Burnley Grammar School

I only started at secondary school in 2002 and our P.E teachers made all of us use the showers then and made clear to us they were mandatory and we were not allowed to refuse to take one unless they told us we didn't have to, which was never! There were six shower pole things made of silver stainless steel and each one provided four blasts of water out of it so you could have four of us to one pole. Quite flashy I thought, but the school was a new build from the mid nineties or so. Most of our P.E classes were about 20 to 24 boys so it was the perfect fit!

The experience of showering like this with a large number of others was interesting to say the least, and they were even less private than more traditional looking old school shower rooms where you just face the wall, we faced each other. The school budget even provided Neutrogena soap sitting on a shelf in the shower area which we had to pick up and they also encouraged us to deodorise afterwards by bringing a roll on anti-perspirant, not a spray. I last took a shower after P.E in school like that in 2006.

The teachers used to really nag sometimes about using the showers after P.E, I think most of us would have skipped them by choice, most people unless committed naturists don't exactly volunteer to get naked with each other very easily do they. I knew I would have to shower at the school before I arrived there as they had told us in a briefing we got, and I had a chat with both my parents about it who told me not to think too much about it because it will be alright and they'd done just the same because everyone did. If you are seeing the exact same people a couple of times a week in the nude beside you under the shower stream I think it all becomes quite normal and even mundane quite quickly after the awkwardness and shock to the system of the first couple of times.

Being frequently told to do bare-chested P.E was also commonplace in our lessons, either with skins and shirts, or the whole class going bare-chested sometimes for reasons unknown to me now but accepted at the time.

The P.E teachers were generally pretty O.K with us all even if they did nag us all to strip and shower or do the whole bare-chested P.E thing quite a lot. Me and my P.E teacher once played tennis outside and both of us were bare-chested, I still don't know why!

Alan so you think there is something very cruel about pursuing very elderly people though the courts but you didn't think there was equally something very cruel about pursuing very young people through the school?

I disagree with you on this. Age should be no barrier to justice, especially with very serious allegations. You are obviously showing your own inherent decency in saying that but I wonder how much decency some of these people showed for others, take your Nazi one for a moment, every one of them whatever age should feel justice. During the war many of these people probably killed many very frail and elderly people over the age of 90, why should they now get a free pass if found and the evidence is there to implement justice against them. I'd feel the same about someone like your teacher and others like him, and like Mark has said, I agree with it, just knowing a chap like that had his collar felt by the law and realised people knew what he was up to would be a form of justice even if there was never a conviction or court appearance and just some questioning. He could go to his maker knowing those old school pupils were onto him and never forgot. That's how I see it.


Nigel, your Miss Pagett seems like a right old bitch doesn't she. That's one for Yours Truly's double standards list. Can you imagine the male teacher who sometimes took you for football standing watching the girls doing anything similar, never in a million years was that happening even as far back as 1972 in any school. It doesn't even surprise me what you say. The girls at school always seemed to be trusted more than the boys for some reason, and they shouldn't have been, I saw more girls in groups taking a sneaky drag at break times than any boys ever did as one example. As others have already stated here a number of times, boys learn at an early age that their own privacy is not as important as the girls, your story illustrates this to perfection.

Hi Christine Sanderson,

You are quite right, secondary schools can be a breeding-ground for rumours. Even as a former cripplingly-shy and socially-challenged young person I can remember hearing plenty.

There was the male teacher I remember my late sister gloatingly telling me was into BDSM. I suppose that all seems so anodyne nowadays, doesn't it? If he was it was his own business. But it did provoke one or two mental images that it took time and effort to get out of my head . . .

I have already mentioned Towel Lady. She might have escaped a disciplinary hearing for that act but she didn't escape the inevitable rumours concerning her sexuality, which were still circulating in my time at that school, some ten years later.

There was a woman teacher who had been a nun before she went into teaching. So the rumour went, she had been kicked out of her order for alcoholism. But the girls, with the finely-honed instinct for cruelty that all females seem to be born with, started a better one - that she had been kicked out for falling pregnant (this woman was, to put it kindly, a plain Jane).

There was the languages teacher who, it was whispered, was obsessed with a South African folk-rock act called The Bundhu Boys and who would without the slightest provocation, bore vulnerable and helpless teenagers to the point of coma with endless tales of their brilliance. Unfortunately I discovered through personal experience that that one was definitely true. Maybe one day I'll be able to talk about it openly.

Alright, that last one was facetious. But it brings me on to a genuine point.

I can remember darker rumours from my primary school. Such as the teacher who was alleged to have broken a boy's arm in a fit of temper. Having spent a year in his class and found myself on the receiving end of his mercurial temper and hard hands for little and nothing at all I can fully believe that that incident really happened.

(I once on Radio 4 heard the observation expressed that angry people experience a spurious sense of their own entitlement. As if, because they have anger, they are entitled to lose their temper and behave however they feel like doing in the moment. I certainly witnessed that from this man.)

If this man really got away with an act of such grave assault against a primary-age child he can only have achieved it with the active collaboration of our headmaster. Which was the man who was rumoured once to have strapped a boy's bare bottom.

Our primary headmaster was a large man, tall and bordering on obese. He always seemed to be dark red in colour, what I can still remember as being termed as a choleric temperament. There was always the impression of him that he was stuffed up with anger, which might have spilled over at the slightest opportunity. Critically, I cannot cite a single memory if him making any effort whatsoever, not one single time, to suppress the aura of menace he always seemed to project, and this is a grievous thing, in my opinion anyway, for a man who spent his professional life working with young children. My little sister only told me some years back how he once rapped his knuckles on her forehead because he caught her not paying attention in assembly. He was just a bully.

I once was sent to him. As shy and timid as I was I still ended up receiving the ultimate sanction. I think it was because my academic performance had slipped.

He made me come around to stand beside him at his side of the desk. He then proceeded to berate and belittle me for I can't remember how long. All the while I was there beside him I could feel his huge hand, ever so gently, slapping my backside, while he fulminated at me, again and again and again. The implied menace could not have been more unmistakable.

This being 1981 instead of 1971 he wasn't able to draw out his cane and settle it that way. But I was left with the unmistakable impression that that was exactly the way he would have preferred to deal with a troubled child.

Basically my primary headmaster was as twisted and bullying as my class teacher. My question to you, Christine, is, what was your practice for flagging up abuse when you suspected that the head teacher was corrupt and untrustworthy?

Comment by: Mark on 4th April 2025 at 22:05



".....Would you ever consider her suggestions Alan, such as formally reporting the things you write about on here. As I see it, you can keep writing on here about your school and certain teachers and your view of them and what they did but it won't take things any further. But you could take Christine's suggestion and think about it and do something and see what comes of it. If you don't do anything you guarantee failure, but if you try you may just succeed in some small way......


"I suspect your teacher had many victims during his time teaching and if there is still a chance he is alive and kicking I'd want him to face the music even if it was just to be questioned and put the fear of god into him and make his past come back to haunt him........"


