Burnley Grammar School

In reply to Yours Truly, I vaguely remember the medical exams at infants school. As far as I remember we did not undress completely. I took off my shirt but of course in those days we all wore vests. that may have been removed but we kept our shorts on. Mum was present.

Worse was to come at Secondary school. (All boys school) for the medical exam we lined up outside the room already stripped to the waist. The rumour went round that you the doctor would tell you to drop your trousers during the examination. Upon being told to enter the room there was a boy in front being examined and then i found out that the rumour was true as he was told to drop his trousers and pants and so a got a full view of his behind!! And so my turn came and the instruction came and I just had to blank out what the Doctor was doing when he told me to cough.
I said earlier that at infants school mums were present at the exam. In fact mums were invited to attend the secondary school exams though much to all our relief no ones mum ever did attend. for me it was a greater relief because my mum had died and that manet my nan who was looking after me got the invitation and said she would attend. But luckily I dissuaded her and I am glad I did. To think I would have had to stand there with as a 14 year old fully exposed would have been mortifying.
Why were we put through such experiences?

Hi Danny C,

I just wanted to reply to a detail in one of your previous posts.

You stated that even the sixth-form boys at your school had to take PE stripped to just shorts.

That is just appallingly callous and negligent. Imposing a belittling dress-code regime forcing boys in their mid-teens to get nearly naked is crossing a particular line. A young person past their sixteenth birthday is a young adult and their dignity is to be respected. Especially given that they have chosen to remain at their school when they might just as easily have enrolled at the local sixth-form college where their dignity would have been respected. And also especially as boys that age have as many body issues as girls albeit different ones. Making them appear in public looking like Tarzan Of The Apes - well, frankly, that was bordering on assault.

My school imposed the same PE rule (not the appalling shorts-only one) for all sixth-formers and they too had to do PE until they did their A levels. In fact they seemed to use to used the sixth-formers as a kind of unofficial auxiliary police force, even detailing them to supervise classes of younger kids when there wasn't a teacher available. My first ever games lesson, the first Monday of my second week, was taken by two sixteen- or seventeen-year-old boys, who were exactly as conscientious and considerate of their younger charges as you would expect from boys that age. Ie, not very.

I have mentioned before about the unfortunate changing-rooms/ dinner hall/ assembly hall geography in my school. One morning we boys were taking a maths class in the dining hall when the assembly hall doors swung open and a class of girls in the usual aertex/ gym pants/ bare feet combo, filed out, led by two attractive sixth-form girls dressed the same way. Those girls received a piercing wolf-whistle from some boy in our class. They showed no reaction, just stalked past impassively, treating it with the indifference it deserved. But even so, and even as an especially gormless fifteen-year-old boy, I thought it was wrong they had been exposed to that, especially given their status as young adults.

My eldest sister went into our school's sixth form, I didn't. That meant she fell under the school's sixth-form PE policy. My sister was naturally conformist and really quite straightlaced. There was no illicit smoking or getting silly on weed for her. She actually believed our school's purported 'caring christian community' propaganda. I suppose because being conformist had worked out very well for her from her first day at school at four.

And yet. I can remember my sister gloating about how she and her friends were bullshitting the tyrannical head of the girls' sixth form in order to get out of doing sixth-form PE. She consistently ducked those PE sessions for the whole two years. This is the single sole example I am aware of of my sister ever deliberately engaging in rule-breaking.

Which is telling, isn't it?

Julian, yes when I refer to "boy pants" in my mind I'm talking about the skimpy y-fronts that parents bought for us when young. Around the time of my 16th birthday I started buying my own underwear and switched to my first pair of boxer shorts and since then have never changed habit, always buying boxers/trunks. I wish I'd worn the things as a younger child too. Thinking back I don't think many if any boys wore such things, I think we were all y-pants or similar type wearers.


Some on here might be interested to browse this site that I accidentally discovered recently which appears to have a lot of comments quite similar to those here in content. This morning before getting down to proper work I decided to paste up my debut post on this History World thread from this week four years ago onto it and it was published in my own name instantly on the site with no need to register. You would be able to quite easily have real time to and fro discussions on this, unlike here. Worth a mention to those who may feel interested or inclined.

The photo of the boy to go with this discussion is actually a spitting image of how I looked at his age in terms of body shape and look, hair and face for school PE, except for one big difference, the size and length of those shorts! The two pairs I used in black or white colour were much shorter and firmer fitting, and nobody wore longer or baggier shorts then.

Take a read on this;

https://shirtlessbarefoot.blogspot.com/2018/05/how-to-start-shirtless-sports-and.html

In reference to Danny C's comment "wearing little other than basic boy pants of the time" and Yours Truly's reference to pants I suppose during that era they were just briefs. At least the Boxer style underwear of today would have been less exposing. Although I should not think that nowadays boys would boy be treated in the same way.

I've previously on this site described my own school in the 1980's as having what I call a "barechested culture" when it came to boys and PE, which seemed to spill across into our drama department too, but then the head of drama stood in on some PE lessons himself on a regular basis, mainly rugby.

I also found football tedious and simply a bore, you described it as soul destroying Yours Truly, true if you had noo interest or were simply no good against others who were. Any chance to avoid it I'd take. That was next to impossible in a secondary school of the 80's. But my school's desire to keep PE lads as skins as much as possible even extended outdoors to football games sometimes, these were the few times at my school I actually did the skins and shirts set up. Inside we were always skins, so it didn't apply, even in team games which often got divided on shorts colour only.

So my house colour was red. Therefore we had plain red long sleeved sweatshirts for outside for over autumn and winter only. I still have mine. But the PE lessons were only taken by classes of boys within the same school house, so we were all red tops. We were not allowed vests or anything else under the tops, only the one layer. You can see the issue if you want to play football and divide up teams. So my main teacher went the skins v shirts option, and I always felt like I was on the barechested side of it. Sometimes it was quite chilly, and he made us just jump up and down furiously to warm up and thrash our arms about before getting on with things. So as someone who already hated football and had been made to do it barechested it was a double whammy of joyless endurance, add in some less than great weather and you got the full hatrick of hate.

