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Eleven plus
How did it all begin? Everyone had to fill in the form before sitting the 11
Plus and the only optional answers were to the question in which candidates
listed the schools to which they wanted to attend. Whitgift and John Trinity
seemed far out of reach to a New Addington boy in a class of over 50 pupils at
Fairchildes Junior School, therefore it was either John Ruskin or Selhurst
Grammar. Ruskin was nearer but there was never going to be anything other than
one choice, because Ruskin played football and Selhurst played rugby.
There were three exams and there was also an interview, somewhere
near West Croydon, in which I remember Mr. "Joe" Lowe asking me if I’d ever been
abroad and the other board members laughing when I replied, “yes, Wales”. Mr.
Lowe didn’t laugh, which I should have taken as a sign that he didn’t appreciate
wise-cracking, working-class upstarts. Many years later my youngest sister,
Frances, while working for Croydon Council in the Education Department, looked
up the 11 Plus results for boys in Croydon in 1959; I’d come 100th. I would love
to have seen the interview report.
My early days
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JB and his son
at Selhurst Park |
Hewitt’s for the uniform (the shop is still there, an anachronism in the 2000s).
The satchel. The pens. Ink. Big round and worn old pennies for bus fares. The
early interest in collecting bus numbers. Not long after the 1959 entrants had
crept into the playground a new series of "Crackerjack" started, Crystal Palace
had started their second season in the “new” Fourth Division and, after watching
the football results on Grandstand, a Saturday evening on the box was always the
"Lone Ranger," "Garry Halliday," "Bronco" or "Laramie," "Juke Box Jury" (“before
a young audience” noted the Radio Times) and "Dixon of Dock Green".
There weren’t many boys going to John Ruskin from New Addington and
I don’t recall it being a particularly fun time (unlike starting at primary
school). Homework was the biggest shock, especially for subjects which seemed to
have no relevance for 11-year-old boys. In hindsight, the lack of enthusiasm
amongst some of the teachers probably had a lot to do with an early antipathy
towards Latin and French from which I never recovered. Homework also played
havoc with watching children’s TV; "Blue Peter" had been running since 1958 so
it was essential watching on a Thursday (along with the aforementioned
"Crackerjack," which introduced a new entertainer, Ronnie Corbett).
"Whirlybirds" and "Noggin the Nog" made the start of the weekend palatable.
Today, it seems ironic that the TV programmes made more of an impact on my first
year at John Ruskin than most of the teachers. Mr. Hancock was the sole
exception, because he was the form teacher; as for the rest, I have no
recollection of any of the academic teachers in the first year. Sport was
different because I had aspirations to play football; in reality they were
delusions but Messrs Graham, Smith and Hasler made games, how should I put it,
“interesting”.
The good, the bad and the ugly
"School days are the best years of your life"... discuss. There are many who
would agree that the teachers make the biggest impact on the success or
otherwise of our school days. I would like to highlight some of the good, the
bad and the ugly teachers who made so much difference to life at John Ruskin.
The first of the Good teachers was my class teacher in the second year, Mr.
Crowe, who was also our English teacher. He introduced us to the poems and short
stories of D. H. Lawrence; he also made poetry interesting and I associate my
first experience of other writers from 2C days. Mr. Murray is the second Good
teacher because he awakened and developed my interest in history that has
remained to this day; more on him anon. There were other Good teachers who never
taught me but who made positive impressions, Mr. Cracknell being the prime
example. My last Good teacher is Mr. Tucker, who was only at John Ruskin for two
years but that coincided with my two years of economics in the sixth form. Not
only did he introduce many of us to The Guardian newspaper but also to a
rigorous approach to learning. Along with Mr. Murray he provided moral and
physical support in the 1966 General Election in New Addington, part of the
Croydon South constituency, the Labour Party candidate overturning a substantial
Conservative majority.
