was it degrading Alan, did he sometimes make the PE class do the walk while shirtless or something?

I agree with Mike Swift here. There is nothing wrong with archived school days imagery or films of PE lessons. The argument being raised here that such things should not be seen or used presumably extends to the very black and white photograph that is used to accompany this discussion too doesn't it?

If I had any record of my time in school doing PE like that I would be quite pleased to see it and proud of myself if I looked and did what the boys of 1936 did.

Out of interest while on this line of thought, does anyone actually have any photographic or film record of their own schooldays, especially physical education related?

Comment by: Mark on 9th February 2025 at 15:58

I didn't have any problem with the various capers we had to get up to. Mark, but I never really saw the point of it. For example, all Wednesday afternoon was "sport" often in in the park", quite often, , involving a degrading walk down the high street, being drilled by our loudmouthed teacher, usually kicking footballs about when we got there.. I would rather have been doing something practical that might be useful to me after I had left school (technical drawing for example, with a teacher other than our old perv), or English. I frequently played truant on Wednesday afternoons, you would be amazed at the number of "dental appointments" I had!. I was never a Muscle Mary.

Alan, they say that boys who are gay can't throw balls, is that true in your case? I've heard this said a few times over the years and always wondered if there is any truth in it, or why there would be. After all, gay men and boys can be every bit as fit as anyone else and many like to take even better care of their bodies and appearance than us straight guys!

Even staright boys have issue at times with PE lessons, being forced into showering or going shirtless, so I should imagine being gay and knowing it as a schoolboy piles on even more added pressures for some of you for very clearly obvious reasons with all the nudity, shirtlessness and general changing room hanging about.

I don't have any problem with films showing old PE lessons being archived though. I think they are useful to see. We can learn much from the past.

Comment by: Matthew S on 9th February 2025 at 10:46


Thank you for that Matthew - it is much appreciated. I think one of the reasons I disliked what I knew myself to be very young is that you fear you will grow up to be like the two men I have mentioned. I didn't, as it happened, so I was lucky in that respect.

Paul, Mike Swift,

Please do not think that of Alan. Please see his comment from 1st February, if you haven't already, which surely makes the reason for Alan's very strong views clear.

Perhaps we all have a tendency to judge by our own childhood experiences. His must have been the worst.

Please excuse my posting this, Alan.