So we've done loads of these skins v shirts football games under this teacher, my head of PE at the time, and then another time we get another PE teacher come out with us wanting a game and all of a sudden he has a small cardboard box under his arm and out comes some green I think it was, flimsy bibs to stick over our heads on top of half the boys red shirts. No skins that lesson, and this guy took a few lessons over time when he did something similar, including rugby. Then we started having football games done with the head of PE again and it was back to half of us going skins to play again. Where were these bibs? Someone must have mentioned it and was told they were not essential. As head of PE he had the final say I guess. One thing I did notice about our Foxy (Mr Fox) was he'd sometimes join one of the teams of boys against the other and he never ever chose the skins team to play on.

Having read Danny C and Yours Truly's post's (I so agree with you YT and understand your feelings), I will say one thing for our school - we never had to endure "drama" lessons, because at least the school was pragmatic - we had to earn a living in a run-down area and apart from those childish"nativity plays" in the very early years (and I never took part in them either), we were spared "artistic" teachers or militant women concerned about the "patriarchy" in contemporary drama, because how would one expect to be employable if you had no practical skills except for reciting "Once more into the breach, dear friends, once more". It wouldn't have impressed our local employers, not even if we had given them Hamlet's soliloquy. "That this too, too solid flesh would melt" would have cut no ice with the manager of Woolworths or Currys, for what was left of local light industry.

Drama, like music, should be a voluntary pursuit. Not everyone was meant to be David Tennant (thank God!), or play the trumpet, and though I did, the latter, that was in my own time and I was well aware that trumpeters were ten a penny, as were actors. If anything, thanks to the lunatic budget Reeves forced on us a couple of weeks ago, people will struggle even harder to find work, and the theatre is well down the list of essentials.

Perhaps if schools cut out the crap, there would be no need to stay on till the boy was a man of 18. Let people develop as individuals. If they want to act, fine, but the local comp isn't RADA.

Only about 1% of Gen Z could survive the kind of physical education we lads were put through in the seventies and eighties in school. It was brutal at times. They'd be thinking they were in an army boot camp under some sergeant major if my gym was anything to go by. There was blood, sweat and tears and a lot of agony, scrapes and sprains. The equipment could be lethal. Went on a four mile run and were then expected to play football too for a further half hour and keep running the pitch, in a blizzard topped off with a naked parade to the unavoidable almost cold showers we shared as collective added torture while the teacher smirked at our predicament. So why am I kind of nostalgic for all this? We were a hardy PE battle scarred generation, the Boomers and Gen X.

Christian Cooper,

Weirdly enough, and rather unexpectedly for the same kid who hated shorts, dreaded school plays and found playing football soul-destroying, I got used to the communal showers pretty quickly, although I never felt them anything less than degrading. I suppose it was a question of having to. The sooner you got yourself in there the sooner it was over. Certainly there was no arguing with our stereotypically angry, hard-bastard games teacher. Male PE teachers seemed to be a specific breed, didn't they? At least during my growing-up years. It was as if they bred that way in kennels or something.

As regards the double standard with showers, that was quite simply sex discrimination and wrong. Girls got to preserve their dignity while we boys were herded like cattle. 'Tween' and adolescent boys lack the more sensitive and compassionate instincts that girls usually have and it takes us longer to discover our own basic humanity. If anything the practices ought to have been reversed, with the girls being treated more callously, given that they were much more likely to look out for each other and not let it degenerate into a Lord Of The Flies-type scenario.

On the other hand I find that worn-out trope that boys must be toughened up, which was the constant justification for so many
discriminatory practices against boys, to have a glaringly obvious flaw. My secondary school was basically a human zoo. Probably a third of the boys I went to school with did not need any more toughening up, they were quite toughened enough already. What they needed was civilising. But civilising was not on the curriculum. Perhaps schools are different today. But I shan't hold my breath.

I have remembered two other random details about PE kit at my secondary school.

As well as the aertex polo-tops and gym knickers the girls were also allowed to wear navy blue cardigans as part of their kit. I don't know why - since when has knitwear been a part of sportswear? It wasn't a thing I envied but it always made me scratch my head a bit. And most of the girls did wear them. They were happy enough to leave their trainers at home but anxious to remember their cardigans.

There was also an 'adult PE kit' for the women teachers - but not the men. This one is another headscratcher. Our male PE teachers just lived in their inevitable tracksuits, as you would expect (in the case of our tyrannical PE senior teacher I think he really did live in his, he only seemed to own the one). For the ladies though there was this somewhat minimalist standard issue PE attire of a vest top and a very short pleated skirt. (They could also wear tracksuits if they chose.) We had a constant stream of young student teachers through our secondary school and seeing the more attractive ones out on the playing fields bouncing around in youthful enthusiasm in this gear was an uplifting experience and an unexpected fringe benefit for us developing young men. Especially when it was the new school year and someone had obviously been on holiday and was nicely tanned.

It was character-building (har har) and the first intimation to me that there was actually more to life than daleks.

Yours Truly - I've enjoyed reading your comments, they are so accurate and I'm sure many will agree.

On school plays, I've mentioned the ones I did at secondary school. But one part I could have had a leading role in and declined was at my primary in my final year, where each Christmas we did a whole week of evening shows for parents about a fornight before Christmas if you were in the two top years. My final primary year I did Joseph & The Technicolour Dreamcoat. I had a nice enough child singing voice and was in contention for the main part of Joseph, requiring a solo song. This in itself didn't bother me too much, it would be great to get the lead role and my parents would be thrilled. But I declined the chance to do so, simply because I was told the part would mean I would have to stand up and be barechested for a period in the role. I was not going to do that voluntarily under any circumstances. Singing was nerve wracking enough but I could have just about done that for the pride of the main part. I told my music teacher I would prefer another part but did not give her the reason. I can only wonder what she would have said if I'd told her I would love the lead role but couldn't face an audience without my top on before I got the posh coloured dreamcoat on my shoulders. So the role went to another boy who did the honours instead on consecutive nights and I took a lesser role. I know my music teacher was surprised I declined. Then I was later off to the secondary where I was forced into these things anyway. These Christmas shows at primary were all done barefoot, and even the whole school choir beside the piano had to be too, which always seemed a little weird to me. A year earlier I'd done a week of David & Goliath, and although almost all were barefoot in that I managed to get away with new plimsolls on my feet in my role in that. No such luck with Joseph.

I remember a feeling of embarrassment even age 5 when I first had to do barefoot PE in infants. No idea why or where that came from. I had no shirtless anxiety at the same age, that came later. I remember a teacher making me be the only one in tne school hall remove my footwear and socks when I was around 6, and feeling dreadful. I'd forgotten to bring the right shoes for something we were doing so lost what I had on completely. I felt punished like that.

