I remember some anxiety about the move from infant to primary school in 1960 – it was a big school, with big boys in the top class, including my brother. We had all heard stories of punishments.
And I was quite right to be concerned. It was essentially a Victorian institution, which would be unrecognisable as a primary school now. It was boys-only, with liberal use of corporal punishment – both ‘smacker’ and cane on the hand – outside toilets, no hall, no space for gym or games, not a blade of grass, with lunch eaten at our desks. We were taught copper-plate handwriting, and there were inkwells in desks, although the school-issue nib pens had recently been largely superseded by our own fountain pens or even biros.
In fact the school was Victorian; built in 1844, after moving from an earlier site over the North Gate. It had been a long time since the children actually wore blue coats, and there was no uniform at all by the time I got there.
Class 1
Middle row; William Hill, ??, ?? Taverner, ??, (Fatty) Dymond, Peter Salter, Andrew Horne, ??, Bob Winton, Stephen Watson, ?? , Francis Benbow, ??, Simon Whitelock.
Front row: ??,??, !!!
Kneeling; John Huntley?, ??, ??, ??, Butch Yeo, Brian Gale
There are 38 children in the picture, but 40 in the class – I am unsure who is missing. There was one pair of twins, and the register shows one pair with the same birthday (Andrew Horne and David Lake, 7th March 1953), although probability theory says we would have expected two pairs in a class of this size.
Miss Parish
But the biggest shock of going to primary school was in leaving the tender care of kind Miss Pemberton at Cyprus Terrace, and falling into the clutches of Miss Parish.
I find it difficult to write about Vera Parish in a calm and balanced way. For over 60 years I have considered her a cruel tyrant, like someone out of Roald Dahl, a persecutor of small boys. I also believe she had a lasting, negative impact on me. But perhaps this is a chance to try and exorcise her influence.
She clearly saw it as her duty to crush the spirit of the children in front of her, keeping strict order in the classroom, and delivering long lectures as she walked between the desks as we sat still in terrified silence, continually emphasising the need for us to ‘obey’. This might have been just tolerable, but she combined it with a vicious tendency to humiliate rather than just punish. My memory, possibly highly selective, is that I was a popular target.
There may have been some preliminary testing done, and I presumably did well as I was put almost at the back of the gloomy, undecorated classroom which was an annex at the back of school, next to the outside toilets. I don’t think I was particularly badly behaved, but when there was some collective punishment to be doled out to the class, she picked on me as some sort of representative to come to the front (although to be honest, I might have been a ringleader as I could be a show-off). There she slowly interrogated me about whatever had been going on, steadily and deliberately reducing me to tears. Eventually I had to take the long walk back to my desk, snivelling and wiping my tears away on the sleeve – I felt sympathy from the rest of the class.
Maybe this only happened two or three times, but it has stuck in my mind ever since, and I feel has contributed to my lifelong morbid fear of being caught disobeying rules, and subsequently being ‘told off’. It has also left me with a visceral anger at petty tyrants imposing arbitrary and humiliating rules, and yet also having a childlike fear of being at the receiving end.
A few clicks on the web revealed that Vera Kathleen Parish had been born in Goodleigh near Barnstaple in 1909, to Percy Parish (1874-1954) and Mary Huxtable (1875-1963). So she was 51 when I arrived at Bluecoat in 1960 – her widowed mother was 85, and I suspect that Vera was looking after her at home. As the extract from the school register shows, she was the only teacher with a degree, and was the longest-serving member of staff having worked there since 1945, but had clearly been passed over when ‘Ossie’ Browning became headmaster in 1953.
So one could construct a rather sad story. A young woman who managed to escape North Devon in the 1930s, and was an exceptional female in getting a degree. Then the war came along – did she lose someone special? – and in 1945 she was back in North Devon, looking after her old parents, and getting the best job she could manage – disciplining 40 seven-year-old boys. Maybe I should not be so harsh on her.
Vera Parish died in 1993 in Barnstaple, aged 84. Having considered these bare details of her history, I honestly hope she had a good retirement.
The Work
In my memory, the work was fairly tedious and unimaginative. We had various series of exercise books, for example Top of the Form for arithmetic, and Reading for Meaning for comprehension. We worked through pages of exercises, while sitting in rows in our desks, all facing forward so we couldn’t talk to each other. Miss Parish must have taught from the front with blackboard and chalk, although all I remember is her telling us to obey. It sounds awful, but in fact I rather enjoyed plodding through all the exercises, ticking off progress, and doing well.
We did pages and pages of sums, many involving money, which I had already covered at Cyprus Terrace.
I suppose we must have had some sort of art and craft, but fairly minimal as I can’t remember it, but maybe this is because I was so hopeless.
Given it was a Church of England School, it is unsurprising that there was some Christian teaching, including standard Bible stories which we illustrated – I still remember doing the drawings above, and being rather proud of the palm trees around Abraham. But the Christian education seemed fairly desultory and certainly not doctrinaire.
We must have had a visit to the parish church, which I carefully recorded, with meticulous attention to the exact route we took.
At the end of the year we got exams in all the subjects, which suited me as I liked the challenge of sitting tests.
I ended up top of the class, and for the maths papers I got 143/150, which earned me 2nd place. Fortunately there was no marks for Art and Craft and Physical Education, for which ‘Fairly Good’ seems generous.
I remember some boys got very low totals. This style of formal, exam-based education must have been so tough for many, setting them up to fail the 11-plus and influencing their whole future.
And then I progressed to Class 2, experiencing the joys of the playground, school dinners, corporial punishment and so on.