The Bad; where to begin? Mr. "Beaky" Cornwell has been immortalised
by Derek Smith’s careful collocation of "Beaky’s"
sarcastic
quips which we roared and hooted at so inflaming him even more. Mr. "Joe"
Lowe put me off the works of John Ruskin for life; that Code of the Guild of St
George seemed like a manifesto for an intellectual British National Party. But
the baddest of the baddies was the Welsh dragon who made "Beaky" look like one
of Catullus’s virgin maidens. Mr. "Rhino" Rees was the only teacher who really
frightened me, in particular when he was ill-treating other boys: who would be
next for the ear twist or the face shoved into the wall or banged into the desk.
And the Ugly? The Eli Wallach of Upper Shirley Road? Please step
forward Mr. "Smutty" Smith, the terror of the Oaks Road playing fields and the
man who thought nothing of handing out impossible punishments. My favourite
"Smuts" story comes from the beginning of my fifth year when, along with a
motley bunch of others who had failed to make the grade in the emergency 5U the
previous year, I listened to "Smuts’" proclamation prior to his first Maths
lesson. He spoke quietly and softly, and you could have heard a pin drop (and
known in which room it had dropped). The world seemed to hold its breathe as he
spoke. He told us that he had been teaching maths O-Level for 25 years [long
pause] and in all that time [even longer pause] only one boy had failed [pause
long enough for your stomach to remind you of what you’d had for breakfast] and
he’d emigrated to Australia. True or not, it worked; in the summer of 1964 every
one of us passed, and a grade C for me was easily the highest mark I’d achieved
in five years of mathematics at John Ruskin.
Poetry in motion
D. H. Lawrence had one period of paid employment in his life, teaching at
Davidson Road School in Croydon. Perhaps it was that connection which made
Lawrence so much more interesting than some of the other poets studied (at the
time we were unaware of the greater connection, between Lawrence and Mr. McLeod,
a former headmaster, documented
elsewhere on this
site). However, there is no doubt that Mr. Crowe’s enthusiasm for Lawrence’s
poetry and his enthusiasm for English literature in general rubbed off on many
of us. Close behind Lawrence were Shakespeare and Orwell, and behind them … but
I digress. Mr. Crowe was enthusiastic about his subject; also enthusiastic was
Mr. Murray who believed that history was not only learning who the kings and
queens had been but also how and why things happened, and learning about British
history from other countries perspectives. Famously I remember his
recommendation that we read French writer Maurice Druon’s novels set in the
period we studied for A-Level history.
Sixth-form favourites
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JB at Chekhov's
grave, Moscow |
As we moved on up the school some doors closed (no more chemistry or physics!)
while others opened. Geography field trips were for those prepared to labour in
the classroom under Mr. Peacock. In return we escaped to such exotic locations
as Kemsing (Kent) and Slapton Ley (Devon); unfortunately Mr. Peacock accompanied
us to Kemsing and we played hide and seek with him (we hid in public houses
while he searched for us). One task involved checking what was growing or to be
found on each square of a squared off map of the locale; it should have been a
day’s work but our group finished the task in 15 minutes by climbing up the
North Downs and using binoculars to identify what was on each location.
Emboldened by our success in spending nearly three hours in two different pubs
we gathered together the rest of the party to spend an hour in the pub nearest
to the youth hostel in which we were staying, which is where Mr. Peacock finally
caught up with us. He demanded that the landlord be found and witness Peacock
asking each of us in turn how old we were; needless to say none of us were 18.
The Upper Sixth trip to Slapton was a more adventurous occasion, as it involved
a week at a field study centre with other schools and didn’t involve Mr.
Peacock. Messrs Byford, Poole, Rayner and Strelczuk set new records in cider
drinking and paid the price with one of the worse headaches I’ve ever had.
The mock elections: remember them? I wanted to be the Labour Party
candidate in 1964 but Mr. Murray had already agreed someone else for the part so
we thought it might be fun if I ran as the Plaid Cymru/Welsh Nationalist
candidate. Fun? More like hell, especially from "Rhino" Rees, who took it upon
himself to break up the very rowdy meetings as we discussed such major issues as
to whether the four Welsh football clubs in the English Football League should
be expelled in the event of Welsh secession. The result? It’s in the
school magazine!