That is a very fair and good question, Mark. If Roberts is still alive he would now be well into his nineties, and I think there is something very cruel about pursuing very elderly people though the courts. The pragmatist in me tells me, even IF he were alive and IF a case were bought against him he would be treated very leniently. and the shock might kill him, and stupid though it might sound, I wouldn't want another man's death of my conscience. Though what they did was in excusable and repulsive, it always makes me queasy to see, for example, elderly Nazi's go through the court system. I remember a year or two ago an old man of 98 was convicted. I frankly think that when a man or woman attains 90 they should not be prosecuted. To see old relics in the dock , many of them no longer in full possession of their faculties, is abhorrent. That is revenge, not justice. I wouldn't want to see a 90 something Roberts locked up. Does that sound contradictory?. Probably - but it would make me as big a bully as he was, and though I can be verbally aggressive. I am not by nature a vindictive man. Believe me, if the internet had been around in the late 80s or early 90s, I would have done something then. In fact, I could kick myself because in the old days of Friends Reunited I do remember one man actually made similar complaints about Roberts,(he didn't name him but as we only had one P.E. teacher, it was obvious who he meant) but sadly the site got taken down and nothing remains. I think our school only garnered about four references, mainly about the decrepitude of the building, not the equally decrepit staff. I only saw it shortly before the site just suddenly packed up and became unavailable. The other punishment seems to be a fine, and I wouldn't want money - it is like those people who sue well known personalities - are they suggesting that a six figure sum will take away the misery and anxiety they went through?. Not in my book. You can't put a price on that sort of thing, and to take money seems to suggest you have a price at which the unacceptable becomes acceptable.

I genuinely believe though, that teachers caught abusing their "power" ought to be dealt with in the most severe way possible. It seems inexcusable that a certain teacher, who I have named before and will not name again, served 22 months for his first offence, and a decade or more later caught at it again was then given a suspended sentence. the man now is 74 and he was 54 at the time of his second conviction, a five year term of imprisonment might have taught him the error of his ways, and he was still young enough to face the full vigour of prison life . But - let's face it - he got away with it. That should never be allowed to happen.

I wish there had been a few Eric's around at my school - I wonder what he would have done about our lecherous old bugger?.

These posts on here are getting longer and longer and better and better.

Nice one Christine!

We had a horrible school shower bully at my comprehenive school in my class going all the way back to 1980 now. I've never forgotten this rather timid, slightly built young lad we had in our class we called Milky Bar, although his name was Rupert, a somewhat posh name for a boy at our school, there were no other Rupert's about. His name and his looks stood out. He was absolutely fine as someone to know and friendly but I always wished he had more confidence to stand up for himself.

I remember he used to wear his round national health style spectacles in the school shower sometimes and this looked funny as he would try to avoid getting his head wet. The shower bully in our class nicked them off him one day while we showered. Our teacher didn't mind him wearing them in there. The bully took them and threw them down the line of boys and they fell to the floor beneath all our feet and we tried not to tread on them and break them. He was one of those nasty ones who then dared anyone to pick them up and hand them back, so we just moved aside and Rupert got down and picked them back up. He was then kicked in the backside by the bully and fell forward. The teacher wasn't looking and didn't seem to hear over the sound of fast running water. The most serious attack occurred with this horrid bully another time after that, he was a bully who broke the boundaries others would never cross, even normal silly bullying boys you can get. Rupert had been getting some stick from the shower bully over what he looked like and while the teacher was absenting himself he took hold of Rupert between the legs, holding his balls and penis and didn't let go. The lad was screaming in pain and this horrible bully was laughing and looking around for everyone else to laugh along with him too, and I'm afraid many did. I was so disgusted, because Rupert was a nice lad and alright by me, so I punched him straight in the chest and all of a sudden the laughter turned to cheers on me for doing it and he ran out, the shower bully that is. He had bullied other boys too, often in the showers when a teacher wasn't about. After I'd hit him he went very quiet and never mucked about like that again and didn't dare even look at me, I was actually bigger than him anyway. So I relate to the story Eric told quite strongly. The moral is always stand up to bullies, they often have glass jaws, and it's good to look out for others too.

You got a good answer there from Christine didn't you Alan. Very positive infact, not negative like you imagined a few days ago. Anyone who takes time out of their Friday afternoon to spend a few minutes writing to you like that deserves some kudos in my opinion, they don't have to do it after all.

Would you ever consider her suggestions Alan, such as formally reporting the things you write about on here. As I see it, you can keep writing on here about your school and certain teachers and your view of them and what they did but it won't take things any further. But you could take Christine's suggestion and think about it and do something and see what comes of it. If you don't do anything you guarantee failure, but if you try you may just succeed in some small way.

I think you've mentiojned Nicky Campbell a couple of times. Share your story with him in a private letter c/o the BBC and I bet you'd get a personal reply.

I suspect your teacher had many victims during his time teaching and if there is still a chance he is alive and kicking I'd want him to face the music even if it was just to be questioned and put the fear of god into him and make his past come back to haunt him.

Hi Geoff,

We had the cricket as an option in third year. I could see the appeal - no stripping and changing into skimpy PE kit, just whip off your jumper and tie, roll up your shirtsleeves and off you went for an afternoon of mostly standing around making no effort.

Even so I never felt tempted to go for it. I always found sport of all kinds boring and I used to get through the classes by daydreaming. I was once disciplined out on the playing fields by our teacher who caught me slipping into a kind of pre-pubescent Zen buddhist trance rather than paying attention to the rounders game I was (unwillingly) a part of. Despite the obvious advantages of it, cricket just looked like it might well have put me in a coma, so . . .

I am pretty certain our cricketers were not made to shower because I can remember them running for their buses afterwards dressed exactly the same way. Yet again I am reminded by reading this that we appear to have got off lightly compared to so many of our peers at other schools in other places in the same time. Although that did not prevent my secondary school being a hostile and traumatic environment in plenty of other ways.


Hi Gary,

Neither of my parents sat me down and warned me about the showering rule. Although my dear old mum packed me off to school that day with a full PE kit and a bath towel, so she was obviously aware of it. I think my mum was just very trusting of authority figures while my dad was emotionally disengaged from us and never gave my sisters or me any advice or support about anything.

In all fairness our first Games lesson was run as an induction session in which we didn't strip, change, do anything or shower, but sat on the benches and listened as our fulminating tyrannosaur of a senior PE teacher explained to us at length how it was all going to be from that point onwards, including the dreaded showers. With hindsight I realise the school was trying to show us consideration by easing us into what they knew would be a challenging experience for us.

Even so my very first shower was the lowest experience of my life to that point. I had never experienced showering before, we only had a bath at home. I tentatively ducked my head under the jet of water to see how hot it was only to look up to find myself locking eyes with our tyrannical teacher who was glaring straight at me.

"Never mind your hair, boy! Get the rest of yourself under there!" He literally snarled at me. He hated me.

So many other posters here, mostly men, have expressly commented on how their gym teachers policed their showering attendance by examining their hair. I don't remember ever getting my hair wet after that one first time. We were not made to. I never brought shampoo anyway and it would just have been uncomfortable and impractical to sit through double Maths or whatever with your damp hair dripping into your exercise book as you worked.

' You never saw girls with wet or damp hair at school after PE though, not sure why!'

Maybe like at my school nobody had to get their hair wet. Or it was just as likely that the girls were not made to shower as the boys were, which is atrocious and blatant sex discrimination.

By fifth year I just regarded PE and Games as a ridiculous and anachronistic inconvenience. I felt I was then too old for PE kit, showers and the irrelevant sports and that it was an indignity to subject young people of my age to it all. My memory became very poor and I don't think I remembered to bring my PE kit a single time that year.

It didn't seem to register with the teachers that the standard punishment for it, namely sitting in the relative warmth of the changing room fully clothed, writing out lines or copying passages from a book and not having to shower after, was still a better deal than shivering in your PE shorts out on the playing fields in the November drizzle!

Once again sexism played a part although a very mild one. When girls forgot their PE kit they were not punished and were allowed to go out on the playing fields and sit on the sidelines watching their classmates in action - a thing explicitly forbidden to us kit-less boys - with the single random sanction that they had to take off their shoes and socks first.