At my infants school I do remember the whole class of both boys and girls taking the PE in the school hall in just pants and knickers, even the girls like the boys. Not often, but just now and again from age 5 to 6, maybe 7 tops. Even at that incredibly tender young age I looked on at the others and thought it wasn't right that the girls were in their knickers like that and had no top on like the boys. These lessons were taken by a lady, there were no men at all in my infants school anyway.

I have one memory of my mother taking me to a riverside park with another mum and child when I was about 4, pre-school and her being fine with removing all my clothes off of me with others around after I'd been in the shallow river water. An age so young that self consciousness hasn't kicked in yet much. I also at 5 have another memory of being around a friends house with him at his pool and then me and him being taken to the bathroom with both our mums and being bathed naked together. I recall it well. Us boys were not deemed to have any need for personal privacy even from our own mothers.

Hi Christian Cooper,

Admittedly I was an unusually inhibited child. School plays and football were particularly torturous to me.

Out of interest, what were the girls' sports kits like at the schools you attended? Hopefully not as blatantly discriminatory as the regimes Simon and Danny C had to endure?

Bare chest anxiety I get, I had it and stomach churn when made to remove tops and stay shirtless so many times I lost count. Bare foot anxiety I also get. I had that too, disliked both my feet and chest being out. Had little choice from primary onwards. Never quite got into the comfort zone about it. Whole bare body, don't even go there, communal showers was an ordeal I never fully adjusted to. Didn't even know we'd take them until the day I had to. Nobody mentioned showers until I suddenly heard running water in the background and we were told to all get straight in, Christ I was shaking, my head racing thoughts at 1000mph thinking how I could escape it. I couldn't, nobody did. My god it was a shock for an eleven year old. The communal shower was closed off by a door one end of our chnaging room so wasn't obvious until the door was opened for their use. The loud sound of that strong running water from lots of outlets actually terrified the life out of me. You could never believe such a mundane sound would cause such a feeling inside. Some boys are made that way and shouldn't be treated badly because of it. But that was then, and boys were treated rough at times because they were boys, not because they were bad. Me and my sister were treated very differently by our father even at home. My sister never had to shower at school like boys did. Same school, we were there at the same time, two years apart. Danny C that was a horrible thing to happen to you. I was shouted at many times to go and shower and given the odd nudge in the back to help me on my way. So bare bodies, bare chests, bare feet are one thing, but bare legs is another. I've not heard anyone bothered by their bare legs at a young age before and wearing shorts Yours Truly. That's a first. I had to wear a purple cap on my head to my first school and disliked that. I preferred my head bare on top. At times it's amusing to note what they insisted we wore and then insisted we were not allowed to wear.

Hey Danny C,

You have tripped my particular switch mentioning school plays.

I made my acting debut (har har) aged five. I was one of the sheep (one of many sheep, as Perry Farrell might have it) in the manger in my infants' school's Christmas nativity play.

Even at the age of five I had detected that there was an agenda to it - I had been appointed one of the sheep because the teacher had decided I was one of the worthless kids. It was noticeable throughout my time at primary school how much the handful of clever kids were favoured. The two cleverest boys in the class were always allocated starring roles in any school play, even though I am pretty sure at least one of them couldn't sing . . .

Anyway. There I was, a sheep. My sheep's costume consisted of a sheep mask which I had made myself (they made us make our own sheep masks, I think as a way of making us collaborative in our own humiliation, har har) and a blanket or towel thrown over my back and that was my fleece.

Underneath my costume I was stripped down to my pants . . .
Why? Just - why?

Nobody could see me under my blanket so . . . why the extreme undressing? When I could just have taken my shoes and socks off and it would have made no difference to the audience? I had to crawl out on my hands and knees in front of an audience of parents, feeling vulnerable, naked and humiliated. Really - just, WHY?

They made us all strip off. Girls as well as boys. I don't know what it was about it but there seemed to be a lot of excuses to get us out of our clothes at infants' school. I think the most charitable interpretation of it is that they though that, as such young kids, we hadn't developed any inhibitions yet. Well, I ***king had for starters and I didn't appreciate it.

PE was conducted in vests and pants/ knickers. I have heard of other infant schools where they stipulated some rudimentary PE kit but not at mine.

Then there was the awful shock of school medical exams.

I have gained the impression that these exams were less harsh for girls, that they just had to be stripped to the waist or whatever. Certainly the girls I saw after their exams never seemed upset in any way, like it was something easy they had taken in their stride. But for us boys it was strictly birthday suits and a shocked expression. What makes it particularly galling is that I had three younger sisters, who will never have been degraded the way I was - because they were girls.

I was six the first time I encountered this particular form of torture. My mother came to the school and met me, which was nice! Then she made me strip naked. Which wasn't. I was sitting in the assembly hall waiting my turn to be ritually humiliated. It turned out the teachers hadn't co-ordinated the exams properly - across the hall from me was one of the girls from my year, who had obviously just had her own exam. She was shuffling up and down the hall in her summer dress and sandals, which were undone, happily burbling some nonsense song to herself, accompanied by her little sister, who looked like her own mini-me.

I was panicking, with my hands clasped over my essentials, while my mum tried to soothe me. This girl used to tease me mercilessly and her seeing me naked was my absolute worst nightmare. It was going to be all round the school, me and my bare bits.

Strangely it never was. I don't know how she didn't see me. Maybe she just pretended not to. Maybe she could see I was in a predicament and decided, for just the once, to be kind. It would have been out of character for this girl but I can think of no other explanation.

Anyway I had my turn in the doctor's office where I was duly weighed, measured, poked and prodded. I got a bonk-on in the sight of two disinterested middle-aged women doctors, much to the mortification of my timid Irish mum. Serves her right.

The strangest thing I remember is one school trip to the local park, which was extensive, with the local river running through it. It was sprung on us all of a sudden by the two women teachers supervising us, that we boys should go catching tadpoles in the river. It may or may not be significant that the girls weren't with us at that moment - they were off somewhere else, doing something else. Probably something where they got to keep their clothes on.

We all had to strip down to our shorts and then the teachers had an 'inspiration' - what we really should do was strip right off to our pants! That way if one of us fell into the water he would still have his shorts to change back into. So there we all were, an entire classful of six-year-old
boys, stripped damn near naked, in a public park.

