Teaching Years

It’s somehow frightening how time slips away when I consider that the start of my art teaching career began in September of 1963. It was in the Kent town of Northfleet: a secondary modern boys’ school in a light and spacious building.

I was only there for two terms, but, the one thing that sticks out in my mind there, was experienced by a colleague. The fact is, whether one likes to admit it or not, the chances are that every class will contain at least one difficult child, and, in the case concerned, the teacher had occasion to stand such a pupil outside the classroom for his misdemeanours.

Unfortunately, the boy had a screwdriver and used it to remove the door-handle and the spindle inside. This left the whole class prisoner while my colleague was reduced to shouting out to passers-by for help.

Foolishly perhaps, after only one term at Northfleet, I applied for a post in an east end school as Head of its Art department. (I was still in the probationary year.) My landlady at the time thought I hadn’t got a chance. However, after an intensive and impressive show at interviews at Leyton Town Hall, I was offered the position – and this with six other candidates vying for the job.

But woe was me!

I hadn’t seen the school.

Built in the late nineteenth century, it proved a dark and dreary place and my art room turned out to be a converted cycle shed in the playground – an ash-felted area with stretched dark green railings on the perimeter.

So, I’d unwittingly condemned two of my best years to a miserable environment and an atmosphere which was reflected in the outlook of both the staff and the pupils. Nevertheless, during this time I was able to produce a number of successful projects with the children - several of which came to the attention of the local newspaper.

Finally, however, a vacancy occurred in one of the Crawley comprehensive schools in Sussex, and I remember saying to a friend that if I don’t get this position I’m going back to being a bus conductor – a job I’d done during my student holidays. Thankfully, I secured the vacancy. And what a difference! This school was huge and based on three main sites in a beautiful rural setting of some two hundred acres, and the buildings were light and modern. Sadly though, as I write this account some fifty years later, I doubt even twenty acres remain, the rest having been sold off to a supermarket and for housing developments. Thus, all future generations of children have forever lost the beauty of the school’s location.

That’s enough of my whinging, but its something I feel strongly about.

I joined that comprehensive school from the summer term of 1966, and began the happiest and most productive ten years of my teaching career. The school enjoyed a great headmaster - a man who treated his staff almost as an extension of his own family, and it was a pleasure to work under him. I was allocated two art rooms, one of which came with complete pottery-making facilities, and I was able to use it three nights a week for adult evening classes.

If I may, I will touch on just three of my public activities while teaching art. In the summer of 1968, the pupils and I designed and built a float (The Blackboard Jungle) for Crawley Carnival. We won outright the best idea and best constructed categories. It was probably a pinnacle year in my life.

On a subsequent occasion, the local Chief of Police approached me and asked if I would mount an exhibition in the main school hall to promote police recruitment – which I think it’s fair to say was a success judging by how well it was attended. And, incidentally, this was the birthplace of the children’s cartoon character PC Pole.

Sometime later, the Crawley Caged Birds Society asked me to organise an inter-school painting competition depicting wild and tame birds. This I did and mounted an exhibition of numerous entries which I finally judged in conjunction with the then town Mayor.

These are just examples of the many times I interacted my subject with various public bodies, but, I suppose, all good things, as they say, must come to an end, and when I returned to the school after a year’s absence to secure my masters degree, the scene had totally changed. There was a new administration at the top whose only concern seemed to centre around examination results. The welfare of the staff and the preparation of pupils for citizenship…?

When I joined the school, it had been as an assistant teacher. There was no graded post available (as senior positions were known). However, over the ensuing years I was promoted to School Counsellor – an American idea and all the fad at the time. Shortly after, I became Head of the Art Department. But, despite this now senior position, and without any consultation, I found I’d been taken out of the pottery room and located in a large, but rather barren, room in another area of the school.

Then, due to staff taking early retirement or just leaving, I was gradually being timetabled to teach technical drawing – of which I had next to no knowledge – and metalwork – about which I knew even less! The resulting pressure began to tell on my health – to a point where during a staff meeting at the beginning of the 1978 academic year, I passed out.

Nevertheless, I carried on for another six years, but found it impossible to struggle on and the time arrived when it became too much and I couldn't face the difficulties at school any longer. So, with great reluctance, I took early retirement – and that after some twenty one years in various classrooms.

To this day, I still miss that way of life. In my time, I relied upon my natural spontaneity and talent which were widely appreciated – but that sort of enthusiastic approach, which went down so well with the pupils and the public, had become no longer fashionable.

I’ll finish on this note:

How do I know my spontaneous attitude was so popular with the pupils? My art room was always full of children during the morning and lunch breaks, eager to carry on with whatever project they were currently engaged in.