Burnley Grammar School

Re: Good Health - it surprises me that none of the pupils in that have yet searched it out and written a comment underneath, especially some of those boys, now men of course. I don't think I'd forget the day that TV came to school in those circumstances.

I agree with Hugh and Jason. I think that Robert has been unfairly criticised. When I first saw the TV programme I couldn't really see much wrong with it. I do believe that the critics have applied today's standards to the past. The answer to the question Jason asked in his first paragraph is surely an increased concern with child protection plus a touch of traditional British anxiety about nudity, which would have been absent if this conversation had taken place in those northern European countries where nudity is regarded in a more matter of fact way.

I was at a boys' grammar school in the '60s. We had a decent lot of schoolmasters who expected us to do as we were told. We didn't think we had rights so we didn't worry about them being infringed. By today's standards it was tough, but having to get on with things without making a fuss made us resilient. As for communal nudity, we quickly got used to it and didn't pay much attention to each other, which helped me to be less self-conscious about my skinny body.

If I had been mistreated my parents would have been the first to complain; but if I had fussed about nude showers my kindly father would have just laughed. But then he had a wartime soldier's perspective of what did and did not matter in life. In retrospect, how right he was.

Robert Coulson - Teacher 1967-2009 on 30th June 2022 at 23:52

Thank you for your informative post, you have encapsulated perfectly what I was trying to convey and done a much better job.

I think too many here don't understand the scale of change that came about starting initially in the late 1980s - remember back then, no one believed that children really were abused in any context at all. I can remember being very sceptical when I first heard of doctors finding cases and that was the Cleveland case in 1987 where there was much wrong with the diagnosis and it was found after a judicial investigation that the case was flawed however it remained around and people became more alert to the possibilities.

To suggest that anyone really had a concept of child abuse in the 1960s, 1970s and first half of the 1980s is living in cloud cuckoo land, it just wasn't true.

When I moved from the navy to general practice, an old and very experience GP who is long dead told me that a lot of children were 'shirkers' and very few parents had anything but their child's best interests at heart and teachers the same. If he had a lad in front of him who was shirking, he wasn't averse to writing 'six of the best' on the prescription and handing it to the lad's father. I suspect on most occasions he did that it's what happened.

There would have been a few who were not well motivated, parents, teachers and strangers but they were a few. I doubt many PE teachers even noticed naked lads being naked - to try to explain, when you work in any environment you get used to it and for anyone working in healthcare, bare flesh is quite normal. You really don't notice after a while and I would imagine in the world of sport it's very much the same, you just get used to it.

So while there are those who might be uncomfortable, you are in a small minority, most would really not be that bothered and most would not have the problem you are verbalising. Try please to get used to that idea.

Harry, i like your final paragraph. Brings back memories of going to the fields during the school holidays. Taking lunch with us . A group of mixed aged boys stripping of and jumping into the nearby lake without a stitch on, and not worrying about who was around at the time.
As far as I know our parents thought that as we were all together there was "safety in numbers" and no one ever did bother us.

I'll go along with everything Robert said. Knock me back if you like for saying it. I saw nothing wrong with that programme either. Nudity was always expected in schools as part of the whole P.E regime at senior level and even some primary levels as some have pointed out just recently. When did it start to become such a big deal and more importantly why did it? I'd see no reason to put up with lads getting worked up over a camera taking a few seconds of film. I don't think the mere fact of nudity in itself should preclude boys from doing what they are told in that kind of situation. It's all above board. I'd make them do it, not offer choices and start negotiating. They're in school and it would actually be a good hard life lesson to learn that you have to do things in life that you don't want to or that make you uncomfortable.

I always thought having a shower after P.E was a good physical education in itself actually. It gave me the opportunity to see others and notice that while we are all basically much the same we also have differences in our make up that are all quite normal. One thing I've noticed is that nobody ever dares admit to like using the school communal shower as an experience, so let me be the first to break that taboo, and no I'm not same sex orientated.

Any teacher of any subject, not just the physical one, who was indifferent to what his/her pupils thoughts and anxieties were should simply not be in the profession and would be a bloody fool.

I don't think Robert you are that fool. I think you are writing in more general terms of back in the day rather than a personal own view but clarification would be ideal either way.

Robert Coulson - thank you for your helpful and accurate contribution. Clearly both you and Hugh were not only around in those dim and distant days as was I but you both actually remember how things were then. It is sad that some people still want to judge times gone by by todays standards.
I, too, have often wished we could combine the best of previous eras with the best of today though I'm not sure how much would come from either.

