Walworth/Mina Road: see if your name's here!

As regular readers will know, a couple of us are collecting people’s memories of English teaching at Mina Road (Walworth) School as part of a research project. Pete was a teacher at the school from 1964-71; Patrick was a pupil who left in 1969.

We’ve been lucky to get hold of some documents that contain lists of pupils who were released for things like choir practice, music lessons and athletics events. Amongst the names are some that belonged to class 2D in 1956-57 and 3R in 1957-58:

Abbott	Sandra
Crump	Linda
Curtis	Jacqueline
Curtis	Gillian
Dower	Carol
Fitzgerald	Eileen
Hill	Brenda
Hollis	Garrod
Hollis	Michael
Keefe	Leonard
Leonard	Keith
Lewis	Kenneth
Longhurst	Diane
Munday	Barry
Richards	Derek
Vallance	David
Wakeman	Alice
Walker	Ian

We’d like to hear from anyone on that list or anyone who was in that class. If you know anyone’s address or email and you think they wouldn’t mind your passing it on, can you please let us know?

We’re especially interested in the English teacher who took you in those two years, Mr Harold Rosen -- please let us know if you remember him, and most especially let us know if you’ve kept any work that you did for him.

We’d also like to know who taught you in years 1 and 2, and 4 and 5 (for those who stayed on).

The best way to get in touch is via an email to walworthresearch@me.com.

Our website is http://remakingenglish.org.

Hypothesis re babies and language

Am now regularly exposed to two children aged around one. This has just occurred to me -- I must check it out in the field (i.e. on the floor) when next I visit. It may be wrong; it may also be correct and completely familiar to those who know about this stuff.

Language, as I understand it, is known to have a different origin from animal cries. The only animal cries we human have are crying, roars of rage and such and laughing -- something like that -- I forget the formulation. These we hear from babies from the start. Only around now, though, am I beginning to notice vocal behaviour that seems the precursor of language; the nature of the distinction is my hypothesis.

Animal cries in babies are expressive, the manifestation of internal states like amusement or hunger. The sort of noises that seem to anticipate language are referential: they occur in the context of the attention being directed to something outside the self, or accompanying some operation like dropping a block into a slot. I'm not sure if these noises are getting specialised yet -- a particular vocalisation for a particular phenomenon -- in which case they would be on their way to being names.

The discouragement of good habits

I take a quiet pride in being economical - not throwing the marmalade jar away until I've scraped the very last milligram of the Sevilly jelly, eating every last leftover scrap in the fridge, turning appliances off. The incentive to save is only partly financial -- one day soon we may all have to go back to scrimping and saving, so in preparation best get back into wartime ways now. There’s are moral and ecological dimensions too, in principle -- though in practice eating all my greens up won’t save the earth.

Nevertheless, it’s disheartening and a disincentive after saving 5p here, 1p there, to break the glass plate in the microwave and then to be charged £27.68 by the bastards at Panasonic for a replacement. Nor much choice but to accept, I conclude: I no doubt need the exact same plate with the grooves in the right place and I doubt if the 99p shop has an own-brand substitute; nor is it likely to be repairable.

Would I have been better off in the USSR with a socialist microwave that didn’t work but with spares that were free to Party members?

At least I wouldn’t feel like a mug for trying not to waste stuff.

Academics in wartime

An item on today’s Today -- BBC Radio 4 -- described a wartime RAF establishment the name of which I didn’t catch. It recruited archaeologists and other academics, as well as gifted amateurs like crossword geniuses, to interpret aerial photographs taken over enemy territory -- thus detecting from an image a millimetre across the presence of a V2 rocket and estimating from its dimensions its possible range, or inferring from the type of goods trucks in a marshalling yard whether foodstuffs or industrial materials were being transported and working out what the answer might indicate about the state of things in the nearby city.

One of the participants, whose name I also missed, was asked if he and his colleagues resented the lack of any public recognition of the work after the war, in contrast with Bletchley. He answered that they didn’t expect recognition: doing the job was the reward in itself because the work was both worthwhile and interesting and the relationships formed during it were enjoyable.

A constant criticism of public policy under every government since Thatcher has been the failure to acknowledge that the worth and interest of the work can be their own reward, and that the motivation to work hard and to the highest standards can be present when there’s no monetary incentive. This particularly applies to work that people chose because it’s interesting and despite the indifferent pay, such as teaching and research. In teaching it can often be a bad idea to reward good work with marks and grades when you want students to come to believe that the exercise of intelligence and extension of knowledge is a good thing in itself. The same applies to teachers, doctors and NHS managers. Might it not even apply to bankers?

Chemistry dream

In my dream last night I was attending, as myself at my present age, an undergraduate chemistry lecture in Canada. The lecturer, who was well-prepared and interesting, talked about some chemical compound that had a twenty-five year delay before it was activated. Then it could be set off by, for instance, the rumble of traffic.  What happened on activation I’ve forgotten or never knew.

I asked a question, something like: ‘It’s quite a long time since I had my last chemistry lesson so could you explain a bit more fully?’ I’d thought of adding that in fact I’d never in my life had a single chemistry lesson, which is true, but didn’t want to outstay my welcome. As it was, my question evoked some laughter.

