My memories of Longton High School

In July 1956, at Trentham Junior School, I was told that I had passed my 11-plus- just. My father chose Longton High School for me, simply because Longton sent more boys to university than the rival Hanley High.

However, there were seven more boys applying than there were places, so I had to attend an interview with the Headmaster Mr Gregory, at the school. For a week before, Mrs Pollard, the head teacher of Trentham, coached me every afternoon after school, teaching me long words like panoramic and dilapidated. I was told to call the Head ‘Sir’ and to be polite and dress neatly, with a tie. I felt intimidated by the size of the school, and the noise, and that the teachers wore gowns. But to my surprise, I passed the interview!

I joined Longton High in September. On my first day I wore my shiny new uniform as I mounted the school bus at Trentham. There was no room downstairs and to my surprise the upper deck was full of cigarette smoke with almost all of the boys smoking. Someone shouted “Eh up, lads, a new fag! Don’t he look sweet? Let’s sort ‘im out!”. Someone grabbed my cap off my head and flung it through the sliding window. I was terrified- what kind of a school was I going to? And what would my Mum say? That cap cost her 7s 6d!

If anyone from Longton High remembers me, they will remember me as a loser, bit of a duffer, not very good at any subject, useless at games (except swimming) because of my eyesight.

When we arrived there were three prefects directing the new boys into their forms. I was allocated to 1B. All the new boys were allocated to Bourne House, but I had no idea what this meant. Houses? In school?

On the first day in assembly, we sang the school song, 'A Merry Heart', which starts with 'Away With Gloom And Fretful Care', and ended with 'to play the game in life's great school'

The photo on the right was taken before the art extention over the toilets- ‘bogs’- on the left of the picture, and the Wedgwood and Lodge extensions to the right of the left wing.

The Headmaster was Mr Gregory- ‘Boss’- (left) who used to cane boys on occasions. He ran a beekeeping club in the school and kept three hives at the front of the school. From a distance I watched boys opening the hives and was fascinated by their actions. I applied to join the society but heard nothing. In any case I probably could not afford the suit. The boss retired about 1960 when Mr Beynon joined the school as Headmaster. Mr Beynon was very strict and feared by the boys and some staff.

The Deputy Head was Mr Meredith, (centre) for some reason called Tut, whose voice could be heard even along the full length of the corridors. He taught history and English Language. He took me for one lesson as a locum, and he said “The words Get and Got constitute sloppy grammar and are totally unnecessary. GET HOLD OF THAT!”. All the time I spent at the school he always wore the same trousers- of which the fly hung loosely.

Mr Cyples (right) was the head of Bourne House and the Housemaster of 1B. He was a sure hit with the board rubber and was a teacher that was respected. He also had his compassionate side. On one occasion, about 1958, a young boy was in a flood of tears and knocking on the staff-room door. Mr Cyples answered and said “What on earth is the matter?”

The boy replied “My brother won’t be coming to school again.”

“Why on earth not?”

“He . . . he died last night. He had diabetes”

“Oh my god! Come on in, lad” and he took the boy into the staff room. Within five minutes he had his coat on and took the boy home in his car and stayed with the family all morning.

I knew the boy and his brother, and several of us went to his funeral at Trentham Church. It was awful.

Harry Cyples became deputy Head when the school became comprehensive and moved to Box Lane.

On that first day we received our timetable and someone asked what elocution is. Harry replied “Well, it’s to make you talk proper!”. The elocution teacher was Mr Lowe- Ken Lowe- and he taught us drama too. He started a speaking choir where several boys read out prose and poetry together.

All of our lessons were in the same classroom. The prefect took us down to assembly in the school hall. Outside the school hall was what was known as the Crush Hall. On the notice boards was a sign saying ‘Ask not what the school can do for you- ask what you can do for the school’.

Everything was so bewildering. All the teachers were men, all wore gowns- and such a big school with so many pupils, some of them almost men themselves. A big change from Trentham Junior School with only 100 children. I was no longer the big boy in the school. All I wanted to do was to go home.