I suspect that if my PE teachers had had recourse to the traditional sanction available for every previous generation of boys who forgot their PE kit - namely an adult-sized gym plimsoll drawn full-force across your tightly-stretched backside in front of all your peers - it might have proven marvellously healing to my atrocious memory. But this was the mid-1980s and even before the legal ban in state schools in 1987 most teachers in most schools were no longer empowered to resort to this sort of fun and games. Which must have been very sad for them.

While we were (theoretically) still expected to shower in our fifth year we were never forced to shower after indoor PE, only Games out in the fields, which seems incongruous now. We were just as likely to work up a sweat in an indoor lesson. I can only presume that they were more concerned about us traipsing mud into their nice, dingy changing room, which seems to be a very different principle to what most other posters here, and especially men, have reported.

Comment by: Christine Sanderson on 4th April 2025 at 16:00



Christine, Roberts certainly intimidated the pupils - especially the younger ones. If he got aggressive his usual line was "it is me they will believe, not you". We heard that line in the first week at the school, and he repeated it often. Too many of us believed him, but when we were in our final year I am sure that at least three other lads would have made complaints had there been somebody to complain to (the headmaster was an old and sick man and he delegated his responsibilities to his deputy who was a friend of Roberts). It was the sort of matter you didn't talk to parents about - embarrassment, pride, I know I wouldn't have done so, but by the time I got to 15 I felt so p***ed off with the whole situation, I began to feel I had nothing to lose. He must be dead by now, but I wish that he had been bought to justice for his offences against my mate at least, who started to drink heavily I am sure as a result of Robert's loathsome behaviour. He wasn';t that way inclined and it troubled him deeply, I know.

Comment by: Eric on 3rd April 2025 at 14:45


"I've been scanning some of the latest comments and thought I would add some of my memories.
In the 1960's, when I was 13, I tranferred to the local grammar school along with several other boys. We became a gang since we were all new in an established environment. We were mostly tall, and it became obvious when changing for PE and showers that there was a bullying culture from a couple of lads who picked on the smallest and more timid members of the PE group. As a gang we became popular by shielding the timid ones from the bullies who soon gave up. (Life in a secondary modern was somewhat harsher than in the grammar school!) ......"

Eric, I think that the nicest thing I have ever read on this site. You and your mates showed real concern and kindness , and I bet your kindness was remembered by the lads who had been bullied long after you left school. If only there had been more like you.

Eric, that was a nice little anecdote about the engine you related there. Speaking for myself it's fair to say I think I learnt something on every visit somewhere at some point. For example I was sitting in on an English class one day and found out according to the teacher that the only word in the English language with all five vowels in the correct order is - facetious. I was convinced there were other words and remember going home to try and check and found many others, very obscure most of them, such as acedious and all these others;

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Category:English_words_that_use_all_vowels_in_alphabetical_order

So I made a point of bringing this to his attention with a note using one of these other words in it the following day when I returned. I didn't see it as a major issue and it was left at that.

The issue with getting 'problem' pupils out of the way of inspectors is well known, I don't know why they do it, we had ways of finding this information out. For example I was in a school once when I thought one of the classes seemed rather low on numbers and saw another that was similar, and questioned this. Infact I did more than that, I made it quite clear I wanted to account for everyone who was meant to be in school that day, who was absent without authorisation or sickness and anyone out of school for other reasons, such as out of school activity, trip etc. We discovered a surprising level of absenteeism on this particular week having gone through the attendance from earlier days and weeks. Teachers are often noted for knowing what the pupils are getting up to but many of them even up to head teacher level like to pull small tricks to hoodwink inspectors at times so have rather a lot in common with some of their pupils it seems.


Alan, thankyou for answering me. I think you veered off into a more generalised chat rather than the one about just yourself but I'll deal with what you have given me and hope you find it useful.

The trouble with openly accusing a teacher of something is that you need some evidence to prove any accusation, you cannot just hold an opinion on what you think of a teacher and present that as evidence. A PE teacher has to watch and be in charge of the changing room, and if showering is involved then obviously they will have to observe that up to a point. A sensible teacher would do so discreetly in my view, and no more than that. Any teacher's sexuality would bear no relevance on anything, even a gay man in a PE class. There are many I'm sure who do a good job professionally without issue. However, if you expected a level of criminality may be present, such as within your school, and you approached me to say something along these lines I would take it incredibly seriously and mention it to my colleagues and then almost certainly bring your concerns to your head teacher with an expectation that he should act or be very aware.

I would also find it useful to have others who could corroborate your own concerns that could be presented to your head teacher. Ideally others would be brought in separately for a chat to see if a theme developed regards the teacher. Whether it would become a police matter would be up to the head teacher, not inspectors, although we could make a strong view if you had made a good case. I'd also like to say Alan that you wouldn't need someone like me to talk to, you would be completely at liberty to contact the police with your parents and make a complaint if you felt able to. But it all comes back to evidence, not just hearsay. Corroborative evidence would be powerful though.

In your own case Alan with your teacher, based on what you have told me, and what you might have told me if I was inspecting your school, I think you could well have had a strong case going forward. Do you think you would have been backed up by others to corroborate your claims? Why do you think that yourself and nobody else did so at the time if you had such strong suspicions about the teacher? Did this teacher actually frighten you or others?

Make no mistake Alan, if you had trusted me with information I would have taken anything you told me very seriously and expected anyone I forwarded your information onto to take it equally seriously too.

I need to also say however that schools can be places where all kinds of rumours fly about the place about teachers from pupils and many of them are often false too and there can be malicious devious children who hold vendettas too, I'm aware of some cases provably dismissed. Whilst it is vital to remove anyone in teaching abusing the position or not up to the job, it's also vital to safeguard all the vast numbers of good teachers from spurious allegations as well, and unfortunately there are children, and even their parents, who are prepared to do this.

It can be very difficult to strike the sensible balance and has to be treated delicately. While we all want to see the guilty caught we don't want the innocent targetted either.

Ofsted inspectors are not there to look for teachers who might be abusing their pupils but if any information came to us directly we'd act obviously. There are the criminal records checks of course which are supposed to be the protection, although they are not foolproof. Anyone can contact the police with their concerns, without the head teacher or an inspectors involvement. You always have that right.

You clearly still feel very strongly about your school and at least one teacher there, so my advice to you right now back in the present day would be to make a formal complaint to your local police station about the gentleman in question, even if it is now 30 or 40 years later. There is no time statute on these things. It could uncover connected issues and others might come forward or be contacted to build up a picture. You're probably going to tell me you think the teacher has passed away aren't you, but even so I feel that would be a course you should explore, it might just allow you to bring some closure to your thoughts to know you've finally done something about it and someone has noted it for you. It's never too late for you to act if you so desire. You could write down a fully written and dated letter outlining everything and give it to the police if you think that would be a best first step rather than talking. People can often get all their thoughts together best when written down.

I'm struck by the strength of your feelings and bitterness towards aspects of your own school and am saddened to read about someone like you who feels it has damaged them so badly. Nothing made me more angry than seeing intelligent pupils putting up with substandard teaching and languishing in schools not serving their interests like they should.

Regards this comment from your post Eric.
"I have read previously of female teachers walking in on naked boys in the changing rooms, and this not being illegal at the time. Yet another example of the inequalities in school life! If a male teacher were to walk in on a group of girls changing he would have been for the 'high jump'. So yes, Towel Lady could legally have made you strip and shower in front of her. (Thank heavens times have changed!)"


I went to a primary school in Essex at the start of the 70's, beginning in 1970, leaving in 1974 to go up to secondary. Every year I was there I had a female class teacher, they all seemed quite mature ladies/old to me at the time. I think at a guess the female to male teacher ratio must have been 3 to 1 or more in favour of women there.

