School days

My old school newsletter arrived in the post this morning. I always have a scan through it for names I recognise but the majority are pupils from the 1940s and 1950s which is somewhat before my time. However, there are always pieces written either by or about teachers that were at the school whilst I was there. Of course, this has now sent me on a nostalgia trip and I have been remembering some of the bizarre characters that taught me over my seven years there.

Mr Harris the maths teacher was a bit of an oddball- good teacher, fairly approachable and friendly, but was scary when he was angry (scary in a rather unhinged way). I remember on one occasion he had told us to stop talking whilst he was teaching about three or four times, getting more cross on each occasion (he had this freaky habit of rolling his eyeballs unhealthily high in their sockets); when we then persisted in talking, he just stopped mid-sentence, walked out of the classroom and stood outside in the corridor looking out of the window. It worked because we stopped talking. We thought we were going to get really shouted at when he returned, but he just walked back in after about five minutes and continued teaching where he had left off without saying anything else to us. The same thing happened on another occasion, but he just walked off and never returned!

Then there was Mr Coupe the physics teacher. All I can say is I am glad I didn’t have him for A Level as I don’t think I would ever have passed. He was lovely, but things just went wrong all the time in his lessons. We once had to evacuate the lab because his demonstration of the diffusion of gases went slightly wrong and we were engulfed in clouds of bromine gas. He also took pride in telling us about the time he fell asleep whilst driving on the motorway and woke up to find his car perched half-way up a tree….and they trusted him to teach us?!

We had quite a few old-school twin-set and pearls type teachers. Miss Bowdler the cookery teacher could be the sweetest person, but she was so strict. There were always rumours around school about her throwing knives and forks at unruly pupils, but I fortunately never experienced this. However, she taught me the best way to chop an onion and this has stuck with me ever since.

Mr Swift was a funny man; he was one of those unfortunate people who refused to go bald gracefully. He had a massive combover which looked daft at the best of times, but one of the funniest things I saw whilst at school was when, on a rather windy day, he walked past the library windows and his combover was flying horizontally out from the side of his head. It’s just wrong!

I had some excellent teachers though. Mr Collis, my A Level chemistry teacher was one of my favourites. He looked like Penfold out of ‘Dangermouse’ (don’t get me started on children’s TV programs!) and was one of the nicest people you could meet. We felt so guilty when, having had a water fight in the lab with the distilled water bottles when he was off one lesson, he found out what we had done and didn’t tell us off, but was just VERY disappointed. I used to love his lessons, as I did Mr Edwards’ A Level Latin lessons. He was the deputy head on the boys’ site and was feared by many of the boys, but again he was one of the kindest people and he had a cracking sense of humour. Miss Smart, also my Latin teacher, was fantastic too. She was another twin set and pearls type, but she was a teacher that really cared and she was passionate about her subject; in fact, we always maintained that the reason she never married was because she never met a man that matched Tacitus!

It all seems a long time ago now, but I have a lot of fond memories of my time at Newcastle-under-Lyme School. The strange thing is that within my current job I now work alongside teachers from the school to recruit volunteers to work within our organisation. It’s funny how life can go full circle.