Our teacher contributor on here said the following;

"The concept of personal privacy or private space will not have even come into the equation, neither will the individual personal thoughts of any of the boys to any great degree."

You are effectively saying the youngsters had no voice then by implication, even if asked to undertake something so significant revolving around their personal selves, their privacy and how they would be seen well beyond the school gates, in other schools and homes around the country.

In your workplace do you think your own privacy and personal space and thoughts were irrelevant too? No they were not as an adult so why should they be as a youngster. Surely that should be even more important, not less or non existent.

The same words in the same post yet people can often interpret what they read quite differently. I refer to Robert's excellent last contribution, and the belligerent tone of Christy's response to it.

First of all, who can argue with such direct honesty.

I didn't read Robert as saying he'd actively force anybody to do anything. All I read was that he would have expected the class to do so without making a fuss and follow his instruction and as he said 'just get on with it'. But that's not the same as assuming he would have forced any boys in his class to take a filmed shower for a TV show if they objected. Of course he wouldn't even in the dark ages as some think of anything before about 1990.

I may be quite wrong here but I think if he had some in class who were very unhappy he would have set them aside completely. If the whole class had the same view then the programme makers would simply have had to do something else and drop that part. No film maker was going to want under age subjects placed into such a situation they were very unhappy about and I'm sure no teacher would either, even in the days of the 70's and 80's.

I hope I'm not being naive in saying that. Perhaps Robert would like to agree with me and clarify my reading of his comments. If he comes back and says he would have compelled a class of his to provide the kind of shower footage from Good Health against their will if some or all had resisted it then I condemn that without a doubt.

Another thing worthy of a mention is that back then in school we did all seem to just get on with it a lot of the time and we did bow to authority figures and accept what they said to us unquestioningly even if many of us quietly to ourselves didn't like something. The days when we respected teachers, police, doctors. Looking at the Lodge Middle School video of them all I'm sure that's how it was with that lot, they got their heads down and got on with it and trusted their teachers. There are probably quite a few other examples out there of that kind of thing, undiscovered or forgotten about.

Very many years ago when every summer seemed to go on forever and the sun always seemed to shine brightly, or so our memories think, I would go along to a nearby weir close to home with a group of others, sometimes up to a dozen or so, some a bit older, some a bit younger, some siblings, ages around 8 to 14 and we'd kick everything off and pile it up and go bathing and splashing about in this weir with absolutely nothing on. Just local lads from our area, not even all at the same schools or anything. It was actually rather a dangerous weir but good fun. On a couple of occasions we got shouted at to all get out by whoever looked out for the area but the next day would often go back and do the same. We couldn't wait to get our stuff off and jump in. It was a public area, anyone could see us. We didn't get in trouble for being naked but for doing something in a slightly unsafe place. It was the kind of thing I always thought most boys were all about, having fun and not giving a damn.

Robert Coulson - Teacher 1967-2009 on 30th June 2022 at 23:52

Thank you for your candid appraisal of times past, it's what I remember more or less exactly.

Again, I see snowflakes who want to apply today's standards have already started whining and whinging about how things used to be. Give up and save your faux outrage, you can't change the past and it wasn't as bad as you would like to portray it. We grew up, healthy, happy lads.

Quelle surprise!

It's just ex-teachers proving everything we thought about some of them. He proves the words in my last post perfectly.

It is what he's saying though. Troubling isn't it.

It's not teachers like Coulson who are on telly like that though is it, repeated ad infinitum and now online.

Let me get this right, I've read it through a couple of times, is this teacher (Robert Coulson) actually saying he'd have mandated (let's just say forced) his own class to do the same as in that schools health tv show during those years. Just hang on here a minute, you're employed to provide an education, a PE lesson or whatever else you teach, not to provide real life stripped off showering extras for tv companies and then tell the kids they have to comply (naked on tv!) to some director/producers wishes over and above the education you are there to provide. You'd be exceeding your permitted duties by a mile and have no right to make such demands. Diabolical! If you'd done that to me against my wishes I'd be up for taking some retrospective legal action believe me. I don't think any of the boys in the tv show were forced to do anything they didn't like and I'm sure they all chose to take part like they did. I just cannot get my head around the prospect they might have been forced by that teacher into the showering scenes.

Well at least you have been very frank and forthright with your opinion Robert and in so many ways nothing about what you have said really comes as any great surprise to me and probably doesn't to many others even though when you write it down in the way you have it does seem almost too brutally honest in parts. But there is no point sanitising the past to spare current snowflakey ideas, we have to confront it honestly.

