Burnley Grammar School

David you confused me with your middle school memory there and your birthday being late as you said it. It made no sense to me. What do you mean you entered middle school in your 10th year because that doesn't fit with middle school age entry. If you were born in September, early in the school year you'd be 9 on entry maybe, whereas August borns would have just turned 8.

I'd imagine suddenly showering in a middle school was a bit unexpected wasn't it.

Tom says - 'I wore shorts regularly to school until I was ten or eleven unless it was cold. I literally have nothing more to say than that about it, because there is nothing worth saying about it.'


Couldn't have put it better myself.

GBBGG after your post on 20th June your one on 21st June seems to contradict yourself a bit there. ;-)

Anyway, great link to We Are The Champions. A show I loved and really strange to say this but I watched a clip from one of the latest Kaleidoscope Presentation Vaults on You Tube only on Monday in which Ron Pickering Popped up briefly at something from 1982 called The British Meat Games, a strange titled athletics event.

On the Clitheroe thread there has been discussion of a school making everyone, boys as well, wear a T-shirt when they do swimming. Seeing this show reminded me of that as all the boys are in tops throughout the programme and always were as far as I can recall it, but obviously that was so that the various teams could easily be identified from each other and nothing more than that simple explanation unlike the school that has been discussed on that other thread.

What were Lodge Farm Middle School thinking of Robbie to give that kind of access. I like the way they thank them for all the help at the end. I bet.

Yes that was the one I was thinking of Robbie. That middle school was doing things more like a comprehensive to me. I wonder if it was chosen for that reason or maybe they just did that set up as a one off for the purposes of that show. Thanks David for your answer which suggests you had a similar set up at your own middle school.

Agree with Claire and the others on that other subject too.

On shorts - I wore shorts until part way through my 2nd year @ secondary school (c1961). this is how it just happened - not at the whim of parents or after protests ... its just how it was. (And my 'norm' for BST is still shorts).

Videos - there was a TV series back in the 80s called 'We are the Champions' - if anyone wants a 'memory burst' - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S_G9vMmeucs

Relating to your last paragraph Andre is this the video that you were referring to by any chance? An old ITV school show from the early 80s about health and fitness for primary school ages placed eight months ago on these pages here. I remembered seeing it put here last autumn so it was easy to trace back. It's quite amazing actually for obvious reasons that hardly need explaining especially if watched towards the end. The pupils in it look like they could have been early secondary students and some seem quite mature for their ages I thought but the credits make it clear it was only a middle school and they all shower together after their PE with absolutely no censorship whatsoever, infact quite the opposite, quite a jaw dropping intrusion of privacy if you ask me.

The link is below and is from a long running series that went out on commercial television over many years during the 70s and 80s known as Good Health, many of these shows didn't pull their punches in other subjects either.

https://youtu.be/NRRw-k7cGJs

Claire, tedious is the kindest way of putting it. What also gets me is that when these subjects get their latest rehash for the umpteenth time they find enthusiastic responders quite fast yet in recent months we have had some teachers placing thoughtful and interesting observations on here amongst many things and they more or less get overlooked completely. What do you make of that?

I wore shorts regularly to school until I was ten or eleven unless it was cold. I literally have nothing more to say than that about it, because there is nothing worth saying about it.

Come on Tim you must have more interesting questions without igniting all that been there done that stuff yet again. For example I thought your other question on showering was reasonably decent and got you a great answer.

It's also being done to death on the Clitheroe Royal Grammar School thread as well. Tedious, isn't it.

I went to a middle school in the 1970's so can answer your last question Andre. You entered middle school in your 10th year, as my birthday was late I was nine for nearly the whole year. The middle school was quite new then and built on the same site as a high school so it shared the same PE block. We had to shower after every indoor PE lesson but outdoor games was always a double afternoon lesson and you could go straight home afterwards without changing and showering. In just about all ways middle school was more like high school than primary in the way it did things.

I agree with the latest posting from Christopher C.

It (and the wearing of shorts @ 13 or 14) has been 'done to death'.

I went to a middle school in the 1970's so can answer your last question Andre. You entered middle school in your 10th year, as my birthday was late I was nine for nearly the whole year. The middle school was quite new then and built on the same site as a high school so it shared the same PE block. We had to shower after every indoor PE lesson but outdoor games was always a double afternoon lesson and you could go straight home afterwards without changing and showering. In just about all ways middle school was more like high school than primary in the way it did things.

Dragging this back to a no underpants rule when there are over 120 pages to reference back at and the subject seems to have been dealt with from just about any angle anyone cares to mention. What's new to say about it, seriously. Some people did so, most didn't and all the explanations for the whys and wherefores have been comprehensively exhausted.

Is this meant to have been a traumatic experience for some on a par with shirtlessnesses and showering.

