Peter Viney's Blog

This was inspired by reactions to LANGUAGE LEARNING IN BRITAIN PAST (link). After years of teaching teachers, I often look back at what made me think and teach the way I do.

My co-author of many years, Bernie Hartley, was six years older than me. He used to start our teacher training courses with an account of his first day as an English teacher at a Roman Catholic girls’ school in Liverpool in the early Beatles era. He had done three years studying English and French at Manchester University, then a year in the Education department, allegedly for teacher training. In this he’d studied child development and child psychology. He thought the girls might enjoy a bit of Wordsworth for the first lesson, and made pages of notes on Daffodils and practised reciting it in front of the mirror, I wandered lonely as a cloud … a host of golden DAFF-odils …

He walked in on the first morning, and thirty girls were screaming, shouting and throwing stuff around the room. He banged the door hard and shouted BE QUIET!
A fifteen year old with an angelic heart-shaped face and long blonde locks gazed up at him from the front row, and said sweetly, ‘Fuck off, Mister.’

As Bernie said, nothing he had done in his Education year had equipped him for that moment. Then in his talk, he introduced what he was going to do in Teacher Training. Nothing whatsoever on knowledge or theory, everything on the micro-skills of classroom management and interaction.

On the whole, the major influence on me (apart from Bernie’s detailed analysis of micro-skills) is NOT doing whatever my teachers did in the 1960s. My favourite subjects were History and English Lit. For History I had one inspiring Churchill Exchange American teacher from Pittsburgh, Mr Haubrich, who was the best teacher (technically and inspirationally) in my first five years at a traditional boys’ grammar school. The English teachers were more a case of “in spite of them” but let’s try and see the funny side.

The first year

As far as I can remember his name was Williams and he was in the older section of the staff who wore gowns into class. All those who wore gowns tended to be terrifying. He had a large black moustache. We had lots of Williams. The Junior School head (Years one to three of secondary, or 11 -13/14) was a Williams, probably chosen for the younger lads for actually having a kindly disposition. Then there was R.D.F Williams who ran the Combined Cadet Force, known as Major Brylcreem. The headmaster used to wince watching him parading and strutting around assembly on Fridays in his uniform … the headmaster had allegedly been in Army Intelligence and a genuine senior officer. Major Brylcreem showed no sign of intelligence.

This moustachioed “Williams the English” forte was making sarcastic jokes, and reciting poems aloud extremely dramatically. He may have been Welsh. I recall Sohrab and Rustrum by Matthew Arnold. Coincidentally, when he was drunk, Bernie Hartley claimed he could recite it from memory. This he put down to a vicious education by the Irish Christian Brothers in which everything had to be memorized. He could certainly do the entire To be or not to be speech and would do so over morning coffee to check his brain was engaged. I have to believe he could do all 900 lines of Sohrab and Rustrum though he was usually forced to stop after a couple of hundred by the groans of the listeners.

Anyway, we listened to and then recited Tennyson’s The Charge of The Light Brigade, Browning’s How They Brought The Good News From Ghent to Aix, Macaulay’s Horatio at The Bridge (another of Bernie’s party pieces).

Lars Porsena of Clusium,
By the Nine Gods he swore
That the great house of Tarquin
Should suffer wrong no more.

You will note a militaristic bent. We were eleven. All boys. That was good. We were then set to write narrative and warlike poems. I remember getting my first senior school “A” for a bit of doggerel about dying Viking Berserkers.

In retrospect, a good start.

The second year

I don’t remember him well. Caswell? Also a gown wearer. I have a feeling he enjoyed clause analysis rather more than Literature. We believed he must have suffered from severe piles, worms, or at least pruritus ani. He was completely unaware that while teaching he would have one hand furiously scratching his anus, sticking his fingers right up through his trousers with an agonised expression. We watched in horror and would try to avoid even touching homework he handed back. I do believe that co-educational classes mitigate some of the more disgusting male personal habits such as nose-picking and testicular adjustments our teachers made in class.

The third year

Another with Brylcreemed hair, white this time. ‘Herbie’ Wiseman. Not a suit or gown wearer, and in fact a light-coloured jacket wearer. Anything he had to say about English Lit. was undermined because he wrote the lyrics to the school song which we had to sing frequently:

We honour them that laboured
To make the school’s fair name
That shaped its proud tradition
And sought its lasting fame
To this their vision splendid
Their inspiration great
With hearts and hands and voices (voy-oy-oy-sis)
We our service, DEDICATE!

(“voices” was an elongated warble)

Nowadays, having been head of a department where teachers had to teach textbooks I had written, I feel some sympathy for his literary exposure to potential ridicule.