It rather proves the point that was made by Tom on 26th June when he said - "The short 'Good Health' documentary showcases a very stark reality from school back then which was that boys privacy was more or less irrelevant and of no consequence whatsoever to anybody at all. It literally lays that philosophy bare for all to see."

A couple of my own PE teachers came into my mind as I read your words Robert and I feel they were very much like you with the style you wrote about things, me being a late 80's teenage schoolboy. With a couple of my own PE teachers after the age of 13 I always felt they didn't treat me as an individual but just as one of many the same, just another brick in the wall as the song goes, expecting the same outcomes from us all no matter what kind of people we were. Fodder just being processed through the system and spat out the other end.

I'm very familiar with the old ITV/ATV Good Health educational series which was a very long running schools strand over many years from the 1970's until the 1990's on dozens of different topics. I think it switched across to Channel 4 in the later years. Another one was Scene which also ran for a similar length of time and tackled many difficult issues over a similar kind of parallel time frame.

There has been a lot of discussion about the one particular series subject featuring health, fitness and body issues. I took note of you Graham and respect your own professional opinion. But I'd like to add mine which will diverge from what appears a majority consensus here.

There was nothing in the Fit & Healthy edition of Good Health that I think anyone should be concerned about. I include within that the detailed showering and brief full frontal male nudity that was shown. That would not have been a problem for anyone in authority some 40 years ago. As long as I knew what to expect and had been told beforehand I would have not have been concerned by such filming taking place with proper supervision. The school would have given permission to film probably with reference at governor level in some way. Loco parentis has been mentioned and that's a very important point. I would not have expected any direct parental consent to be presumed or even likely. Yes, really I would not. In the school I would have expected the class to take part without too many questions, or volunteers if asked for. If for example the director had wished to run some shots of boys showering like in the Good Health piece I would not have thought it unreasonable and would have expected any relevant boys asked to take part in it to do so without making a deal of it or whining over it. In essence, even involving a film crew coming into school to film the full PE standard through to the collective peers fully unclothed showering with each other I would have expected them to just get on with it and do as they were told, yes even in those circumstances. I'm sure that will be what happened in the video that so many have spoken about here. The concept of personal privacy or private space will not have even come into the equation, neither will the individual personal thoughts of any of the boys to any great degree.

Do I think the boys being broadcast showering was treating them badly, quite honestly I don't. It was a perfectly normal safe situation with nothing to be ashamed of. I don't think they should have any complaints. Would I have allowed my son to take part like that, well I would have not raised an objection. At that time, remember that bit. It's important.

How dreadful I can here a few saying. But remember I'm saying this as it would have been in 1973 or 1983. It would not have been the same come 2003. The millennium really did fire up changes along with the Blair Government of the time so that the school (and national) landcape of Thatcher's Britain in 1987 was transformed by the time Blair was out just two short decades later in 2007 not long before I left.

Much of the old school's television should now be well regarded as a significant historical reference point to the times they were made, show strands like Scene and Good Health plus so many others that could be considered a cultural reference point.

I often find myself strongly conflicted about which school eras were the better ones. Each has their own positives and negatives. Speaking honestly I have no problem with the ways I described from earlier years and just wish we could take the best of back then with the best of now.

Bernard quote - 'There are those who find it difficult to understand just how different things were 40 or 50 years ago.'

I agree, I'm only 40 myself, things feel very different from just 25 in school, 20 or even only 10 years back to me and I bet you all agree on that too, but just a minute, what about people like Graham, a self confessed teacher starting from about 50 years ago then, does he not know too or has he just forgotten. To me it seems like those who agree with you are the sensible ones whilst anyone with a differing experience or perspective is implied as being not so sensible.

Two rather good comments by Graham and Hugh back to back I thought. I also liked Rick's long one about his middle school and Greg2's about filming.

Thankyou Hugh for responding, just caught it and am happy to answer with a resounding no to my own question. Yourself? The "extra" scenes for want of a better way of putting it were not required in any educational way to serve the points the documentary was making. Wholly innocent yes, but it still looked a bit gratuitous to me.

Answering the other direct question of Ed's, not a chance would I have consented to such a thing as a parent back in 1980 or so, a year I myself had not long left school myself and not too far from becoming a father. Hand on heart would anyone on here seriously admit as a parent they'd be willing to knowingly consent to full PE showering and changing room nudity being filmed and broadcast in that scenario, even at the fresh end of the 80's, irrespective of the perceived educational value and narrow school tv remit.

