Figure 1.--This is me in Lower 6th Form uniform (spring 1968) - I've got a striped tie, but still the green blazer. |
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Having passed the 11-plus exam, in September 1962 I moved to the local (public-sector) grammar school. This was a fairly recent school - opened in 1954 - and coeducational. At my new grammar school we wore dark grey trousers, dark green blazers with a coat of arms on the breast pocket, and grey shirts with a plain maroon tie. As before, in cold weather I wore a pullover - green to match the blazer - under it. Grey socks and black lace-up shoes (worn indoors and out) completed the uniform. At that stage, navy-blue gabardine raincoats were generally worn but later other dark blue to black coats became more common. For the first few years I was there, caps were worn (sometimes) to and from school. In hot weather, we would ask permission to take off our blazers in class and roll up our sleeves - permission was definitely required, but most teachers were reasonable about granting it. In the sixth form, we wore white shirts rather than grey, and in the upper sixth, dark blue blazers rather than dark green, with a more elaborate version of the coat of arms on the breast pocket. When it was cold, I wore a blue pullover under the blazer. For a few classes we needed protective clothing of some kind. For PE and games, boys and girls were distinctive outfits. Our PE and Games kit consisted of white cotton PE shorts, navy blue games shorts, two rugby shirts (one green, the other white), white plimsolls, white ankle socks, coloured rugby socks, rugby boots and a white sweater. We also needed a towel. There were rules about what we were to wear and when. Inevitably the theory and practice of PE kit differed. I never wore the white ankle socks (twenty years later I gave them to my wife!): in fact, I very rarely wore any socks at all with plimsolls - I found them more comfortable without, and in the winter I put comfort before warmth.
England and Wales had changed the whole education system with the Education Act 1947. This set up grammar schools, which were generally very good, and secondary moderns, which all too often were not. Concerns over the perceived inequities in a selective secondary system eventually led to the widespread adoption of comprehensive schools. Students had to pass the 11-plus to earn a place at a grammar school. Those of us at my school not going to public schools (private-sector secondary schools) took the 11-plus examination, alongside children from the state primary schools, to determine what kind of secondary school they would attend. Most of the other boys at my prep school stayed until they were 13 years old when they took the Common Entrance Examination. Having passed the 11-plus exam, in September 1962 I moved to the local (public-sector) grammar school. This was a fairly recent school - opened in 1954 - and coeducational.
At my new grammar school we wore dark grey trousers, dark green blazers with a coat of arms on the breast pocket, and grey shirts with a plain maroon tie. As before, in cold weather I wore a pullover - green to match the blazer - under it. Grey socks and black lace-up shoes (worn indoors and out) completed the uniform. At that stage, navy-blue gabardine raincoats were generally worn but later other dark blue to black coats became more common. For the first few years I was there, caps were worn (sometimes) to and from school. As the caps found more favour as missiles during the day than for wearing ... they were abandoned after a few years. When I started, most of the first-year boys wore shorts; I wore long trousers from the start of the second year (a fairly common time for the change) but two of the boys in my year wore shorts up to the end of the second year. As 1964 was a long hot summer, they were, I suspect, more comfortable than the rest of us. In subsequent years, the number of boys wearing shorts decreased until by the time I left in 1969, only one or two a year began school in shorts, and then did not usually continue wearing them very long. Mostly the shorts reached to a couple of inches above the knee; one boy who started in (I think) 1966 wore them markedly shorter than that, but he was the only one I remember who did so.
The girls wore a uniform fairly similar to the boys’, but with a skirt in place of trousers, or a dress in the summer. Under their blazers, they could wear dark green cardigans. What happened in reality here was that they wore the cardigan without a blazer unless it was particularly cold: thus the blazer was effectively an outdoor garment which was permitted indoors. Many of the younger girls had bare lega. A few girls still had bare legs, with long white socks, in the third year, but not thereafter. They were not allowed to go completely without socks. They had to wear something on their legs - short socks, long socks, tights, stockings, whatever. They were not allowed to go without any form of hosiery. Quite why, I cannot imagine -- the appearance of a girl with bare legs is very similar to one with flesh-coloured tights. They were also a bit miffed that the female teachers did sometimes turn up bare-legged!
