H.A. Twelves -- more

A year ago (5th January 2008) I posted an obituary piece I'd written about my sixth form French teacher at Bradford Grammar School, Mr H.A. Twelves. (To find it, click on the label ‘Twelves’ in the right hand margin.) People – ex-pupils -- have apparently found the piece by Googling Twelves, among them Tony Moore. The other day he added a Comment to that posting, as a result of which we had an email exchange. The substance of what Tony adds to his comment warrants a full posting of its own, so here it is:

"I can add a bit more. He met his wife Margaret at school: in French he was moved up a year and she messed up her exams and was moved down a year, which put them in the same class. His family were reportedly quite poor, which was I think why he went to Uni in Sheffield -- so he could live at home and avoid any boarding costs. Presumably he got all the scholarships which were on offer.

His first teaching job was at a school in Barnsley or somewhere near there. He was just about settling in when war broke out and the school decided that it didn't like employing conscientious objectors and kicked him out. I think this shook him. But he was more than happy to move to BGS, which was much more his kind of school in all sorts of ways.

Of course he never had any trouble with discipline. He kept his predecessor's (probably much used) cane in his study, but mostly as a reminder to himself of what the school had escaped. He said he never imposed a detention on any child in his entire teaching career, except when he was Second Master and boys were brought to him for punishment. He quite peerless in his power of verbal rebuke. And yet also able to wipe the slate clean: I was once summoned to his study to be told off for copying from a neighbour during a written test and I said I was sorry and that was the end of it.

HAT wrote quite a lot of articles in church magazines and a few booklets, and you might hear his voice in this one.

Mind you, where he got his accent from I don't know!

So far as I know he first went to France as a uni student, to Caen; but I don't know for how long. It was probably not a full year, as would be the case today. I don't know how good his accent was either, but I remember he was very fussy about ours -- much more than any of the other French teachers we had (getting us to chant "un bon vin blanc"). And he praised the intonation of the Loire -- he claimed that the aristocracy used to dispatch their youth from Paris to their chateaux during the summer, with the result that the local twang became received pronunciation ...or King's English.

He and Margaret spent many of their summers in France, travelling by car. He reckoned he'd been pretty much everywhere in the country. I don't think he had a favourite place, but he concentrated more on Paris and the area around Nimes for preaching purposes (Nimes is a Protestant area and generally felt by Christadelphians to be more sympathetic). Peter (his eldest) told me that in his youth he and HAT used to go on the train to some town with a couple of backpacks full of leaflets advertising a couple of public lectures, having booked a room in some local hall in advance, and they would spend a couple of days posting them through letterboxes then hope and pray some people would turn up to the lectures.

As for education, he would have been appalled at the pressing of buttons to achieve grades and the focusing on a dictated curriculum. Far better to know your stuff and then treat the exam as a minor distraction.

He was sympathetic, though, to, the scientists of former years who failed Latin and found they needed it for Oxbridge entrance; and who had to mug up on it very hard and very fast. Of course, his pass rate for this group was 100%."

Tony and I agreed, incidentally, in our surprise at how what a high proportion of the staff of the school were unimaginative and indeed incompetent. If that intake had been taught by teachers who were mainly as bright as the pupils, the sky would have been the limit.

Labels

Damn. While attempting to publish the previous entry (Walworth / Mina Road) I got an error message to say that my Labels could not total more than 200 characters. I'd tried to add the names of teachers as Labels, in the hope that Google would be more likely to pick them up.

Not sure what to do about this. Weed my existing labels? switch to another blog provider? Any advice, please?

Walworth School / Mina Road School

I'm hoping some people will find this by Googling the school’s name. (Its official name from 1946 was Walworth School, but it was often known by its older name of Mina Road School, dating from at least 1882.) Mina Road is off the Old Kent Road in the Walworth district of Southwark, in South London.

Walworth School no longer exists, having been replaced in 2007 by Walworth Academy. It was established in 1946 as an ‘experimental’ or ‘interim’ comprehensive school, in the buildings and with many of the staff of what had been a ‘central’ school. The school was regarded as highly successful and was important and interesting in a number of ways, one of which was its leading role in reforming English teaching in London.

Briefly, the point of this is that I'm involved in producing a history of the teaching of English in this school and two others. We’re going from after the war – 1945 – to about 1965, and we’re collecting memories from people who remember their experience of English lessons at Walworth.