At some point I put up my hand and said “Excuse me, Mr Cyples, may I go to the toilet?”. He replied “firstly, please remember that no teachers here have names. We are all called Sir!”.

At lunchtime I was told I was in the first city. I had no idea what this meant, and we were turned out into the playground- here, called a quadrangle. I was so lonely, so bewildered, that I just turned to a wall and cried. An older boy came to me, put his arm around my shoulder and said “What’s up?”. I told him I didn’t know what a city is. He smiled and said “Sitting, not city. Come on, I’ll take you.”

Sixty years later I can still recite the names of the boys in class 1B- Anderson, Arrowsmith, Berry, Bowers, Bown, Bradbury, Cooper . . . and I was the last . . . White, until in the second term we were joined by a Wyatt.

The toilets were always filthy, with graffiti covering the walls of the cubicles and lots of drawings and information about local girls, which I did not understand.

During that first year I got to know a lot of the masters. Harry Cyples taught French- he taught us in my first year and never missed with his flying chalk duster. Mr Cooksey took woodwork- our first project was a pencil sharpener, a simple square of wood with sandpaper glued to it.  Mr Foulds took us for geography, Mr Timmis for art.

Ron Hannah (left) took 1B for music. Ron knew that I had a good musical ear and he did all he could to encourage me; enrolled me in the school choir and the Gilbert and Sullivan Operettas The Pirates of Penzance and later Patience. He encouraged me to buy a guitar, which I did a year or so later and never regretted it. When I left school I played bass and rhythm in a rock group Geoff And The Wanderers. When I told him of my interest in orchestral music he taught me what to listen for, and to go to concerts if I could and watch the orchestras. In my second year, music as a subject was not available to me as the school quickly put me in the bottom classes. However, I joined the school choir and took part in musical shows.

Mr Meers (right) taught history and religion; he was also a vicar. We called him ‘Oody Vic’ – where the Oody came from, I have no idea. After my first history lesson with him he gave us homework. He told us to write an essay on what we had learned during the lesson about what early men achieved. I did not know what an essay was, so I wrote ‘They made tools from flint’. I received 2 marks out of 10, and my first ‘see me’ in red. I learned that an essay was what we at Trentham called a 'composition’. On open days Mr Meers was noted for trying to convert parents to religion instead of discussing the boy’s progress.

Ken Rowe (right) took geography. He taught us that the North Sea contained many types of fish including cod and whiting. Later in the lesson, no-one in the class could remember the North Sea fish. He said “I’ll give you a clue. What are you WRITING, WHITE?” (Whiting!) Of course many hands shot up, but I was not paying much attention and said “Nothing, Sir, honest!” much to the amusement of the class. Ken Rowe and Ken Lowe (left) often took boys walking the British countryside on many occasions, as part of the YHA group.

Mr Barnes took us for games. Our first cross-country run was very short- up Sandon Road, turn right into Kingsmead Road, right into Queensmead Road, then back to the school. Mr Barnes ran with us, prodding the slowest in the back. The slowest boy was also the heaviest, whose name I cannot remember, but he always took about twenty minutes to recover, bent over double, gasping and retching. A couple of years later he left school with heart problems.

Pop Willatt (left) taught Maths. He never taught me but he did wear one shoe with an extra large heel and walked with a limp. I learned later that he lost much of his leg during the war and had a prosthetic fitted, but boys are cruel and his nickname was Boot.

Mr Evans and Mr Jolley taught history, Mr ‘Pansy’ Potter took, I think, Latin with the older boys. I learned French with Mr Sassi and Mr Malkin in later years, and Geography with ‘Soapy’ Purcell. Soapy’s wife often came in to the school to accompany the school choir and we all fell in love with this beautiful woman.

