1953 - 1958
Bradford Schooldays
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| St. Bede's Grammar School, Heaton, Bradford |
In February of 1953 the family moved into “Oakroyd” in Thornton, Bradford. It is a semi detached stone-built house built on four floors and set in about 1½ acres of garden, which slopes down to a stream running inside the garden boundary. Pop still lived there at the age of 95 when he left to live in residential care, having resisted all previous attempts to get him to move. He and Mum had a tremendous love and affection for the place, which he was very reluctant to leave whilst he was mobile. When Pop married Doreen she also fell in love with the house and so nearly all of his memories of the house were happy ones. The two photographs that I have shown are the best that I have to show the house and extent of garden although they are not chronologically correct as far as the story goes.
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Oakroyd from the front lawn
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Oakroyd Garden in Winter
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My maternal Grandmother died when we were due to move into Oakroyd so Mum took Michael off to Chatham in Kent to organise the funeral whilst Pop and I moved in; Pop said that we had the easy job. The removal team had great fun carrying all the furniture down the outside steps, which was the only logical way to get everything into the house. We still had an ancient piano at the time, which must have been particularly difficult.
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| Sacred Heart Church, Thornton, Bradford |
Academia
My time at this school was fairly happy for the most part although the last six months were quite difficult. Despite being a late starter there, I never felt an outcast and was never bullied. I was also quite bright I suppose and after the Summer break in 1953, I went up into Form 2B. The following year I went up again into Form 3A and I remained in the ‘A’ stream up to sixth form. The second year was a memorable one for me; firstly, in the pre-Christmas maths examination, I achieved 100% and Mr. MOORE, or “Friend” as we called him, gave me 2/- (10 pence) as a special prize. It paid for two Christmas presents! At the end of the year I came top of the class of 35 in several subjects including Maths and Latin; I was about 10th in English, never a strong point and 35th in Art. Considering that Pop was a very good artist and my elder son is quite competent, I am not sure why both me and my brother missed out.
One memory of school involved our Physics teacher, Paddy CREEDON, who, to us anyway, seemed like a mad professor. In one lesson we had learned that water is most dense at 4˚ centigrade and he demonstrated this by cooling some water in a little metal container to that temperature, then put a stopper in the metal container and continued with the cooling procedure. As we watched, or not as the case may be, the stopper shot out of the metal container to goodness knows where. Paddy then poured out the contents of the container to prove that it was still liquid. In a second lesson, although I am not sure that this was with Paddy, we learned about the benefits of levers. We were taken out into the school grounds where a metal stake had been driven into the ground; we were asked to pull it up, but, no matter how hard we tried, we could not move it. The teacher then produced a long metal bar and attached one end to the stake, and, using a rock as a balance point, one of the boys was asked to lean on the unattached end of the bar. Much to our surprise, with not much effort, the stake came loose and we were able to pull it out of the ground by hand. Because I remember both of these experiments, I believe that practical demonstration is the best method of teaching. I have never used the water experiment but, over the years, levers have been very useful in and around the house and garden.
When it came round to the GCE examinations, I made a real mess of things, only passing four at Ordinary Level. These were English Language, French, Mathematics and Physics. I still cannot understand how I managed to fail Chemistry which was one of my favourite subjects. Maybe my passion for sport and discovering girls had a bearing on the results. Nevertheless, I was accepted into the sixth form where I chose to take Maths, both Pure and Applied, and Physics. The year started badly and gradually went downhill. In the September, I developed appendicitis, went into Bradford Royal Infirmary (BRI) and had my appendix removed, and then spent two weeks off school recovering. Unfortunately, I never recovered from missing those two weeks and fell further and further behind. It would also be true to say that my Maths teacher, Mr. Charlie O’DOWD was less than sympathetic to those of us who didn’t understand everything first time. There were only four of us in the Applied Maths class, which should have made life easy, but Charlie seemed to me to want to work at the speed of the quickest not the slowest. In the class were James (Jimmy) KINDER, (seemed like a genius to me) Paddy BOYLAN who also seemed to have no trouble. Then there were the two TURNERs, Steve and me. It is difficult to remember who had the most trouble but it was probably me. I have absolutely no idea what happened to them because in the Spring of 1958 I left school. The trouble was that I didn’t tell the school or my parents. I just went out of the door every morning and came home every evening at the right time. I don’t even remember where I went or what I did. Eventually I got found out and my poor old Pop went to see the headmaster, Monsignor SWEENEY, who told him that I had, academically, reached as far as I could go. My revenge to this statement was to return to the school after I had achieved GCE ‘A’ Level in Maths whilst in the RAF.