We’d especially like to hear from people who were taught English by:-
Mr Arthur Harvey
Miss Judith Wild
Mr Hall
Mr Gus Greely
Mr Harold Rosen
Miss Pip Porchetta
Miss Valerie Avery/Noakes
Mr John Dixon
Mr Leslie Stratta
Mr Simon Clements
Mr Charlie Stuart-Jervis
Mr Andrew Salkey
Mr Alec or Alex McLeod.

If anyone out there has kept any of their English work, we’d love to see it. Or if you know anyone who may have.

To get in touch, add a Comment to this blog posting (click on the link at the end of this). It won’t automatically be posted on the blog but will first be emailed to me for my approval. If you want your message to be just a private communication to me, say so: I won’t publish it and I'll send you my email address so we can communicate in confidence. But I'm also pleased to publish anything appropriate if that’s your wish.

I'm involved in this history project as one of my jobs (privileges!) as Senior Visiting Research Fellow (i.e. retired lecturer) at King's College London. I taught at Walworth myself from 1964 to 1971.

I'm working most closely with Patrick Kingwell, an ex-pupil of Walworth, formerly a senior officer of Southwark Council and an active local historian. Also with three colleagues at the University of London Institute of Education: Dr John Hardcastle, Professor Richard Andrews and Dr David Crook. Between us we’ve just been awarded a generous research grant by the Leverhulme Trust to continue the work for three years and produce a book.

Bradford photos on Flickr

As promised some time ago, I've posted my Bradford photos on Flickr (shared photo site). Here’s how to see them. (I've added my Flickr page to my Links -- see right hand margin, below the long list of Labels.)

Go to Flickr.
In the Search box type my username, Utpictura
The page that comes up will have three headings: Photos, Groups, People. Click on People.
The next page is mine. Click on the icon to the left of my name and my ‘Photostream’ (all my photos) will come up.
The easiest way is then to click on Sets.

The Bradford set is called ‘Great Horton, Bradford, October 2008’.

Our old houses

I doubt if this will be of any interest except to family and Bradfordians -- if them.

From birth to moving away to university I lived in three houses in Bradford (and in a flat for the first month or two – I think the address is on my birth certificate but I’ve never looked for the place).

The first was 314 Poplar Grove. The postal address was Great Horton, Bradford, but that title was dubious because we were on a hill in a new (1920s or 1930s) development on a hill above Great Horton, a village which Bradford swallowed in the 19th century. We were probably more like Wibsey, though that was less respectable.

There’s no way of making this a good picture. I took it on a dull day in 2002.

The house cost, I think, £700 in 1941 or 42. I'm sure that when I lived there it was even uglier. The pebbledash -- always an unpleasant material -- was a drab grey. There was a garage but it was wood or asbestos, across a passageway from the side door. It housed our Hillman Minx (1937?) which sat on four piles of bricks (‘laid up’) during the war. I remember my dad (back from the army) reinstating it, a process that I must be mistaken in remembering involved removing from the engine nuts or bolts that somehow attached themselves during the years of abandonment.

The front room window has clearly been replaced and the paintwork was brown, with a graining effect worked in the varnish by Mr Livesey. (In those days there was no such thing as white paint -- and I'm not sure it wasn't better that way. Houses were brown, maroon, dark green or dark blue.) The back garden was great: it had an Anderson shelter (I don’t remember going in it except after it was abandoned – Bradford wasn’t bombed), a lawn, a bird bath and black current bushes, and at the far end a gate into the snicket which gave access to the back gardens of a variety of interesting and mainly friendly neighbours. Next door lived the Hatches, and a few doors away Muriel Sagar, a teenage girl who used to look after me.

We had evacuees from London. I don’t remember their names (but have a vague sense that I do know and that they might come back to me) or how the arrangements worked, but they were a mother and a boy.

In the larder (separate from the ‘scullery’ – no such thing as a ‘kitchen’ in such houses) a blue enamel bucket contained eggs preserved in something called Isinglass). Our front room furniture was, I think, ‘utility’ – under-upholstered armchairs and sofas covered with some textile that was rough on the legs and with angular (cardboard?) arms. (The buses had ‘utility’ wooden seats.)

There were no houses at the other side of the road (which wasn’t made up -- I used to find interesting shiny stones on it) but a stone wall over which there was a sheer drop into a quarry. Later, in my next house, when I was 7 or 8, I learned to fear the Quarry Gang who lived below the quarry in the ‘slums’ and the Canterbury Avenue council estate.