In hot weather, we would ask permission to take off our blazers in class and roll up our sleeves - permission was definitely required, but most teachers were reasonable about granting it. In the sixth form, we wore white shirts rather than grey, and in the upper sixth, dark blue blazers rather than dark green, with a more elaborate version of the coat of arms on the breast pocket. When it was cold, I wore a blue pullover under the blazer. At break times we had to go outside unless it was pouring with rain. Outdoor activities included the usual sort of things like football games (with blazers as goal-posts, of course). Snow provided the wherewithal for snowball fights, which usually left us with rather damp clothes!
For a few classes we needed protective clothing of some kind. I did chemistry in the 6th form, so I had to have a lab coat - just an ordinary white one. This lived in my cupboard in the lab, together with various items of apparatus which I kept clean by pickling them in acid. Unfortunately, the acid fumes also pickled the lab coat, so that when I took it home to be washed, it disintegrated comprehensively in the washing machine. My mother tried hard not to laugh... I didn't bother trying! In the third year, I had done metalwork, for which we had to have aprons (I'd have thought lab coats were more suitable...); we also needed aprons in Cookery for Boys, which was a popular option in 6th form General Studies.
In the first year, once a week we had a period of drama. This took place in a church hall across the (very busy main) road from school. We had to take off our blazers and shoes and do the lesson in our socks. This contrasted oddly with practice in the gym (see below). Those boys who wore long trousers often had trouser legs trailing on the floor, but for the rest of us - most of the boys wore shorts, and the girls wore skirts - this wasn’t an issue. I have never found it very comfortable just in socks, and I always wondered why they didn’t make us do it in bare feet (I suspect plimsolls would often have been left in the school!). It was probably just as well that none of the girls wore thin tights or stockings at this stage. For a few weeks in the summer of each year, the school hall was in use for national exams (O- or A-levels, as it was in those days). This meant that it was not available for school assemblies. These therefore took place in the gym. Everyone from the headmaster down had to remove their shoes and go into the gym in their socks (or, for the girls, stockings, tights etc.). At the end we would often go sliding around on the gym floor: I don't think I realised at the time, but this actually pointed out rather well why they didn't let us just wear socks for PE - it really was too slippery.
For PE and games, boys and girls were distinctive outfits. Our PE and Games kit consisted of white cotton PE shorts, navy blue games shorts, two rugby shirts (one green, the other white), white plimsolls, white ankle socks, coloured rugby socks, rugby boots and a white sweater. We also needed a towel. There were rules about what we were to wear and when. Inevitably the theory and practice of PE kit differed. I never wore the white ankle socks (twenty years later I gave them to my wife!): in fact, I very rarely wore any socks at all with plimsolls - I found them more comfortable without, and in the winter I put comfort before warmth. If your plimsolls were too dirty, you had to do PE in the gym barefoot. Since we wore plimsolls both indoors and out, and I never cleaned them, the inevitable happened and one day, I think in my first term, I was told to do PE barefoot. The showers, after a few weeks, became effectively optional, as a result of which I never showered. Since I usually did my best to avoid getting seriously muddy, this didn’t matter much. It wasn’t that I minded being naked in front of my contemporaries, I simply did not like showering--I still don’t. We had always done athletics for outdoor PE in the summer, for which we often took our shirts off, and from my second year I was usually barefoot. From about the fourth year onwards, I did athletics or played tennis in the summer, and did cross-country in the winter, both for outdoor PE and for games. For tennis or athletics I wore just shorts - bare feet and no shirt - and I don't ever remember being unpleasantly cold. One year when I was doing athletics we had PE first thing in the morning, but I soon got used to running barefoot on fairly cold dewy grass.
