by Paul Feeney
With our newly acquired coolness came the temptation for us to start smoking cigarettes, a sure sign of being ‘cool’ and mature; an image we saw depicted on advertising hoardings on every street corner. It was all part of growing up and most of us felt we had to try it at least once. Many were sick after their first puff and gave up immediately, but there were plenty of others who carried on smoking and unintentionally began a lifetime of nicotine addiction. You needed very little money to get hooked on smoking because most sweet shops sold cigarettes in packets of five and some even provided a special single-cigarette service for young school kids. These shopkeepers would break open a packet of cigarettes and sell them in singles at 3d each. Children and teenagers usually bought Player’s Weights Cigarettes or an equivalent because they always seemed to be the cheapest and it didn’t really matter to us what the brand was – a cigarette was a cigarette. You would regularly see schoolchildren smoking in the street when travelling to and from school; they would even smoke at break times when they were at school. There wasn’t the stigma attached to smoking back then. You were supposed to be over 16 to buy them over the counter but the rules were very relaxed. There wasn’t any publicity about possible health risks; in fact the advertising campaigns gave the impression that cigarettes made you feel better, calmed you down and made you relax, hence the ‘cool’ image. All of the older school buildings had outside lavatory blocks and these were used as hideouts for smokers during break times. Teachers and prefects would frequently make surprise ‘smoker raids’ on the toilet blocks to catch smokers at it. Innocent non-smokers would cross their legs and avoid going into the lavatory blocks for fear of getting caught up in a smoker raid and being wrongfully punished.
Desktop computers and the Internet were still decades away, and the word ‘computer’ was not yet used in everyday language. Even big computers were still in their infancy and in Britain they were only used in a few very large businesses. These commercial computers were huge – the size of a very large room – and they were a long way from being as sophisticated as the computers we now use. Technology was very primitive in comparison to today. Many of us still had no television or telephone at home and there were no such things as pocket calculators to help us with our maths at school. We had absolutely none of the modern-day information technology gadgets available to us; all we learned came out of books and we wrote everything down in books – no such thing as cut and paste in those days. Our school desks were crammed with all kinds of textbooks and we needed sturdy leather schoolbags or satchels to carry our homework books back and forth each day.
The way the schools were run and the methods of teaching were very different from today too. Each school would have a number of teachers who were qualified to teach in specific subjects and between them they would cover the whole range of subjects taught in schools. The type of school you went to would determine how many subjects you studied but it was usually around ten to fifteen. In a typical secondary school lesson, a teacher would stand at the front of the class and lecture the pupils on his or her specialist subject while chalking explanations and diagrams onto huge blackboards that were fixed to the front wall of the classroom. We also studied school textbooks and library reference books and we did enormous amounts of written work both in the classroom and at home, but the teachers’ lectures were the principal method of teaching. At primary school, we learned to recite our times tables (multiplication tables) by rote and how to do simple arithmetic and mathematical problems. Now, at secondary school, we were expected to know our times tables by heart and be able to recite them on demand and to instantly calculate a specific multiplying task in our heads: Seven fours? Nine eights? Twelve sevens? We were also studying more advanced mathematics, including algebra and geometry. As a general rule, secondary-school children were required to use fountain pens for any written work and any mistakes had to be crossed out rather than rubbed out so that the teacher could see how you had arrived at your answers and where you had gone wrong in your calculations. We copied everything down in exercise books – a separate one for each subject – and we were marked on the standard of our handwriting and spelling as well as the quality and accuracy of our work. The range of subjects we studied was far reaching, including some things that we could never imagine as being useful to us in later life. There were some core subjects like maths and English that you had to continue with up to the normal school-leaving age of 15, but many schools allowed pupils to drop a few subjects as they progressed through the school so that they could concentrate more on their strongest subjects. This was especially the case for pupils who were intending to stay on at school until they were 16 to sit their General Certificate of Education Ordinary Level (GCE, O level) examinations. Unfortunately, in the early 1960s, not everyone was given the opportunity to take these exams. The majority of secondary modern schools did not cater for GCEs or any other alternative certificates of education. It was usually only the independent, grammar schools and sixth form colleges that provided for students to sit these exams. Up until 1965, when the Certificate of Secondary Education (CSE) was introduced, most secondary school children left school at the age of 15 without any qualifications at all. Prior to 1965, if they wanted to obtain any form of qualification they had to enrol for a further education course or join a sixth form college.