For the next house, 12 Haycliffe Drive, perhaps half a mile away, I have no picture so will perhaps return to it another time. It was a similar semi, perhaps slightly bigger, but had the advantage of being two doors away from my grandparents (at no. 9, with Mr Grant in between and, during the war, Colonel Moholski) and having a field at the back with horses and sometimes pigs and the farm at the top end, above us. In my memory that was the best house. There was grey wallpaper with a white grid pattern.

When I was about 12 my grandma, now a widow, sold her house and joined us in buying a large Victorian end terrace down in the valley, in Manningham, off the road running out from the centre of Bradford to Saltaire. We were now three children, two of us at the grammar school which, with the move, was a short walk instead of two bus rides away. Devonshire Terrace (we were no. 5) was a gated, shabby-genteel cul-de-sac. We were the bottom house on the left.

The gates are long gone.

Next door was the elderly, confused, rouged, tipsy and unhygienic Miss Briggs, and two doors away the genial Geoghegan family with four boys – Patrick, Anthony, Philip and Ricky – and one girl, the youngest, Simone. Their mother was French and glamorous. The boys went to the (reputedly rough) Catholic grammar school, St Bede’s, and all did well. Patrick ended up in the Foreign Office, Anthony in the wool trade (Bradford’s thing), Philip became an architect and I don’t know about Ricky, or Simone. They were a smashing family.

On the other side lived another nice family, the Denisons.

We also had a back lane at the bottom of which was our garage and, behind that, a drop down to some allotments.

Like much of Bradford, these houses have been cleaned. In our time all stonework was black with soot -- as were the stone walls and sheep on the surrounding moors. Stone looked better like that, especially on the magnificent Victorian mills, warehouses and public buildings.

During my teenage years thousands of Pakistanis came to Bradford to work in the woollen mills. These families at first lived close to the centre of town but over the years spread out into areas with larger houses like ours. When I went past in November the occupants of Devonshire Terrace and the road it is off, St Mary’s Road, seemed to be entirely Asian.

Devonshire Terrace/Manningham never meant that much to me. My Wordsworthian Eden was Wibsey/Great Horton with its waste land, curving roads of pre-war semis, snickets, 18th century stone cottages, fields with black walls, hills, bad-tempered farmers in filthy raincoats taking rusty buckets to soaking horses in rotten wooden sheds, mills smelling of sheep’s grease, sinister mill dams, trams, the Cosy picture house – and above all Moor Fields, of which I've written here on other occasions.

Why stories are important

The importance of stories in education usually isn’t well explained. It's just this:

Stories give us practice in creating imagined worlds from words.

By ‘imagined’ I don’t necessarily mean fantastic. Imagining includes simply entertaining in consciousness scenes, situations, states of affairs, people, things etc. that aren’t immediately present to our senses in the surroundings we’re in at the moment. Bringing these ideas into consciousness is a creative mental activity, though not a deliberate one.

We don’t have to try to learn to do this; it comes with language. Once language has developed to a certain point, words arranged in narrative – stories – make imagined worlds appear to us without our having to try. So, presumably, what regular and developing experience of stories does is teach us to get meaning from, first, less familiar linguistic elements (language different from that we experience in everyday speech, in vocabulary and syntactical structures, for instance); second, differences of register and style (to ‘place’ one style you need to know many) and, third, more complex narrative structures.

In this respect – getting good at using words as instigators, props and organisers of imaginative work -- it’s equally beneficial to be read to as to read for oneself, or indeed to listen to oral stories.

(One of the inadequacies of educational theory – at least at the level it’s usually taught at – is the failure to distinguish what we get by virtue of simply being human (which we are by virtue of a particular biology and living in human society) from what can develop in us as a result of particular sorts of cultivation. For example: everyone (almost) can talk; it seems good in school to provide for the plentiful exercise of this capability; but what can school specifically add, by attentive and directed regimes of experience and activity, to the talk we can all do anyway?)

The essential is to develop the capability that we gain with language itself to have language induce imaginative work.

What this in turn depends on – the prior step, as the Soviet psychologist Vygotsky explained in the 1920s and 30s -- is an ability to attach our other-world-making to ‘signs’ in general. It’s our ability to find meaning in signs that enables us to find meaning in one sort of sign, words. Signs, in this special semiotic sense, are simply things outside us that we treat as signs – the smoke, for instance, that we see not just as smoke but as meaning the presence of fire. Signs are things that are there (in the real world outside us) that we use to bring into existence in the mind things that aren’t there, such as the idea of fire. Meaning is that relation between the thing outside that acts as sign and an idea inside us. The thing outside us can be a visual or auditory thing, such as the sound of a spoken word or the appearance of a written one.

