Recollection

“Gregs” in the War Years

(Contributed by Tony Glynn, pupil 1941-45, written in 1973)

On the first day of the term following the midsummer holiday of 1941, a company of nervous eleven-year-old boys waited outside the gate of St Gregory’s – that gate on Ardwick Green North which is now permanently locked but which, at that time, was the boys’ entrance. They were the new intake of First Formers. They carried brand-new schoolbags and, in accordance with regulation, they had their gas-masks, most of them in metal canisters, slung across their backs. Not a few of them were accompanied by their mothers.

For the first time they encountered Mr Wilfrid Holmes, who was on the scene early, tweedy, with his hair untidy and with various documents concerned with the raw recruits in his hand. He seemed to be everywhere at once and, to add to the pressures of the moment, there were the questions of the mothers.

In the thick of the flurry, one asked about school dinners.

Yes, she was assured by the Head, her son could obtain a substantial dinner daily.

The mother, perhaps overwhelmed by the idea of vast numbers of boys beyond that august frontage, asked: “But have you got enough plates to go round?”

“Plates?” shouted the harassed Head. “We have enough for a regiment, madam!”

The question was not all that unreasonable. Rationing and short supply were part of the regular pattern of life in the 1939-45 war and the abnormalities of the time were felt in the schools as much as elsewhere. Those who went through St Gregory’s in those years can now look back with some sense of wonder at the manner in which the staff coped with difficult circumstances.

In the early days of the war, there was evacuation, but it was short-lived. For a time, in the earliest days of the war, the Army took over the school and the boys were given temporary accommodation at Devonshire Road School [Ardwick Central School] nearby. *

(* They were initially evacuated to Timperley.)

From the autumn of 1940 there were bombing raids. Although the danger diminished by mid-1942, there were a few scares in the ‘doodlebug summer’ of 1944, when some flying bombs reached the north-west. Always, there was rationing and the scarcity of clothing and school materials.

Consider the Gregorian at war:

The nearest he had to a school uniform was a cloth Gregorian badge with its I.H.S. device, so frequently mistranslated as “I Have Suffered”, sewn on to whatever serviceable jacket he had. A distinctive school cap was a thing of the past and the metal cap-badges were no longer made, although here and there amid the motley headgear might be seen such a badge bequeathed by an older brother who was at the school in peacetime. After about the middle of 1942, the gas-mask gradually disappeared from his equipment, but it was carried religiously in earlier days.

When he made his way to school, the wartime Gregorian quite likely played his part in Anglo-American relationships by carrying sandwiches of the ubiquitous Spam, sent under [President] Franklin Roosevelt’s lease-lend scheme. The bread was regularly “wholemeal”, which was brown. He last saw white bread, bananas and oranges somewhere about early 1940 and would not see them again until after 1945. On the rare occasions when there was blotting paper at school, he was told to make it last because it was scarce. Notebooks were used sparingly and the wartime ink at St Gregory’s seemed always to be of a watery brown colour.

In the sub-culture of schoolboy life, the favourite comics and “bloods” appeared fortnightly instead of weekly because of the paper shortage. The Gregorian read about Red Circle School in the “Hotspur”, “The Truth About Wilson”, a popular sporting serial in the “Wizard” and “Our Ernie” in the “Knockout” comic, all printed on muddy wartime economy paper. When it came to raising some extra cash, the Gregorian at war followed an old tradition of saving his comics and selling them off in the school yard.

He was a creature of his time. His conversation was richly peppered with the catch-phrases of Tommy Handley’s “ITMA” radio show (“Can I do you now, Sir?”, “Boss, boss, somep’n terrible’s happened!” and “Don’t forget the driver!”); or those of “Happidrome”, another radio programme, which featured Robert Vincent, always known as “Enoch”, but whose real name was Vincent Robinson and whose nephew, Peter Robinson, was a wartime Gregorian for a time.