Just let any teacher try that one in 2024 without ending up on some kind of register. WTF?

The telling thing was, they had brought two fishing nets with them, those ones on the end of a long pole. Which means they had decided beforehand to take us tadpoleing (is that a word? I don't know. It is now.). The whole thing had clearly been premeditated. In which case why didn't they tell our parents in advance to send us on the trip with a spare pair of shorts or swimming shorts?

Please don't misunderstand me - there was nothing sinister going on. Once again I think it was emblematic of the attitude prevalent then that small boys didn't have any instinct or need for dignity (wrong) - or maybe that we were easier to control when our dignity was taken away from us. And as I say, once again, the girls were spared the indignity of the tadpoleing.

Getting back to the school plays, the following year I played, variously, the front and the back end of the pantomime cow in the school's production of Jack And The Beanstalk. Once again stripped down to my pants under the costume. After that I decided that enough was enough. From then on I started feigning illnesses to get my mum to write me a sicknote. By my last year at primary the teachers wouldn't cast me in the school plays at all. They didn't dare. They knew that one way or another I wasn't going to be there on the day.

EM Forster wrote that the past was a foreign country where they did things differently. Well the 1970s were certainly very foreign. Particularly if you were a boy.

Hi Danny C,

Thank you for your comment.

Just a few final words on the double standard.

I can only conclude that the shorts requirement in infants' school was to cut us young chaps down to size by making us feel vulnerable and undignified. I do not think it can have been an official rule since there was no uniform requirement at that stage. They were absolutely serious about it though. I tried turning up to school in long trousers - after all, trousers were a clothing item traditionally gender-specific to boys and hey, the girls were wearing trousers so why couldn't I?

The second day I did so I got taken aside and shown the school's implement of torture, the so-called 'slipper', which was in fact a large black plimsoll, by my scary class teacher. She turned it this way and that, making sure I got a thorough, unhurried look at it, while she warned me that if I turned up in long trousers again I wouldn't just be staring at the slipper . . . It was a terrifying moment for a five-year-old. It was shorts for me all the way after that. It takes a certain type of specialist to intentionally terrify a five-year-old child but my primary school seemed to have a knack for recruiting such people.

Like I have said, in contrast to your school, it was the girls who often went barefoot in PE and even outdoor games lessons. The difference was, it was through their own free choice - a choice which we boys also had, but chose not to choose. I can even remember the odd woman PE teacher out on the playing fields taking her class in her bare feet.

I think we can all remember being forced out onto the muddy, waterlogged playing field to play football while we froze our nipples off in flimsy nylon tops and shorts during those Siberian winters we got in the UK back in the 1980s . . . only to get back to class afterwards to discover that the girls had spent the same PE period doing a dance class or whatever in the nice warmth of the assembly hall or the gym.

If we forgot our PE/ games kit we were kept in the changing room where we had to write out lines. When the girls forgot theirs they just had to take their shoes and socks off and were allowed to mooch about on the sidelines, chatting to their mates.

First world problems, I know. Well, apart from the shorts thing, I realise many people who read this will think I'm harping on it too much, but I honestly felt half-naked going to school in short trousers. I had been having a hard time adjusting to school as it was and this just made my life unnecessarily difficult and unpleasant. I know every other boy seemed to take it in their stride but really, forcing that on me was just unthinking cruelty.

This was the mid-1970s and the whole culture was totally unreconstructed by today's standards. A child who was resisting wasn't in distress for some personal reason which ought to have been understood, they were just bad and they had to be made to toe the line by whatever means necessary.

Comment by: Charles on 6th November 2024 at 09:51
Danny C (3rd November) – I’m not saying I agree with it, but I can kind of see the argument for removing shoes, socks and shirts for Drama lessons. I am, however, completely puzzled about the three stage shows you had to perform shirtless. Were these plays where it was appropriate for the character you were playing to be shirtless, or some sort of song and dance performances, or what? And were all the boys taking part required to be bare-chested, or just those with certain roles or parts?




Charles - Happy to give you a separate answer to your question from my other comment.

Certainly the main one was very appropriate if you were keeping true to the book. It was a Lord Of The Flies enactment, mirroring the book we were doing in English Literature at much the same time. I was nearly 15 at the time. Although we began fully dressed within about 5 minutes we went behind a curtain and all the boys were down to our underpants and a bit of flimsy cloth to hide them, and not a stitch of anything else. That was ALL the boys, it must have been at least 20, possibly even 30 of us. We then spent the rest of the time on stage like that, for an evening performance in front of all our parents and whoever else was watching us, all shirtless. There was very little female involvement in this one. Our drama teacher of the time would not take no for an answer in terms of involvement in it.

I met this drama teacher again just 4 days ago for the first time in 37 years!

The other two times were a Barnardos childrens home play we did where I played a grubby kid brought in off the street covered in dirt. I was wearing rags, an old oversized shirt of my father. Other boys were the same , about 6 to 8 of us I think, and we had our rags removed for our pretend wash in a silver metal tub pushed on stage. We were in pants, two of the others sat facing each other in the metal tub and splashed what was about two inches of cold water over themselves for effect. The rest of us beasically got our rags taken off us and had to sit down as we were for a bit, shirtless and barefoot in pants, and with painted pretend dirt on our legs, body and faces. I was not quite 13 doing this.

The other time was rather different. An early example of doing something environmental with a message, where five drama class boys were picked out at ransom, me being one of them, oh the luck, and once more ending up in just our pants but this time we were fully body painted in green on our torsos all over and brown for our legs and had to be wound together as one large growing tree. This one was presented to the school, and felt quite different actually. Although wearing little other than basic boy pants of the time and having a bare body the paint on me made me feel I had coverage and felt less obvious compared to normal pasty white skin on show. The green was very helpful in covering things up, but I was still barechetsed all the same. I remember girls smirking faces watching me and wondering what they thought. Once done we had to walk across to the PE block and shower it all off but it was special stuff meant for skin use, not a pot of Dulux.

I did also do another 7 things on the school stage where I did manage to keep things on by the way. I'd hoped to get the suited role in the Barnardos play which meant I could just wear my blazer and shoes but that went to another boy in class and I remember sitting on that stage as we did that, in my pants, everyone watching me and the others like me, made to look a homeless grubby street urchin and thinking what a lucky so and so my classmate Andrew was who looked so smart, and he was one of the sportier self confident ones in school who was full of confidence when it came to PE and all that went with it going barechested and all the rest, so should have had my role instead! But his confidence didn't stretch enough to have the urchin role. From memory nobody chose the grubby urchin roles, they were simply assigned to us without much choice.


