Children of a different social class

[Debbie]

Putting about the treehouse and the children's admiration for it reminds me of the other time when Ern brings a table he's made in woodwork.

It must be almost the only points where one of the children does something requiring a skill and Fatty doesn't immediately see it as an opportunity to boast.

Now was that because he wasn't good at woodwork, or he knew intuitively that Ern would have just believed that Fatty was better at it, whereas the others (except possibly Bets) would have just laughed at him?
I think at some point it's said that Fatty is actually good at the things he boasts about (I do wonder how popular he is at school though!), so maybe woodwork was something he wasn't good at. That puts a slightly different aspect on his boasting as it could be seen as just taking a pride in what he could do. If it was just boasting out and out, then I'd expect him to remark how the lovely bookcase he made had pride of place in the headmasters' office or something.
Or if he does it because he knows the other will just tease him, so it's perhaps done because it makes him feel one of them, part of the teasing crowd.

Or would he normally have done it, but knows that Ern will take it to heart and he doesn't want to hurt him.

[Anita Bensoussane]

A very interesting discussion. Regarding the table and the treehouse, I imagine that Fatty's private school puts more emphasis on academic subjects, expecting a large number of pupils to attend university and go into high-flying careers, while Ern's school (he probably goes to a state school) allows more time for practical subjects, preparing pupils for a range of options and expecting a fair number to take up apprenticeships. Therefore, Ern may well have learnt practical skills that Fatty and the others haven't had as much opportunity to acquire - and he clearly has a flair for woodwork and perhaps other areas of craft, design and technology too.

[Katharine]

Anita, I agree about the emphasis on practical skills depending on the type of school. Although I don't have any experience of private schools, certainly from the experience locally, the grammar schools were geared up to produce students with academic qualifications to go into professional jobs, practical subjects such as carpentry etc were taught in the secondary schools. Grammar schools were abolished a year or two before I was due to take my 11+, but the local grammar school didn't offer many practical subjects for a while, ie typing as they hadn't had the facilities. In the end, (I can't remember the dates), the old grammar school building was pulled down and a new school built, presumably because it was easier to do that and have one with woodwork facilities etc, than to try and adapt the original classrooms.

Going back to my parents' generation - the non-grammar schools offered few, if any formal qualifications - O levels weren't on offer, and particularly in the boys' school, many teachers weren't interested in teaching the students to a particularly high standard in academic subjects. Those with skills in carpentry etc could move onto apprenticeships etc at the age of 15, but there was a general feeling that many of those who hadn't passed their 11+ would just end up in unskilled jobs in local factories.

[Nair Snehalatha]

Fatty was not as skilled as Ern in carpentry -- no book tells about Fatty having made any wood work-- But carpentry was taught in schools those days.In Whyteleafe school Julian wss very tslented in.carpentry., having made a barrow for the school garden as John Terry wanted.To come back to Ern, he had a gift which perhaps Fatty did not have -- and that was carpentry.I doubt if Fatty could have made the tree house as Ern did in Tally ho cottage.My sorrow is that Enid Blyton should have brought in Ern ftom the very beginning -- a very.nice.simple boy--Anyway he's in.Banshee Towers which I font read much.as it it the ladt book of the find outers-- There is a tinge of sadness there

[timv]

I can't say if it was a general rule across UK (or just English ) secondary schools then, but in my grammar school in Sussex in the mid-1970s Carpentry was still taught to boys from the ages of eleven to fifteen, with the alternative for the final year or so of this to do Metalwork instead. This was alongside compulsory Art, but both crafts and Art only had one double period ( ie two 40-minute periods run together) a week and very few boys did 'O' Levels let alone 'A' Levels in either of these options; this and their minor position in the timetable shows that they were both seen as unimportant, with the school's main emphasis going on academic subjects. As of this point either the Head or the local education authority (I do not know who had the final say) did not permit girls to do carpentry or boys to do cookery - the latter was seen as 'only for girls' and was usually called 'Domestic Science'. There was no assumption that boys would need to do any cooking although at this date many would be moving away from home to student accomodation or bed-sits near their new jobs at 18, and attitudes were still stuck in the 1950s though TV chef shows were already increasingly popular so men doing cooking was already a career option (I remember Keith Floyd and some chef, Graham ?, who was known as the 'Galloping Gourmet').

