1970s school memories – Glascoed People & Places

Glascoed Junior and Infants School in the mid to late 1970s

Memories kindly shared by N.M.

I was delighted to receive an account today of a former pupil’s memories of attending the school in the 1970s.

As someone who was brought up in a different State Primary School in the same decade, the account inspired a few chuckles and gasps – “Oh, I remember that too!”

We were the generation whose school milk was snatched by the Milk Snatcher (if it hadn’t been stolen by “a Humphrey!” … apologies to those younger than us – you probably have no idea what I’m talking about!

Enjoy – it’s a fabulous piece of history, of a world that has changed forever (for better and for worse).

Introduction

I attended Glascoed school in the second half of the 1970s and into the early 1980s. When I started there were four classes with a teacher apiece, and nearly one hundred pupils spread over the seven school years; that number had dropped considerably by the time I left. The catchment area included Glascoed, Monkswood, Coed-y-Paen and Little Mill, each of which provided substantial numbers of pupils; there was a state-funded school bus for the latter three areas. The demographic was widespread to say the least, with families ranging from traditional farmers to the nouveau riche middle classes by way of ROF employees in Monkswood and residents of the council estate in Little Mill. The wealthiest of the families allowed their offspring to attend the primary school (in a few cases only the infants’ part of it) before they were whisked off to whatever private boarding school their parents had previously attended. So the average classroom would contain a huge range of abilities and motivations, everyone from the “clever kids” on a fast track to university through to farmer’ sons who were just holding out until the end of compulsory schooling.

The School Coach

The Monkswood and Little Mill contingents were ferried to and from school in a large “luxury” coach, which was in no way suitable for the narrow lanes of Glascoed. We were expected to ride that bus without any adult supervision from the age of four onwards; obviously there were no seatbelts in an era when older cars didn’t have them fitted in the front seats either. When the coach met any other traffic head-on, the other vehicle would have to reverse however far it was to one of the passing spots. Our regular coach driver could be easily persuaded to increase speed going over the humpback railway bridge so that everyone on the back seat would be propelled into the air for a brief but delightful second.

The Prefabs

When I started school, the first two smaller prefabs had already been constructed for reception class through to the first year of juniors. The original school building housed the second- and in some cases third-year juniors, while the final year was taught by the headmaster in the larger dinner hall. Obviously, all the teaching materials had to be cleared away before lunch, which was a distinct disadvantage. I remember the third and largest prefab being built in the summer of either 1975 or 1976. That then served as a classroom for the oldest two years, an assembly hall with a stage that everybody could just about fit onto cross-legged with a bit of a squeeze, an upright piano next to it for whichever female teacher could play a few notes, and a corner office at the bottom of the room for the headmaster.

The school canteens: Little and large.

Most of the children had lunch in the main canteen, but twenty or so of the oldest would eat in a smaller room behind the kitchen. It was regarded as a great privilege to be able to eat there, and pupils could be banished as a punishment, forced to eat with the little kids. I was once relegated for a year for the apparent crime of not liking peas. The main canteen was also used for showing Watch! on Tuesday mornings to the entire lower school and for sundry purposes like the annual hair check for lice or the school photographer’s visit.

The cloakrooms!

The building also had two cloakrooms that were ice cold in winter. The compulsory bottles of milk would be deposited in one of them by a dairy farmer every morning and then left for several hours to either freeze or go sour in the heat. At that point the infants under seven would be compelled to drink them, which has left me with a lifelong aversion to drinking pure milk. I don’t have a lot to thank Margaret Thatcher for, but putting an end to my misery after three years is at the top of that list.

The toilet facilities were primitive to say the least: a red brick block behind the school with abundant spiders webs, assorted creepy crawlies and the hardest loo paper in existence.

Healthy activities

The girls and reception class played in the main playground, around which all the classrooms were grouped, while most of the boys ran around the back playground. I distinctly remember furtive games of kiss chase though, so at some point we must have shared a playground. British Bulldog was absolutely banned, but our other favourite games were hopscotch and singing circle games such as ‘I sent a letter to my love / but on the way I dropped it / someone must have picked it up / and put it in their pocket / thief, thief, drop it!’ It involved most of us singing with our eyes closed while one person put a stone behind someone else’s back, and there was some sort of chase around the circle. Another fun game was ‘What’s the time, Mister Wolf’. Long skipping ropes were always popular, and the dinner ladies showed infinite patience in turning the rope for us kids to run into. Then there was a leg elastic craze in the late 70s.

Since we were out in the sticks, key services had to come to us instead of the other way round. My beloved mobile library came once a week, and the less beloved mobile school dentist turned up like a rotten tooth every year. The one exception was the swimming classes, which were introduced (I think) in the late 1970s. It was clearly cheaper and easier to hire a coach to take all the juniors to Fairwater Comprehensive every week than any other alternative. Learning to swim in Llandegveth would have been frowned upon. Fluorescent orange plastic PE bags were all the rage back then, in fact I think the school might even have sold them once a year, with one of those order forms where parents would put the cash in a small envelope.

The lower junior classes did rounders all together, while the oldest children were divided into boys and girls for football and netball respectively. I played centre on the netball team as its captain, and I think we lost every match we ever played against another school.