Tim,
We had to put up with the'no under pants rule' under our shorts at school.

Tim - depends what decade you're talking maybe on showers in school don't you think.

I can't imagine many of secondary age 11 - 16s who went to school back in the 1970s or 1980s having the luxury of deciding for themselves whether they fancied a shower or not after PE. It was all about compulsion wasn't it. You had to, sod what you thought about it, sod your privacy, sod being shy. Do it unquestioningly. Were these decades peak mandatory widespread school communal showers at close to 100% schools doing so like that?

It also makes quite a difference within those same decades whether you were a male or female in school. Boys seem like they had to shower more than girls and didn't teacher Robert recently write up a piece that suggested just this as fact. This in itself is interesting and one wonders why this difference existed as it collates to long held ancient views going far back that boys did not need to be concerned about modesty issues in any way at all, which in my opinion is a misguided broad brush old concept.

Clearly there has been something of a shift in attitude since those decades above, and the decades before those too, compared to the last couple or so. Some people who went to school back in those decades seem to look back and feel really hard done by now but I'm not sure they should feel that way.

As I think that teacher Robert said in his long piece, it is still government policy to this day that any place providing physical education to the over 11s must provide proper changing and showering facilities, which surely means that each and every senior school across the UK has workable showers to be used. Whether they do is another matter. Also, was it ever government policy in those older decades that schools should use compulsion regards showering after PE.

Didn't somebody a few months ago on here place a video link from an old programme that showed a school shower that was happening in a middle school not a secondary. That's an interesting question just how many middle schools did that because I always thought it was none at all even in the decades I've mentioned. Did anyone here ever really take showers in their middle school as young as just 8?

Tim - I was at two secondary schools where we had dedicated PE kit, i.e. top and shorts. At the first, age 10 - 15, the requirement was minimal, white top, which most of us achieved by just keeping our underwear vests on, and shorts, colour immaterial, but generally black or white cotton. At the second, age 15 - 18, white t-shirts and black rugby shorts were specified, and enforced. At neither was there any rule regarding underwear. At the first school we tended to go commando. At one point we were advised to wear some form of protection, jock-straps being mentioned, but in our innocence, none of us knew what these were, and most of us carried on blithely risking the family jewels in the interests of comfort. At the second school, a mix of jock-straps and swimming trunks prevailed, particularly for Rugby, although some went commando

There is nothing liberal about this era Tim. Even the so called liberals are nothing of the sort and seem highly intolerant of anything that challenges their view of the world they live in. Like you, I noted the contrast in that entry between what was said about school in the 70's and now. They are suffocating children in school with endless irrelevant nonsense nowadays and not nurturing genuine individuality, despite the fact that many schools nowadays just love to put a boastful soundbite motto on their websites to make themselves sound so wonderful.

The calibre of some teaching staff today leaves a lot to be desired compared to what I experienced and some are without shame activists trying to indocrinate their pupils into set ideas with a personal agenda. This is abuse, every bit as much as any of our older days teachers who may have crossed the line physically at times or with demeaning put downs.

How common was the no-underpants rule for boys in PE classes?
This rule was never imposed on us at the schools I went to, either primary or secondary.

On the same subject, how common were compulsary showers after PE as against being optional?

Nigel,
I thought we were living in the liberal era, but when I read your post that boys and girls today are made to wear blazers in class no matter the temperature I am beginning to think otherwise.
Same with the other posters mentioning that some schools now require boys to swim with tops on.
Which makes me wonder, have we made progress concerning schools or was it better in the past in our days?

Comment by: Robby on 15th June 2022 at 04:13
Craig,
Don't you think it was unfair for the girls in your class that only the boys were allowed to take their shirts off in class during the heatwave, especially considering that it was just a primary school?
Or were the girls also allowed to take their shirts off?
I don't think that this would have been a big deal for the girls at 10 years old.
In some primary schools it was also common for both boys and girls to take PE classes together in just underpants.
We didn't have this custom at our primary school but I know that some schools did.

Replying to Robby's comments above;

No I don't think it was unfair at all. It would be a big deal even at 10. I've never even thought about it actually. Age 10 is far too old to suggest girls could do the same as boys and work at school in a heatwave without tops like that. Even if they were allowed I could never see a single one choosing to do so. There are differences between boys and girls despite what some lately try to maintain. It may be quite some time ago now but looking back to 1976 when I was at school and we did things like that when the weather was unusually hot for a long period of time it just seemed almost the expected normal thing to go and do if you were a boy and were given the chance to do so. Certainly no big deal.

I don't remember much about what girls in our class made of boys being given the chance to keep cool like that but it's ages ago I might have forgotten but nothing dramatic hits me.