Sign-use (‘symbolic activity') may start in play, as Vygotsky suggests, when a stick becomes a sign that supports the holding in consciousness of the meaning ‘horse’; or, more obviously in our society, with television images and picture books. Such signs are crucially different from the smoke/fire one in that their ‘outside’ or material component is made, not found (a distinction that St Augustine had already formulated).

For Lucy at age 1 a picture of a lion was more than one more item in the visual environment; it already had a meaning and provoked imaginative activity, giving rise to the meaning ‘lion’, which must have comprised primarily some sort of mental image. Already the picture was functioning as a sign, inducing her to imagine a lion – indeed to create the concept of a lion, since she had not seen one in a zoo and probably had no other basis to go on than the image.

Hence the importance of picture books in developing children’s capacity to use signs, whether visual or verbal, as instigators and organisers of mental activity – of imagining and thinking.

And later on stories – in words -- teach us not just to enter into more and more sophisticated narratives but, more fundamentally, to live in the sorts of world that are made possible when we know how to exploit the meanings that words can get us into. (In education we surely just have to trust that they just in general do this; it's nonsense to specify a 'learning outcome' for a single experience of a story.)

Comic strips, of course, are a terrific in-between form, though not just that. They provide a medium for the transition from pictures to words at the same time as teaching us to follow narrative structure. But they're also capable of creating worlds and realities that are particular to them and continue to exercise a special power even on adult readers.

Fragments shored up etc

Just to confirm I'm still here, more or less. No new photos.

What I have to say is just:

1. London beautiful in December, winter light. The best building in London, since cleaning and restoration, is the Festival Hall. Pure modernism: long horizontal windows, piloti, clean shape, not nervous about big expanses of flat surface. The back is the best view, now that the surrounds have been made lovely with paving and the masonry is pristine.

Much depends on the beauty of Portland stone. Contrast the concrete on the rest of the South Bank, which looks good at fewer times – and most of all when lit at night. The RFH cries out for photographs. I'll try and oblige.

2. I'm all for bikes in cities but they have one feature that can make them dangerous. I saw how today, off Chancery Lane (going to King's College library, the former Public Records Office, and another magnificent building, at least on the inside where it’s been restored and repurposed with flair and sensitivity – the finest library building I know, besides the British Museum Reading Room, Leeds University Brotherton Library (another rotunda) and the 17th century libraries of Oxford and Cambridge). Yes, bikes. One came out of side street into a more major road, causing a van to swerve to give him room – as the cyclist counted on him doing. The problem rarely spoken of is that cyclists don’t like to lose momentum: they value their stored energy and are reluctant to slow down because they’ll have to work hard to get their speed back again. Fit bikes with huge flywheels that could give them a starting boost in such situations.

3. I joined SofaCinema and ordered The World at War without quite realising that the DVDs would come one after the other, using up my whole monthly allocation so I'd be unable to watch anything else until I'd got through the whole series.

It’s great though. From the last episode I watched: a fed-up soldier waiting in a landing craft off the English coast ready to be towed in the next few hours to Normandy and D-Day. He comments cynically on the fatuous messages of cheer issuing from the top brass. Monty, brilliant but a fool: ‘God speed, and good hunting in the fields of Europe!’ Prat. One can appreciate how that went down with the fox-hunters of Wigan and the Gorbals.

One gain from the series: the name and music of Carl Davis, who I hadn’t heard of. The music you get at the start and end of each episode is haunting: thrillingly modernist and discordant with that tragic Central European note one gets in Bartok and Martinu, one to which I always mentally attach the phrase ‘the dark days of 1942’. But not without, too, a suggestion of the ‘broad sunlit uplands’.

I wish I could put a link so you could hear it, but of course it’s copyright. It’s at times like this, when a piece of music affects me profoundly, that I wish I had the musical knowledge to identify the features causing the impact.

I can’t get enough of World War II, while my inclination is to avoid anything about WWI. Is that because WWII’s in living memory – even mine, just; I remember my dad being in the army? Or because it isn’t done to death in school history, poetry anthologies, novels etc?