There was a positive cult around the comedy films of Bud Abbott and Lou Costello, whose cackling cross-talk went into the sub-culture. The day of the variety stage was not yet over and, by hanging around the stage-door of the now demolished Ardwick Hippodrome in his lunch hour, the wartime Gregorian might see Nat Mills and Bobbie, Forsythe, Seamon and Farrell, Collinson and Breen or even the legendary Wilson, Keppel and Betty going in to rehearsals. There were some who still collected the autographs of these performers, a hobby which had a vogue at the school in earlier years.

The war dampened professional sport considerably. For most of the war and long after it, Manchester United’s ground [at Old Trafford] was unusable because of bomb-damage, so United and Manchester City played at Maine Road on alternate Saturdays. Wartime league football was not greatly distinguished, however, for most of the big names of the period were in the services. The wartime Gregorian might be a United or City fan, but he went to Maine Road whatever his team and he gave his support in a most orderly fashion. The howling tribalism on the terraces and the phalanxes of police, familiar in the Seventies [and since], were not yet part of the football scene.

The wartime Gregorian did not require home-grown violence in his life: the historic circumstances of the time could deliver violence enough. It could come in an air raid or less directly, with the news that a relative or perhaps the father of a schoolmate had suffered in the fighting overseas.

Those same circumstances brought physical changes to the school. “Blast-walls” were constructed around the outside of certain doors in the yard. They were L-shaped brick walls which prevented wooden doors from being shattered in by bomb-blasts. The stairway at the end of the block at the right of the yard was fortified with tubular steel scaffolding, so it could be used as an air-raid shelter. Mysterious figures in purple chalk graced the walls of the larger form rooms. Their significance was unknown, but a popular theory was that they indicated the number of soldiers that were accommodated in each room when the school was turned into an emergency barracks.

The school in those days was much more compact than today [1973], comprising only the older part, with the yard totally surrounded by buildings, although most of those on the left when viewed from the Ardwick Green end were mainly unused workshops dating from the days when the establishment was an industrial school.

The exceptions were a room used as a bicycle store, the section containing the home of [caretakers] Sam and Dinah Wilson, and the dining room, reached by a staircase. On that side of the yard, too, was a sink and tap, scene of moments of discomfort for newly arrived Gregorians when the ferocious custom of ducking first formers was followed. Many of those who arrived for that new term of 1941 were ducked in that sink and others had the even greater indignity of being ducked in the well-remembered horse-trough, which stood outside the gents’ convenience on Ardwick Green.

The custom of ducking First Formers was long established in the Gregorian scheme of things. When the newcomers arrived, they were fair game for the older hands in the first few days of the new term. The blast-walls boded ill for the new arrivals of 1941 for they offered a variation on the time-honoured ducking theme. Numbers of the innocents were grabbed by the older hands and shoved into the blind-ended blast-walls as into a Black Hole of Calcutta and held prisoner by their tormentors who guarded the entrance with swung school-bags. As a regular replacement for the traditional initiation rite, however, it didn’t take for longer than that brief season.

At that time, and throughout the war years, the school had an expanse of brick-scattered wilderness behind it where there were once streets of houses. The strip of land on which the modern frontage now stands was also a brick croft and was sometimes the scene of rule-of-thumb cricket matches, as well as a venue for fist-fights, being conveniently out of the way of authority’s eye and not overlooked by windows in the school.

At Christmas 1940, Manchester burned from end to end in the all-out blitz of fire bombs and heavy explosives. St Gregory’s suffered because the gymnasium, a long wooden building with one wall largely made of windows, standing on the site of the new block which contains the hall, was made unsafe by blast damage. Afterwards, it remained locked and strictly out of bounds. The hall of that time, on the ground floor [facing Ardwick Green Park] and today partitioned into classrooms, had to serve as a gym.