For the most part, secondary schools enforced strict discipline policies and any wrongdoing resulted in some form of punishment, included the writing of lines (‘I must not…’). There were also a lot of after-school detentions and frequent use of corporal punishment (canings). You did hear stories of girls being caned or slippered but that was quite rare. Boys, on the other hand, were regularly beaten and sometimes for fairly minor misdemeanours. It was often the independent and grammar schools that imposed the toughest rules of discipline and administered the harshest punishments to those who dared to break them. Some schools even had designated punishment rooms where offenders would be caned during their lunch break or after school. It was also not uncommon for boys to be caned in front of their classmates and sometimes in front of the whole school. Such public canings were usually reserved for major offences, such as bringing the school into disrepute, fighting in the street or barging in front of an old lady at the bus stop. In schools where corporal punishment was used, teachers would carry a cane around with them, usually secreted beneath their clothing (many wore gowns), and they would lash out at the first sign of laziness or wrongdoing. Schools were supposed to register each punishment they meted out in an official ‘punishment book’, but these were never kept up to date and there are no proper records to show how much beating actually went on. Some of the physical punishment was quite brutal but the threat of it was often all that was needed to maintain discipline. There were plenty of playground scraps and rivalry between neighbouring schools, especially among the boys, but there was no graffiti or vandalism and few cases of theft, and you very rarely heard of anyone being expelled. Some schools chose not to use any form of physical punishment for misbehaviour, opting for gentler forms of chastisement instead. This was more prevalent in all-girls schools and mixed-sex schools where the same types of punishments would apply to boys and girls alike, with a leaning more towards writing lines, walking around the playing fields after school and detention. These kinds of penalties were also handed out at the schools that used corporal punishment but only in cases of minor rule breaking; the preferred option was to beat the wickedness out of you.
In state schools, it was quite normal to have between forty and forty-five pupils in each classroom, but teachers still managed to command silence during lessons and we would never dare speak to the teacher without first putting up our hand and waiting for them to give us permission to speak. Teaching was a highly respected profession and teachers always dressed formally to look the part. Some were softer on discipline than others and, as children do, we sometimes tested their patience to the limit but we remained respectful of their position. We always stood up wheneve
r a teacher entered or left the classroom and we would address teachers as sir or miss; there was never any familiarity between students and teachers.
When moving around the school, we had to walk in single file, never run, and we were expected to keep silent while in the school buildings. Outside of school, we were told that we must never walk more than two-a-breast along a pavement and that we must stand aside to allow anybody coming from the other direction to go past. If we were travelling to school by bus or by train, we had to give up our seat to any adult who was left standing, especially pregnant ladies, the elderly and anyone with a disability. Many schools banned pupils from leaving the school premises at break times unless they had written permission to go home for lunch. We were expected to use the lavatories during break times and not to have to ask to go during lessons. This could prove difficult because of the problem with smokers commandeering the toilet blocks at break times, but we had to manage. At the end of the school day, before we left our classroom, we would check the area around our desks and pick up any litter that may have been accidentally dropped during the day and then we would stand our chairs on top of our desks in readiness for the cleaners to come in.
As we grew into young teenagers our school uniform became an embarrassment to us, more so for those with brightly coloured or unusual uniforms. We began to feel very self-conscious about our appearance and what made matters worse was that our young teenage years coincided with the start of the ‘Swinging Sixties’ period, when it suddenly became very important for us to be fashionable, whatever our gender. We were now too cool for gymslips, hockey sticks, school caps and blazers. We began pushing the boundaries of school uniform rules: altering blazers by removing the coloured braiding and unpicking seams to make fashionable vents; boys removed turn-ups from their trousers while girls rolled up the waistbands of their skirts to make them shorter. Everyone tried to get away with wearing stylish shoes instead of the ugly regulation school shoes, commonly known as fish-boxes. We were becoming rebellious teenagers and there had never before been a better excuse for rebellion because we were the teenagers of the 1960s and this was turning into the most exciting decade ever.
As far as popular culture is concerned, the period from 1960 to 1962 was a fairly drab time. During those first two years of the 1960s we did see some changes in popular music and fashions but nothing really remarkable. In 1961, at the age of 14, singer Helen Shapiro took the country by storm when she became the youngest ever female chart topper in the UK with her number one hits, ‘You Don’t Know’ and ‘Walking Back to Happiness’. Around the same time, the record producer Joe Meek was busy creating his now-renowned ‘Wall of Sound’ style of popular music from his legendary home studio above a leather goods shop at 304 Holloway Road in London, where he produced number one hits for John Leyton with the haunting ‘Johnny Remember Me’ and The Tornados’ ‘Telstar’, which turned out to be his most famous work of all. We called rock and roll and pop bands ‘groups’ back in the 1960s, and groups like The Rolling Stones, Manfred Mann and The Dave Clark Five had already formed and were starting to develop large numbers of fans around the London area. At the same time, Liverpool was already revelling in their very own Mersey Sound with groups like The Beatles, Gerry and the Pacemakers and The Searchers. Indeed, every city in the UK seemed to be generating its own crop of home-grown popular music talents. Among these up-and-coming bands of the early 1960s were The Hollies, who were working the clubs in their native Manchester, and The Animals, who had already amassed a large following of fans in their hometown of Newcastle-upon-Tyne.