Mr Watts took Chemistry and was also the leader of the Combined Cadet Force on Friday afternoons, which I joined in my fourth year. We waited weeks for our uniforms and when they appeared they were so uncomfortable- hard and scratchy- but I loved my boots as I could stamp around in them just like a real soldier. However, after a year I decided that practising killing people was not for me and I left the CCF to join the School Service, which was supposedly to repair books and tidy the quadrangles but in fact was unsupervised, so we could do as we pleased on Friday afternoons.

Mrs Wyatt and Mrs Gray were the school secretaries and Humph, whose second name I never discovered, was one of the two caretakers.

In form 3c we learned hardly any Maths under Mr ‘Dobo’ Jones as he had no control whatsoever over the class and we spent his lessons talking, playing cards and reading magazines, while Dobo wrote and explained formulas on the board with his back to us, apparently unaware that he was being totally ignored. Few of us could understand his broad Welsh accent anyway. He lasted just one year in the school.

Every year, on the Friday before Remembrance Sunday, we had a remembrance service in the Great Hall when the Head read out the names of all the old boys, and some existing pupils at the time, who died during the war. There must have been about 80 of them, and often boys fainted during the long service.

In my third or fourth year (1958 or 59) there was a boy called Wozza, whose father owned a sweet shop in Longton. Wozza used to bring a selection of chocolate bars and individual cigarettes, which he sold outside the rear entrance at break time. The cigarettes were Dominos, tuppence each. They could be bought in tobacconists in paper packs of four for sixpence. Boys bought individual cigarettes and smoked them by the back gate by the sports field.

The school scarves had tassels on the ends and these could be removed and swapped with tassels from other school scarves, mainly the local girls’ high school Thistley Hough in Newcastle. We boasted that each tassel represented a conquest, but I doubt that it was true- cetainly not in my case.

About 1959 the school put on a performance of ‘Patience’ by Gilbert & Sullivan. I was a heavy dragoon, Keith Ollier played Grosvenor, Trevor Cooper as Lady Jane. The opening song started with the line ‘Twenty lovesick maidens we . . . ‘ which caused a great deal of mirth, with boys adding ‘. . all down our legs’. I remember Ron Hannah laughing too. After the show Ken Lowe recorded the dialogue on tape; my sole line was “Here comes the colonel” and I duly said it to the tape, and immediately went a deep red. I wonder if the tape still exists somewhere?

In 1960 I was allocated to form 5 remove, which meant that I was not attached to any one class but could join any class I liked, to sit at the back, in preparation for my ‘O’-levels. In July I took 8 ‘O’-levels and failed all of them. The Boss called me and one other boy- John Brassington, who was also from Trentham School and who also failed all of his examinations- into the balcony of the Main Hall and told us that we were failures and he did not want to see us in his school again. We were sacked! A few days later my mother went to see him and persuaded him to let me have another try. Again I was alotted to 5 remove. The following November I passed three examinations, and two more the following July.

The whole school walked down to the new school at Box Lane in groups, in the July before the end of term, to look at it.

I was the very last boy to leave Sandon Road. The following September the new school became comprehensive and admitted girls.

About 1987 I revisited my old school, which was now Sandon Road High. In the Crush Hall notice board still hung the sign ‘Ask not what the school can do for you, but what you can do for the school’. I met the head, who told me that the school was refurbishing an old lectern they’d found. He took me to a workshop- and there was the old LHS lectern , complete with carved phoenix, that the Boss used every morning on the stage during assembly.

In my life I have run my own successful business, acquired a B.Ed(Hons) degree during which I learned of the death of Harry Cyples in December 1999, written computer coding and built computers as well as run several choirs and played bass and rhythm in rock bands. Duffer? No, just a late starter- I was always about 18 months behind the rest of the boys of my age and as such was ignored by the school who concentrated on potential University boys.

Over the years I have spared hardly a thought for my schooldays, but now, here I am sixty years later, in the last half term of life's great school, and I think of all the thousands of boys that passed through Longton High, all the hundreds of teachers, millions of memories, the school building itself, and its contents- all now gone, and few records exist. It’s as if none of it ever happened at all, and I wonder . . . what’s the point of it all?