To end, I just want to mention the question someone asked about how girls treated boys in school who were around them while barechested. For me it was not the PE lessons we did that proved tricky, it was the drama classes we did, because they always involved girls from our immediate form and the class lasted a double period. ALmost half of drama was shirtless boys. Often if we removed shirts and ties at the start we stayed that way for the two hour duration. Very occasionally we could be in shorts only, just like in PE but a lot of the time the boys just removed our blazers if we had one on, our shirt and tie and placed them on hangers in a clothing area of our drama studio or laid somewhere at the side or on a spare chair piled up. Unlike PE, everyone's shoes and socks came off, girls too, so no double standard in drama on that one that I recall. Much of the time this left all the boys sitting around in our dark grey long trousers, barefoot and barechested. It felt odd and unnatural like that. We often did small group drama tasks and girls would be up close and make comments at us, and me, knowing full well that a lot of boys in our class were not really up for haging around girls like this without our tops on, and the girls knowing we had no choice in some cases took advantage to tease and attempt to get reactions. Not many girls, just a very small handful, but that was enough. I actually think some of the nicer and quieter intelligent girls were quite embarrassed to be around a lot of barechested boys during drama like that and may have even had some empathy.

I had a conversation 4 days ago with the very man, my head of drama, that did all this to me and others for three years from 1981 to 1984 when I did drama under him and let's just say in a nutshell he didn't in principle have any issue with any of this whatsoever, and remembered me as being fairly at ease with myself and creative! Perhaps he was pretending to remember. It sort of matched up with one of my report slips of the time but how anyone cannot pick up on awkwardness under his tutoring eyes I do not know when you are telling boys aged 12 to 14 to remove shirts all afternoon among a bunch girls. Of course many of us were awkward, would he not have been if we'd made him and the other men in school sit around the staff room half dressed?

Nice relatable comments Yours Truly. Your own and Simon's comments on double standards ring a big bell with me personally.

At my secondary school the girls PE was done in footwear, mainly plimsolls and short white socks but the boys had to be barefoot for the gym/sports hall activity (as well as barechested) and even for lots of spring/summer activities outside on the grass, sometimes beside plimsolled girls. We didn't share heaps of lessons with girls in secondary, about one in six lessons were a shared boy/girl thing. My timetable never changed much with PE, it was three early morning PE lessons each week at school, sometimes the girls shared a lesson in gym with us as often as once a fortnight. If I'm perfectly honest I don't know why they did when at other times they did things to themselves with their own teacher. We had a huge sports hall and a slightly smaller gym for indoor use, plus four squash courts with a viewing area from above.

Anyway, the girls had their footwear, the boys did not. So when the girls came and joined us in the gym for PE, sometimes under dual instruction from a male and female teacher, at other times our male teacher left the girls teacher in charge of the lot of us, the double standards noticed dramatically. The girls nearly always all wore their plimsolls, yet in the same lesson doing the same things the boys had to be barefooted. Some of us wished to wear trainers or plimsolls and were not allowed to do so, while the girls could. I never understood it. What's the difference, are boys feet tougher and girls more tender, of course not. But this double standard was striking and I was always happiest in footwear doing things. We knew this in school as young schoolboys at the time, this is no being wise after the event years later kind of thinking. The footwear difference for boys and girls was the real weird one. I played squash barefoot and barechested with a girl a few times, while she was in footwear and shorts and polo type top. I even played a female PE teacher in full tracksuit and trainers while I was in just shorts and nothing else. She insisted on playing me, so awkward and must have looked ridiculous to those watching us above. On parents sports days out on the grass in summer each first Monday afternoon in July the boys had to be barefoot all afternoon (4 hours worth) there too but the girls had footwear and socks. But you could make the same point about no tops allowed on boys at mine too, whilst girls had theirs. A boy at my school was not allowed to wear a top of any kind in the school gym/sports hall. That was the blanket rule across all of our gender whatever year you were in, even including boys of the lower and upper sixth who had to do PE in our free periods at least once a week as a condition of staying on to study further.

The way you have articulated the whole attitude to boys in school compared to girls "Yours Truly" is spot on and so well said. No matter how well behaved or how much you tried you could feel the wrath of some staff teachers, or even a caretaker or a matron simply for existing. I saw this happen to others. That's true. Our school had a dedicated librarian middle aged woman who was a right old curmudgeon, always treating some boys like they didn't belong in the school library at any time. I was very well behaved and had friends who were intelligent and well mannered and who did the work, but even so I still had my brushes with a few.

You state one of your worst experiences was your first school shower. This was one of mine too, I related it four years ago on here I think. Basically me and my best friend were caught trying to slope off out the changing room after PE soon after starting secondary at the ages of 12, fully dressed with coats on and bags slung on our shoulders when we got apprehended and accused of not joining the others for our debut secondary school communal shower, which was true, we had tried not to shower. I'm sure there were a couple of others who also didn't but didn't get caught, so we were out of luck. I regretted this almost immediately. Neither of us were very sweaty or dirty from memory. We were nervous about it and shy, hardly a crime for new boys, with a lot of new faces around us, and facing such a new situation but me and my best friend were turned around and while everyone else was done and almost dressed, the two of us had this PE teacher bearing down over us both and made us remove our coats and strip naked for him on the spot before grabbing the two of us together by the back of our necks with each of his hands squeezing tightly and marching us across the large changing room floor stripped off, to the now empty showers and literally threw the two of us in with quite some push. That's 43 years ago now, in September of 1981 and I recall it like it was yesterday.

To this day I would not dream of sharing that event with any family member, although I have done so on here. Now last Friday I attended a school reunion for a Class of 84, my secondary years are actually 1981 to 1987. Although that teacher was not there, another who took me in 1984 and all the other years I was at the school was, and I mentioned this to him and gained a sympathetic hearing and a comment from him telling me he wished I had told him at the time. Telling one teacher what another had done never crossed my mind in those days. Maybe he knew something about this other chap I've no idea, I didn't press the point too much, I wanted a nice evening not a heavy going one, as at the time in the early 1980's I just thought this was the almost normal way boys were expected to be treated at secondary schools at the time, many which came with a reputation ahead of attending them, even the very good ones like the one I was a pupil at, one of the best in my area. But there you have it.

