A life in letters: School Teachers (Wishaw High School)

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.

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