The war-damaged gym was a silent and unattainable place to the post-1940 generation. We looked through the windows and saw the broad wooden floor gathering dust and the unused wall-bars, which presented great scope for adventurous messing about to the mind of a First Former. It was a symbol of the good things lost with the days of peace and normality.

A victim of the 1940 blitz was the chairman of the school’s governors, Dean Charles Dunleavey, parish priest of St Augustine’s, Chorlton-on-Medlock. On the fearful night of 22nd December, he was injured when his church and presbytery were destroyed by bombs. A curate, Father George Street, was killed in the presbytery. Dean Dunleavey lived another thirteen months, dying on 29th January, 1942.

Even earlier, St Gregory’s lost a popular teacher, Laurence Traynor, killed when the Lancaster bomber in which he served was shot down in a raid on enemy territory.

Those raw recruits of 1941 were quite used to the misfortunes of war by the time they arrived at St Gregory’s but, one day in the first week of their first term, the rising and falling wail of the “alert” siren took them from their classes to that fortified stairway. There, with the rest of the school, they sat on the concrete steps until the steady note of the “raiders past”, then “all clear” released them. Mr Harry O’Brien, who taught music, was one of those who kept order there, walking up and down between the seated boys. Soon, he went into the R.A.F. and was next seen as a visitor in uniform.

This was a regular pattern. The athletic “Johnny” Bill also went into the R.A.F. about the same time. Gerry Curran was already an Intelligence Corps officer and, on a couple of occasions, he returned in uniform and took a section of the First Form in sessions more remarkable for light-hearted banter than academic content. Another who went early to follow the banners and bugles was Mr Merrick. He, too, returned in uniform and took those same First Formers in the makeshift gym, devoting the whole session to the art of kicking and heading a football. On another occasion he gave them a fine discourse on the merits of various cars – about which wartime Gregorians knew little since, apart from those needed for essential work, all cars were laid up for the war [due to petrol shortages].

Although there was a drain on manpower, the older established teachers, some of whom like Ted Corney had been there since the opening of the school in 1923, remained as fixtures. Each had his peculiarities.

The Head, doubtless beset by a million administrative problems in that troubled time, was to be seen stalking the corridors with his gale-swept hair and always with a bundle of papers under one arm and his cane under the other. Ted Corney was mildly Pickwickian, with his wing collar and his thin-rimmed glasses, dispensing wisdom on the Third Order of St Francis, chess and philately when not teaching French and English.

On the ground floor, Danny Whealing commanded his own domain in the handicraft room. There, the young hopefuls would troop in to grapple with the mysterious business of woodwork. The first order was “Form three sides of a rectangle!” after which individuals were selected to recite what were known as the Rules of Planing. There was swift retribution for those who did not know them.

In the makeshift gym might be found Norman Fitchett who always presented the appearance of the old-time Physical Training instructor (“Physical Education” was a term not yet coined), well-scrubbed and close-cropped. Apart from putting his charges through their ungainly paces, he would often extol the virtues of economy and self-help. It was he who introduced most of them to a piece of equipment they would know in a future time and place: a soldier’s “housewife”, the cloth folder containing needles, cotton and darning wool. A breach of the rules under Mr Fitchett’s eye meant punishment administered on what was decorously called “the seat”, with the sole of a hefty gym slipper. Outside the walls of St Gregory’s, Norman Fitchett was famed as a skilled boxing referee.

“Jos” Clark, highly esteemed by every Gregorian who ever knew him, sat in Room Three on the first floor. He sat in majesty, his eyes sometimes deceptively half-closed, but missing nothing. Jos had a large heart and there was no doubt that he enjoyed his teaching. The debates he promoted in Room Three did not produce parliamentarians, but many a wartime Gregorian found himself as an unvarnished extrovert when arguing the toss under Jos’s amused gaze.