The reunion took place in the large sports hall I spent many hours in during the 80's and once inside, with no windows and artificially lit, it could have been all the way back to 1981 again, it was virtually unchanged to look around at, even the basketball nets and benches looked like the same ones to me. I'd already been back two years ago for a previous reunion, Class of 82, and that had been my first step in that place since 1987 and it was a bit like time travelling to the past just looking at the building, before you got to the actual people there.

Another thing: did you ever have to share PE classes with the girls?

Hi Simon,

Thank you for your reply to my post. Yours is far and away the worst example of double standards I have come across on this forum. I felt utterly outraged reading your account. I absolutely hated my secondary school days but, reading the testimonies from other respondents on here, I have come to realise that I didn't actually have it that bad. I was severely shy all through my schooldays and being forced to take PE lessons stripped off as if I were about to go on the beach wouldn't have done anything good for my confidence.

Just a few more details that come to mind.

There was no putative footwear rule at my secondary school, it was purely up to the individual pupil, of either gender, whether they wore footwear or not. It threw up a weird and obscure gender divide whereby the girls often seemed perfectly happy to take their PE lessons barefoot. During any indoor lesson half to maybe 70% of the girls wouldn't have bothered bringing any trainers. I can even remember numerous girls happily playing rounders or performing athletics out on the playing fields during the summer months barefoot. By stark contrast none of us boys ever did the same. I don't know why, it wasn't something I ever discussed with anyone else. I just took the view that the world didn't need to see my feet and, seemingly, every other boy in my year felt the same.

My school had tennis courts, which always seemed an extravagance for a bog-standard comprehensive school in the mid-1980s with acute funding problems courtesy of Maggie. The strangest thing is, they were never used for tennis lessons, apart from one half-term when the girls - only the girls - did tennis. I always wondered what that was about, given that tennis is not a gender-specific sport. I can only assume that the school authorities decided that we boys needed to do team sports for the usual 'character-building' bullshit reasons.

In my final year self-defence classes were introduced - for the girls only. I had always wanted to learn some form of self-defence but had always been too shy to do so. If these classes had been offered to the boys I would have taken them up. I had been badly bullied and wanted to make it stop. But never mind. I was only a boy. I am still angry about this blatant discrimination almost forty years later.

The amusing thing is, the school specified a particular change to the girls' PE kit for these lessons: a loose-fitting top and long trousers/ leggings and bare feet. This more maximalist kit was presumably because the instructors taking these self-defence classes happened to be two fit, good-looking young blokes in their mid-twenties, who by the nature of the activity, were going to be getting 'hands-on' with the girls.

Anyway, that rule went out the window straight away. The girls in my school year being the bolshie lot they were, half of them turned up to the first class in their usual aertex tops and gym knickers. I know this because we boys saw them filing into the assembly hall. Har har, I bet that had the senior staff at my catholic school grinding their teeth in chagrin!

Hi Simon,

Out of interest, did you have any siblings at the same school?

Several people have posted about their experiences with school PE/Cross Country and the limited kit allowed. At my school it was only shorts for a gym detention.

I wondered what sanctions were applied for rule breaking.

With us it ranged for cold showers, up to caning. The most common was to repeat the detention another day. Caning was rare in detentions, but I recall one situation where 2 boys started to push one another/fight – the result was 6 strokes each of the senior cane immediately after the run.

Hi Yours Truly,

I found one sentence in your post particularly interesting: "They see boys as little beasts that need to be put in their place, cut down to size." That perfectly captures what I felt about my school’s approach, especially the PE regime. There seemed to be no real reason to have us lads constantly shirtless and barefoot; it all served as a way to keep us under control, to reinforce a sense of discipline and humility. It often felt less about physical education and more about asserting authority over us.

Thanks for giving voice to a perspective I hadn't heard in a while—it really resonated with me.

As a new poster here I feel I should say a little about my own experiences. So Here goes.

Nothing too traumatic ever happened to me in PE or games lessons, which is why I have never posted here before although I have followed this site for a long time. My particular interest is in the gender discrimination between boys and girls.

This preoccupation was sparked in me during my days in infants' school. There was no uniform requirement until we went up to the juniors but there was an informal rule, vigorously enforced by our teachers - all women - that we boys had to wear shorts to school. I don't know why. There was no practical purpose to it and, cuttingly, there was no equivalent rule imposed on the girls demanding skirts or dresses only. They were free to wear whatever they wanted, including long trousers. I can even remember one girl wearing a short dress over a pair of trousers. Whereas it had been impressed on me by my sinister, menacing primary 2 teacher that if I dared to show up to school in long trousers I would be slippered. It got worse the following year when my eldest sister, two years younger than me, started at the same school and could do so in trousers while I was still in my shorts.

I don't know what purpose it served. It just made me feel more unhappy than I already felt, and I had been struggling with school to start with. It was a catholic school and I think they went by the ethos that above all, before all else, children must be made told to do as they are told, and they regarded that principle as more important than educating or empowering us. It made for a bad time and I remember the years 5-7, years that should be among the best of anyone's life, as being particularly traumatic. I think that women teachers take an instinctively more adversarial approach to boys than to girls: they see boys as little beasts that need to be put in their place, cut down to size, while girls must be nurtured. When my sister started school she was treated as a returning heroine and immediately moved into the top set (yes, they even streamed us in infants' school) while I was regularly shouted and screamed at - and I was not a badly behaved child, I was very shy and timid and nervous, I was too scared to misbehave. But that didn't save me. I was a boy.

Anyway, on to secondary school. The PE and games kits weren't anything traumatic, to be fair. In the gym it was shorts and a vest and footwear was allowed, outside, it was a rugby-type top and shorts if football, or the indoor gym kit if it was athletics. None of the shorts-only rules or being slippered in the changing room that previous posters here suffered.

We had the inevitable communal showers, of course, and I can still remember my first one, which also happened to be the very first shower I had ever had in my life. (My family were poor and working-class and growing up showers just seemed like a middle-class thing). I still remember it as one of the lowest moments of my life and I am not exaggerating. The girls had to shower as well, which is fairer than some of the schools referenced here where showering was apparently enforced only for the boys.