Sometimes one of the men would take us for a PE lesson, mostly the outdoor ones, maybe some football, but generally speaking our class teacher took us for PE, always doing so in the school hall/gym. It wasn't really a fully fledged gym like a secondary school one but it did the job I suppose.

Much like the middle school pointed out on here a few pages back shown taking showers to point out good hygiene from a young age, my primary school also made us take showers after PE all the way through that school. This was apparently a lot less common than at secondary school but I didn't know that at the time. The showers were taken exactly the same as in secondary school, although were a bit smaller in size. We had to line up along two sides of a long oblong area beside each other to take one.

It was in my third of four years at this primary school, in 1972-73 that we had my oldest teacher, so she seemed, Miss Pagett (they always seemed to be a Miss!) who broke the boundaries completely compared to my other three teachers there because she always came unhesitatingly into our changing room and stayed there while we changed out of clothes, watched us shower (naked of course) and get dressed again, and there was nothing we could do about it to stop her. She just would not go away. She rarely even troubled the girls who seemed to be left to their own devices and trusted because she was always in our changing room with us and quite clearly couldn't be in two places at the same time. We are talking ten year olds here, some might have been eleven. I left the next school year when I was twelve. Yes times have changed Eric but I thought she was out of order and pushing her luck even then. For me she was the only thing that made taking a shower at primary school feel terribly awkward, not the other boys, and I never saw anyone doing unkind teasing either at my primary school or secondary.

Hi Eric,

My God! I never even realised that!

In my memory I had long assumed that it was an idle threat, intended to intimidate and humiliate two naïve preteen boys, which it definitely succeeded in doing. To find that she really could have done that to two boys going into their teens is just something else.

From the anecdotes I heard about this woman, from the towel incident to her slapping both boys and girls across the face and hitting one boy over the head with a blackboard duster, she had a penchant for overstepping the mark and would have been more than willing to carry though on her threat. It sounds like we had a narrow escape.

As a matter of fact, a few days later on the same trip, during a rest stop on a long hike, Towel Lady sat down on a low mound that she did not realise was a red ants' nest. The good woman experienced a literal, real-life case of ants in her pants and two of her male colleagues had to cordon her off from view with towels while they stood facing away from her, while she hastily stripped off all her clothing from the waist downwards. We pupils were standing a little way off, not trying hard enough to suppress our sniggers.

Sometimes - just sometimes - karma comes on swift wings.

I played a lot of cricket at school over summer, which bored me to death, often spending the whole lesson doing nothing but standing mostly stationary fielding on our school playing field. I think I even went an entire lesson once when I didn't even touch the ball throughout it. Despite this quite sedentary fielding I was told to shower after it, which I found quite frankly daft. I did more vigorous activity to myself during lunch hour than being bored fielding at cricket.

Everyone has stories to tell about showering in school PE lessons it seems.

I've been scanning some of the latest comments and thought I would add some of my memories.
In the 1960's, when I was 13, I tranferred to the local grammar school along with several other boys. We became a gang since we were all new in an established environment. We were mostly tall, and it became obvious when changing for PE and showers that there was a bullying culture from a couple of lads who picked on the smallest and more timid members of the PE group. As a gang we became popular by shielding the timid ones from the bullies who soon gave up. (Life in a secondary modern was somewhat harsher than in the grammar school!) If changing and showering had been properly supervised by the PE teacher our intervention would have been unnecessary.

To Yours Truly:
I have read previously of female teachers walking in on naked boys in the changing rooms, and this not being illegal at the time. Yet another example of the inequalities in school life! If a male teacher were to walk in on a group of girls changing he would have been for the 'high jump'. So yes, Towel Lady could legally have made you strip and shower in front of her. (Thank heavens times have changed!)

To Christine Sanderson
When I was in teaching in the 1970's we had an HMI inspection, and I had to give a lesson to a class of remedial boys in a workshop that was being re-equiped and had no tools or benches. I talked and demonstrated on a car engine mounted on a trolley, and managed to keep their attention for the whole lesson. At the end, the HMI gentleman who had sat quietly at the back came and talked to me. He recognised the difficulty of giving the lesson, particularly to that group who he recognised as 'challenging', and said he had learnt more about the parts of an engine than he ever knew before. I took that as a compliment.
After I retired, I was walking through a Peak District village when I came across a group of 6 teenagers equiped with maps and rucksacks who looked lost. "Where are you going?" I asked. "To a campsite in this village." they replied. "Are you doing the Duke of Edinburgh Award?" "No we are the remedial group doing the easier Peak Award. There is an OFSTED inspection in school this week so we've been sent out before we cause any trouble!" That's one way a Head teacher can try and get a better report I suppose! I wonder if that still happens.

My entry into secondary education was aged eleven slap bang in the middle of the seventies in 1975. I was always out and about doing things like climbing trees, racing bikes and running around the place with others both a bit younger than me and older.

What I liked doing in my spare time which kept me active didn't exactly match up with the school agenda when it came to physical education though.

One thing that completely blindsided me was the concept of going to school and an expectation I would have to actually take a shower. I couldn't believe it, nobody said anything to me or anyone I knew about such things, nobody. So when I started as an eleven year old it didn't even hit me that I'd have to shower even though when we walked into our new changing room for PE that September there was obviously a shower area one end of the changing room. The penny didn't drop and I just thought it was there for other people to use, not me or our class, because nobody had ever told us about such things at the time.

We came in from outside and I remember starting to change and all of a sudden I heard water starting to run quite loudly behind me and the next thing our teacher said 'in the showers everyone'. He had a small pile of hand towels in his arms as he said it, taken from a cupboard where he turned them on. I said to him that nobody had told us we had to have a shower and he said 'I'm telling you now'. I remember asking the 'Do we have to?' question to be told a firm 'yes you do'. I turned to someone and asked if he knew we had to have a shower and he just shrugged his shoulders. I remember really not wanting to do it and my heart rate must have doubled. I'd never seen another boy naked in my entire life and now I was surrounded by them with myself the same. I felt so awkward and strange and our PE teacher was keeping a quite close eye on proceedings as we did it. I just kept thinking 'I don't want to be naked like this'.

Kids were treated in a quite adult fashion in those days and there were teachers who were trying to knock the childhood out of you from about the age of ten, one used to say to us at that age that 'you should start behaving like adults'.

When I came home I told my dad they told us to shower at school today and he said 'oh that's normal'. Well it was all the way from eleven until I was fifteen and then for some reason in my final fifth form year our PE teachers decided taking showers after PE was no longer something we had to do unless we wanted to and so many of us just upped and went without one, making me wonder why they had been so keen to make me shower after PE only a couple of months beforehand and now it was no longer compulsory to do, as the lessons were basically much the same and at fifteen many of us were probably more in need of showers after PE than we had been at the age of eleven or twelve when some of us hadn't even hit the change yet.

I remember a babysitter coming to sit with me one evening, a girl at the school who was about sixteen when I was just about to start there. She told me the school always went hard and stricter on the younger ones but it got better as you got much older, and she was right.

Many of the boys I was at school with and myself had quite long hair at the time and our PE teachers always made us get it dripping wet through, if our hair was dry or even just a bit damp we had to go back in again. My hair used to take ages to dry properly and I disliked sitting in the next lesson with damp drying hair. You would see boys in class like that who had just come from PE to the next lesson. You never saw girls with wet or damp hair at school after PE though, not sure why! One of our PE teachers, and our year head used to complain about the length some boys hair was becoming although they didn't force anyone to get it cut, because so many of us had it. In 1979 one of my friends suddenly went mad and got a crew cut which shocked everyone but it pleased the PE teacher.