I don’t know how the lecturer responded except that she was nice about it, but in the audience was a colleague from my own department. I'll call her Eileen because I haven’t known anyone called Eileen since 1984 (Eileen Daffern, admirable communist co-director of the Centre for Resources in European Studies (or similar) -- six empty rooms, some notepaper and a lot of books -- at Sussex University). I was a frequent guest at pseudo-Eileen’s dinner parties, and came to realise I was something of a trophy, possibly because of my British accent and because I came with jokes, in which Canada was not self-sufficient. Her face wreathed in smiles at my question, she turned round to beam at me and then at all her friends in the hall as if to say, ‘Isn’t he wonderful? Isn’t this a great find I've bagged?’

Where did the dream come from? I don’t know but I was impressed by what my Canadian humanities students knew about science from their broad high school curriculum and the range of subjects they took in first year university.

My other observation about chemistry is that the chemists I've known -- not a large sample -- have been more interesting, more cultured and more human than the physicists.

English teaching, Romantics and Moderns

I've been carefully re-reading, for our history of English project, Ian Reid’s Wordsworth and the Formation of English Studies. It’s of particular interest because there’s an extended discussion of English at Walworth/Mina Road School in the 1950s and 60s, including accounts of some key teachers: Arthur Harvey, Harold Rosen and John Dixon.

His claim is that all these teachers, and teacher-educators at the Institute of Education and King’s, right back to John Dover Wilson and including Percival Gurrey and James Britton, were heavily influenced by Romantic values and ideas that sprang originally from Wordsworth’s poetry. The problems with his story are, first, that these people, for all that they had in common, had many important differences and were influenced, differently, by ideas that came from places quite other than Romanticism, and second that -- as Reid fully acknowledges -- Romantic ideas had been so thoroughly absorbed that they were no longer felt to be ideas or a theory but were simply the common-sense air that everyone breathed. How could a thinking English teacher not have been a Romantic if that was what you were if you didn’t espouse some moribund and atheoretical hangover from Augustan convention and classical rhetoric?

A question that continues to intrigue me -- it falls outside Reid’s remit -- was not how teachers were (still) influenced by Wordsworth but what they made of the liveliest literary movement of their own century, Modernism. If university-educated English teachers were a key group within that part of the society that seriously read literature, how can their work have been, to all appearances, so utterly unaffected by Ulysses, Kafka and Pound? Eliot got in there through certain exam syllabuses, maybe some Yeats too, but, as far as I can see, few others. Gabriel Josipovici (click on his name in the labels at the side) complains that British novelists still continue to write in nineteenth century genres. Well, it seems accordingly that kids in English lessons wrote nineteenth century narratives and Romantic poetry, as if the vast upheaval of Modernism had never taken place.

It’s possible to think of explanations. For instance, it’s not easy to see what teachers could have done with Modernism if they’d wanted seriously to build it in, in setting writing tasks, for instance; it may be that Modernist texts are simply too difficult for younger readers; or the Modernists’ sense of the exhaustion and irrelevance of nineteenth century forms wasn’t and couldn’t be shared by readers who hadn’t read enough of it to have grown weary.

Blue plaque for Miss O'Reilly

Miss Anne O'Reilly was the first real head of Walworth/Mina Road interim comprehensive school, 1947-1955. Her niece, Pat Jones, and my colleague on the Walworth history project, Pat Kingwell, persuaded Southwark Council to award her a blue plaque for her war work (for which she was given and MBE) and her headship of two schools, Peckham Emergency Central School during the war and the new Walworth School after it.

The four-year-old Walworth Academy (principal Devon Hanson) hosted the ceremony, the plaque was unveiled by the mayor on the wall of the only surviving building (from 1905), Simon Hughes MP spoke and we all went inside for refreshments, mingling, and more short speeches, including by two impressive ex-pupils from Peckham, then David Harris from Walworth, Pat Jones herself and Pat Kingwell and me for our project, Social Change and English: A Study of Three English Departments 1945-1965, appealing for more information and stuff. Lots of reunions and, for Pat K and me, a chance at last to meet people with whom we’d had only email or postal contact.

Some decent photos will be up on the Academy site in due course; in the meantime here’s my petty offering.  (Click to enlarge)

1. On Mina Road facing the school and the plaque.  I'm sure there were more people than that when we eventually got inside.



2.  Here I can recognise on the right John Sparrow (English) talking to Simon Clements (late 50s and early 60s, English and Social Studies).  Of those present, John must have been the teacher who taught earliest at the school (1952).  I also see Mary Lou Thornbury who taught World Studies in the 1960s and 70s.



3.  I'm sure there will be a better photo of the plaque forthcoming. You can at least see Miss O'Reilly's dates, 1891-1963.



4.  Finally, the one surviving original building (1905: the Mina Road Higher Grade School) which only now can we get a decent view of, after the demolition and new site layout.  Here the only people I'm sure of are, on the right, Kim James, who I taught in the first and second year and hadn't seen since, and Bill Metson on the left, who we met and interviewed through the project.


I'm looking forward to some decent pictures taken by Tony of the Academy.