Hesketh Fletcher Gym Team

Between the age of 5 and 7 everyone in my class was sent out to the school hall in their pants and knickers to do PE like that. There were no tops on anybody whether they were boys or even girls and nothing on anyone's feet. This took place from 1971 until 1973 in my case and quite frankly I can scarcely believe it now when I remember back. Most of these PE lessons were taken by an old dragon who seemed to me at the time like she was 100 years old and just stood there watching us.

From the age of 11 through to 18 when you forgot your kit our teachers would give a pair of shorts and tell you to go bare top. Cross country was always ran bare top but we did other sports (football and rugby) where the teachers never hesitated in picking out a skins team or if we were exercising on the school yard.simply having the whole class go bare top.

Boys look completely natural doing gym without their tops on, girls really wouldn't at all would they.

I shared the school gym with some boys without shirts in PE when I was about twelve and found it quite embarrassing to be around so many boys like that, who I knew from class and seeing so much of them. i don't know what they thought.

I did amateur gymnastics as a schoolgirl and spent a lot of time amongst other practicing girls and some boys who sometimes did not wear tops while we were with them but I would not have wanted to be like them, for a start off it wouldn't look very pretty with some of the gymnastics we attempted although the feeling of freedom would certainly have appealed to me. In 1972 I did a school gymnastics display in a busy shopping centre concourse with other schools taking part, in a black leotard alongside boys doing gymnastics who did not wear tops.

No, girls should not be doing topless PE lessons at any age. Boys is very different and actually I think many want to do so because boys invest more importance than girls about what their bodies shape up like. My own son was one who took a keen interest in fitness and his looks, his sister doesn't share that same enthusiasm at all and never has.

Maggie.

Children like me at my first school were only ever made to do games in PE like that if we had completely forgotten to bring our PE clothes along. When it happened to somebody I remember a lot of tears and a tantrum taking place.

I am now 60 and at infants in 1970 boys and girls at the age of five and six didn't have to bring a PE kit at all, we just took everything off and did the PE class in our undies in the hall and then just stuck our things back on afterwards, quick and easy and we all changed together in the same place, so I can lay claim to having shared a topless lesson or two with boys in school for real.

Daniel I really felt for you pleading to keep your t-shirt on and being made to bare your chest on the spot and for subsequent lessons too. Your teacher should have at least compromised and allowed a vest instead.

I have no wish to cast my top aside and never have other than wearing a bikini on holiday in Spain and Portugal when I was in my 20s/30s & early 40s. There was a temptation to try topless on one of my holidays to Spain when a number of ladies around the pool area of the hotel we were staying at were topless but it didn't really appeal to me. If I had been asked to go topless in school PE that would have horrified the hell out of me I should think, even some boys have problems going there. How we look and appear is a very personal thing to each of us as individuals isn't it, and everyone should decide for themselves.

When I grew up at the start of the swinging sixties we lived in a bit of a smart neighbourhood in Surrey. I now live in Perth, Australia where young men are frequently seen happily showing off their top halves and I'd assume by doing so probably wanting people to look at them approvingly. But in my case even my own two brothers back home in Surrey would never have been allowed out at home in the road in front of the neighbours without a shirt of some sort on, never mind a daughter. My mother was something of a snob and considered boys who hung around in the road playing without shoes on their feet or a shirt on their chests to be acting like lower class persons even as children. But we were a well off family and had a small swimming pool in our large rear garden in 1965 and we were all able to bring our friends home to use it and she was more than happy in the garden for boys to be around the home wearing next to nothing but I do think that I always wore normal female swimming attire and would not have considered going topless even in the garden at home at any time and I don't think I would have had any desire to do so.

I enjoyed seeing the boys exercise with their shirts off. At middle school a good number also wore vests under their games shirts and the PE teacher would always ensured their vests came off if they were picked as skins. High school was a different matter with no tops allowed inside. One teacher in particular was known for having boys take off their cross country vests and make them exercise outside fairly regularly too.

Me and my twin brother both used to play out in the street outside the house without our tops on fifty years ago. He was always going out like that and I did too until I must have been about 7 years old. But when mum took us down the shops each week to get the groceries and dragged us along she was always happy for my brother to go along without a top in the summer if that was how he was already dressed but if I was the same I'd be sent inside to get something more to put on like a cardigan or slip on singlet top.

I very much doubt that any school would make that an actual demand Fiona. Whether they would actually allow a girl to wear one by her own choice is something else altogether. Each school has it's own unique small differences.

Reverting to Mark's question, do any schools today allow, or even specify, bra-tops or sports bras as tops for girls PE?