To be fair, looking back, I think the girls got it worse with PE kit. They had the infamous 'gym knickers', which were only marginally more inclusive than swimming trunks, and those ubiquitous aertex polo-style tops, which are fine for an 11-year-old but less so for a self-conscious, developing 14-year-old who is getting lewd comments from the boys. I can also remember, owing to a classroom shortage, we boys taking lessons in the dining hall, which was situated between the changing rooms and the assembly hall, where the girls would sometimes take their lessons, which meant they had to parade before us in their PE kits. They would be treated to a rousing chorus of catcalls and wolf-whistles from the boys (not me!).

There is one caveat to all this. The girls' PE teacher was always keen to enlist a group of boys to carry the gym mats back into the girls' changing room (why couldn't they do it themselves?) and one time I was one of the conscripts, which meant I got to have a ganders' at the girls, changing room.

It looked identical to ours . . .

. . . Apart from the fact that they had partitions in their showers. For us it was the ubiquitous bare balls, pants off and into that shower or else! thing, glowered over by our stereotypically tyrannical games teacher, who seemed to be moved by some inner baleful rage. That got me and it still does.

The girls always seemed happier in their PE lessons, such as we boys saw of them pout on the fields. There seemed to be an air of genial authority and a collabrorative air between them and their teachers which was in complete contrast to how we boys were treated. (I may be wrong about this. My sister has told me about a bullying PE teacher she encountered; but generally I think I am right: girls just were treated easier).

Anyway, that is that. That is what I had to say. I hope I didn't go on too long or was too boring, but I needed to say this. Sex discrimination has always affected us men just as much as it has affected women and I make no apology for stating this obvious truth.

There was a very clear double standard in the dress code, all based on the assumption that boys were more forgetful and needed fewer items to remember. Girls could wear plimsolls inside, trainers and tracksuits outside, but boys were limited to just one item: white shorts. The thinking was that by having only shorts to remember, boys would have an easier time, with no shirt or footwear needed, so there’d be less to forget.

Even if boys did forget their shorts, they could simply borrow a pair from the spare kit box, since that’s all they ever needed. Meanwhile, girls had more options for different situations, like footwear choices and warmer clothing for outdoor activities.

Interestingly, my parents—like most others—were fully supportive of the bare chest and bare feet rule for boys. They seemed to believe that it was a good way to keep things simple and thought it would toughen us up by having us exposed to the elements. The school seemed happy to reinforce this, which only added to the sense of unequal treatment.

From over the pond where it's just about midnight. I saw Jason's post from this side of the water so feel able to intrude on you English gentlemen.

I'm a high school biology teacher aged 60.

My mother went to Junior high and High school in the 50s. She did the naked communal showering then. I went to Junior high and high school in the 70s and I did the communal naked showering. In junior high, PE was still segregated by sex. After class, the coach brought us into the locker room and was there as we undressed and made sure we all took our showers and used soap. If a boy did not, he was helped by the other coaches. No parent ever complained. It was for sanitation. Nobody, us kids and the teachers wanted to be around the kid that was stinky and smelly after participating in PE. Participation was mandatory, unlike today. Back then, I do not remember any student not participating, we all enjoyed sports and we got to be active rather than sitting for an hour. Us boys got to do things like play tackle football. It was flag football supposedly but we were typical boys and the coaches let us be boys.

I lived, and still do, in the Central Valley of CA and it can get hot in late spring and the fall months. We did PE when it was over 100 outside and nobody cared. We would rather be outside. Our school had no other AC other than open windows. I did not know how hot it was outside until my parents bought the first window AC unit for our house.

To this day, I am almost 60, I still work outside in the summer on hot days with no problems. Last year, we had an addition built onto our house during the summer. I was working with the contractor and his crew even on days when it was 110.

I am a teacher and have students who faint if the classroom is above 72.

When I moved to the high school, the district went to co-ed PE. With that, they instituted co-ed locker rooms. This was the time of the ERA (the time there was a push to get the Equal Rights Amendment passed and a discussion of equal rights for women). So for schools, boys and girls were to be treated equal, even in the locker rooms. We dressed for PE and showered together in the same communal showers and after the first awkward week, we all got over it.

Many of us had seen the opposite sex naked on many occasions. Nude co-ed swimming was still a thing at some YMCAs. Many had hippy parents or been to the nude beaches that dotted coastal CA. In the CA Delta were a few islands that were famous for their nude beaches and party atmosphere (underage drinking) that many teens had been to. My friends and I did a lot of backpacking and in the 70s, many backpackers went nude or partially nude in the backcountry.

Now, I teach a recently built high school. It has private shower stalls at the request of parents. We cannot have kids seeing each other naked because even students of the same sex might have something that others have not seen before. (Sarcasm for those that do not recognize it).

I am a biologist and I tell students all time, we are human and we all have a naked body under our clothes. We come in two styles, male and female. If that were not the case, I would not have a job because I would have no students and none of us would be here.

Every year when I have to teach human anatomy I still get parents requesting I not teach about penises and vaginas because they do not want their 16 year old students to know about those or see pictures or drawings of them, even the ones in their textbook. Too late, they all have looked them up on the school issued laptop.

The private shower stalls has had an unintended consequence (I did bring this up when they were proposed but I was told it would not happen). Students are using them to have sex. If students are caught having sex in the bathrooms regularly, why would they not use the private shower stalls for this also. By the way, the student restrooms are just filthy because of what students do to them and the last place I would ever consider ever having sex at.

I know teens have sex, but if they do it at school, the school has to suspend them. The problem is made worse by the girls caught prostituting themselves and then we have to call the police. We have female students that will give BJs for $5.

Communal showers stop this, wash off all the sweat, grime and stink that builds up during vigorous exercise, and teach kids good hygiene in social settings. We have students that because of their living situation rarely have a chance to bathe. With the American fear of having other see their naked bodies that is not part of most other cultures world-wide, we are teaching our children our bodies are something to be shameful of.

This is why body shaming is common now and why young ladies are committing suicide because they do not have the perfect body. I am sorry, no woman will ever have the perfect body because there is no perfect female body. Each woman is unique just like each man is unique. It is our genetics.

Being exposed to as many naked bodies as I was I learned this. We are so intent on protecting our children’s feelings that parents are even now protesting when medical personnel need their children to undress for exams. Is a human body so shameful that it is to remain covered up even when there is a medical necessity to determine was is wrong to undress for an examination?

Hope this gave a fresh view from my side of things over here.

New poster here.