By 1962, Jacqueline Kennedy, the wife of President John F. Kennedy, had been hailed as the fashion icon of the 1960s, appearing on the front cover of every newspaper and magazine throughout the world. We were fairly content with life as it was in the pre-1963 era because we knew no better, but in hindsight there was nothing special going on culturally and little to excite us brand-new teenagers. The most significant social activities available to us at the time included an evening down at the local youth club and the occasional church hall dance. Those of us who were tall enough and brave enough might sometimes sneak in to see an X-rated film at the local flea-pit cinema. Our main access to pop music was through the staid BBC Radio service and in the evenings we could listen to the commercial broadcasting station, Radio Luxemburg. The trouble with Radio Luxemburg was that most of the country got very poor quality reception and there was a constant problem with hissing noises and fading sound. We were always twiddling with the tuning knob, trying to get a better signal. It seemed like the only bits you could always hear clearly were the incessantly repeated adverts for Horace Batchelor’s secret Infra-Draw method for winning the football pools. Our choice of television viewing was also limited. We just had two channels, BBC and ITV, and we had to watch our favourite shows on 405-line small screen monochrome analogue television sets. The pop records we bought at the time were only available as mono recordings, but that didn’t matter too much because no one had a stereo record player anyway and we had never experienced anything other than mono sound. ‘The Twist’ dance craze kept everybody happy on the dance floor but other than that we were still struggling to break free from the aura of the 1950s. The best-selling single of 1962 was Acker Bilk’s ‘Stranger on the Shore’, and Frank Ifield’s ‘I Remember You’ followed close behind. We certainly needed something revolutionary to happen to shake off the dust and get us post-war baby boomers going.
We did occasionally step outside of our self-obsessed teenage bubbles to follow world events. We all took a great interest in news reports of the space race developing between Russia and the USA. Back in 1961, we were amazed to see the Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin becoming the first human to orbit the earth in outer space on board the Vostok 1 spacecraft. We saw regular news reports of the Vietnam War and we were all very pleased that Britain showed no signs of being drawn into the conflict. However, when the Cuban Missile Crisis started on 14 October 1962 it seemed possible that the Cold War, primarily between the USA and the USSR, was getting closer to becoming a nuclear war, and this frightened us all, especially British teenage boys who were fearful that the government might bring back conscription, which had only ended a couple of years previously, on 31 December 1960. We knew that if the government were to reintroduce conscription then all of us post-war baby boomer boys would have been called up when we reached the age of 18 and sent off to war. Mind you, we also knew that we might not be around long enough to celebrate our 18th birthdays if there was to be a nuclear war. Fortunately, the Cuban Missile Crisis was short-lived and a joint agreement to resolve the situation was reached on 28 October 1962, thereby allowing all British teenage boys to rest easy again and get back to more important personal issues, like combing our hair and looking cool. We had grown up in a peaceful country and this was the closest we had ever come to knowing the fear of an impending world war. Thankfully, we were now able to return to our previous state of calm to await a more welcomed disturbance that would begin to happen in 1963, heralding the arrival of the exciting period of the 1960s that we all look back on so fondly. It was in that year that 20-year-old Jean Shrimpton hit the headlines and became the face of the sixties, knocking Jacqueline Kennedy off all of the magazine covers. At the same time, the new ‘mod’ fashions were being sold in a growing number of London boutiques and these mod styles were starting to appear in national magazines; the mod culture was spreading countrywide. This year was the turning point when everything seemed to be changing from lacklustre to brilliant and The Beatles were among the front-runners of this new-wave cultural movement. Their 1962 single release, ‘Love Me Do’, only reached number seventeen in the UK record charts, but they were now on the verge of greatness and about to start their long domination with the release of ‘Please Please Me’ as an A-side single. That was in January 1963, and we didn’t know it then but we were witnessing the birth of what was to become known as Beatlemania. Very soon, the eyes of the world would be on England and every
one would want to come here and visit places like Liverpool and especially London, to feel its special atmosphere and be a part of the liveliest and most trendy place on earth.
These cultural changes coincided with some very noticeable improvements in the majority of people’s overall standards of living. At long last, we were starting to have baths and toilets fitted inside our houses and we were filling our homes with lots of modern household conveniences, or ‘mod cons’ as we called them: from washing machines and fridges to central heating and instant hot water supplies. Gradually, we were having all these luxurious things installed in our homes, albeit decades behind the Americans. We were even getting our own personal telephones installed by the GPO (General Post Office) and in two-tone colours as well. Mind you, in the 1960s the demand for telephones was so great that many of us had to put up with sharing a telephone line with a neighbour; it was called a party-line, which meant that two or more subscribers shared the same pair of wires and only one party could make a call at a time. It was a terrible service but at least we had our own telephone, which meant we no longer needed to use the draughty public telephone boxes out in the street. Foreign holidays were also starting to become more affordable, enabling some of us to replace our annual week in Clacton-on-Sea with a trip to the sun-drenched Costa Brava. Suddenly, our living rooms were being adorned with lots of naff souvenir ornaments from all over Europe. Bob Dylan and Joan Baez-style folk singers became commonplace entertainers in coffee bars up and down the country and a new type of 1960s live music began to bellow out from high street pubs and basement clubs all over the place.