Hi Timothy,

It really is astonishing, isn't it, that people paid out big money to have their children treated in that way. It is a very strange custom, still alive to this day, that middle and upper class parents in the UK are prepared to pay ruinously expensive sums of money to have strangers raise their own children for large stretches of the year.

Nude swimming seems to have been very common at boys' private schools and even at one or two state grammar schools. Maybe it still goes on, who knows. Having been fortunate enough to have been born poor and working class I was spared that degradation, with the nearest thing I ever experienced to it being the dreaded school medicals.

I suffered two medical exams, at ages six and eight. I must state that nothing untoward happened in either of them, and hat my bad memories were due to my being an especially shy and oversensitive child. The first felt particularly cruel - I had had a traumatic time trying to settle in at infant school during my first two years and my situation was not helped by the callousness and indifference of several of the teachers, who above all seemed only to want children who meekly obeyed the rules and therefore made their own lives easier. At six I had finally settled in, made friends and was finally doing well academically. In my own little way I felt I was soaring. Then came the first medical exam. It felt like a punishment for daring to get above my station. I have posted about it before, how to my utter horror a girl from my year was still in the same room as me after I had stripped off.

At eight it was just as traumatic but for a somewhat different reason.

Once again I had received no prior warning of my fate, with my mum meeting me in a side room and gently coaxing me into taking off all my clothes before entering the office where the exams were being held. I have since read accounts from other men who say they were allowed to keep their pants on until the moment of doom but there was none of that mollycoddling at my primary school, which I always felt seemed very uncaring of the feelings of the children in its charge. The only thing we were allowed to take into the exam room was whatever courage we could muster.

There was a teaching assistant in our infant school, a woman in her sixties. Just like the teacher I described in my previous post this woman seemed to have a burning intolerance for children who exhibited any signs of vulnerability and especially boys. Being shy and timid was harsh luck for me. I was badly treated by her on numerous occasions. In particular I remember several times when, to my profound and infinite shame, I lost control of my bladder in class. I would be taken aside into an empty room by this woman, who would proceed to subject me to a harsh scolding even while she was making me strip naked in order to change into clean shorts. You might have thought that a young child that had just had an accident was in urgent need of kindness, compassion and reassurance . . . She had different ideas. And there was not even an attempt to keep it private. Afterwards I would be cast out back in my class in a different pair of shorts, which meant that every other kid could tell what had happened to me just by looking. There was never any attempt to reign in the mockery from the other children, it was as if their opprobrium was intended as part of my punishment. The girls were always especially mean. It was purgatory.

At the lofty age of eight I assumed I had long escaped her and she was only a bad memory. Walking into that room was like the shock of a cold shower. And then I saw her. I can only assume she was present as a representative of the school's authority. But at eight years of age with my bare balls hanging out and feeling the worst I had ever felt her presence was far from appreciated.

She did nothing untoward. Neither did the other adults in the room, which consisted of a male doctor, a female nurse and another woman (health visitor? social worker?) who, to give them their due, all looked utterly bored, as if the last thing they needed to see that day, or that week, was yet another little lad of eight wearing nothing but an expression of mild shock.

I was weighed. I was measured. My spine was checked. But I do not remember experiencing the infinite violation of the 'drop 'em and cough' test that so many other men have cited shuddersome memories of.

My mum was also allowed to sit in. I realise this was intended as a demonstration of good faith to our parents, to reassure them that there was no funny stuff intended. And indeed there was no funny stuff. But it still felt like a very strange meeting of worlds, to be stripped naked under the school's authority in front of your mum .Humiliation wasn't the word.

It may also have been intended as a shrewd control strategy. Like most eight-year-old boys I loved my mum and wanted to be brave in front of her and so I swallowed down my adverse feelings and got on with it.

Afterwards I threw my clothes back on, shuddered and went back to class, trying to lose the memory of what had just happened. Later that same evening my mum told me how impressed and proud she had been by my courage and how she had intended to give me a kiss but that I had disappeared abruptly. Of course I did! I just wanted to get out of there!

Well, it didn't kill me. But what I always found objectionable was how arbitrary these exams were. Some LEAs had them, others didn't. At secondary school it was galling to discover that several friends from other local primary schools had never been subjected to the humiliation we were. I also remember a local friend from primary that went to the other catholic secondary school in our area who had to undergo a full medical exam at the start of every school year.





I felt that I would never ever be clean again. No attempt was ever made to curtail the inevitable mockery from the other children and after being cast out in a different pair of shorts - which flagged up to everybody that you had wet yourself - you were essentially thrown to the wolves, with the girls being particularly sadistic.



in truth nothing untoward happened at either of these exams and my enduring bad memories were due to me being a particularly shy, timid and self-conscious child.

I remember the Cleveland case from 1987 without having to check it up.

That was Marietta Higgs and some other chap and their obsession with Satanic child sexual abuse, with some quite wild theories and accusations being made. I believe it was all complete and utter nonsense and non existant but took a few years to reach that conclusion. Meanwhile a lot of damage was done to innocent families, none had done anything wrong. Some people are equally dangerous from the other side of the equation. That woman sounded mad to me at the time, she had no basis for her accusations and I'd question what was going on in her own head and that of those who believed her.

It wasn't the negative response you expected was it Alan. The others were right, it helps to be a little less judgemental sometimes.

Comment by: Yours Truly on 2nd April 2025 at 00:13




".....

But here is my question to you, Alan. Are you happy to leave such an important issue as rooting out the deviants in the hands of box-tickers?

Did you ever hear of the so-called 'Cleveland witch hunt' of 1987? It was started by a senior social worker who had this seeming morbid obsession with nasty stuff. I shan't go into details on here because I have put a lot of heart and soul into this one particular post and don't want it to be moderated. Google it. If you must. My point is, this deluded woman was literally taking what she deemed 'evidence' from a checklist. it all fell through in the end........"

I must admit I do not know too much about Cleveland, YT - the little I have read seems to suggest that there were two opposing opinions. I think that sometimes, what parents regard as "discipline" is, in fact cruelty - a bit like teachers in fact. I recall a case in London a couple of years ago when a girl of ten was beaten to death by her own father, with the connivance of his wife and brother. All three skipped the country and phoned the police in the UK to admit what they had done. When they returned to this country they tried to retract their confessions - to no avail. All three were found guilty and are now enjoying long stretches in prison. Their (pathetic) defence was the father was merely discipling his daughter. I think sometimes, on balance, it is better to err on the side of caution.

As regards complaining about teachers, I think even a box ticker, provided they are genuinely impartial, should be informed, because I know I felt so sick and depressed in my teenage years, I would have done anything to have bought his behaviour to the attention of people who would have done something to stop it. If necessary I would have been happy to have signed a sworn statement. The problem is, as we have seen, a bit like cruelty to animals, the miscreants often get away with a non-custodial sentence, often just a paltry fine, but it would have ended his career. These days they would be put on the Sex Offenders Register, which would preclude them being employed elsewhere with minors. Personally though, I think a stiff prison sentence would do them far more good - say five years

There's a lot of people pouring their hearts out here about school.

My own father admitted to me he was a bit of a rogue in school back in the 1950s and once told me there was not a bit of his body he thought hadn't been either caned, belted, plimsolled or smacked during his time in school in that era. He actually made me laugh when he turned to me and said the only thing they didn't do to him was cane him across the soles of his feet!

