I’m very sad to hear about the death of the great illustrator Ronald Searle. His black humour and scratchy, inky drawings pretty much defined English cartooning when I was growing up and, though he produced a lot of other work through his very long and brilliant career, he’ll be best remembered (much to his chagrin) for creating the girls of St. Trinian’s and illustrating the Molesworth books.
The great thing about the worlds of St. Trinian’s and Molesworth — and why we kids loved them — was they showed life in an English school as an only slightly more darkly exaggerated version of the reality as we knew it, a Darwinian jungle with useless teachers trying to keep a lid on total anarchy. I was a bully-hating daydreamer like Nigel Molesworth (though with better spelling I hope) and we all joked and sang songs about setting the school on fire the way the St. Trinian’s girls did.
Searle was a legend to me, one of the greatest illustrators — hell, artists even – that England has ever produced. As any fule kno.
This picture from the kid’s TV quiz show Top of The Form is like a snapshot of English society and the social upheavals of the 60s and 70s. On the top row are pupils from an Aberdeen grammar school with their smart blazers and ties and neat, shiny hair (probably with shiny shoes too) who look like they’ll grow up to be Tory cabinet ministers. On the bottom are long-haired kids from the (in)famous Holland Park Comprehensive which at the time symbolized modern liberal ideas in education about doing away with the stuffy old grammar schools and replacing them with a supposedly more egalitarian system — and obviously a more relaxed attitude toward uniforms and hair. You can almost feel the class tension between the two rows of kids, though in this case it’s the smartly turned-out grammar schoolers who were more likely to be working class than their counterparts from that particular comprehensive.
Located in a very swanky part of west London, Holland Park Comp was the sort of place that sent Daily Mail readers into a rage about trendy lefties. While the student body included plenty of kids from the poorer parts of nearby Notting Hill (it had some back then), its location near the centres of London bohemia and progressive politics meant it also had more than it’s fair share of the offspring of the arts, media, and political elite. Famous parents with kids there included John Mortimer, Ken Russell, Lady Antonia Fraser and, um, Bob Monkhouse (maybe not quite so “elite”). Tony Benn sent all his kids there (son Hilary is second from left above) as did several other prominent left-wingers which led to the school being called “the socialist Eton.” Anjelica Huston was a pupil as was Ari Up whose band The Slits played their first ever gig there on her last day at school in 1977. The teaching staff was no less celeb-studded, at one point two blokes by the names of Bryan Ferry and Andy Mackay taught there (pottery and music respectively).
The school had such a reputation for being liberated and groovy that the joke at my rather more grubby comprehensive in west London was that the kids there were all doing drugs and having sex with each other. One year a kid transferred to our school from Holland Park and, even though he looked very normal, was immediately given the nickname “Junkie” which stuck to him for the rest of his school years.
I went to a summer school there one year to take some extra English classes and the teacher, predictably, had shoulder-length hair and all the Holland Park kids called him by his first name. One day he asked a girl to read a poem out and she did it so clearly and confidently it was like listening to professional actress (she might have been the daughter of one for all I knew), nothing like the embarrassed mumblings a teacher at my school got when they asked a kid to read something out loud, and I remember feeling more than a little inadequate and intimidated by the casual confidence of the moneyed class.
Not being an expert in education policy I have no idea if comprehensives were better than grammar schools or not, but I would think the son of a cabinet minister going to the same school as the son of a cab driver was a good thing. Though I sometimes wonder why it was that even though the pupils at my own school included plenty of kids who lived in equally-swanky and rich Chelsea they were all from the council estates with not a single son of a movie director or rock star among them. Guess we weren’t trendy enough.
I love this photo of Hammer films scream queenBarbara Shelley looking like a sexy school teacher on her way to drive the boys in the Upper Sixth wild as she tries to get them to concentrate on iambic pentameter while all they can think about is that slit in her nice tartan skirt.
I know she wasn’t Scottish but this song seems to fit.
I actually did have a sexy Scottish school teacher, her name was Miss McWhirter and she taught German. This being the 70s she often wore tight, high-waisted flares and her bum would wiggle when she wrote things on the blackboard which would reduce the class to rapt, sweaty-palmed silence. I don’t remember a word of German but I do remember that.
And then there were the sadistic, bullying PE teachers, I hated those bastards and can’t watch this clip without having some very unpleasant flashbacks: The adolescent circle of hell that was the communal changing room, the teacher checking that you weren’t wearing anything under your shorts (was it only my school that had a rule about underwear at games?), or making you feel like a worthless weakling because you forgot your kit or had a note from your mum excusing you. Did I say I hated those bastards?
Every school had one, or they used to, the fresh-faced idealist straight out of teacher-training college armed with all the latest liberal ideas in education, determined to relate to the kids. In the 1970s you could identify the male version by their facial hair and corduroy flares, while the women tended to be wispy types given to silk scarves and maxi skirts.
One term at Secondary School we had this young English teacher with scruffy shoulder-length hair who, instead of making us read Shakespeare or any boring old nonsense like that, showed us clips from movies which we’d discuss afterwards. This being the 70s he didn’t show us any morally-uplifting, boys-own stories like Reach For The Sky or The Dambusters (too much like celebrations of the war-like patriarchy?) but instead we were treated to extracts from Hitchcock’s grisly serial killer movie Frenzy and Lindsay Anderson’s radical Public School drama If… Imagine the heap of shit he’d get into now for showing a bunch of 14-year-olds a film where the pupils mow down the teachers and parents with machine guns and bombs. I can’t remember his name now but I like to think of him as our school’s very own Howard Kirk.
He obviously knew the way to a boy’s heart was through nudity and violence because we actually behaved in his class, but that mostly wasn’t the case with the trendy teacher who usually exuded all the authority of a timid hamster, and in the Darwinian jungle of an all-boys comprehensive the kids are savage little sharks who can smell vulnerable fresh meat in the water from a mile away so they usually got eaten alive. Once we had a substitute Biology teacher called Mr. Bone (really!) whose life we made a living hell, and not just because of the comic goldmine that was his name. His first mistake was to tell us he was a vegetarian (the first one I ever met) which led to constant shouts of “have a nice roast lettuce for dinner Sunday, sir?” and trying to engage us in a chat about pop music by talking about Joni Mitchell’s latest album. It was like Cat Stevens trying to deal with a roomful of Noddy Holders. Every time he turned his back on us he was showered with a rain of pellets from the sacks of dried rabbit food in the classroom. He only taught us for a little while and when we asked our regular Biology teacher what had happened to Mr. Bone he told us that he’d walked out of a particularly unruly class one day and never came back. Last he’d heard he’d had a nervous breakdown and was living in a communal squat in Earl’s Court.
So if you’re out there somewhere Mr. Bone, I’m sorry we were such little shits. But you really should have just hit one of us over the head with a text book.
The sentimental musings of an ageing expat in words, music, and pictures. Mp3 files are up for a limited time so drink them while they're hot.
Contact me: lee at londonlee dot com
