I have forgotten many of the teachers at Wishaw High
School during my years there (1964-70). I suppose most of them must have been
reasonably competent, but there were not among them many skilful or inspiring
educators. A few I recall simply as names or nicknames: Miss Donnelly in the
English Department; ‘Dr Beaker’ who taught chemistry; Jock Bonomy in P.E.;
Derek Winton in Modern Languages. Others I remember because of my positive, or
negative experiences in their classroom.
One comment by music teacher Mr Kerr coloured my
impression of him – but then, perhaps it epitomised his attitude to me. In the
middle of a lesson in my early years at the school, in which he must have felt
I was being particularly inept, he said something like ‘If this were an orchestra, Mr Dempster would
only be fit to play timpani,’ which I think even then struck me not just as a
personal insult, but a gross undervaluing of the musicianship of percussion
players.
Among the eccentrics on the staff was the gentleman
in the Technical Drawing department whose idea of punishment was to get you to
stand in front of the class and pretend you were perched on a 100-foot ladder
about to jump into a ‘wet towel.’ When you were in position, he would gently
address your butt with a T-square.
This gentleman also spiked his lessons with
often-repeated irrelevances – telling us that ‘Napier’s Bones’ did not consist
of skeletal remains, but an early calculating device invented by John Napier
(1550-1617), and recalling the story of another, much later Napier - James
Napier (1782-1853) who in 1842 conquering Sindh province in India, exceeding
the mandate he had been given, and supposedly send his superiors a punning
message reading ‘Peccavi’, the Latin for ‘I have sinned.’
I suppose most of my teachers must have been
reasonably competent, but there were not among them many skilful or inspiring
educators.
I realise it would have been difficult to awaken me
to the joy of mathematics, so I don’t blame ‘Bum’ Dickson for his failure in this,
though I remember sitting in his chalky classroom, its window-ledges crenelated
with big geometrical shapes while, as an end-of-term diversion he explained the
binary system and basic computing to us. But despite his responding patiently
to my questioning, understanding of this eluded me.
But I know that I could have been awakened in English
and History with just a little more challenge and stimulus. One of the most
reprehensible teachers was a gentleman in the history department who, year by
year, declaimed his way through the same set of notes (which I sat through in
both my 5th and 6th years), pacing up and down the classroom while we recorded
his wisdom. Each year, he relished Thomas Carlyle’s description of Robespierre
as a ‘sea-green incorruptible’; each year when we reached Palmerston’s
Conspiracy to Murder Bill, he wondered aloud with mock seriousness what poor
William had done to turn people against him.
Never do I recall this teacher encouraging us to
think for ourselves, to evaluate sources, to question received views. His
obvious relish for colourful phrases encouraged me to turn in
extravagantly-worded, rhetorical harangues instead of reasoned essays and this
probably accounts for my poorish performance in the Higher exams. I don’t
recall being pulled up for the lack of cogency in my historical writing, but I
suppose that even if I had been, I might have lacked the wisdom and maturity to
amend my style and content.
Clearly my senior-school English essays were
similarly bombastic. I remember turning in a long piece of writing about a trip
with my parents to the Scottish National Orchestra Proms at the Kelvin Hall in
Glasgow, when Bryden Thomson was conducting among other things the Polovtsian Dances
from Borodin’s Prince Igor. In my
essay I captured minutiae such as Thomson reaching out this shoe to straighten
out the corner of the red rug on the podium. My teacher George Brown returned
it to me with scarcely any marking, and a couple of notes in small red
handwriting at the end: ‘Write a little less and a little larger. Avoid
polysyllabic words and phrases.’ But I don’t recall him making any face-to-face
attempts to persuade me of the errors of ostentatious verbosity.
George Brown, the Principal Teacher of English had
taught my parents the subject at Airdrie Academy, and must have been nearing
retirement in 1970. He was privileged in that his classroom, a pleasant room
with one wall of floor-to-ceiling bookshelves lined with literary works, was
the only one opening out of the hallway at the front of the school. Mr Brown
was no doubt erudite, but from his teaching you might almost assume that
English (and Scottish) literature had come to an abrupt terminus about the time
of Thomas Hardy.
Nor in his class was I awakened to the timeless
relevance of the themes treated by writers such as Shakespeare and Hardy – but perhaps
the fault lay with me. How could I, would could not yet understand myself,
comprehend fictional characters? And yet I suspect that sympathetic, inspired
teaching, and a judicious choice of fiction would have encouraged me to
recognise aspects of myself in the pages of literature.
One of the teachers I rate most highly was also an
English teacher – a Mr Mason, whom we nicknamed ‘Perry’ after the television
detective. I remember him inspiring us to read D.K. Broster’s Flight of the Heron, and, trusting him,
persevering through the opening paragraphs until the story came alive. Most of all, I am grateful to him for
introducing me to the concept of modern poetry by playing a recording of John
Betjeman reading from his work.
Mr Mason was the only teacher in the school to
address boys by their surnames, while girls were given their first names. He
was firm, but I had the impression that he respected me, and this was
uplifting. Purely for personal interest, I read Muriel Spark’s 1953 biography
of the then poet laureate John Masefield, and wrote a long (and probably
highly-derivative) piece about the poet which Mr Mason read.