Other School Activities
I have already mentioned a passion for sport although I was not particularly good at anything whilst at school. I played football for the Under 15 Second Team and represented the School at Cross Country and High Jump.
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1955/56 - St. Bede’s Under 15 2nd XI
John TURNER - Front Row, Second from Left
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I remember that, in year 2, I was eventually ‘selected’ to play cricket in a class match. In the first innings I scored 35 and after that I was picked very much earlier in the selection process. Mind you, I never ever scored anything like that again. When we were older, some of us did cross-country training at lunchtime. I never won one of these training sessions but eight of us did finish together on one occasion. I cannot remember why there was no desire to win that day. The course went from the school down through Heaton Woods and then up the 1:5 hill onto Shay Lane and Long Lane before turning left on Bingley Road, then a flat run to Toller Lane and a further left turn onto Leylands Lane and downhill to the school. Having done all that training, when we ran on our own course in the Bradford Schools Championship, we had to run around the school playing fields to make up the correct distance. It seemed like miles extra.
I had been taught to play Chess at home and I joined the Chess Club at school for some time. I wasn’t really good enough to play for the school but because of a variety of circumstances I did get picked to play once. There were seven in the team and we lost the match 5 - 2. I was one of the two who won, much to my delight, however I was never asked to play again!!!
I also carried on with my Scouting for some time but it got to be very boring especially when we spent what seemed like a full year trying to qualify for our bird watcher’s badge; this included having to draw birds and as will have been noted already my artistic talents are not great. I did learn a little about astronomy and the knowledge of most of the constellations that I learned about has stayed with me. I suppose the best part was camping at Sleights, near Whitby. It was always fun to be away from home for a week or so and I always thoroughly enjoyed myself. We were not all that well supervised in those days so we had plenty of adventures out of camp.
One extra curricular activity was dancing lessons with the girls from St. Joseph’s College. In those days most boys and girls learned a little ballroom dancing, possibly so that they could legitimately get hold of one another. For some time we had weekly sessions after the school day had finished; this took place in the main hall. After some preliminaries, we were made to line up, boys on one side of the hall and girls on the other. The idea was then to walk across and whoever was directly opposite one another became partners. A funny thing happened here, which was none of my doing; I always seemed to end up dancing with Ann BARRETT. This must count as an early version of stalking. We did know one another because she lived on Churchill Road in Thornton and we went to the same church. At one stage of my teenage years, most of the other teenage boys fell out with me for some reason that was unclear to me. Ann was one of a small group who supported me and I was always welcome in her house. I should point out that she was never a girlfriend.
Being a Catholic school, St. Bede’s regularly had Mass in the main hall for all the pupils. I reckon that all that kneeling straight onto the hard floor contributed to my bad knees! Two of the boys would act as Altar Boys to assist the priest, a task that, amongst other duties, involved ringing the bells at the correct time and also moving the Missal from one side of the altar, after the Epistle reading, to the other side for the Gospel reading. For readers not familiar with this practice, the server would stand, move round to the right of the altar, climb the steps, three in the case of St. Bede’s, collect the Missal, step backwards a couple of steps, bow to the altar then go down the steps and at the bottom, genuflect, then climb the steps to the other side of the altar, position the Missal, back away, bow then make your way back to your position, which was now on the opposite side of the altar to where you started. Meanwhile, the other Altar Boy would move in the opposite direction. I was the Altar Boy who started on the left. Now the bells were, at St. Bede’s, kept on the second step, but on this day they had inadvertently been placed on the top step so, when I stepped back from the Altar to bow, I kicked the bells, which clattered down the three wooden steps, much to my embarrassment, and the congregation’s delight. When I arrived back in class, I was greeted with various versions of “Rings on his Finger and Bells on his Toes”.
One other thought comes to me about my Grammar School days. I can only remember once hearing anything about sex. One lad talking to another when I was within hearing distance said “It is embarrassing when you want a shag, asking whether she has the rags up”. I had no idea what he was talking about. There was no sex education at school and my own had consisted of a small yellow booklet, which arrived on my bed when I was about 14 and from which I learned the mechanics but not much else. Obviously I had led a rather sheltered life but others hadn’t. Still, looking back now, in a school of the number of boys at St. Bede’s, and the fact that I was over 17 when I left, it was quite remarkable that I had learned nothing of practical use.
The following photograph was taken after my time but many of the teachers were there at the same time as me. The photo is courtesy of ‘The Yorkshire Post’.
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