At that time, I believe he produced the school plays which we were too young to audition for. (Our second year teacher would have been distressed by that sentence ending in a preposition.) The school plays I recall were Murder In The Cathedral and A Man For All Seasons. Every school did those two. They’re both dreadful plays.

This one sat languidly, leaning back in his chair, while we read doggedly around the class. We had H.G. Wells The First Men In The Moon. I mentioned this in the accompanying Language Learning piece. I’ll quote myself:

In the third form yet another angry middle-aged man (most of our grammar school teachers seemed permanently angry; perhaps it was the War) had us reading First Men In The Moon by H.G. Wells aloud around the class. Lazy bastard. Trouble was, in 1900 when Wells wrote it, the primary meaning of ‘intercourse’ was ‘conversation.’ So we had to read ‘We must have intercourse with the Selenites’, ‘There’s a Selenite! I shall have intercourse with him’ and if we sniggered, we were punished. He never tried to inspire us to read more dramatically. We just droned through it. It can’t be all we did in a year, but it’s all I remember.

The fourth year

No gown. Early thirties. Jefford. A major step up. He took us through Macbeth, our first serious Shakespeare. The school rented in the film version by Orson Welles and projected it. My grandkids are being exposed to Shakespeare four or five years earlier. I still have my doubts over whether that’s too early.

I recall him as pleasant and competent and enthusiastic. He later moved to the local College (where the English Lit teaching was so much better). I ran into him with his wife and kids five years later in a Norwich coffee shop on Elm Hill and he remembered my name, and invited me and my girlfriend to join his family at the table.

The fifth year

The GCE year. So why do I have zero recall of who taught us English? Was it Mr Jefford again? I know we did The Mayor of Casterbridge, The Merchant of Venice and um, something else.

The Sixth Form

In fact, our form teacher and General Studies teacher was the (newish and younger) Head of French, Nick McCabe. He had huge influence on my future in American Studies by exposing us to Cannery Row and The Grapes of Wrath by Steinbeck, and The Sound and The Fury by Faulkner. In retrospect, he was much better at Eng Lit teaching than two of our three English teachers. And we did a lot on music. When he retired as Head of French, he went back on a part-time basis teaching music, and taught my son. Bernie would have said it’s all to do with ability to teach rather than knowledge.

I found my A-level papers. Three teachers. Three areas

Literature since 1900

Lord Jim by Conrad
Under Milk Wood by Dylan Thomas
St Mawr / The Virgin & The Gypsy by D.H. Lawrence
Saints Day and Marching Song by John Whiting

Let’s start with the positives. For Literature since 1900 Tom Bircher taught us. The youngest teacher, new to the school.

Two influences: I later directed Saint’s Day at university.

Tom Bircher taught the year below for GCE, and also taught that year Under Milk Wood. My old friend, the late John Wetton, was in that class. You may note that after he joined King Crimson in 1973, their second album with John was Starless and Bible Black (a line from Under Milk Wood).

Whenever we go down to look at the mill pond flat sea, I say, ‘Too rough for fishing today’ a quote from Under Milk Wood.

Tom Bircher later directed my wife Karen and our Best Man, Nick Keeping (both two years younger than me), in Henry IV Part One, a joint production between the boys and girls grammar schools.

He was easily the best English teacher in my seven years at that school, and I guess he was only six or seven years older than us … Bernie Hartley’s age. He didn’t balk at D.H. Lawrence and was unembarrassed discussing him and Lady Chatterley’s Lover which we had all sniggered over years earlier.

On the other hand, my first move would be to try casting and acting out scenes from Saint’s Day. We didn’t do that. I later did Drama subsidiary at university. Working on plays in a Drama department is radically different from working on them in an English department!

Shakespeare

Much Ado About Nothing
Henry V
Hamlet

We were lucky here. We didn’t get a ‘problem play.’ We had to do three from a list of five, and the other two possibles were Coriolanus and The Tempest. The first is a struggle and possibly my least favourite play of the lot, the second requires actually seeing a really good production. So we got the right three.

In a local tragedy, the teacher assigned to us for Sixth form Shakespeare was killed in a car crash just before the start of our first term. They persuaded a retired headmaster to come in just to teach the Shakespeare paper for two years to the sixth form, a Mr Curtis. To us, he was elderly, but he had the knack of discipline from years as a headmaster, in spite of being cross-eyed, a major impediment to establishing eye contact in class. The main thing was, the man truly loved his Shakespeare. It was his hobby as well as his job. We thought him somewhat strict for sixth formers, but his background knowledge was outstanding. We spent much time on Henslowe’s Diary, as well as boy players, miracle and mystery plays, Elizabethan and Jacobean history. We watched the Olivier Henry V in the school hall where there was a projector.

