Recollections

Tom has kindly provided a photograph and copies of his certificates.  The extracts that follow have been taken from Tom’s unpublished autobiography and give an interesting insight into his time at St Gregory’s. He writes:

”St Gregory’s Central School was a three-storey building situated behind Ardwick Green which was about a mile from the centre of Manchester. It had a large inner quadrangle with some derelict buildings in one corner and a gymnasium, which was unused due to bomb damage. The front block [south wing] contained an assembly hall with classrooms on the floors above and the eastern block had woodwork, chemistry, physics, and an art room. Before the school was established there in the early 1920s it had been an ‘Industrial School’ for naughty boys. There was a large bell hanging on one wall and it was widely believed that that it was rung when one of the boys escaped. Some wit had written “Abandon hope all ye who enter here” over the door which we had to use as an entrance and this did nothing to calm my fears when I started there in September 1943.

To get to school I caught the No. 5 bus from Urmston and then the No. 39 tram from Market Street. When the tram reached the straight stretch opposite Ardwick Green it was considered de rigueur to jump off before the official stop which was a long way up Hyde Road. This could be rather dangerous because the drivers would speed up as part of a game to stop us getting off and if the cobbles were wet the road was very slippy. Matters would be made worse if some wag managed to hook the strap of your school-bag over the handle on the side of the tram just before you jumped off. In later years we caught the 8.33am train from Urmston to Central Station (now G-Mex) and if we were lucky, the 4.05pm train back. Before the Clean Air Act came into force, dense fog could cause chaos, trains and buses were sometimes cancelled and although I never had to walk all the way home, I do remember walking in front of the bus with a cycle lamp to show the driver the way. In normal circumstances, buses rarely broke down and always seemed to arrive on time. Woe betide any boy who failed to stand up for a lady, or otherwise misbehaved on the bus.

The headmaster at St Gregory’s, Mr Wilfrid Holmes, was a tall, stooping, white-haired man who tended to lean over us and spray us with saliva when he talked. He was a dedicated practitioner where the cane was concerned, and was particularly good at teaching maths and geometry. Although there were about 500 boys in the school, he had no secretary or admin staff when I first started there and his office was an untidy jumble of books, papers and confiscated property. The tuck-shop on Ardwick Green was managed by a formidably stout, Scottish lady called Dinah Wilson, who also ran the school canteen. Her husband was the school caretaker. The school uniform was a smart affair, a maroon blazer with yellow edges, but after a year or so, nobody bothered to wear it. The metal cap badges were hard to come by as they could cause damage if the cap was used as a weapon.

A lot of the [male] teachers had been called up for the war (there were four women teachers) and some seemed quite elderly. The maths teacher, Dickie Kerr, was notorious for his savage use of the cane and no one was spared. He had no favourites (in fact, I don’t think any of the teachers had); if there was a lot of talking before he started the lesson he would cane the whole class.

I rarely got the chance to play for my form football team as there were too many good players about and, in any case, I wasn’t any good at the game, a born spectator. The only pitches available to St Gregory’s were Platt Fields or Plymouth Grove, a fair way to walk to play football after school; this was a disgrace for a school that had one of the best boys’ teams in the North of England. Several of my contemporaries went into professional football, Don Gibson signed for [Manchester] United, Norman Mayo and ‘Pop’ Burns for [Manchester] City and Ronnie Taylor signed for Hull City.

In some ways, the privations suffered during 1947 were worse than those undergone when we were at war. The meat ration was reduced from 1/2d (6p) to 1/- (5p) worth weekly and bread and potatoes (3 lb per person per week) were also rationed. Early in the year the road hauliers went on strike and troops were brought in to keep the nation fed. In February the heaviest snowfall since 1940 occurred, followed by floods, and buses couldn’t get through. There were power cuts and an acute shortage of fuel. Because of the fuel shortage there was no heating at school for a time so we were told to put our overcoats on and grin and bear it.

St Gregory’s took in pupils from a wide area, most of whom had passed for Grammar schools but hadn’t been given places. Some of them were financially astute, and one incident, particularly, sticks in my mind. There was a derelict building on the corner of Dolphin Street and Higher Ardwick. A former Chinese Laundry, it had been bombed in the war. One morning there was a loud crash of falling brickwork. Two boys from another school had been collecting firewood for bonfire night, the falling masonry killed one boy instantly and the other boy was injured. At lunchtime we rushed to the scene and were formed into a queue by fifth-formers who charged us 1d each to view the scene. There was some blood but I’m sure that the tomato sandwich with a bite neatly taken out of it had been put there after the accident by some enterprising showman. They made a lot of money that day.

I passed my Central School Certificate exam in 1947 and decided to stay on at school until I was 16 to take the Northern Universities matriculation exam. I can’t remember whether or not Mum was consulted about this; she mustn’t have raised any objection and, indeed, persuaded me to take the Town Hall exam and even went with me (she had never been allowed near St Gregory’s) when I was interviewed as part of the test.

I had not been working hard at school, my homework was always done on the train and although I missed some of the “mock” examinations, being off with the ‘flu, my results mustn’t have been good enough because ‘Old Joe’, as the headmaster was known, called me in and informed me that Mum would have to pay a sum of money, £2.10s (£2.50p), I think, as surety if I wanted to take the exam. This money would be paid to the Manchester Education Authority and if I failed the exam, it would be forfeited. He added that, in his experience, no-one had ever passed and therefore been able to reclaim the money, so he did not have much confidence in me. I hadn’t, by the way, told him that I had been successful in the rather prestigious Town Hall exam, or else things might have been different. I would like to say that I started working then, but not so, I spent a lot of evenings at the youth club or the billiard hall or the cinema. The first paper was English Literature, the works of John Keats, David Copperfield and Julius Caesar and the day before the exam we went on a bike ride to Pickmere. It was a lovely day … and I got a puncture and had to walk most of the way home. So, next to no revision. I didn’t find the exam, as a whole, very difficult, but just in case, I told my Mum I hadn’t done well. She didn’t seem to mind; I think she was worried I might want to go on to further education.

In the following weeks we had a great time, playing table-tennis all day, nobody seemed to have any idea of what they wanted to do, there was no career guidance and none of us thought we had done well in the exams. The results were [normally] published in the Manchester Evening News and as there was no entry for St Gregory’s we thought the worst, but we knew that ‘Old Joe’ was short-sighted and had no admin help, so one Sunday morning, Alan Morgan, Ronnie Hamnette and I decided to cycle to the headmaster’s house in Withington Road; we got his address from the telephone book. Mrs Holmes answered the door and thrust a crumpled piece of paper at us with our results on it. We had all passed, Alan and I had done rather well and Ronnie scraped through.

I had to call at the school twice to get my money back and obtain a Certificate.”

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