I told him he should have behaved better then, but he said most boys in his class were on the receiving end of something physical even if they were well behaved and a number of times there were whole class canings and beltings for trouble caused by the few, or when someone didn't own up to something, so innocent boys often received the cane, leather strap or plimsoll across some part of their body, often the bottom, hands or legs for things they never did as part of collective discipline. Head smacking was also frequent he said. That was a horrible story of yours Keiron from much more recent times. None of this kind of thing was seen at my school.

Personally I can't relate to living in constant fear of such regular physical chastisement at school. I never saw anybody touched at all, and that was in the 1970s/80s. I couldn't escape the very common and regular shirtless PE and forced to take showers though, most of us are all in that same boat together on all that aren't we.

Yours Truly, I feel your pain, quite literally.

For some reason teachers at school thought you were not listening to them or could not hear what they were saying unless your eyes were fixed directly into theirs. I used to look down a lot while I listened to them, but I was paying attention.

On the last day before we broke up for the Easter holidays back in 1987, it was a Thursday in April the day before Good Friday, the 16th. That morning we had our normal gym lesson. I was 14 years old, it always seemed to be a packed gym and this one must have had 25 boys in it. We did PE there in school in boring plain white standardised shorts all the exact same, our bare feet and it was mandatory no tops on, and always was like that all year round for gym. Not so bad in the summer but not how I liked to begin a winters morning on arrival. Our school gym actually had ice on the inside of the windows in January 1987, just single pane, not double glazed then. You could tell when we were cold in there because our nipples gave the game away easily. I remember the cold floor underfoot in those days too, and sometimes it being so dusty that by the end you'd look at your feet and they'd have a brownish dirty dust all over the bottom of them just from the gym floor. The gym didn't seem to get cleaned often enough. We did of course, showered every time, no let offs.

Trainers and a t-shirt would have been nice. The lads in the gym instruction video from what looked late eighties in my time pass for your typical boys doing gym and I myself fit the mould of the one on camera.

My school did not have corporal punishment which had just been removed as a sanction everywhere at the time but like you say Yours Truly, other lesser methods were deployed. On my morning lesson on the day we broke up for Easter as I mentioned above, I was in the gym, dressed as I described, and the PE teacher was saying something largely unimportant and I was just standing there as he spoke looking down at my feet when the next thing I felt the most almighty smack come crashing across the back of my head with quite some force, which I hadn't seen coming. The other boys gasped. It came out of nowhere quite unexpected. I was accused of not paying enough attention, but I was paying intense attention. My head launched forwards almost like whiplash and I screamed OUCH, and was told to be quiet for that too. My neck was in agony but he didn't believe me and accused me of putting it on.

To this day I don't know why he did that to me. I was no troublemaker and he was normally alright with me. My neck felt completely twisted as if I had sprained a muscle in it and I couldn't look left or right very easily without turning my whole body at the same time. I spent the whole of Easter 1987 with this painful neck and the first half of my holidays, it was a week before it eased off and away.

Obviously my folks at home noticed my lack of movement and I mentioned it to them anyway and only said I'd done it moving awkwardly in PE that morning. My dad even suggested taking me to our GP or getting him out but I refused like kids do. I just wish I had told them the actual real reason it happened rather than passed off some vague PE excuse at the time. The PE teacher basically injured me (it's GBH isn't it) and left me in pain for a week, and in the year afterwards it was noticeable how sometimes my neck would ache or be tender in ways it hadn't been before, so I must have aggravated something still there a bit from the original incident. I should not have let the teacher get away with that, I realise that now, but at the time I knew I was going to have to spend many hours in the gym with that guy (yes you Trevor Probert!) and rocking the boat was probably not a good idea, that must have been my reasoning I would think.

There must be hundreds of thousands of us who have something similar to tell who made such excuses from all kinds of teachers.

I've read what you've said Christine about questioning children in school and the kind of answers you expect back. You're probably right, as children we soaked up rather a lot to ourselves.

Comment by: Chris F on 1st April 2025 at 17:10



I agree with, and entirely sympathise with your situation, Chris. I was one year behind you, and agree with what you say. It seems that we were invisible to those P.E. teachers, who, if they knew anything about psychology would have realised there was a reason for our reticence - I went to a very tough school in a working class area (we were considered fodder for Fords or "the army", and anything else was too way out to even think about) and you would not have dared to admit who/what you were, because there would have been physical violence as well as name calling and what is euphemistically called "teasing". As regards swimming, I think that being in water is a bit like being covered by a blanket - it is only psychological, I agree, but you feel less exposed. In a gym you feel like you have a spotlight on you.

Comment by: Roger Chappell on 1st April 2025 at 22:14


Again - thank you Roger. I think the fact that inspections are announced in advance is totally wrong. If they had come to our school (they never did), I know the first thing our headmaster, poor old devil, would have done, was to ensure the school lavatories, which was outside in the yard was repainted. It never was in the five years I was there, the white emulsion becoming greyer each year (the school was under permanent threat of closure). Very occasionally some synthetic disinfectant was poured into the filthy urinals, (every other Monday I think) and the word "F***" had been written in permanent ink markers, too many times to be erased. I never once entered into one of the two cubicles, because those that did, did so at their on risk, but I can't imagine it was any more sanitary than the more used facilities (which I only used in extremis)

Comment by: Christine Sanderson on 1st April 2025 at 22:37



Christine, provided I knew the interview was in camera so to speak I would have told you of my concerns about our P.E teacher, who was homosexual and was far too interested in watching boys close up showering and changing as you got older - when you were 11/12/13 he was content to shout and threaten, but when you got to 14/15/16 it was like having a camera on you when you got to the lesson and especially after it. I myself was a homosexual (and have always wished I wasn't), so it was a case of taking one to know one: we all have a "type" in my case, I had come to my terrible realisation very young, before secondary school, as we had a neighbour who was a policeman - he was straight of course (I don't think canteen culture would have allowed anybody who wasn't to have admitted it) but this man had a beautiful wife and two children to prove it - he always looked immaculate, clean, well groomed, and looked and smelt as if he had just emerged from the shower. He was my "type", very masculine. Roberts type was tall, wiry, confident, very sporty lads. As I wasn;t that tall and wasn't very sporty (as were quite a few of us), he would be contemptuous (one of his favourite, cleaner knicknames for me was "Tin Ribs"). Whether you like somebody or not is that the way to inspire either confidence or respect?

Roberts was able, to some extent, to disguise his interests because he was an ex-Army rugger-bugger type, and as Roger, in the previous, very honest, message suggested, I think, in our case, some of his fellow teachers had suspicions, if not evidence, of his proclivities. In fact one of my ex teachers, who came to see me play when I was in my early twenties (as a matter of fact, it was the concert I mentioned yesterday - our leader , who always had one eye on the cash register - had arranged an evening of early Basie and Glenn Miller for the then emergent "nostalgia" market). I had received a name check for a solo, and he must have remembered me - I will never forget he came up and told me I had played well, he had no idea I played the trumpet because our school had no music in it all, and they didnt care what you did outside, and when I told him what a misery my life had been at school (by then he was retired), he actually mentioned Roberts by name - BEFORE I did - and he told me that at least things had worked out for me. Until that night I don't think he even knew I had a forename!. I learned from him Roberts had "disgraced" himself on a school trip to Snowdonia the year BEFORE we left - I daresay drink had been taken (how it got hushed up I will never know), but I already knew how vile he was because one of my friends at school with me, played football very well, and was taken under Roberts wing, and that included out of school "training" which included intimate massages. Graham never told me of this until two years after we left school, I was sworn to secrecy and he told me that Roberts had told him (at 15/16) that their sessions "had to be secret and not mentioned to anybody" his excuse being it would have made other boys "jealous" (he really did fancy himself!). He was very ashamed (he had been drinking, and sadly that would continue for many years), and though I suggested he made an official complaint he wouldn't hear of it. I would have backed him up knowing of his behaviour in the school changing room and showers. I doubt men like Roberts even care about the damage they do (Shakespeare again "The evil men do, live after them"). Perhaps a spell in prison might have concentrated his mind?

