King Henry VIII Grammar School

It just said B Stanger (City and Guilds) in the staff list. I remember those old desks in Joe's art room arranged in a rectangle, the idea being we could all see a model in the centre. One day, he taught us to draw faces, so two boys were picked as models and sat next to each other in the centre of the room, but back to back. After 40 minutes, Joe walked around to inspect our work, but stopped when he got to one boy and asked him what he was supposed to draw. He had taken the easy option and drawn the boy facing away from him, i.e. drawn the back of his head! Joe did see the funny side of it.

Yes, you are right. Bert Stanger's entry was always 'City & Guilds' which presumably meant he had been apprenticed as a carpenter or whatever. The most coveted apprenticeships were with the City Council in those days. It was drawing techniques that Joe taught me best, including perspective and so on. I was ok with a pencil, not so much with a brush. I don't remember having to draw anything but still life in 105. Sadly, there were no nude models. Who knows what might happen there now.

I chose woodwork in the fifth, having had enough of the arty stuff. I was always more practical, building go-carts, dens, radios etc. I wasn't the best at woodwork, but near the top. The best by far was a very intelligent lad who eventually did double maths A-level before uni, but he lived on his father's farm so was used to working on the tools. We had another academic type (he ended up doing classics), very well built, good at rugby, but was useless at practical stuff. Like your classmate, Bert got us to make a flower pot stand, which was supposed to have an octagonal top. When I say octagonal, of course, I mean a regular octagon. This poor lad kept fiddling about, and when he took it up for marking, Bert looked at it, smiled and said "Oh dear, everything you do turns into a disaster, doesn't it!". The top was octagonal, but an octagon of sorts, more an irregularly truncated octagon. Jack seemed to think that we would all succeed at maths so long as he kept uttering the same mantra... moan to us: "Now come on, gentlemen, we should be on R-Exercise-100, and we're only on number 50" ad nauseam.

Dickie Dawson taught me Geography in the third form but will always remember his rugby coaching in a Games lesson. To check on the binding of the front rows he would crawl through the scrum tunnel advising on how to bind. A better Geography teacher than rugby coach I suspect. Now, I was never taught by Piggy Shore but I do have a interesting take to tell. Following a few days off school with a nasty tummy bug my mother insisted I had another day before returning as I was still a bit off colour. My mother decided we should go to Birmingham as a treat. At lunch time I was taken to the cafeteria in Lewis's store. As we sat down with our food I glanced across the dining area and who should I see but Mr Shore. Terrified he might recognise me I angled my seat out of his gaze and hoped there would be no consequences. However, he was not alone but accompanied by a lady I took to be his wife. Later I began to wonder why he would be lunching with his wife in Birmingham on a school day. Fortunately there were no repercussions when I returned to school and to this day I wonder why he was there.

So Irwin living in Ash Drive would mean he got on the bus before me, which makes sense. Keith McGawley did have a bit of a fearsome reputation, but I got to know him a bit better in my final year at school and found that he was in fact a very pleasant, nice and likeable man. Rod Markley started in either 1970 or 71 and was I think a science teacher of some sort. He drove a very small sporty blue Suzuki, which most of us were amazed by as we only knew Suzuki for their motorbikes. He parked it by the prefects' hut. He was a young guy and rumour had it that his parents had a bob or two and had bought him that car which we all considered to be a bit exotic at that time. Dave Cooper was my English teacher in the 3rd form and he was a great one for promoting reading books and for that I'm grateful. He did have a lisp and the joke was that he said "My wife likes flowers and I give her a ssssssstttthhhpray every day." He took over the library from Fred Perry when Fred was made the Head of the sixth form. Dickie Dawson was a good teacher and a nice guy. His younger son, Adrian, was in my year. Who was the teacher who ran the swimming teams in the early 70s? He was Doc something and nicknamed Tramp since he had a bit of a mad beard and was very scruffy with half the front of his shirt always untucked. Nice bloke though. Also who was the Maths teacher who had written the book or books on New Maths? Was it Alan Edwards?