We have actors paid fortunes who refuse to do certain things in front of the cameras, yet you see films like this and it feels like the boys were just thrown into it without a great deal of thought and possibly choice, and all for nothing monetary and no repeat fees that's for sure. I noticed that the other clip that was posted from another one of those shows mentioned that those kids were from a thetare group or something, so young child actors but the notes at the end of the PE edition made it clear those ones were the real boys and girls at that school.

I'm the guy who a few weeks ago had a discussion with Alan about the school doctor and circumcision where I asked him if he was a zealot. My school doctor suggested I needed to have it, persuaded my parents who then did it to me at ten years old when I didn't want to but they went with the doctor over my wish. My parents consented to that and I moaned like hell about them a few weeks ago on here. They are still alive. What about in this case if the parent had consented to their child being part of filming but the child did not wish to take part, especially on discovering the nature of some of it, what then?

I'm only bringing this up as a debating point because it is one worth having, not to come across as some kind of prissy prude who doesn't realise that times used to be different and all that, I know, I'm 61, I was there and know first hand how things seemed to be with kids in school sometimes struggling to find a voice against authority and all that.

Hugh - many thanks for your sensible and well thought out comment. There are those who find it difficult to understand just how different things were 40 or 50 years ago. I never saw a p.e. teacher shower with the boys but I can well imagine that it was normal practice in some schools and that it was not a problem. Boys generally just accepted what was required of them and got on with things without a fuss - indeed, they would not have been aware that there was anything to make a fuss about.
I was, like most boys, somewhat apprehensive about showering together but soon found out that there really wasn't a problem. As for practices which I did not experience - I would not dismiss them just because I did not experience them or because they wouldn't happen now. People may have been a little too accepting in the past but I think the pendulum has swung too far the other way now.

Regards the ATV Good Health thing.

It's all so easy talking about other peoples sons dispassionatley like this when talking consent and all it entails. So let's get personal here.

Another straight question from me too.

Would anyone here be relaxed enough to consent to their own son being filmed naked in the school showers like the Good Health video showed if you knew that was the likely outcome on screen. Anyone, even in that foreign country known as 1970's/1980's Britain?

James M on 29th June 2022 at 17:35

Perhaps you should answer your own question first before asking others.

I merely talked about best interests and implied vs. informed consent. I didn't say anything was right or wrong.

Okay Hugh so that was a well written great read you put up here, thanks for taking the time with it. So I just scanned back to see what all the fuss is about and watched the full 15 minute video in question.

The general changimg room scene fair enough and we know it's all educational based, but.......

Simple question, you're back in the 80s now. Q - Is it okay to stick the camera directly into the showers and film the boys in school full frontal exposure? Yes or no.

I sound like an interviewer asking a politician there don't I. Try not to give the typical politicians answer. Many thanks.

I don't think he was applying today's standards to yesterday was he Hugh, he said he'd not have done some of those things at the time.

Spencer on 28th June 2022 at 03:00

Gender discrimination didn't exist back then!

Girls generally got away more lightly than boys, my school was a boys school, my sister went to a girls school. The worst punishment they got was a detention or lines or the like. We got the cane. They had shower cublicles, we had communal showers. It's just how things were.

At home in trouble my sister might be sent to her room or occasionally if my mother was really cross she might get a couple of slaps across her legs, my mother dealt with all discipline for my sisters. My brother and I got the cane from my father always on our bare bottoms.

There was no comparison but no one called it discrimination!

Graham Butterfield on 28th June 2022 at 19:07

If I may say, I think you are applying today’s standards to times past.

I base my comments on my time working until retirement as a doctor. First, as I’ve recounted before here as a medic in the Royal Navy and then for many years up until I retired a couple of years back as a G.P.

You comment that while you would have welcomed the making of the film in question you would not have allowed the changing room scene under any circumstances. First, I would question whether this would have been left up to you or whether it would have been a decision made over your head for you to comply with. I suspect the latter. Second, you talk about ‘best interests’. The concept of ‘best interests’ only started to be addressed in UK law around 2005, before that it didn’t really exist as a formal concept but acting in ‘best interests’ is now enshrined in law. To talk about taking action on this score in the 1960s and 1970s is way ahead of time as the concept really didn’t exist. Even now young people do not enjoy the rights of adults but now you must be deemed to act in their interests alongside a number of other duties and responsibilities including due care and attention.