This attitude, which would now be called 'sexist', went along with boys not being permitted to do hockey until about 1973 as the Head ( a former county-level rugby player) thought it 'girly' . He was also not to pleased when we started doing unisex games of volleyball indoors in PE in the winter - 'manly' cross country runs were preferred, and his favourite sport of cricket in summer. (The Carpentry masters mostly doubled up as cricket/ rugby coaches, and were usually selected for their expertise at this - not many had professional qualifications.) Some parents were still rather old-fashioned and actively complained about Careers Evenings when girls were encouraged to go into science courses at university, as late as 1974-5. My father , who ran engineering courses at the local polytechnic and wanted to get girls involved, said that at our careers evenings he faced some parents saying that he was putting girls of marrying and putting family first. This was still a sort of 1960s suburban sitcom -style social world to some degree, which modern youngsters may find hard to credit seeing that it was fairly recent - and at most one or two teenagers from an annual group of about 120 in each academic year would get to Oxford or Cambridge each year. Perhaps 5 or 6 would go to uni in London, where I went. I remember that one of my girl friends (fairly academic but shy and with little self confidence) was pressurised by her parents not to go away to university but to do a secretarial degree from home and then find a 'temp' job and a husband instead! The posher universities were seen as 'not for our sort' - a debate still active decades later.

[Boatbuilder]

Up until the time I left secondary school in 1963, both Metalwork and Carpentry (woodwork as we called it) were taught in my school in Liverpool, Tim. I can't recall if there were 'O' level exams taken in those subjects as I didn't persue them in the 4th and 5th years. I'm not even sure Art was one of the subjects but Geometrical and Engineering Drawing was, as that was one of the subjects I passed. There was certainly no Cookery/Domestic Science as it was an all boys school and in those days, as you say, it wasn't seen as a boys 'thing'.

[Katharine]

Interesting to read of both your experiences of the education system.

Things had changed a little bit by the time I was at secondary (or high) school. Both boys and girls took needlework, woodwork, metal work and cookery (Domestic Science as it was called back then). For the first 3 years until we chose our options for CSE/O levels. I can't remember if we had all the subjects timetabled into the week's lessons, or if they were rotated, ie metalwork for one term, being replaced by needlework the next. I know that's the way it's been done in more recent years. I don't know if many girls opted to the 'boys' subjects or vice versa, as I didn't take any of those subjects myself. There were however considerably more girls taking typewriting as an option, with just a few boys in the class.

[Debbie]

I went to a school that had been a boys' grammar school. Clearly it wasn't by the time I arrived

We did woodwork and technical drawing. No sewing/cooking available at all. The rumour was that the CDT block had been built by the CSE students one year as a project. It certainly was wooden and rather rickety!

My dad was at a secondary modern and is very good at woodwork from skills he began to learn there. They were expected to learn it to a fairly high standard.

My children's comprehensive they all do (under other names) sewing, cooking, woodwork, electronics. That sounds good, but the reality is that they don't do enough of any subject to find they actually enjoy it and are good at it. I understand why, but it is very much a case of Jack of all trades and master of none, which I think is quite sad really. They also focus (to my mind) too much on the technical side so they can easily come out the other side without a clue on sewing a hem/button or cooking food that is useful etc. I understand why, I just think it makes it fairly useless as a subject unless they're in the minority that take it further. I'd like to see it far more focused on life skills.

(totally irrelevant) My middle daughter had issues at cooking because her teacher didn't want her to cut as she's missing her hand so couldn't hold the food in the "required" way to cut. As they were mostly doing salad/fruit salad type it meant the lessons were totally useless. I got my revenge when we went to her limb centre-they gave her a prosthetic with a knife on the end. Now the risk assessment in having an excitable 12yo with a knife on the end of her arm is far harder than the risk assessment in having a child cutting the food using the method they've used since they were 4yo.

[Hannah]

The boys at St. Rollo's do woodwork too.

[Anita Bensoussane]

I'm enjoying reading about everyone's experiences. I went to a comprehensive from 1981 where all boys and girls (for the first three years) had to do woodwork, metalwork and plastics (a term was spent on each of those every year) as well as home economics (which consisted of cookery and sewing). However, very little of the timetable was given over to those subjects, particularly woodwork, metalwork and plastics. Like Debbie's children, I felt I'd only dabbled in them and I certainly didn't reach the stage of feeling confident about using tools like drills, chisels and planes. Often, we didn't have time to finish our projects. This meant we rarely had the satisfaction of taking home and using the items that we'd designed and worked on.

Getting back to Enid Blyton characters, Bill in the Malory Towers books is the only fourth-former who chooses to study carpentry with Mr. Sutton. We're told that she has made "a pipe for her father, a ship for her youngest brother, and a bowl-stand for her mother" and that she's "as proud of these as any of the good embroiderers were of their cushions, or the weavers of their scarves."