Hi Simon,

Out of interest, were the girls in your mixed comprehensive made to do PE barefoot as well, or were they allowed to wear footwear?

Ross, yes, it was insanely strict, at least for us lads. Our regular PE lessons were conducted in complete silence, with no talking allowed, and the teacher relied on his whistle to keep us organized—calling us to attention, starting or stopping activities, and so on. On the rare occasions when we shared the gym with the girls and were supervised by a female member of staff because our usual male teacher was absent, their routine seemed noticeably more relaxed. However, it always felt like the female teacher had been specifically instructed to be extra strict with the boys, making sure those sessions were just as intense as our regular ones!

James your experience of being the only one going shirtless because you forgot your kit mirrors me slightly. I'd come into school at 12 years of age with swanky new gym trainers to wear in our sports hall which was a light cream coloured floor. My trainers had black plastic soles on them and my PE teacher went mad at me when he saw me walking the floor in them. I'd forgotten we had to have non dark trainer soles. He shouted at me to get them off IMMEDIATELY. I took them off and he took them off me and walked off with them and stuck them in a corner. I kept my short white socks on hoping they would be okay, knowing they'd be a bit slippy, but he came back at me asking what I thought I was doing and made me lift my legs up and yanked each sock off my feet and told me I was now doing the lesson in my bare feet which couldn't mark the floor or make me slide dangerously - he shouted 'BARE FEET LAD, COME ON GET ON WITH IT!'. I'd tried to keep my socks on because I wasn't up for going barefoot at all but now I was the only one in the whole class going around in my bare feet like that. Now although I still had shorts and a shirt on, just being barefoot like that made me feel incredibly naked and exposed and I was no fan of going barefoot. Did anyone else have this sensation like that when the school made them do their PE barefoot even if they kept their shirt on?

I tried to get my parents to buy me another pair of compliant trainers that were okay for school PE but they wouldn't buy them and so my teacher made me the only one in PE for a few months always going barefoot in his lessons and this made me feel like I came from some kind of poor family that couldn't afford things which wasn't the case. One kid even accused me of being too poor to afford proper shoes. I told my old folks at home this but they thought I was a fusspot and doing PE without shoes and socks on was fine, even if I was the only one like it.

I eventually saved up some birthday cash and bought myself some new trainers that complied with PE rules, only to start the next school year a few months later and get a new PE teacher when the old one left and his methods were completely different and we could no longer wear trainers at all and everyone was told to get to sports hall barefoot on the gym days, and all of a sudden at age 13 he inflicted the bare chest PE uniform on the lot of us quite unexpectedly. I'd never done it that way before. Well at least I was not alone like it. At my school it just seemd to be down to the personal taste of the PE teacher how we were expected to turn out, not any set standard school rules about it. I think I heard someone complain about it and just get a 'my class my rules' response.

Simon your school sounds like it had a strict PE teacher.
For us PE, games and cross country shirtless and barefoot was normal but we could at least talk when playing games or out on a run.

At 14, I once forgot to bring my PE kit for a lesson, and my teacher made me participate shirtless. It was embarrassing at first, but I got used to it as the lesson went on.

That year, in 1991, was my first experience being the only one shirtless in a PE lesson, and I found I actually enjoyed it. I decided to “forget” my kit on purpose the next lesson, and this time another boy forgot his as well, so we both attended shirtless.

Afterwards, our teacher called us to the front of the class and announced that he only allowed boys to forget their kit twice a year. He put his hand on my shoulder and told me that if I forgot a third time, I’d have to be shirtless in all future PE lessons that year. My heart raced at the thought.

Later, I spoke with my classmates. I was too shy to admit that part of me wanted to be shirtless in PE permanently. Some of the girls said they’d remind me to bring my kit, while others teased me. Eventually, I decided to bring my top to the next lesson.

During that third lesson, another boy, Pete, forgot his kit but was too embarrassed to go shirtless. He asked Bobby, who’d been shirtless once, if he could borrow his PE shirt, but Bobby refused, worried that he might end up permanently shirtless himself. Pete even offered Bobby £5, but Bobby still wouldn’t lend him his shirt.

Seeing Pete getting desperate, I offered to help him out. Pete reminded me I’d already forgotten my kit twice and asked if I was sure. I joked that the teacher was probably just kidding and agreed to help, partly because I wanted the £5. So, I attended the third lesson shirtless.

At the end of the lesson, our teacher called me to the front and announced to the class that from then on, I’d always attend PE shirtless. There was a lot of surprise, but secretly, I felt a strange sense of happiness.

Some of the girls later told me they thought the teacher might have been joking and urged me to bring my kit next time. So, I told them that I didn't mind either way, wanting to appear cool and in control.

For the fourth lesson, which was outisde, I brought my kit, dressed in the changing room and left for the school sports field with the others. But as soon as the teacher spotted me, he told me to take off my shirt and hand it over. My classmates went silent, realising he was serious. When I asked for my shirt back at the end, he said my father would need to come and collect it. I didn’t want to tell him, so I was left without my PE shirt.

Eventually, my mother noticed it was missing. I explained what happened, she was annoyed and said she would go speak to the teacher herself. I was mortified at the thought of my friends seeing her at school, thinking I was too afraid to be shirtless.

When my father came home that evening, he wasn’t impressed. After my mother explained the situation, he decided that as a consequence for losing my PE shirt, I’d now remain shirtless at home too, at least until I learned to take better care of my things. I didn’t dare protest.

The teacher stuck to his word and I ended up doing all lessons that year shirtless but I also ended up not wearing a top at home for most of the time to the delight of my mother when she realised she had less washing to do for me.

Hi Ross, what you are describing as your punishment regime was normality for us lads in the early 1980ies. In my mixed comprehensive, for boys, it was white shorts only, nothing else allowed, for PE, athletics and cross-country. This minimal kit was stricty enforced by all teachers. I never saw a boy with any kind of top covering his chest or anything other than bare feet. It was quite simply unimaginable. Talking was strctly banned in the sports hall and theoretically also outdoors even if it was more difficult to impose this rule there.

Ross - I agree completely - bare feet and top were just normal kit for cross country and other p.e. It seems rather a shame to use lack of top or footwear as part of a punishment as I rather enjoyed things that way most of the time. Running barefoot was common sense - plimsolls were likely to come off on our muddy runs and muddy feet are a lot easier to clean than muddy plimsolls.