Now, Christine, you couldn;t be expected to know about this paedos behaviour, but surely there is something wrong with school inspections, if the probity of the staff cannot be checked up upon. Corrupting the 'normal' is disgusting, but teenage boys?.

Inspections, if they are to mean anything, should be carried out without prior warning. It seems to only be in the NHS and School system where these things are pre-arranged and orchestrated, a place serving food, for example or industrial premises can be entered without warning., and the business named and shamed in the local press.

In short, Christine, I probably wouldn't have told you at 15/16 I was homosexual myself but I most certainly would have told you about Robert's behaviour. It does seem to me that P.E teachers are especially excluded from proper scrutiny - I have mentioned - to the point of repletion, I admit, about a teacher called Michael Quinlan who having served a prison sentence for indecency towards boys was allowed back into the profession to do it all over again, and we also know that at least two cowardly old men, former P.E. teachers, are hiding in South Africa, fighting deportation to Scotland to face charges of gross indecency and buggery against boys who were at school with broadcaster NIcky Campbell, and a recent Radio 4 series "In Dark Corners" also revealed the journalist Alex Renton was subjected to indecent acts at a boarding school, and at least one of those teachers was a member of the loathsome (now happily defunct) Paedophile Information Exchange.

Do you feel - and I mean you no personal disrespect, - that male inspectors ought to inspect all boys schools?. I know at 15 I would have felt more comfortable talking to a man about Roberts than to a woman - also, of course, at that age, you do not have the command of language or gravitas to point out the seriousness of the situation

Sorry to go on at such length, but what would you have done, if you had received information that a teacher was a practising pervert?

Hi Alan,

I feel you are too harsh on Christine Sanderson, although I admit I also find her seemingly total lack of concern for the feelings of boys rather triggering. You rather contemptuously described her former career as a 'box-ticking exercise'. Well, with no wish to be insulting or dismissive', I suggest that that was exactly what it was.

You seem to be suggesting that OFSTED people should be tasked with rooting out the deviants. I can see why you say that and in fact I think I made a similar remark in a previous post to her.

While I was lucky enough never to cross paths with any perverts I wasn't so lucky in other ways. While there was no formal corporal punishment at either of my schools there was a great deal of informal CP, smacking, shaking, shouting and even screaming. I was an exceedingly shy child who struggled to fit in and socialise and had problems with concentration.

Or. As teachers saw these things in the 1970s: I was a troublemaker.

I experienced the ruler across the knuckles, the ruler across the backs of my legs with my shorts pulled up and was even threatened with the slipper. I was once 'made an example of'. That was the exact phrase the teacher used. It meant being made to stand on a chair in the middle of the entire gloating class, feeling naked in my shorts, while the teacher denounced me to them, telling them about all my misdeeds and how they should all try never to be like me. I still remember this experience as worse than the physical punishments and as one of the the worst, most shocking experiences of my whole life.

And all this was before I reached my sixth birthday.

And it wasn't just me. I have posted before about the teacher who locked a boy on his very first day at school in a cupboard because he wouldn't stop crying for his mum. This woman was absolutely vile, with a hair-trigger temper and an apparently uncontrollable loathing for distressed children (especially boys. I know I keep harping on this but this is because in my experience it was true that boys just always seemed to be treated worse.). There was the teacher who, it was rumoured, had once broken a boy's arm whilst hurling him across the classroom. There was the rumour about the junior headmaster that he had once thrashed a boy across his bare bottom with a leather belt. There was our deputy headmistress, who looked like Leo Sayer in drag and dressed like the catholic equivalent of an ageing hippie with her floral dresses that looked like my mum's curtains and ghastly jesus sandals, and who had an seeming obsession with corporal punishment, although she couldn't practice it on us. (One time she told us of how sailors were flogged in the Royal Navy in the old days. It was the first time I had ever heard that word and I can still remember the peculiar, exultant glee with which she enunciated it: "F-ll-ogg-ed!". )

I think I would have been extremely appreciative if Christine Sanderson or any of her cohorts had swung by and outed these twisted bastards before getting them dismissed from the profession.

But here is my question to you, Alan. Are you happy to leave such an important issue as rooting out the deviants in the hands of box-tickers?

Did you ever hear of the so-called 'Cleveland witch hunt' of 1987? It was started by a senior social worker who had this seeming morbid obsession with nasty stuff. I shan't go into details on here because I have put a lot of heart and soul into this one particular post and don't want it to be moderated. Google it. If you must. My point is, this deluded woman was literally taking what she deemed 'evidence' from a checklist. it all fell through in the end.

In my last post to you I mentioned Towel Lady. There is that incident. And there is also my own experience of her. On the school's traditional annual residential week trip up in the Lake District, our (male) dorm teacher found out that me and another boy hadn't been showering. He sent us to shower on the spot. Which is fine. On the way there we were intercepted by this woman teacher who proceeded to give us a roasting which she concluded with the dire threat that if she heard of us not showering again on the trip she would stand there and watch us while we stripped and showered. And as twelve-year-olds we really believed she could and would do it too.

Do I think she was a deviant? No, I do not. I do think she was overbearing and something of a bully, and that, for a teacher, is surely bad enough. But she might well have registered as a deviant on some lazy, catch-all checklist, which is something untrue and which she did not deserve.

I am very sorry to hear that that stuff happened to you, Alan. But, as I always have to remind myself, it's a new day and you are not what happened to you.

Private school, parents paid a small fortune, 1961, swimming was stark naked in the indoor school pool, I remember the deep end was an astonishing 9ft deep, the shallow was 3ft. We often did dives into the 9ft end. One teacher would often get us out the pool doing push ups at the edge or running laps of the pool whilest still fully completely naked. Our parents had to pay for this kind of education at the time, and we had to be brainy enough for it too. Character building they called it. I can think of other words.

I've digested the comments with great interest.

I know it's a bit late in the day Alan but if I rewind the clock about 30 years and you do the same to the time you were in school to the particular time that is relevant to you, I'd like you to indulge me with an exercise. Tell me what you would have said to me if I had approached you directly, with anything you say to me being treated in confidence and not reported back in your name, especially if you wished to go somewhere private to speak rather than in the full glare of a class situation. It was always possible to take both written and oral pupil comment.

Once you tell me what you think you would have said to me I will try and do my honest best to answer you as I think I would have done so at the time. The question is would you have been honest with me, or like many children end up doing just answer quite predictably or not wishing to say much.

I did speak with many pupils during my job and we are aware of what was called coached answers, especially by teaching staff. I approached many pupils randomly, some are keen to speak, others are not. I did not elect to ignore the actual pupils, I sat in many classes with them, observing their teachers, the behaviour and the atmosphere. A lot of the job is simple observation, which is inspection after all.

Let me tell you about schools and the inspections we got from someone who spent over forty years in the classroom because it might prove interesting. At one of the comprehensive schools I was teaching at which was of a generally good standard we got sent notes to inform us of an upcoming HM Inspection, previous to Ofsted, this was in the late 1980's. It was about a month's warning that the school was going to be receiving HM Inspectors, quite absurd in my view and during this time some money was found to "do up" the school reception area and buy pot plants and a few other clean up jobs here and there, including a new piece of carpet in the staff room too. This was all the head teacher's doings and it received a lot of mutterings I can tell you from the staff who wouldn't have minded a few extras in the actual classrooms. I also remember the school cleaners working overtime in the week before the inspectors came. It was like a Royal visit when something suddenly gets spruced up that nobody cared about beforehand. I always thought it was taking inspectors for fools and I bet they could smell the fresh new carpet or paint a mile off.

