of ridicule. For a long time, I was known as ‘mop’ because I had long hair and we couldn't afford a haircut. Without being snobbish, I was an intellectual cut above these other kids and I could answer the teachers' questions. We had a sarcastic swine of a Scottish teacher who said, ‘I wonder, Yarwood, how you can answer all these questions?’ It was quite simple. I was always reading. My old grandmother used to say, ‘He'll come to a bad end, that boy. He's always got a book stuck in his fist.’
Ruben Landsman
From school I put in for a thrift form. I was given a corduroy suit and a pair of boots, and I came home so proud of that suit. But when my father came home in the evening and saw it, he asked, ‘Where d'you get that from?’ ‘From school,’ I said. ‘I signed the thrift form.’ ‘You can take it back.’ Charity he wouldn't have. We had literally nothing to eat, but charity he wouldn't have.
Daniel Davis
I used to get clothes from the Free School. I got a corduroy jacket and trousers, and a pair of boots. I had difficulty lifting them. You could hear somebody walking in those boots a mile away. We got them once a year before Passover. We also got free dinner tickets – but they only gave a certain number of tickets to each class, so if you were lucky you got the meal, and if not you had to go home. And in the morning, if you came before time, you used to get a chunk of bread and an enamel cup with some milk in. At dinner I had to eat whatever Mother made. We had to be satisfied. It was a lousy life. During those years I was always very frail because I didn't get the nourishment needed.
Alfred Anderson
When I was ten I got a job before school, delivering milk from Denend Farm to people nearby. By the time I was twelve I'd saved up enough to buy a bike, and I used it to earn pocket money to do more milk deliveries. I used to have milk churns hanging off the handlebars.
Bessy Ruben
We used to do a school play at Christmas time. This particular year we did Sleeping Beauty. One of the older girls in the Seventh Standard chose the characters. She chose a girl named Annie Silverman for the Sleeping Beauty and I was Fairy Crocus. She showed the list to Miss Poole, who used to stay behind and rehearse us. She looked at the list and said, ‘We can't have Annie Silverman for Sleeping Beauty. We'll have Betsy Schiffenbaum instead.’ That was me. There was a feud between Annie Silverman and me for years. We put the play on in Toynbee Hall and it was a great thrill – it was wonderful.
John Wainwright
There was no thought of my going on to further education. When I got to the top class, X7, two of the older boys were studying for the Grammar School examination, but presumably their parents were better off than mine. I wasn't entered. In fact, when I was twelve and a half I was put in for the ‘Labour Examination’. I went down to Wigan on a Saturday morning and I had to answer written questions and oral questions. I passed it and so I left school.
John William Dorgan
I owe a lot to the headmaster of the Colliery School, Mr Alcock. When I was supposed to be leaving school at thirteen, my mother went to see him and said that I was worth something better than going down the coal mine. She asked if I could stay on at school. The headmaster said yes. Another person stayed on at school – a girl called Mary Carr. We sat together at an old iron-framed desk made for two at the back of one of the classes. We didn't have a teacher so the headmaster gave us a book that he called a ‘classic’. He told us to read the book and write an essay on it. Mr Alcock was very painstaking. He corrected our spelling and phrasing and then he would make us write the essay again. Sometimes I had to write it a third time. Mary Carr never had to. She was brighter than me.
Fred Lloyd
I stayed at the school until I was thirteen, and I was very good at writing and arithmetic – that was my thing. My writing was put up on the blackboard for other children to copy and when one of my brother's girls was at the same school twenty years after I'd left, she came to me one day and said, ‘We've been looking at your writing, Uncle. It's on the blackboard.’
Don Murray
They had a scheme in those days called the ‘Half-Time system’. You could work in the morning and go to school in the afternoon, and the following week it would be reversed. It didn't matter which way round you did it, you couldn't win because if you were at work in the morning, you fell asleep on your desk in the afternoon and got a clout from the teacher. If you went to school in the morning and went to work in the afternoon, you fell asleep at work and got a clout from the overlooker.
Jim Fox
Our headmaster was a strict disciplinarian. We called him ‘Bossy’ Read. He earned the name. If you met him on the Saturday morning and you were on the opposite side of the street and you didn't pitch your cap as you passed, he would bring you out on Monday morning and he would say, ‘Look, Fox. I saw you on the other side of North Road on Saturday and you didn't touch your cap. Did you see me?’ If he thought you had seen him, you got the cane.
Arthur Harding
I had a special pal called Peaky. His people were on the respectable side. The father was a collar-and-tie man working for the Port of London Authority. We were always together and always playing truant from school. Peaky couldn't read or write – he couldn't even sign his name. I did try once or twice to take him home and teach him the alphabet but it was hopeless. He didn't have any ambitions to be a scholar. So one day, we were in Brick Lane and they were playing a gambling game in the street. One boy there had a metal watch and chain on. So I said to Peaky, ‘Let's have his watch.’ I took it out of his pocket, it was quite simple. I put my hand up and swivelled it off. Just as I handed it to Peaky, the boy tumbled me. ‘Give me my watch back!’ he said. I laughed and Peaky walked away with it.
Well, the boy knew us, knew our names, and he did a thing I never thought he'd do. He went to the police. To cut a long story short, I got twenty months and Peaky got nine months. We became the first boys ever to be sent to Borstal. It was called Borstal because it was in the village of Borstal, near Chatham in Kent. We were the first guinea pigs in 1903. When we got there, they made two cells into one for us. There was a bit of a school there, where they had proper teachers. The governor, Mr Weston, wanted to make the new system a success. We were given library books and I read Oliver Twist – that was the first time I found out about Dickens. You weren't kept in a cell all the time and there was plenty of physical exercise outside. I also learnt a lot of woodwork in the carpenter's shop. Even though the more backward lads were taught to read and write, they couldn't teach Peaky nothing there. He did his nine months and when he came out, his parents had moved out of the East End to give him a fresh start. Not long after, he got a splinter in his hand and he died from blood poisoning.
Ernest Hugh Haire
I attended Tranmere Higher Grade School, Lancashire. It was a fee-paying school and the quarterly bills were sent to my father. I started as a small boy in the Infants and we used slates and pencils, which were marvellous because you could easily cheat. You just had to lick your answer out and copy what the person next to you had written. We had reading, writing and arithmetic. Spelling was a matter of repetition. I remember getting out early one day at the age of six because I was the only one who could spell the word ‘yacht’.