Ave atque vale
Mr. Lowe’s attitude towards me changed when the A-Level results came through and
instead of Ds and Es I came up with As and Bs. I re-applied for university and
worked for a year, an early gap year but without the travel. The highlight, not
necessarily for its pleasurable working experience, was six months as a ward
orderly on a surgical ward at Mayday Hospital.
Nothing at Ruskin, especially educationally, could have prepared me
for the rigour of sociology at Sussex; geography at Durham, my second choice,
probably would have been much easier. Sussex was near the centre of the Swinging
Sixties and the academic line was, if you wanted to study, fine, if not, also
fine. There were no lectures, no more than two tutorials a week, with the
occasional seminar, but we were expected to read and research extensively and
write thoroughly with due regard for the English language. No-one looking over
your shoulder as at Ruskin; in hindsight some of our time at Ruskin could have
been spent more usefully learning about what to expect at university (plenty of
the younger teachers who could have helped there). Perhaps some of the teachers
could see the changes sweeping England and had done what they could to open our
minds outside the demands of the examination syllabi; to question the status
quo. Perhaps that’s what they wanted to do at school, challenge Lowe’s status
quo; perhaps it really was Mr. Cracknell who set the agenda once Mr. Lowe had
retreated to his study to peruse his “borrowed” Ruskin memorabilia.
I like to think that teachers such as Tucker, Murray and Crowe gave
us a better start than we appreciated at the time; somewhere there’s a picture
of me snipped from the Daily Express, an outraged headline above an
article fulminating against Sussex students (we were burning the US flag again
in protest against the Vietnam war, so Mr. Murray would have approved). The
three years at Sussex came to an end far too quickly and while my thesis on
football hooliganism was lauded my third-class degree was just about right; I
hadn’t had Mr. Smith around to ensure that I passed statistics, which would have
given me a II:2. But, and it’s a very big but, as time passes it’s not Sussex
for which I get nostalgic, it’s the idea of Ruskin and the solidity of a
collective memory.
What happened next
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JB in Chernobyl |
And afterwards there was an institution prepared to accept me for a postgraduate
course and I moved effortlessly into librarianship and a long and a productive
career in the British Library. Not quite to the top, but near enough to get a
nose bleed from time to time. Plenty of highlights that most of the teachers
would have been proud of I’m sure: the last but one person responsible for
running the (old) Round Reading Room of what is once again the British Museum;
running the Newspaper Library and bringing in a £5million lottery grant; taking
the lead for the six UK and Ireland legal deposit libraries in ensuring that our
interests were met during the passage of the Legal Deposit Libraries Act 2003,
which extended the legislation to electronic publications (the first piece of
legislation in this area since 1911); continuing to work with politicians from
all the major parties, which remains one of the highlights of my work today. The
interest generated by studying the geography of the Soviet Union in the sixth
form has never gone away, and I count myself as fortunate to have travelled
there many times, initially for work more recently for pleasure. One highlight
was being in Moscow during the abortive 1991 coup, watching the tanks roll in
then partying in the Kremlin as the coup was toppled, and another visiting
Chernobyl in the winter of 2004. And sometimes I put pen to paper, mostly
professional (sometimes translated into other languages), though increasingly
for fun in football fanzines, both print and electronic.
Camberwell is, shall we say, an interesting place to live
(especially with Jennie Agutter living just around the corner). Closer to where
many of us remember, the 130 bus still runs from New Addington past the Shirley
windmill, though no longer to Croydon as it continues to Norwood Junction via
Woodside, very convenient for Selhurst Park which is where you’ll find me when
Crystal Palace are at home. And when the tram takes you on the direct route to
New Addington from Croydon there’s a stretch on Shirley Hills where boys on
cross country laboured long and hard. Now that’s something from John Ruskin
Grammar School I don’t miss!!
Camberwell, South London, January 2005;
email
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