However, our head on this late 1980's inspection had his "official staff notice" of this specific inspection, I think it lasted the entire week. But unofficially he had all his staff in the staff room one afternoon when the children had all gone and amongst many things he made it clear to all of us to try and prevent any children talking much to these inspectors incase they say too much and let the school down and wanted us to keep a close eye on who if any in our classes might say something to any if approached. I found this very foolish as the school had a good reputation anyway and the children were the only reason any of us had a job in the first place. These inspections make teachers very touchy indeed and in the case of that head teacher I had he didn't trust his own school roll not to rattle off a list of grievances, and a few staff had plenty of their own. I believed in honestly answering any question I might be asked and not saying what I thought might be the right answer they wanted to hear.



I worked at another secondary school a few years later and that had an Ofsted inspection and it was completely the opposite and that head teacher was keen for anyone to have their say quite openly and for any children who wished to speak with them to do so, and I think many did so actually. Even in the previous school many children spoke directly to HM Inspectors and I was not going to stop them doing so. I trusted my own pupils to speak sensibly to these people and show maturity, and they did so, thus making my own classroom look well run and disciplined. I never made the mistake of thinking I could fool an HM Inspector or Ofsted but even some heads that should know better think they can do so.

I remember that the male PE teachers at my last school didn't seem popular with many of the staff and one complained during an inspection that they were getting in the way and putting him off doing his job the way he normally did it. I recall some of us having a staff chatter about that and suggesting he was probably having to behave himself a lot more than normal, he had a firey and short tempered shouty reputation that could be heard by many staff who found him intimidating to be around so the children must have been even more so.

In some schools the staff are at each others throats even more than the pupils, so said a friend of mine who worked at another school in my area who I'd frequently meet up with and compare notes.

Comment by: Alan Noble on 1st April 2025 at 17:35
I think I might be in that picture - 14 at the time at BGS.

That's lovely Alan, would you care to say a little bit more, such as who you think you might be in the picture and what the school was like. Most people on here didn't go there and only talk about their own school based on the picture which brings up many memories of everyone else's school gyms.

I think I might be in that picture - 14 at the time at BGS.

Many adults don't know what the whole trans thing is all about and transphobia, so expecting a small five year old to do so is the antics of the madhouse, but then many of those people are literally fruitcakes I'm afraid. Isn't there are massive irony in such people that would suspend a tiny child for something they could not possibly understand. These very people that do that claim that they are the ones who are understanding and reasonable and inclusive and kind. No they are not, they are completely the opposite to what they claim, they are the ones with no tolerance of others! When it comes down to small kids they are just wicked.

This madness will end sooner or later and when it does our next generation will look back at some of these people with complete and utter disgust and shame. They are setting back mainstream gay related issues for both men and women, most of us are actually quite regular men and women who consider ourselves quite normal, because we are and we are not looking at everything through sex/gender tinted glasses. I almost never mention my gender or sexuality to anyone because it's not important enough. Saying so here to me is the exception but only because I find it relevant to the discussion. In my early secondary years it loomed large though, and PE lessons magnified it with all the naked showers and bare chests for PE.

I'm gay and went to secondary school in 1978 where I was immediately thrown into a situation of PE for gym being done only in bare chests for the boys there and showers, all of this I found quite intimidating and difficult to adapt to. Having my shirt off was just not me. See my comment of 6th Feb this year for details if you missed it.

Even if a school inspector had come up to me or even taken me for a one-to-one interview in an office and grilled me I doubt I would have said anything about how I felt about having to shower, remove all my clothing or do PE without any top on. I didn't even broach the subject and my feelings at the time with anyone at home either, it was just my own quiet discomfort that simmered along within me, and I remember thinking I was the problem because I was the one who didn't like taking my top off for PE or stripping right off for the showers and being seen by others like that at close range. Now I'm learning how others felt too and it seems a lot of us were thinking similar thoughts. A general look across the web can see many examples of such discussion drawing similar conclusions. The answer at my school to boys who disliked showering and were a bit more obvious in showing it was for the teacher to grab them and pull them towards them, one lad in my class was once lifted up by his ears off the bench and pulled into the shower for ignoring a teacher telling him to get in for about the third time of asking. Nobody actually paused to think why are some of these boys reluctant. It wasn't because they wanted be dirty and sweaty! For myself I just jumped in like I was told to and removed my shirts when told I could not have one on. We didn't even need telling most of the time, it became automatic.

Although there is a lot to be said for treating everyone the same at school, and all of us had to do these things, we are not all the same.

When I saw the recent discussion, including video evidence, on the boys being filmed in the showers at school for television done right at the time I was at early secondary school I just thought, yes that's about right showing all that, by definition of being born male, even young ones in school like me and you were conditioned to accept a certain way about things and never to confront those who did it to us. A school shower was/is an enormously big deal to so many children of both sexes, and for many boys taking our shirts off was quite a big deal too, maybe that's because I was gay and starting to know it, I don't know, although it looks like there are a lot of straight men on here who felt similar. Some people say they felt a bit different when they went swimming at school. I still felt much the same, although it felt a bit different to the normal PE, at least swimming was a bit more fun and you forgot yourself easier. The swimming pool we got taken to for lessons had a large communal changing area and communal showers and we had to use them there as well after leaving the pool. We used to be allowed to walk into them with our swim trunks on to remove the chlorine off them but then had to take them off and thrown them aside and do things properly. There was a soap dispenser we had to use there, quite posh actually. At the pool we were sometimes even watched by a male member of their staff there who was nothing to do with our school, incredible as that sounds because sometimes we were taken swimming by women teachers. This was only in the first and second years, age twelve and thirteen. Boys and girls areas were separate but we could all hear each other and if you were not careful it would be easy to be seen by the other side.


Regards the school inspector, I hope you don't mind me saying this but you are far too harsh about Christine though Alan, and I think I find Yours Truly the more balanced viewpoint on her comments. Although I've said what I've said, I do try not to be angry in life about things and towards other people. Even now I tend to think it was me who created the issues not my school.

Hello,

In response to a couple of comments below on my earlier comments, I do understand the point being made. I'd add it wasn't just a matter of listen to the girls, ignore the boys. At first we changed no one's kit - it had always been full length leotards for or girls in gymnastics, just shorts for boys in gymnastics and fitness drills (girls wore t-shirts and shorts for fitness drills), t-shirt and shorts for everything else. But we had to review the kit anyway (the supplier went under I recall correctly), and the leotard was an extra expense, and also slowed things down, so there were lots of arguments on top of girls' complaints leading to us to change the girls' gymnastics uniform to shorts and t-shirts (which had to be tucket in at all times).

More generally, while I do sympathise there might have been some discomfort, and it was different treatment, of course there are physiological differences too, and the idea of double standards goes both ways - it is society that has decided women are forbidden to show as much of their bodies as men, and in sports such as swimming or gymnastics that might reduce the comfort or practicality of what they must wear.

Ultimately, some discomfort is inevitable growing up. Not just on this matter - many students feel uncomfortable wearing shorts, or when I was a student I didn't like the blouses and gym skirts we had to wear in gym. But growing up is about overcoming fears as well. I recognise it wouldn't be normal nowadays, but if I were setting the gym uniform from scratch ignoring outside opinions, I'd probably stick with what it was back in the day in the 70s and 80s. Practicality, safety, simplicity, at the expense of some initial awkwardness I'm sure would be overcome.