“Tusker” Waldron had a vigour which could communicate itself to his pupils. Owen Lee, who taught art and machine-drawing, had an intensely intellectual mien and looked something like a rugby-playing professor. In spite of the clothing shortages of the time, Bill Kerr somehow had the well-turned-out aspect of a nineteen-thirties’ bandleader and Bertie Baron, who taught geography and art at a late stage of the war, also had a rare touch of sartorial elegance.

At the same time, a teacher who was to be associated with the school until his death in 1958, Mr John Vickers, joined the staff in September 1941. The distaff side of the teaching profession took a foothold at St Gregory’s. From 1923 onward, the school was a wholly male domain but, with those new arrivals of 1941, there also arrived the first lady teachers in its history. They came because of the wartime shortage of male teachers and they were heroines of considerable calibre.

The two pioneers who entered the school in September 1941, probably with the same trepidation as the eleven-year-olds, were Miss V. Dickenson and Miss M.F. Curran, a sister of Gerry Curran. Miss Dickenson was to marry during her sojourn at St Gregory’s, becoming Mrs Corbett. She made her first appearance wearing a well-remembered striped Manchester University blazer.

Miss Curran had a crowning glory of a hue which indicated pluck, a commodity which she had in generous measure, mingled with whimsy and kindliness. It was to be the good fortune of certain of those new recruits of 1941 to adventure through four years with Miss Curran as their form mistress. They still recall her with affection.

A short time later, Miss E. McManus, whose father, the late Alderman Bernard McManus, was well known in Manchester civic affairs, joined the staff. Music was one of her accomplishments and, when the climate was right, she would play some of the “pop” music of the time, strictly off the curriculum. I have a memory of her, framed in the historical circumstances of 1942, sitting at the piano in the downstairs hall, playing “How Green was My Valley” and “The White Cliffs of Dover”.

Later, Miss C. Emberry taught at the school and Mrs Wilfrid Holmes was also on the staff for a time.

Long ago, in the days of big moustaches and strong beer, Captain A.S. (Clubber) Williams, of New York City Police, gave his cops a dictum. “The law,” quoth Clubber, “comes out of the end of a police club.” 

Quite likely, Clubber’s name was unknown to the teaching staff of St Gregory’s, but they had a spiritual affinity with each other. For, let us not gloss it over, the cane was used at St Gregory’s. It was used with energy and frequency and no one quibbled about it.

That ancient nonsense, “This will hurt me more than you”, was never offered. As honest realists, the teachers would not insult the intelligences they sought to improve by uttering anything so palpably fatuous and untrue. If you transgressed, you were caned on the hands – and there was no doubt as to who felt it.

The cane was the punishment for being late, for not doing homework, for being inattentive or impudent in class or for simply being caught out at some devilment. It came at two, four, six and even ten strokes at a time. Often in the course of the day, the scholastic air was disturbed as some miscreant received his payoff. Rarely was the yell of the victim heard, however, for the sub-culture had a stoic code of honour and the cane had to be borne with bravado. Nevertheless, the dance of the pain-maddened Gregorian was interesting to behold. It was a variation of waving the punished palms in the air, clutching them under opposing armpits, blowing on them and sitting on them when the performer returned to his desk.

Jos Clark could draw upon the institution of caning to teach good diction. “When a boy has been caned, his friend should not ask, ‘ ’Ow many ’ave yer ’ad?’ It should be ‘How many have you had?’ ”, Jos would declare, putting all the h’s in their proper places.

The system [of caning] was generally fair enough, however. The rules were made plain and few Gregorians of that day could claim they were punished unjustly.