I was particularly intrigued by Spark’s account of
the poem The Everlasting Mercy which
describes the coming to Christian faith of Saul Kane, with its (to me)
eye-brow-raisingly controversial lines, such as the insults traded by Kane and
a former friend: ‘You closhy put! You bloody liar’ – though what a ‘closhy put’
was, I couldn’t have told you. I suspect this poem attracted me because
something in it reflected my own Christian environment, and because as with
Betjeman’s writings, it showed that ordinary language could work in poetry.
I had an inspiring history teacher in my early years
at Wishaw High, a flamboyant character by name of Maurice Kemp Bonner. He certainly
managed to stimulate my interest in the subject, showing some latitude in
allowing me a certain number of ‘Dempsterisms’ each period – ‘Dempsterisms’
being inane, immature remarks which I considered witty, such as mis-translating
‘Magna Carta’ as ‘The big cart.’ If I exceeded the specified number of Dempsterisms
per period, I knew I would be belted, and on occasion was.
But MKB also encouraged my writing. I wrote a silly
little poem prior to the General Election on 31st March 1966 – to achieve a
rhyme, it ignored the fact that by that point Edward Heath was leader of the Conservative
Party, and also mis-represented the status on the previous leader. My poem began:
‘The only way to dispel the gloom’
Said his highness Sir Alec Douglas Home
‘Is to kick out the rotten Labour today
And tomorrow install the Conservative way.’
The second verse began ‘Harold Wilson at once
protested’, and I know the remaining seven lines gave voice, with similar naivety
to other political leaders.
I showed this to MKB – I was in the habit of
apprehending him as he walked at lunchtime along the corridor from the canteen
to the male staffroom – he typed it up, and affixed it, with a single drawing
pin to the notice board outside Bob Craig’s Latin classroom. Later, I watched
eagle-eyed Sam Barnard reading it disdainfully, and then ripping it down and
crumpling it up in a swift, contemptuous movement.
I had bought a copy of the first volume of Sir
Winston Churchill’s History of the
English Speaking Peoples (Churchill had died in the January of my 1st year
at Wishaw High.) I persevered to somewhere around the third chapter before
giving up, but that was enough for me to encounter Boadicea the ancient Queen of
the Iceni of the Norfolk areas whose story inspired me. Without further
research, I wrote a blank-verse drama, Boadicea,
scribbled into a jotter. I suspect this
was a poor piece of work – the only line I can remember is ‘Suetonius was in
Anglesea, taming the hostile Druids’ – but I showed it to Maurice Bonner who
was encouraging.
I think it was Mr Bonner who also encouraged me to
write poems about more down-to-earth subjects. A few days after he’d told me
this, I said to him ‘Please sir, I’ve written a poem about television aerials.’
‘Good!’ he replied. But he would not
have been pleased with my execution of the poem, for I recall the first line
began portentously ‘Wrought, not by aesthete’s subtle style, but….’ I had still to learn that in poetry as in
life what’s needed is simplicity and authenticity, not flowery bombast.
But, like Mr Mason, MKB noticed me, tolerated me,
encouraged me and for this I am hugely grateful. He left Wishaw to work at Port
Glasgow High School.
The other teacher who took time to relate to me
personally was the Principal Teacher of Classics, Robert Craig. He was a
knowledgeable man, warm-hearted if sometimes irascible. He was in the habit of
keeping the most able pupils to himself, and I remember after our 5th year
prelim in Higher Latin, he sent everyone in the class who scored lower than 48% to another class. I had 48%, and got to stay.
I suspect I rather ingratiated myself to him by my
attempts to turn pieces of Latin poetry into English verse (very poorly, with no
attempt to match the metre). One appeared in the school magazine, called ‘Avis
Urbis’ (The city bird) and based on something from Catullus. It began
reasonably
Wings of awesome splendour bright
but in the second line there was a catastrophic falling-off
–
Lift her above the city by night.
I even sat in Bob Craig’s class when I had free
periods in my Higher year, doing additional work, and when the Highers came, I
scored a C. When I left his class for the last time, Bob gave me a small volume
which he had clearly owned for many years, a copy of classicist A. E. Housman’s
poem-cycle A Shropshire Lad, and I
treasured it.
In the end, I think the positive contribution to my
development made by teachers like these far outweighed the negative impact of
some others. It was the teachers who accepted me, and in some small way shared
themselves with me who helped me to survive and grow a little.
See main article on Wishaw High School
See main article on Wishaw High School
2 comments:
Thanks for posting , John. Brought back lots of memories. I was at the High School from 1963-69, and remember all of the teachers you mentioned. I recall Maurice Bonnar somehow trying to teach me Russian while the rest of the class were doing a written exercise of some sort! What a crazy guy! I would take issue with your statement about 'Perry' Mason being the only teacher to address boys by their surname. I recall Derek Winton doing so, in fact he often called me 'bois de Hinshel' (ho, ho!), and an English teacher called Forsyth too. I remember well one day when I was in 4th year, and had been absent for a week, he started the lesson by saying "Hinshelwood, can you give me a summary of last day's lesson'. I smugly replied 'I was off last week, sir', to which the immediate response was 'yes, I know you were, and that is why I am asking you. I want to see what effort you have made to keep up'. Ah, memories! John Hinshelwood
hi, im reseaching a family tree and wondered if you remember Judith or paul hoskins they went to school there same time.they lived i believe in carluke
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