Every single boy in my class seemed to willingly hang their shirt on the back of the chair for the day, but only because we were told we could. I remember being told I had to put it back on on to get my dinner at lunchtime while I sat down for 20 minutes or so but taking it off again afterwards until the end of the afternoon around about 3.30pm. Many of us also walked home without our top on and probably never put it back on for the rest of the day, went back to school next day and took them off for the day again by about 10.30am at mid morning playtime break.

I suppose it might raise a few eyebrows from some people nowadays if you saw a lot of ten year olds walking out the school gates at the end of the day minus their shirts even during a long heatwave but these are really quite fond memories for me and a lovely period in time.

After school I also used to walk half a mile to the local sweet shop and thought nothing of doing that at the time to get sweets, an ice cream or lolly with my friends with none of us wearing anything on top. Completely carefree and unbothered. A shame we can't stay our 10 year old selves isn't it.

You mentioned PE lessons where kids of both sexes wore no tops. I never did that at any age but up to the age of about 6 or 7 my parents used to go to a beauty spot near home with other parents who were friends and all the children, me included, boys and girls would paddle and splash about in a shallow stream without our tops on together and think nothing of it. We would also dry off and change afterwards briefly with nothing on in front of each other. I also know there were other people nearby unconnected to us. There was nothing like the hysteria that someone might see you like that back then and yet I don't think things have fundamentally changed except in some peoples heads nowadays with how they perceive the world around us.

Remembering school in the hot summer of 1976 like Rose & Craig have done.

Because of the hot weather a number of our usual P.E lessons got turned over into a swimming lesson instead which as far as I was concerned was brilliant news. We didn't need to book the public pool as school had already got a nice small pool of its own installed which wasn't that old and we had easy instant access when our P.E teachers wanted us to use it.

The boys at my school were used to doing P.E topless generally away from the pool already because gym stipulated either a simple white vest or nothing. Most of the time we wore nothing on top.

I do also like others have said definitely know we did some lessons outside in that weather because inside was just so stuffy and that many boys, and some girls would be loosening up the regular uniform and boys allowed to completely undo the buttons on the front of our light blue shirts so they hung completely open as we worked. I am quite certain that some took them off completely for a short while too.

None of this seemed to create any problems and just seemed an obvious thing to do. I don't even remember it creating any distractions.

Nowadays this same school expects everyone to wear full blazers in the classroom and you have to ask permisssion to even take the blazer off while you work which seems excessively demanding. When I was told this by a fifteen year old daughter of a friend a couple of months ago I was astonished at the lack of freedom they are now given.

Ron: For what it's worth, our local town centre was full of shirtless bra-topped women of all ages and sizes yesterday, with not a sign of "safety-shirts" anywhere. And some of them were "randomly" tattooed in various places. Again, a sight you wouldn't have seen in the 1960s/70s.

Autre temps, autre moeurs, a they say.

In reply to John about how many people are out and about shirtless nowadays.

Well I was out this morning, in a short sleeved polo top I might add, and walked into my local co-op store behind two lads in their 20s, neither had tops on or were even carrying one in their hand incase they should need to wear one. Our local co-op fires up the air conditioning a treat in hot weather and today was no exception, so when I bumped into these two guys on my way around I heard one saying how nippy and fresh he was feeling to his mate. I had to chuckle and one noticed I think. Who in their right mind goes out like that with the intention to walk into a supermarket for pity's sake. You'd never have seen that once upon a time in say the 60s/70s. When I came out and crossed over to my local Nationwide branch there was yet another in scruffy shorts and his bare upper body with associated random tattooing across a huge stomach on view to the rest of us.

I was coming to the end of the 4th form in 1976 and Rose is accurate. Me and my mates just wore shorts as soon as we got in from school and in the holidays later in the summer. It becaame the norm for a few weeks. I remember it being just too hot to do much really active PE outdoors as well. One thing I do remember was that we actually wanted cold showers afterwards and got them too but the water in the pipes had been warmed up so much that what came out didn't even feel that cold but lukewarm. It was the same at home when we ran a bath to cool down that even the cold water seemed fairly lukewarm, but we didn't waste too much as I'm sure there was a neighbourhood standpipe near to my street at the time and there must have been some kind of water ration going on at one point. But it didn't stop school giving us cold showers though. I also remember our school gym which was often freezing cold in winter but that summer was dreadfully hot and you couldn't open the windows as much as you'd want to because of the design. Just standing about you'd be sweating and glistening over your body or drenching your top through.

Craig, I remember the summer of 1976 very well. It was my last term at Primary School, the weather was absolutely torrid for the last few weeks of term and all uniform regulations were suspended for the duration. I don't think we ever took desks and chairs outside, and we didn't have an official shirts-off policy, but we did spend more time than usual out of doors as our playground had a large grassy field with a row of mature trees along one side providing shade for lessons which didn't need desks.