Don't the boys in the picture have the most wonderful bodies. They look like they do a lot of exercising. I did share gymnastics lessons in school with a group of boys when I was in a mixed secondary in the late 60's and the boys wore white shorts like these, just a bit smaller, and they wore no shirts but didn't seem to look as good as these ones do. I would not have wished to join them however, some things really are best left to the boys and men.

I actually did this at school in the seventies for real when I was six years old. In those days very young boys and girls did PE the same at our school and girls and boys took music and movement class the same too. We were too young to think anything much of it at the time. I do not know why we were not in tops but some things were easily accepted in the seventies.

Many men probably don't realise how discomforting or even painful larger girls can feel without support, so for those and I include myself there, such a proposition would never have been practical and certainly not as an adult. I would have always been relaxed about a simple sports bra without a further top over it though but in my day it was polo tops all round.

Definitely not for me, I'll leave that to the men and boys, they are designed to go without a top while women really aren't best designed to do so in physical things that move us around are we.

When I was young in the fifties I would often go to the beach with girl friends in places like Great Yarmouth, Lowestoft and Cromer and enjoy time on the beaches topless with the other girls I knew at the time. I do have pictures in black and white from 1957 and 1958 with our foursome like this at the ages of 9 and 10. I think we were with one of our parents on these visits which were day trips away. None of us were what you would consider to be tomboys. I've got lots from the back garden at the time with a couple of friends also behaving much the same as some of our brothers would have done. It did not seem wrong or unusual then.

I'd go topless in a girls class at any age, it would be different. I don't think I'd want to with boys in the same lesson though, that might make things a bit distracted wouldn't it. I think boys are lucky they can do this.

I think I would too Joanne. You are admitting you would also be unfazed sharing like that with boys. I think within minutes of such a class everyone would probably get over being in that state and accept it more than people think, and it would give a lot more confidence to everyone and break down some of these enforced barriers we create nowadays. Such days seem a long way off though. But in principle I would accept the challenge.

I'd be okay so long as all the boys were skins.

Yes Mark I would have been alright going topless in the school gym but only at a younger age, maybe not when I was 15. I probably wouldn't have even minded doing it alongside the boys but I shouldn't be saying that bit out loud should I, as long as the boys were the same.

Mark...cheeky! Yes I'd have volunteered straight away. The freedom of a bra top and not having to wear those horrible aertex shirts would have been welcome.

Mark, October 26th

A good question, but I suspect that any possibility of girls participating in PE as "skins" died with the near-universal demise of topless PE for boys

My daughter was at school around the time of the London Olympics, and the sight of female athletes competing in many disciplines in just bra-tops ansd shorts, effectively more generously cut bikinis than they were happily wearing at the beach or the pool, led her and a group of her friends to campaign, ultimately unsuccessfully, for similar sartorial freedom in PE classes. Funnily enough, when she joined our local athletics club as a teenager, all of the club outfits that she was issued with were just that - bikinis. Fine for public display the athletics track, not fine in private in the school gym.

Towards the end of her time in secondary school, about the time when the need for good sports bras for girls was starting to be recognised, my mother showed up for PE in just her bra, minus her PE shirt, and actually got complimented by the PE teacher for doing so, and although quite a lot of her class followed her example for a while, that fashion now seems to have faded too.

Question for Joanne, or any other female reader. Would you have liked a chance to go skins in the school gym too?

Hello Daniel, That sounds a pretty rough year. Thanks for explaining.

Hi Joanne,
No problem with answering your questions. Yes the teachers always picked the teams and decided which boys did the lesson as skins. As regards the teacher I mentioned before, having got on his wrong side straight away and shown I was reluctant to take my t-shirt off I suppose I shouldn't be surprised that he kept picking me to be a skin. He was that sort of character! That year I definitely found myself doing PE without a t-shirt more often than most other boys in the class and I suppose I got more used to it, but that's not the same as saying I didn't mind.
And yes I was allowed a vest for cross country and track athletics in the summer.
Stuart J - although it sounds as though we had quite different physiques, our PE teachers were clearly very similar in their general approach. Not nice to be on the receiving end of that, especially your teacher making you a skin when there was absolutely no practical reason for it.

To Adam & Daniel.

I had a similarish problem to the both of you as a boy in PE. I was constantly made to remove my top in PE which I disliked doing because I thought I was too thin. This view of myself was compounded by a PE teacher who told me I looked like I needed to eat a few good meals and toughen up. I thought he used going shirtless against me in order to show me up on purpose because I would frequently find I was in the group of people, often a small minority who were ordered to go skins and it wasn't always just for a team game either. I remember I started measuring my biceps and chest and waist for any sign I was getting a little less thin, and weighed myself hoping to put on a few pounds and was always thrilled when I had done so, but it always fell back off again. I was five foot eight tall and just over eight stone when I was fifteen. This took place when I was at school at the end of thee eighties and beginning of the nineties.