Nostalgia

[Sean Regan]

From when I was ten, an aunt and uncle managed a pub for the "Chef and Brewer," chain, for a few years, this would be around 1951.
At the time they had no children. I was occasionally invited to travel up on the tube from South London, to stay with them over the week-end. There were always places to go on Sundays with her as the pub was very quiet on those days, being in the City of London.
The pub had six floors and a "dumb waiter" which went up from the ground floor to the kitchen at the top.

I was watching Ian Hislop's documentary last night about the history of the railway and how goods changed from being carried by roads, to be sent by rail. As an example of how crowded everywhere was in London with horse drawn vehicles until the rail network reached its peak, he showed a number of street photos including this one, which is of Ludgate Circus, where you can see the pub in the background. (I froze the programme and took this photo of the TV screen.)




A few years later, they moved and managed an off licence in Regents Park. I still occasionally visited them, on Sundays.
One of their customers worked for the BBC and often gave her tickets for radio shows that required an audience. On one occasion she invited me to go with her as she knew it was a show I liked. So together we saw the recording of an episode of "The Goon Show" with Peter Sellers, Spike Milligan and Harry Secombe. I think it was at the theatre in Shepherd's Bush.

 

[edinburgh]

ain't what it used to be.

 

[Oliver Buckle]

Watching the series about school children through the ages was very nostalgic when it got to the '50's , Copying reams of stuff off the blackboard, and I had a school uniform just like that, with a cap. School dinners too, and the third of a pint of milk we all got mid morning. My Dad was a teacher and he said you could tell the kids who didn't get breakfast, they suddenly brightened up after that milk.

 

[Sean Regan]

I was at school in the late forties and fifties, there was no uniform at my junior school, but that changed when I went to grammar school in 1951.
We wore a uniform and caps right up to the fifth form when we were seventeen, for many like myself it was the cap with which you started, so it became a bit too small. However there was a way to wear it. You folded the back under so you could perch it on the back of your head and comb your hair back over the peak so the cap was invisible from the front!
I needed a new blazer for my final year which were black barathea. So as I had a Saturday and holiday job I could afford to buy myself a barathea suit and just wear the jacket with the regulation colour grey trousers. I just pinned the school badge to the top pocket.
I rather stood out as the uniform was single breasted and my suit was double breasted! The headmaster only noticed it a few months before I left, so there wasn't much he could do about it.

An aunt knitted me a scarf in my school colours, she got a bit carried away, the one Alec Guiness had in "The Ladykillers" or Harry Potter's had nothing on mine, whic when round my neck the ends almost touched the ground..

My school, like others in vast numbers, long after I left, under the Wilson governmentm, was made a comprehensive. The idea being that it would raise the general level of education.
It was sad to read on the Old Friends Reunited site, the stories of former pupils who'd experienced the change. It was that all the good teachers left, "some yobs came in," the discipline went and instead of improvements, the former grammar schools were dragged down to the level of the comprehensives.

I did the "nostalgia trip" about thirty years ago and went to look at my old school.

Here's the entrance. Looked OK, but then it'd been a gated private catholic girls school for over a decade.

We had a sister school, the girls there wore berets as part of their uniform. Money was tight back then and many parents made their kids wear the same uniform for their last couple of school years, so as they would be still growing it might be a bit small or them.

"St Trinians" wasn't that far removed.

Girls have been rolling over the waist bands of their skirts to shorten them, from the mid fifties.
So you can imagine on their way home when they could get away with it, there were a few well endowed seventeen year old girls with a blazer which was more like a "bolero jacket," which wouldn't quite do up, over a blouse a little too tight for them and a very short skirt.
Added to this, these girls wore their berets on the side or back of their heads much like Jean Moreau. I found the effect quite devastating.

There was a large pond in the grounds in front of their school. On their final day at school it was a tradition that they threw their berets in the pond.

I'm still in contact with two "girls" from my teens who went to other local grammar schools We got in contact through Friends Reunited.

My cousin who is two years younger than I, went to my sister school. She was Head Girl in her final year.

I can remember after leaving school and had been working for a year and had a car, I was eighteen, I met a girl at a jazz club and we started going out together.

My cousin who lived near myself and my parents remarked to me one Saturday that she'd seen me in my car the other evening with this blonde girl. I told her where I'd met her and that I was picking her up after she finished work as a hairdresser that evening and we were going out celebrating her birthday.

She replied "That might be where she is on a Saturday, but during the week she's in the fourth form at my school and it'll be her fifteenth birthday!"

Whoops!

There was a large pond in the grounds in front of their school. On their final day at school it was a tradition that they threw their berets in the pond.

 

[Oliver Buckle]

My school, like others in vast numbers, long after I left, under the Wilson governmentm, was made a comprehensive. The idea being that it would raise the general level of education.
It was sad to read on the Old Friends Reunited site, the stories of former pupils who'd experienced the change. It was that all the good teachers left, "some yobs came in," the discipline went and instead of improvements, the former grammar schools were dragged down to the level of the comprehensives.

This wasn't always so, my father left Edmonton County to work in a secondary/grammar in Harlow new town for ideological reasons in the 1950's, it later became a comprehensive in the 1960's. He can't have been the only socialist teacher. I remember reading reviews of the first comprehensives for my sociology 'A' level course, I seem to remember Anglesey was one, which were extremely favourable. No doubt there were cases like that you cite, but they were far from universal, and although I remember one boy getting himself upgraded to our grammar from a secondary modern it was extremely rare. Basically, fail at eleven and you were a failure for life under the old system.