Every so often, and I’m not sure if it was once a year or every two years, the teachers would mark out a bicycle route in chalk on the girls playground and we would all bring our bikes into school for a few weeks. We would then practice bike safety in the afternoons and then at some point be examined for the bicycle proficiency exam. Just about every child had a bike of some sort, and would have been taught to ride it before their fifth birthday.

In summer we were allowed to spend the rest of our lunch break up on the common. Initially we all had to line up together in pairs and walk there and back via the road, but sometime in the late 1970s a direct access path was constructed through the woods between the school and common. From that point onwards anyone who wanted the loo was able to go by themselves, which came as a (literal) relief to many.

Sports Day was of course held there once a year, the usual assortment of running, jumping, sack race and egg-and-spoon competitions. Winners would be awarded a large A4 cardboard certificate. The Silver Jubilee in 1977 was also celebrated there – my main memory of it is spending days on end in schooltime colouring in alternating Welsh dragon and Union Jack flags. I have a distinct memory of an annual village fair being held on the common in that era, mainly because I once won second prize in the wild flower arranging competition (an activity that would presumably be frowned upon today).

Cultural pursuits

The school was also inordinately fond of country dancing, and I recall Mrs Evans, a diminutive former classical singer who taught reception, being the main instigator in this. At some point dance costumes had been sewn from polyester which could be worn for concerts or other performances. The best eight dancers in the school would occasionally be allowed to St Briavels for a country dancing competition. I don’t remember ever being invited. My skills clearly lay elsewhere.

In the late 1970s an ambitious concert or musical performance was put on each year for parents, which involved as many of the children as could plausibly be squeezed onto a stage. My memories are most vivid of A Christmas Carol, The Sound of Music, and Joseph and His Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat (by the time of the latter they’d given up on live action and staged it as shadow puppetry). The school had its own selection of percussion instruments to accompany songs, but apart from the glockenspiel and rattly jingly things our music educational started and stopped with the truly abysmal recorder group. I look back and am truly astonished by the patience of Mrs Harris, who somehow managed to avoid putting her fingers in her ears and telling us how terrible we were.

The whole school apart from reception would occasionally go on a day trip to London or Windsor. One time the plan was for the senior boys to go to the Science Museum while the girls would, of course, want to go to the Ideal Homes Exhibition. Even in the 70s that appeared an outrageous notion to me, and I think enough parents must have had a word in the headmasters’ ear so that we ultimately all went to the museum together. Then there were residential school trips for the juniors every year, although never beyond the confines of South Wales. Talybont, Forest Coal Pit and Butlins Barry Island were favourite destinations for the school. I remember that Butlins cost 35 pounds per child for the week in about 1977/78, all inclusive, which was a lot for many of the poorer families back then. We had what by modern standards would be regarded as an incredible amount of freedom on those trips: in the early evenings we were allowed to go around the site in groups without adult supervision.

"The times they are a' changing ..."

Education was probably at a really interesting transitional point in the early 1970s, but it was quite confusing for those of us going through it. The metric system had been introduced for maths lessons, but it was something that our parents neither used nor really understood. Many of the younger teachers had probably been trained with quite progressive ideologies about non-frontal teaching, with tables in friendly groups rather than in traditional rows. My mother was infuriated by the – as she saw it – refusal to teach ‘proper grammar’ and parsing in favour of project weeks and endless creative poetry. Most of the poems seemed to be themed around our endless love for Wales – and let me just say it was hugely convenient that Wales and vales rhyme so well, it saved my rhyming bacon on numerous occasions. I have a distinct memory that the school won a prize for its project work in the late 1970s, when Gary Williams was head. I was a voracious reader, but got told off in first year of juniors for reading too much Enid Blyton, which to my mum’s utter bewilderment was deemed ‘unliterary’. Then there was the complete lack of uniform (although girls were not allowed to wear trousers), which even then was unusual for a primary school. In the late 70s someone designed a dark blue school pullover with a completely invented logo on the front; parents could buy one, but it was never mandatory.

All this touchy-feely content contrasted sharply with the conservative disciplinary approach, which was largely based on terrifying kids into submission for fear of getting caned. Glascoed was of course no better or worse than any other school of the time in this respect. I don’t even think girls were caned in the 1970s any more but it still scared me witless. Aged four I had somehow confused the words cage and cane in my mind and thought that miscreants would be locked in a cage. The male teachers in particular were quite literally old school – the first Mr Williams seemed personally offended by me being left-handed, and most of all for meals; he once physically picked me up while we all had our eyes closed during prayers before lunch and moved me down to the reception table as a punishment for holding my spoon in my left hand. Affection came solely from kind dinner ladies like Mrs Lawrence, who was a truly angelic soul. Any special educational needs were neither recognised nor acknowledged at the school, which I suppose was typical for the era; every so often I think back to fellow pupils who, in retrospect, very obviously had ADHD or were on the autistic spectrum, and I wonder how much more humane their schooling might have been today.

In the senior class of third- and fourth-year juniors, mornings were less touchy-feely and started with a written paper under test conditions for verbal and non-verbal reasoning; only much later did I realise that this might have been a hangover from the days when children would have sat the 11 plus at that age. The papers were marked immediately and then we were graded on our result from the top to bottom position in the class; bizarrely we would then have to physically move our entire desks to reflect that position in the class, on one of the four tables, and spend the whole of that day on that table, presumably hugely motivated to improve and get one of the coveted places on ‘top table’. So our days were this hugely mismatched combination of inflexible traditional grading in the morning and creative expression in the afternoons.