Watts and Barraclough

Several posts ago, as a starter for my ambitious project to hit 1,000 posts on my 10^th blogging anniversary, I put up a list of surnames, with the idea that just asking people to guess the context would be good for a shot or two.  My brother inadvertently blew my cover with a comment identifying them as teachers at our grammar school, so I might as well cut straight to the Act II exposition, which is to say something about these long-dead formers of my self.

I’ll start with a couple about whom I remember least, and will therefore have to make up most.

Mr Watts had an artificial leg, having lost the real one in the war.  I think it was his left one, because I can picture him riding his bike to school.  This had been modified so that he only had to pedal on one side; I’d only see him in the morning, when he would be riding along Mallard Way towards the staff entrance and so would be on the same side of the road as me.  But it could have been his right one.

His inevitable nickname was ‘Pegleg’.  I guess he must have been aware of this, but he was a kindly soul who clearly had a thick enough skin to elect to be a boys’ secondary school teacher in the knowledge of all that would entail, and I don’t think there was ever any unpleasantness serious or discernible enough to need escalating.

I have no idea what he taught.

Mr Barraclough taught, I suspect, geography.  If so he must have taken me over from Mr Styles (q.v.) when I was in about the fourth form and done serious damage to my interest in the subject.  To be fair, my interest in any subject other than skiffle was at serious risk by then, so I can’t completely lay my abysmal O level performance at his door.  Oh all right, I can.

I remember him being extremely tall, which is confirmed by a photograph I’ve recently stumbled across online.  Online sources also suggest he was an avid user of the cane, but I never experienced that.  Mind you, I don’t remember ever having been caned during my school days (or since).  I was too timid to be a threat to any of my teachers.

Team Spirit

We all learnt that at school, didn’t we?

In my case, and probably in yours (assuming no millenniums read this blog), team meant sport.  Which meant competition.  Our team, because it was a team, had to develop spirit, which was what would enable us to beat the other team.  (The fact that the other team was usually a random Wednesday afternoon selection of one’s classmates, and so didn’t really have time to do that, wasn’t important.  The concept was the lesson.)  Team spirit enables the team to compete and win.

(It didn’t work that way in practice for me, because competing in a sporting team turned out to mean competing mainly against one’s teammates in order to improve one’s chances of being noticed and so advancing one’s social status, something I could do much more easily indoors.  Although one couldn’t totally duck, I generally managed to avoid contact sports, because I didn’t like getting hurt, of which there was a more than fifty-fifty risk because, although I wasn’t physically weak or small, I resisted acquiring the skills needed to avoid getting hurt without running the risk of getting hurt, which I didn’t like.  And cricket was for privileged boys.  So I never properly learnt team spirit.)

I now, I think, see the fallacy in all this.  Out here in the real grown-up world, most teams aren’t, or shouldn’t be trying to beat another team, never mind their own.  They are, or should be, trying to get the job done.  But that bloody competitive sporting team spirit they learnt at school does nothing but get in the way.

History? Ancient, innit.

“So, how are you getting on with ‘Wolf Hall’?” I asked someone who’d just come back from a fortnight in Mauritius.  She twisted her mouth.

“It’s quite hard, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” I said.  “It takes a while to suss out that when she says ‘he’, usually it means ‘Thomas Cromwell’, whom she’s cast as a first person narrator speaking in the third person, and doing so in the historic present tense …  But once you get past that – ”

“Oh no, that wasn’t a problem.  That’s not what I meant,” she said.  “It’s just that I don’t know anything about ancient history.”

“But, you do know about Henry the Eighth, and his wives and the Pope and stuff.”

“Not really,” she replied.  “I kind of ducked all that.”

You probably think I’m conversing with a teenager.  Not at all: this is a highly intelligent, educated and mostly well-informed person eight years younger than me.   I was intrigued by this gap, and would have pursued it further, but dinner was on the table and I had to gulp down the rest of my gin.  We never got back to the subject.

But when I got home I started to think about it.  My first thought was “does it matter?”, and my immediate answer was “yes!”  Unless you have at least some understanding of what was going on in and after the Reformation, you won’t understand a lot of what’s going on today.  Because today’s norms are born of yesterday’s controversies, and to hold a view about, for example, whether it matters who is our next-but-one monarch (if that bothers you) or whether prisoners should be allowed to vote, you need to know how we got to where we are.

On the other hand, I then reflected, I got through more than half my life without any iota of such understanding.  Although I scraped a History O level, that was really no more than a demonstration of my powers of memory.  Thus although I knew (roughly) the names of Henry VIII’s wives, in order, I had no idea why he had to have six, and certainly not how this eventually led to the Civil War, or for that matter the First World War.  History, when I was taught it in the fifties, was almost entirely about the ‘who’, ‘what’ and ‘when’ of the past; hardly if at all about the ‘why’ and ‘how’. 

As it happens, the path of my life meandered to a point, maybe twenty years ago, where I was suddenly prompted to take an interest.  Needing something to read (in the loo, since you ask), I came across a series of Pelican histories of England, and grabbed one at random.   I remember very clearly the key thought: “Ah, so that’s why William the Conqueror needed to invade us!”  I’ve never looked back.  (Don’t set me any exam papers though.)

So I don’t in any way blame my friend for not knowing what Henry VIII was about.  She received the same rubbish education I did, but never got steered into that particular later-life diversion.  I think (although I don’t know for sure) that today’s teaching of History might be a little bit more educative (in the sense of thought-provoking); but ask me again in five years’ time, when it’s been dragged back to the fifties.