A man of considerable knowledge who knew how to impart it. Due to his teaching, I always now refer to the single play Folio Society editions of Shakespeare (I have most, bought secondhand). He expressed contempt for editions where half the page is footnotes. The Folio Society editions have no footnotes. I don’t need to have hoist with his own petard explained in Hamlet. Mr Curtis did that work.

With my ELT training hat on, I would mark him down for too much Teacher Talking Time, too little student interaction. But when the speaker is entertaining and erudite, you may prefer to listen to them rather than a fellow student’s mumbled opinion.

However, he went puce avoiding country matters in Hamlet and in my memory the full humour in Henry V was lost. There is the precious scene where Alice teaches Princess Katherine English:

KATHERINE: Ainsi dis-je; d’ elbow, de nick, et de sin. Comment appelez-vous le pied et la robe?
ALICE: Le foot, madame, et le count.
KATHERINE: Le foot et le count! O Seigneur Dieu! Ils sont les mots de son mauvais, corruptible, gros, et impudique, et non pour les dames de honneur d’user. Je ne voudrais prononcer ces mots devant les seigneurs de France pour tout le monde. Foh! Le foot et le count!

You have to see a production where the “O” in COUNT is eradicated as Shakspeare intended and the remains roundly pronounced. Maybe I drifted off that day or was absent, but I had to see the play before I got the joke.

That was positive. On the negative side, I can’t conceive of teaching Shakespeare without acting out scenes … not just assigning roles for reading aloud. We never acted out anything.

Chaucer and Other Major Authors
The Clerk’s Tale
Samson Agonistes by Milton
Portrait of The Artist as A Young Man by Joyce

This poor chap, a Mr Smith (real name, aka Smudge) had a huge influence: He was the worst Eng Lit teacher I ever saw. Possibly the worst teacher in the school (though most of the French Department would have run close).

I suspect he was assigned the sixth form as younger kids would have “pinned him to the blackboard.” He looked like Tony Hancock crossed with John le Mesurier, and marched to school arms swinging in a Monty Python funny walk (unintentional).

I’m going to be cruelly critical. I have discussed him before and some of my group saw him as a bottled-up existentialist with a sardonic view, so interesting. I disagree.

For years I used him in Teacher Training as “How not to start a lesson.”

Our first day of Sixth Form English Lit. He came in with a pile of books. Set them on the table and gloomily tossed one to each of us. Some landed face down and open. They were new copies too. I’ve always respected books as physical objects (we could not afford many at home) and I was shocked.

He sat there and said,’This is Samson Agonistes. It’s by John Milton. (sharp intake of breath) It is the most boring thing I have read in my life. It is the most boring thing you will read in your lives. We have two years to get through it. Adams, start reading aloud …’

This story (often told by me) has repercussions. Six years later, after a postgraduate English seminar at UEA (University of East Anglia). The staff had to attend these evening sessions, chaired by Malcolm Bradbury. I got in the lift afterwards with a professor. He said he was most surprised I had chosen William Carlos Williams for my short talk on poetry. Everybody had sneered at Asphodel That Greeny Flower. Malcolm Bradbury had defended my choice vigorously. The lift got stuck, as it often did. We stood there.

He said, ‘What’s your thesis on?’

‘Hollywood and The Novel,’ I said.

‘Examples?’

‘The Day of the Locust.’

‘Never heard of it.’

‘The Last Tycoon.’

‘Ah, yes,’ he said, ‘Hemingway.’

‘No, it’s Scott Fitzgerald,’ I replied.

He glared, ‘I think you’ll find it’s by Hemingway.’

I decided it wasn’t worth arguing it, but asked, ‘What’s your special area of interest?’

‘John Milton,’ he said, ‘I’m writing something on Samson Agonistes at the moment.’

‘That must be incredibly boring for you …’ I said.

These first impressions really do stick.