Equally, informed consent was not a concept that was paid much attention to until the mid-1990s. Even for things where people had to sign on the line there was little explanation and in many cases we dealt with what was termed implied consent. So for instance, if a child was sent to school there was implied parental consent and the school acted in loco parentis and within that they were free to do as they saw fit to educate a child. It’s quite possible the parents of the lads in the film knew nothing about it until it happened or they may have been told a film crew would be in the school, had my father been told what was happening he would have told me to get on with it as most did back then. There was no written agreement back then and in most cases I doubt there is now, it’s more likely to be the terms and conditions of business from a private school. Back when I was at school, the headmaster, acting in loco parentis was entitled to cane me when he saw fit without reference to anyone and he did on several occasions so to talk about consent being informed at that time is nonsense. That of course would be illegal now, never mind requiring consent.

When I was a medic in the navy there was barely such a thing as informed consent except perhaps for surgery when it wasn’t an emergency. By virtue of being there, men implied their consent to whatever happened and they were certainly never asked whether they minded or not and from a medic’s point of view that included things like having thirty or so men lined up, naked, for physical exams which were intrusive and certainly not personal. As a recruit I had to join the line up too on several occasions, no one ever asked me if I minded or whether I would like to be examined in private or whether I would like to keep my underpants on for 95% of it.

Things about consent began to change in the mid-1990s largely on the back of court cases where people rightly talked about outcomes they had never been advised of prior to surgery and the process became much more thorough than it had ever been and over time that has rolled into all aspects of treatment including general practice. On a personal level, I opted a while ago not to have some surgery and live with a level of debility because I thought the risks of the surgery, explained very thoroughly by a consultant, outweighed the benefits. In the past, I would probably only have been told about the benefits and the risks would have barely been mentioned if at all.

To give an example of how consent has move on that some of the men who post here might identify with (I suspect many are of my age and a bit older) you visit your G.P. and complain of ‘waterworks problems’ including slow flow, getting up at night more than once and more frequency during the day than you might have had previously. They are symptoms of an enlarged prostate, very common once you are over fifty.

I know your symptoms can be eased by prescribing a class of drug called an alpha blocker, (hands up here all who take Tamsulosin? ;-) I explain the working of the drug to you and that I think it will help, suggest you take it for four weeks and report back. I go to prescribe it and immediately before I can do that a message will pop up on the screen saying ‘rectal exam required’ when I acknowledge that it will then immediately ask have I explained what is involved and obtained informed consent to do it and again I have to click a box to say yes and then I have to click a further box on completion noting anything untoward I found before the prescription can be issued so such is now how much consent is required. None of this would have been required when I was first a G.P. and certainly not as a medic in the navy where thirty lads would be told to ‘turn around and bend over’ without even being told what to expect. So consent is now informed but it was implied.

I would also add in response to what you wrote that I found the earlier posts of the men concerned credibly and they rang true with what I remember and I can certainly remember our P.E. teachers did shower with us, there was no other facility for them to use and particularly if you had the last lesson of the day as P.E., they would be getting cleaned up ready to leave too. I didn’t think it was abnormal in any way. There were usually about sixty boys and three or four the P.E. teachers in the showers, no harm was done.

There was a whole list of things we were not allowed at school and cameras was one of them but who had a camera back then? Many of the things you couldn’t have were relatively innocent. I remember hearing on the radio one morning about a competition in a newspaper called ‘The Sun’ which I thought was interesting. It wasn’t a paper we ever had at home so on the way to school I bought a copy. Another lad who was older saw me and asked to borrow it, I hadn’t even opened it but passed it on, intending only to look at it when I got home that night. He was caught with it and it was traced back to me. Having bought it was the cause of one of my visits to the headmaster for the cane! I never got my paper back and equally never bought another copy but the six stripes across my bottom made me the class hero in the showers later that day.

I would have been absolutely delighted if a television company had made an approach and wished to document health issues at any of the schools while I worked at them doing Phys.Ed. I would have seen it as a very positive idea and welcomed them. I would have been more than happy to have been a part of the on screen discussion and explanations and there would have been no obvious concern about observing a class going about the normal daily activity of a Phys.Ed lesson in whichever indoor or outdoor activity they wished to observe, or some of the demonstrations given in the way they were. But I would not have allowed the changing room shower to be filmed in that way under any circumstances and cannot quite understand how that happened in the way it did because I do not think doing so was in the best interests of the participants of that school and would not have been in any other one either. To me it makes no difference that they were primary school under twelves pre-puberty. All children deserve respect and adult care. As others have previously pointed out, it would not just have happened like that, it would have taken the agreement of rather a lot of people beforehand. Infact everybody except the participants themselves who probably did do just as the were asked to do I'm afraid to say. It is quite possible the school did not offer the children involved the opportunity to give full informed consent, even when adults did on their behalf.