[Katharine]

I totally agree with the comments about just dabbling in practical subjects nowadays.

I wonder if in these more enlightened days of upcycling/reusing items, rejecting fast fashion etc etc, whether life skills will find their way back onto the curriculum? It's all very well people moaning about things being thrown away instead of being repaired, but apart from basic things like sewing a button back on, or 'cobbling' a small tear in something, anything else is probably too difficult for many people.

[Judith Crabb]

Fascinating about attitudes getting more liberal and then losing direction. Australia mirrors the UK experience. In my 1950s primary school I suffered a weekly lesson of sewing while my male classmates went off to woodwork and metalwork. I was hopeless at sewing and I'm sure I would have flourished at woodwork - grandpa was a carpenter and I grew up in his workshop, not that I learnt any woodwork, all his attention being devoted to his grandsons, but he was very generous in providing me with wooden toys and bookshelves).
In my final year at primary girls did cooking and laundry while the boys continued with their woodwork and metalwork.
The funny thing is that if at the time I had been given the opportunity to learn woodwork I would have refused on the grounds that it was a subject for boys. I am so pleased that times have changed.

timv, Graham Kerr The Galloping Gourmet spent some years in Australia.

[timv]

Thanks for the info on Graham Kerr, Judith; I can remember his TV shows very well and he was the first chef I recall who actually interacted with alive audience (and even took his dishes down to the public seats for them to sample) rather than just standing on a set 'lecturing' them in the manner of the over-dressed, bossy Fanny Cradock in the 1960s. A breath of fresh air and a forerunner of a lot of modern chefs - possibly he picked up his style in Australia?

Its very interesting to see how lessons and the approach to what boys and girls 'should' learn has evolved. Certainly I found that the 'cut-off' point occurred when I went to secondary school when things became much more rigidly defined; at my rather 'arty' junior school (owned and run by a former Drama mistress who put on plays every term) an interest in cookery , literature or art was OK for boys , but as soon as I got to the much larger State grammar school it was clear that it was frowned upon by the majority who'd been at more anarchic local village primary schools. A liberal approach to and involvement in school clubs specialising in Drama and Art, even for 11 or 12 year olds, occurred much quicker than evolution in sport or 'woodwork' - mostly I suspect as we had an influx of younger teachers in Eng Lit and Art and did not in crafts or sport.

We do not see many pics of the staff in class in Enid's books, but I assume that her teachers at St Clare's and MT would have worn their university MA gowns to teach in the same 'formal' manner as the older staff did at secondary school in the early-mid 1970s - at least the Heads would have done so. (This again started to change in the 1970s, and by the late 1970s our school only had the Head and Deputy Head, who were aged about 58-60, wearing gowns like in a Billy Bunter book. ) I can see Miss Potts and other more strict MT teachers doing this , but not 'horsey' Miss Peters there: MT has a good mix of older and younger teachers with different styles of formality.

At St Clare's I note that Angela' s mother Lady Favorleigh seems to expect their Mamzelle to be far more fashionable and elegant, ie presumably from a smart Paris college or finishing school, than she is in reality. She is openly rude about her, and that leads to M's indignant niece Claudine deliberately 'falling accidentally' into the swimming pool near her at a swimming gala and drenching her - one of my favourite moments in the series. St C seems to have memorable moments and crafted 'set-pieces', eg the Fifth Form night time escapade with the real and fake sleepwalkers, rather than memorable longer storylines - did Enid change her style between series? (At our secondary school swimming galas, canny female staff sitting near the diving board used to put umbrellas over their legs when people were diving!)

[Boodi 2]

I had forgotten all about secondary school teachers wearing university MA gowns to teach in the early-mid 1970s, but that was the case at my school too. As it was not a mixed school (i.e. only girls) there was no woodwork or metalwork and we had to choose between science, home economics or art, all of which had a double period (i.e. an hour and a half) twice a week. As I was bad at maths and considered that I did not need instruction about how to cook (although in retrospect learning to sew might not have been a bad idea!) I opted for art, which I enjoyed, especially the history of art lessons.

[Barnard]

At my Grammar School, apart from the Headmaster, did not wear gowns. The exception was the teacher of German. He wore a gown because he thought he was ‘special’. In fact, he wasn’t.
In my first year, the boys did cookery. The comment on my report read, ‘he produces surprisingly good results from the chaos in which he works’.
I suppose that was a compliment.