Issue No. 15: THE GREAT DIVIDE

For two years in the top class of the Junior School we were constantly drilled, tested, graded and punished in order to succeed. The ultimate prize was to pass the 11+ exams. We were repeatedly given old 11+ papers in all of the subjects and completed them under examination conditions. There was no room for failure. However, inevitably, there was failure and the consequences of this were calamitous for many.

When the results of the 11+ exams were known, the boys and girls who passed were, obviously, proud and elated. However, it was soon borne in on us that some of our friends, comrades and fellow sufferers who had, it seemed to us, spent a lifetime with us (six years, but it felt much more) were no longer going to be part of our journey through life. Maybe we expected some of them not to pass, particularly the kids in the two bottom rows of the class. Quite probably, they expected the same, but the sudden realities of success and failure, with the forced separation of friends and the very different prospects to be faced in secondary education, came as a great shock to everyone. This was the first Great Divide in our lives.

Billy Jones & Co.

There were also those who were expected to pass but didn't. One of these was Billy Jones. He was a quick-witted, bright, cheerful and smallish boy, who was always dressed smartly, topped off with a natty bow tie. He lived straight opposite the school gates and was the apple of his mother's eye. His Mam looked much younger and prettier than the other Mams and, unlike them, wore brightly-coloured summery dresses. Her hair was in the style of a 1940s movie star and she always had a big smile for Billy when he emerged from school.

When Billy failed the 11+, the bright light dimmed in his eyes and also in his Mam's. Over the next two or three years I saw him trudge up Park Avenue on his way to the secondary school when our paths briefly crossed as I went in the opposite direction. There was no longer any spark or cheerfulness about him. I saw his Mam too a few times. She looked older and worried. She now wore drab browns and greys, like the other mothers. She had pinned her hopes on Billy's bright future - and they had been dashed.

Catherine Colley, the top girl, sailed through the exams, as did Fatty Lawrence, the top boy. Catherine's two loyal fillies, the Oates twins, faced the cruellest fate; one passed the exams and the other didn't. Born together, brought up together, birthdays together, schooled together and roped together as part of Catherine's proud team, they were now, aged 11, prised apart and forced to go their separate ways.

If the shock of separation at that young age was traumatic, then the education system in our town had a yet crueller twist. The 12+ exams allowed a very few kids from secondary schools a last chance to enter the Grammar Schools. However, at the same time, the Grammar Schools carried out a 'cull' after the first two years and expelled those that they deemed as failures. One of these was Harold Downes who, ironically, lived in the next house to Billy Jones.

Embittered

Harold was embittered by being expelled and couldn't come to terms with it. I guess that he was ashamed but hid this beneath a cloak of anger and resentment. I met him in the summer holidays after his expulsion. Already, he was being picked on and taunted by other boys that he would soon join at the secondary school. His anger had led to a number of fights, all of which he had lost. His immediate future, once he attended the school, was obvious.

Like Billy, Harold was the 'big hope' for the family. In his case though, unlike in Billy's, this had a desperate edge. His parents were poor and, either due to the poverty or to some genetic condition or both, his Dad, his two younger brothers and Harold himself were all chronic asthmatics. His Dad could never hold down a job for long. His Mam was a dead ringer for Bette Davis, with the same slightly bulging eyes - but these eyes were always showing fear and anxiety. She carried the whole family, but it was clearly crushing the life out of her. Harold, briefly, possibly offered a way out, if not for her or the rest of the family, at least for himself - but he had been thrown back into the coughing and wheezing pit of their shared existence.

There were many working class children who went to Grammar School in the 1940s, 50s and 60s whose lives were forever changed for the better as a result of the opportunities that the experience opened up for them, and this would not have happened but for the introduction of the 1944 Education Act and the inception of the 11+ exams. Of course, there were also those children who attended the secondary modern schools who, despite not going to the local Grammar School, nevertheless forged successful careers and better lives for themselves. However, society develops and progresses (or should) from one generation to the next and one must question a system which introduced an arbitrary quota of only allowing 20% of kids to pass the 11+ exams, with the in-built bias towards middle class kids from better resourced homes. What I have anecdotally described is the flip side of the well-known Grammar School success stories, the side of the vast majority of kids who never made it to the 'elite' and whose voices would remain unheard until a more egalitarian system of education was introduced (in England and Wales) in the 1970s.



Further Reading: Check out Michael Rosen's excellent blog on Schools in the 1950s.