Two for the price of one, Bags Allen Edwards was Tramp, and vice versus

Bags, that was Alan Edwards during my time there. He always had the nickname Tramp, as in Tramp Edwards. He was head of maths although he never taught me, but his son was in my class/year. Until the sixth form, I never had a maths textbook. Instead, it was all Tramps' photocopied notes, that whiffed of alcohol or something when freshly printed and still warm - everyone used to sniff them - , so-called new or modern maths. I guess we were the guineau pigs. Some of it I readily understood, like numbering in different bases instead of 10, binary, topology, but never undertood matrices or set theory, and frankly I hadn't a clue what they were all about. There was a school debating society - which I avoided because it would have meant wasting more of my precious time at school out of hours - and they used to post adverts of forthcoming debates on the notice board. I remember one distinctly: THIS HOUSE BELIEVES THAT MODERN MATHS IS OF NO PRACTICAL USE

I appear to have got my tramps somewhat confused, so thanks for clearing that up. The teacher I am thinking of was also incredibly scruffy and as I said ran the swimming teams, a much younger chap than Edwards and I think, but am not sure, taught one of the sciences. I am sure he was Dr something or the other. It wasn't Doc Greatorex, because I knew him through school and through my Dad because he worked there when Greatorex was a student and they knew each other.

Was it Doc Edmondson? Chemistry? I don't remember him doing swimming since when he came I had long given it up, but he was always in rolled up shirtsleeves with a tail or two hanging out. Bit of a gut and beard, good teacher and fine bloke?

I remember it well as methylated spirit smell, I don't know what the photocopying technology was then. New maths was an absolute disaster. I got an electronics degree in London and went into design and Henry VIII maths remained a millstone around my neck. No fond memories of Tramp at all, we were just proof readers for his book and our education definitely suffered.

FMOT, they are exactly my memories of Tramp's experimental maths system. He was like a mad professor, designing and compiling it all as he went along, then testing it all out on us poor saps. We were absolutely guinea pigs. He eventually got it published under the title "Mathematics, Modern Style." Not that we ever saw a text book, of course. Everything was on those badly printed sheets. If we were lucky they were on Roneo copies with black ink, but the other type was a blurred blue system which is the one that smelled of alcohol. The majority were badly typed (or even handwritten) and even more badly copied so that much of it was illegible. I vividly recall many occasions when Kolisch would breeze into a lesson shouting "Sheets! I have new sheets!" He would hand out this bundle of papers and the rest of the lesson would be spent going through them with a pen to fill in the illegible bits. Because we were guinea pigs, the exercises were full of errors. So some were reissued with new reference codes. Say Ex20 was reprinted, it would become R Ex20, then RR Ex20 and so on. Much time was wasted pulling out useless sheets and replacing them. The waste of paper must have been horrendous.

I believe that Tramp used to go to evening classes at Tech and then teach the same stuff to his classes the same week. I was actually fascinated by it, and the matrix theory has been the foundation of my career, as it fed into the transportation and econometric modelling that I have used in bringing the sciences (if you can call them that!) of economics and criminology together. So called "Leontief" models were an established part of economic planning at the state and regional level, but totally unknown to criminologists until I described how they could be used to analyse organised crime, and to project trends in criminal justice system workloads. If I had attended that debate, I would have to have settled somewhere in the middle: - I suspect that modern maths is of no practical use for a very large proportion of the population, although of course set theory can help to explain this statement....

I don't remember many printed sheets. They were mostly handwritten. Their illegibility stems mainly from the technology at that time. Proper laser printers were not around, nor was black, or even a dark colour. They were monochrome, but the only colours I remember were a very pale wishy-washy mauve, or a very pale wishy-washy pink. My basic maths is still quite strong. I can still do simultaneous equations, basic calculus, trig and stats, stuff I found very useful in electrical/electronics engineering. Essential actually - I've always told students and trainees if you can't do maths, forget about engineering or science. Like much of the stuff taught in school/s, fortunately I have never had to use set theory or matrices. I still don't get them.