Long before the iPhone and instant photos and videos on demand which are now so prevalent I recall a small instamatic style camera being found beside a sports bag in one of our school changing rooms and having to report it as we had no idea why the pupil had come into school with the camera that day and needed to find out. It turned out to be legitimate but no chances were taken that the camera might be used inappropriately.

The only time photography was allowed was with parents coming into the summer Phys.Ed sports competitions. From the nineties onwards you would see the occasional camcorder brought along by a father maybe but these were not openly encouraged, or specifically discouraged either.

If I can just go back a few weeks ago to something else I read surrounding teacher training from someone who said they had done so back in the 1960's and pointed to some earlier comments they made. Mine was in the first half of the 1970's and things must have changed somewhat to put it mildly. It was stated that in training Phys.Ed teachers were sometimes encouraged to use school showers alongside their pupils in order to keep tabs on them. This is completely false and a packet of total nonsense, no such methods would ever have been instilled for trainee Phys.Ed teaching. I still know old colleagues even older than me who were trained in the 1960's.

Some quite good discoveries there Lance. I'm keen to see some more of those if they are around. Generally speaking programmes, even for children, were quite hard hitting at times in the past. They chose to present genuine matter of fact reality as it was without dressing it up in some kind of palatable fashion to avoid whatever sensibilities might be out there with the viewer, children or adults alike.

Greg2;

My sister and I attended the same school from the age of twelve upwards. I was only a year and a bit younger than her. She once told me she and girls never showered in the school, they were available but untouched. Yet at the same establishment I got no say in the matter and I showered almost all PE classes because I had to mandated until I was fifteen. Why. Gender discrimination surely?

Comment by: Tom F on 26th June 2022
The short 'Good Health' documentary showcases a very stark reality from school back then which was that boys privacy was more or less irrelevant and of no consequence whatsoever to anybody at all. It literally lays that philosophy bare for all to see.

The above is so true isn't it.^

School governors, the head teacher, the PE teachers, the adults in the production and broadcaster, and all the parents, the whole lot thought nothing of full on filming of boys, their pupils, their sons, in the school showers that would then be transmitted widely on a probable repeat for a few years ahead. It's also worth remembering that there were only the three TV channels in the UK at the time so even daytime shows for schools probably got a decent sized non school audience looking in on them.

That PSHE infodoc style show had a familiar habit of doing this with boys. Here is another example from the same time when they followed a youngster with spina bifida fly-on-the-wall style in an edition called Still One Of The Family. Close the start the cameras are in the bathroom filming him struggle to get in the bath.

https://youtu.be/i9EeVC2T1Vo

Here is another in the same series, this one a handful of years later in the same decade. This one is all about cleaning, again, and ends up with uncensored boys in the showers again and even a mixed bathtub of boys and girls too. All under the light hearted guise of good fun and education. Amazing what you could get away with in the name of education in a way.

https://youtu.be/FnDycs_9cg4

There seems to have been a bit of a pattern here. The producer on all three was Philip Grosset. Interesting.

I've had one of those "never realised that" moments reading this at the age of 52.

I was a Ravensdale Juniors kid from 78-82 and from the very moment I began there it was regular showering as part of our P.E set up, so that's long before my 9th birthday. It's never crossed my mind that was unusual at that age. It was a quick - 2mins I reckon - in and out job, no clothing at all, starkers as the day wer were all born. All quite small really with room for about 8 at most so some would have to wait. I cannot for the life of me remember being bothered by it at that age but I can certainly note the anxieties doing the same when I went up to the next school when I hit the change and hormones and all that goes with that time of life.

Tony on 25th June 2022 at 02:04

I'm not sure you can have a decent shower unless you are naked! For me and we are all different, it didn't bother me after the first couple of times after all, by then we had all seen each other naked and there was nothing to learn and nothing to hide. Others may have been more uncomfortable but I really wasn't bothered. That it was compulsory didn't really rate either, lots of things were compulsory at school and I'd much rather have had a communal shower with other lads than eaten some of the school dinner slop that we had to eat every day whether we liked it or not.

As for the gym now, yes, other men of all ages use the showers. I don't take that much notice of who does and who doesn't and I'm not there at the busiest times in the evenings but during the day it's unusual if there are not 10-12 guys showering.