From the war years, a mosaic of impressions is retained. The school dinners in the upstairs dining hall, where Dinah Wilson held sway with that glorious voice in which the hammers of the Clyde could be heard. Once, a certain type of tough meat with rather yellow fat appeared on the tables there. The customers were quite sure they diagnosed it right – horsemeat! Sam Wilson, coming out of the cellar, brandishing a shovel and offering to make short work of certain young upstarts who had been up to mischief on the cellar steps. The bundle of smoky-grey kittens which, in the days of a brilliant summer, were to be seen cavorting around the door of the Wilsons’ home. Mr Kerrigan, who taught chemistry, making rather too much of a foul-smelling gas and shouting, “Quick, lads, open all the windows!” Was it really chlorine, or were we being kidded? The longest-established smoking and card party in the city of Manchester going on at the rear of the “usual offices” at the further end of the yard. It probably started in 1923, but the players changed with the generations (it might well be going on somewhere in the school today) and Jos Clark knew all about it. Sometimes he would swoop and, if the look-outs had been dozing, he’d catch the players and bag a haul of Woodbines. The great snow of early 1945 in which there was not only a snowball battle in the ancient tribal war between Gregorians and the boys from St Thomas’s, but certain teachers were sent fleeing towards the school as hordes of untamed Gregorians pursued them with snowballs. This scene was cut dead when a blast on a well-known whistle was heard and the Head was seen leaning from an upstairs window at the front of the school. Miss Dickenson, in the earliest days of Hitler’s invasion of Russia, using a map to explain where the fighting was in progress in the vicinity of Taganrog. Come to think of it, has Taganrog had a change of name? One hasn’t heard of it since 1941. Miss Dickenson again, lining up her First Formers each morning to inspect hands and ensure that they were washed and the nails cleaned, an alarming manifestation of petticoat rule.

The ladies, of course, had plenty to put up with. Take, for instance, Miss Curran and the day-old chick lark.

This was perpetrated by one pupil named Hall in Room 12 during the first period of an afternoon close to war’s end. The scene was as good as anything from the chronicles of the Remove [lower fourth form] at Greyfriars, as recorded by Frank Richards.

At lunchtime, Hall had acquired from heaven knows what source a day-old chick in a perforated cardboard box and smuggled it into class. He hid it under his desk and no sooner had Miss Curran opened up on mathematics than the bird spoke.

“Cheep! Cheep!”

The form grinned.

Miss Curran looked severely at the boys.

“Cheep! Cheep!”

Miss Curran started. “Come out the boy who is imitating a chick,” she said.

The grins widened. The chick cheeped again.

“Will the boy who is imitating a chick come out?” she demanded.

“Cheep! Cheep!” from the depth of the class.

Miss Curran left her desk and strode in the direction of the sound. There were evident signs that Hall would soon be on the receiving end of the d’Artagnan cut and thrust. The cheeping continued, guiding her to the spot. The desk was opened and the perforated box revealed. The small bundle of yellow down within quite melted Miss Curran’s wrath. She cradled the creature in her hand and comforted it with tender sounds.

It was about this time [1945], in the rather relaxed climate when it seemed that a golden age of peace was just around the corner, that Shepherd, a gifted artist in Four A, produced a series of large caricatures of the teaching staff. They had great vigour – Bertie Baron, for instance, was shown as a medieval baron charging on a snorting warhorse – and they were much admired by their subjects. These drawings hung in the staff room, which was the small room at the end of the first corridor of the old building. Possibly they eventually passed into the hands of their subjects and some might still be in existence. Any of them would be a considerable find for historians of the war years at the school.

The end of the war in Europe was a confused business in which there were several days of conflicting rumour. Berlin had fallen to the Allies. No, Berlin was still holding out. Hitler was dead and the German High Command disintegrated. No, Hitler was still alive and Germany still fighting.

One morning in May 1945, Mr Holmes told the assembled school that Mr Churchill, the Prime Minister, was soon expected to make an important announcement, but even so, he (the headmaster) would say when it was permissible for anyone to celebrate the end of the war by taking time off school. And St Gregory’s boys sweated it out in the classrooms until they were able to join in the rumbustious mafficking in the streets on VE Day.