Teachers on playground duty generally turned blind eyes to boys going shirt-less at break and lunch-times, but the nearest we girls came to that was either tying up the bottoms of button-front shirts in film-star mode or, for the more daring, repurposing long-abandoned cotton vests by tye-dying in school colours and then either wearing them with the hem turned up as far as we could get away with, or cutting the bottom off ditto.

Outside school, more practical rules applied. Almost all of us playing out in the estate where we lived (me included) went topless, or nearly so, from the time we got home from school until bedtime, and often until school the next morning, with almost everyone in swimwear or the shortest possible shorts. Inside the house, Mum and Dad rarely wore more than shorts, Mum adding a bra or sometimes a t-shirt. Bedding was reduced to just a cotton sheet, often only used in the cooler early hours of the morning.

It was often uncomfortable while it lasted, but fun to look back on from a distance.

Paul how many people were at this cafe where you stated that 9 out of 10 of them were not even wearing shirts today? It seems a very high percentage even accounting for such hot conditions.

I've never actually thought about that question John posed and now it will be raising my awareness in the next couple of days and through the summer. I wonder if it is true.



The boys in school always used to come out onto the playing fields for PE without shirts on in this kind of hot weather. I would be lying if I said I like to see a nice looking well maintained chap out in this weather like that maybe at a park or in the street because it means they have a high degree of self confidence which is nice in itself. I would not expect to see anyone turn up at the local library, in an office or at the shops like it though.

John, in answer to the question you pose. I've just been in my nearest park and walked there and back which is about 2.5km both ways. In the park, I would say most men were bare chest as was I. I had worn a T-shirt to walk there through the streets but once in the gate I took it off. I stopped at the cafe where I would say 90% of the men were bare chest regardless of whether they were alone or with someone.

I set off home bare chest but did put my shirt on not because of any sense that it might be expected but because my shoulders were beginning to burn and it was wise to take a precaution.

Tomorrow I will do the same but will remember to take some sunscreen along and equally tomorrow I won't be wearing underpants with my shorts because all they got was sticky and they are completely unnecessary in such warm weather.

Yes indeed, pyjamas were on the school uniform list and in the main they were very welcome. We slept in open dormitories and the windows were open no matter what the weather outside so for much of the year pyjamas were worn. At bedtime we had to undress, put blazer, pullover and trousers in our lockers or over the bedside chair and socks, shirt, vest and underpants had to go in the laundry bin so even on the coldest nights it was pyjamas only. On a very few nights in the summer term it would be warm and on those nights many did used to sleep naked, we didn't have to wear pyjamas, it was just wise to but in the morning they had to come off as you got out of bed and you then wrapped your towel around your waist to go to the washrooms where there was always a shower which was at best luke warm but usually cold - as were the ones after sports.

Robby, as a boarding school back then parents only came at the beginning and end of term if at all. Many did not have cars and so we made our way by coach from school to the station and took the train home. I can't remember my parents visiting apart from the very beginning of my time there when they came with me but it was an expensive trip as they had to stay the night in a hotel and not something they could afford to do often.

On swimming instructors, all the staff at school were men apart from two teachers - one French and one German and of course Matron and the housekeepers. They never came near the pool but of course Matron was around the dormitory at times and always present at medical inspections which happened with the school doc every year.

Is it my imagination or do you see far fewer barechested men and especially school aged boys walking around outside during hot summer heatwaves in the UK nowadays than you used to see back in the 1970's, 1980's and 1990's. Are men slowly but surely being body shamed into covering up or genuinely becoming more shy, insecure and all round self conscious about how they appear to others?

Hugh,
About your comments of swimming traditions in Victorian times, I did some quick research about it and it is true that men swam naked even on public beaches at that time.
But one must remember that swimsuits, either for men or women, did not exist at the time till later.
So women just wore modest dresses while the men and boys swam naked.
In spite of the separateness they were still in close proximity on the same beach in many places.
When local bye-laws started to be introduced slowly it forbade men to swim naked on public beaches, obviously because of several complaints by women especially if they had daughters with them.
However these laws applied only to men and boys up to about 16 were still allowed to swim and play naked on the beach in front of everyone.
As you say some women would take their daughters to these public beaches to educate them about boys. This is taken from some journal accounts and articles of the time.

Craig,
Don't you think it was unfair for the girls in your class that only the boys were allowed to take their shirts off in class during the heatwave, especially considering that it was just a primary school?
Or were the girls also allowed to take their shirts off?
I don't think that this would have been a big deal for the girls at 10 years old.
In some primary schools it was also common for both boys and girls to take PE classes together in just underpants.
We didn't have this custom at our primary school but I know that some schools did.