Anyway, Mr Smith also started doing The Rape of The Lock by Pope. To be fair, it’s a poor choice for Sixth Formers, and the man also had The Clerk’s Tale by Chaucer, one of the duller Canterbury Tales, and that’s the fault of the syllabus designers. Sixteen to eighteen? The Miller’s Tale is the one to do. Mr Smith combined with Patient Griselda turned so many of us off Chaucer. However, I went on to Bournemouth College for six months. I had not applied to university (our headmaster thought boys with luminous socks and guitars were not suited). When I got my A level results, I realized I needed to. The headmaster said straight away, ‘We don’t want you back here!’ (Whether this reflects on me or him, you must decide). I went to the Careers Office at Bournemouth Council, who advised me I could join the External London BA course until I secured a place at university then leave. No grant, and no fee either. I accepted so spent six months on English and History there. The teaching was stratospherically better (and the same people taught A level there). For Chaucer, we had a young Australian lecturer. This was a guy who could read Chaucer’s English properly, and was so enthused by Chaucer, he even made The Parlement of Foules interesting. He got us fascinated by Piers Plowman and Sir Gawain & The Green Knight. When I was at Hull reading American Studies, friends who were doing English complained of the awful first term spent on these works … well, with my Australian teacher, they were absolutely fine. Again, so often it’s NOT the book. It’s the teacher.

We battled through The Rape of The Lock with Mr Smith for a couple of months of reading aloud (we all had worked out by then that reading around the class in alphabetical order was a total waste of time) then he stood up, ran his fingers through his hair furiously, and said, ‘I can’t take any more of this book! It’s total nonsense. Hand your copies back. I’m switching to A Portrait of The Artist As A Young Man instead! I now believe that his growing horror at Rape of The Lock (read aloud) was because he hadn’t read ahead of the class and didn’t actually know it.

A wiser man would have made that choice at the beginning to the benefit of the school book budget. Looking at my exam paper, he could have gone for Fielding’s Joseph Andrews or The Selected Poems of W.B. Yeats instead. The Pope and the Milton were alternatives in the same section with the Fielding. The Fielding would have had far greater appeal to the age group, but I think in long retrospect that he could have made something more out of Samson Agonistes. Examining the Old Testament story, and what little history is known, would be obvious to anyone else. Not to him (but I did).

In those days, renting a film was hard. The BFI (British Film Institute) had a very limited catalogue, on 16 mm. You had to book weeks in advance and project them which needed a technician in a white coat, and while schools could get Henry V and Macbeth, other films simply weren’t available. A pity. I’d have wanted a class doing Samson Agonistes to watch Cecil B. De Mille’s 1949 epic Samson & Delilah and compare. At least it would have been entertaining. Even in the mid-70s when I was lecturing part-time on Film Studies, obtaining film extracts was a major and slow task (and required a technician to project them).

A Portrait of The Artist should have been easy enough, but he managed to make it dull. I never appreciated it until I worked with Bernie (it was his favourite book) who regaled me with the tales of the Irish Christian Brothers in Lancashire and assured me the book was all true, but a tad under-stated. They were worse than Joyce’s portrayal. He conceded that to feel the full impact, you needed a Roman Catholic education. In our state schools, hell and damnation had never been threatened in that way.

Mr Smith was somewhere between melancholy and clinical depression, I now believe. School rumour was that he was shell-shocked from the Korean War. He may have been an alcoholic too. In the fifth year we had a school trip by train to see The Merchant of Venice at the Old Vic. It was a classic production, with Lancelot Gobbo played by the actor who was the burglar in the “Watch out! There’s A Thief About!” public information TV adverts. It was a great production, the last before The National Theatre took over. It was on the GCE syllabus.

A friend was sitting in the back row, next to Mr Smith, who had the aisle seat. Mr Smith got up and left as soon as the lights went down. He returned during the encores reeking of gin. In those days, the bar at Waterloo Station was one of the only places serving alcohol in the afternoon (so we guessed) then in those days London had many illegal drinking establishments. Waterloo is a three or four minute walk from the theatre. So you’re teaching the play. You’re in London with a first class production and you can’t be bothered to watch it? So you abandon a group of fifteen to sixteen year olds and go off to get pissed? It was risky too. That would surely have been an instant and deserved sacking offence … I would have sacked him on the spot if I were the headmaster. People that depressed do seek to confront it and bring matters to a head.

When Friends Reunited was going, I sometimes looked at my school section which took me to an Old Boys website. Ex-pupils of my era were complaining about the poor standard of teaching at such an elite state grammar school … and more teachers in my days were poor to very poor than those who were good teachers. Going back, Bernie always said his education year was a waste of time. In those days a decent degree was sufficient qualification in itself. You did not need a Cert Ed. I doubt that any of them had it.

I remember the headmaster’s son intervened on the website. He pointed out that his father had started at the school in the same year as us. At home he would rant about the old stagers with secure jobs he was stuck with, and he pointed out that the ones his dad then appointed, like Nick McCabe and Tom Bircher, were all really good. Looking back, that seems correct.

FOR MORE OF MY RANTS ON MY SCHOOL DAYS:

If Your Face Fits – Continuous Assessment

This could be subtitled ‘History Teaching in Britain Past’

Language Learning in Britain – Past