The new arrivals of 1941 left on a bright summer day in the euphoric period between VE Day and VJ Day. In historic terms, it was the very eve of the atomic age. The hours ticked away for Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

A short time before, they [the 1941 intake] had received their Central School Certificates, handed over by Father Ernest Banks, then of St Aloysius’ Church, on the stage of the hall. On their last day, in that same hall, there was a modest record party, with Owen Lee in charge. Records were brought in by the boys themselves, most of whom were now hooked on the sophisticated glories of big-band swing. The Saturday morning broadcasts of Major Glenn Miller’s American Army Band were the cult listening of the time and Sergeant Mel Powell’s piano piece, “My Guy’s Come Back”, summed up the spirit of the moment. Somebody brought Ellington’s “Take the A Train”, which blasted its brassy cadences into the air of that hall where, in 1942, Miss McManus’s “White Cliffs of Dover” and “How Green was my Valley” had seemed so daring.

Owen Lee, who seemed to be no admirer of the juvenile taste in music, held back the hit record of the time almost to the end.

“Alright, I suppose you’ll have to have it, but don’t howl the place down,” he grumbled as he placed it on the turntable. It was “G.I. Jive”, a piece now totally forgotten but, for some reason, the stuff of life for us at the time. It was a far cry from the first gramophone music I ever heard at St Gregory’s which was in the first days of the new term of 1941, when Harry O’Brien played the Bach-Gounod “Ave Maria” and Heddle Nash singing “The Erl King” on the cabinet gramophone in the room in which he taught music.

“G.I. Jive” was the last significant sound I remember from St Gregory’s. We said good-bye to various teachers, we passed into the brilliant sunshine of the outside world and perhaps each of us felt that same wrench of leaving a familiar path for something new and untried. Like “G.I. Jive”, like “Forsythe, Seamon and Farrell” at the Ardwick Hippodrome, like the trams that used to whine and clang along Ardwick Green, like air-raid sirens and Spam and “Careless Talk Costs Lives”, the youngsters we were would pass into history.

They were hard days and nobody at St Gregory’s treated us with kid gloves, nor would we expect to be treated. The school and ourselves took on each other on terms which were mutually understood.

Only in retrospect do most of us realise what fun it was.

*     *     *     *     *     *

Don Gibson – footballer

Thomas Richard Donald “Don” Gibson was born on 12th May 1929 in Manchester and attended St Gregory’s during the war years, establishing himself as an outstanding footballer. He joined Manchester United in 1946 as an amateur, turned professional the following year, and made his first-team debut in the First Division on 26th August 1950 against Bolton Wanderers. In the 1952-53 season, he lost his regular first-team place to Johnny Carey, who was moved to right half-back after Tommy McNulty was introduced at right back. Don enjoyed eight years as a professional at United, winning a League Championship medal with the club and making 115 appearances without scoring. He moved to Sheffield Wednesday in June 1955 on an £8,000 transfer and made 80 appearances for them until his transfer to Leyton Orient in 1959. 

Gibson was the son-in-law of former Manchester United manager Sir Matt Busby, having been married to his daughter Sheena for 59 years until her death in 2015.

Staff during the Second World War

Among those who taught St Gregory’s pupils for some time during the war years were:

Other points of interest during the war years:

• Mr Lawrence Taylor was killed in action.

• Religious inspections continued.

• His Majesty’s Inspectors continued to visit the school regularly.

• Examinations continued.

• Central School Certificates awarded.

• New admissions enrolled in August, with numbers being maintained.

• Female teachers employed for the first time.

• Use of supply and temporary staff.

• School closed for various reasons, such as:

                  - Feast Days

                       - Fuel shortages

                        - Nearby unexploded bombs and time-bombs

- Victory in Europe Celebrations (8th-10th May, 1945)

• Sports Days suspended.

• Employment of Uncertificated teachers for short, temporary periods.

• Some female teachers were permitted to be absent on the occasion of their husbands being home on leave from the armed forces.

• Some teachers were relatives of existing staff.

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