Crier Profile - Brenda Wilson
In the first instalment of this profile, Brenda Wilson, Headmistress of Swaffham Prior School from 1991 to 2002, tells us about the early years and how she first became a reception teacher.
I WAS BORN IN MANCHESTER. I knew I wanted to be a teacher so I applied to training college rather than university, although in those days it was seen very much as second best to university. I enjoyed Sheffield very much but as far as classroom management goes, I learnt more watching a warm-up comedian at a summer seaside show. I could see how he worked the audience and I remember thinking, if I can see those techniques, then they could be taught and used in the classroom. I did art and RE at Sheffield, followed by a Divinity course for graduate teachers at Westminster College, Oxford. I'd had a religious experience when I was 15 and felt that if RE was compulsory (as it was in those days - the only subject in the 1944 Education act that was specified, it was just assumed all the other subjects would be taught) then it should be taught properly. It was often just put on the timetable and used for other things!
Then I went back to Oldham, teaching in a secondary modern school for two years until I got married. I'd come straight from Oxford - a lot of my course was based in the training college but there were lecturers at the university as well, so I was on an academic high.. I taught basic English and maths with the first year, and RE throughout the school. We had some pupils doing it as an exam subject for CSE.. I had all of the non-exam fifth form classes (five of them) and I was talking about the origins of religion and Mesopotamian fertility symbols, when some pupils could hardly read!
It was tragic, really. So I came down with a thump. I was studious.. I hadn't come from a booky home: my father was a bus driver, my mother worked in wholesale warehouse for hairdressers - she became a buyer eventually. I was the only one from my road who went to grammar school - I dutifully studied, got all my exams - it was quite a shock to realise there were people who couldn't read. But we did have fun! Do you remember the Spinners? Folk group with one chap who was six foot seven - had to have his national service uniform made to measure! Well, we organised with a local vicar a kind of religious day in school, and we had David Frost - he's the son of a Methodist minister. And a pop group, and different activities all day. It was great fun. The Spinners were a bit put out because we'd put them a bit too close to the pop group, and they complained about the noise - but they were lovely people!
I'd met my husband to be, Conrad, at Oxford; he lived in Birmingham; he was a teacher too; we both went back to our respective parents for two years.. duty, I felt I had to go back to my parents, to pay back for the investment they'd put in.. then we got married, and went down to Hampshire. My husband taught in a comprehensive there, and I taught in the girls'Grammar in Basingstoke. Right next to Aldermaston, the Atomic Weapons Research Establishment, AWRE - where all the boffins were making the atomic bombs - and my husband was teaching RE to the children of the people who were making the bombs! Quite a contradiction really. Greenham Common was nearby. During political crises the American planes had their bombs loaded and engines running.. there was always one of them in the air. I fell pregnant and gave up the following February. We were very hard up, we hadn't intended to have children for another couple of years. Teachers earned less than the average wage.. very badly paid at the time. Just under two years later we had our second child .. By that time my husband was becoming disenchanted teaching RE, and to earn extra money he started working at the evening centre in the school. He was Head of Centre and this became more important to him than the day job. He decided to apply for a job as deputy principal in Birmingham. We bought a house in Handsworth Wood, four miles from the city centre. I was doing odds and sods, home teaching - quite an eye-opener. The saddest one was the boy who'd got a form of cancer. His life expectancy was short, and he'd given up, he wasn't interested in anything.
After my third child was born I started working with adults. In the Adult Literacy movement I had a group of physically disabled people, with a wide range of ability level. One, Iqbal, lovely man, very tall, literate in his own language but not in English. We started talking about football, and one of my heroes was Bert Trautman, a German ex-prisoner-of-war who'd stayed on after the war, and he played for Manchester City. He broke his neck in a cup final, three minutes before the end of the match. I was telling them this story, how all the newspapers had shown a photo of him as part of the team holding up the cup at the end. It was the first time I'd realised that not everything in newspapers was true, and they'd doctored this picture. Iqbal just smiled ruefully and said 'that's what happened to me.'He'd been watching TV, stood up, fell over and broken his neck but the injury wasn't seen to for several days, by which time the damage was permanent and he was confined to a wheelchair for the rest of his life.
Then I was asked if I would do an O'level English class. 1972-ish. The literacy movement was going strong. It was the time in education when adults were having opportunities they hadn't had before. There was one lad who was an inspiration - and a thorn in my side. He'd gone through secondary modern school, without ever reading a book. Left school at 15. When he was 19 or 20 he'd got in with a group of students from Birmingham University in his local pub, and he'd got interested in what they were talking about. The first book that he read was Nietzsche's philosophy, with a little Collins pocket dictionary and a set of felt pens, red green, blue and yellow, and as he read through the book, every time he came across a word he didn't know he would look it up, colour code it and classify it. He was now 22-23 and the reason he was in my class, was that he had been provisionally accepted at Birmingham University on the condition that he could get Maths and English O Level. And he did.
After that I did English as a Foreign Language, again in evening classes. I looked after the boys in the day then went out two nights a week, much to the chagrin of my eldest boy who by then was old enough not to want to be in his pyjamas at half past six. But I really enjoyed working with adults. The nice thing about Birmingham was that we were living near Conrad's family. Family is good to have nearby - you don't have to make an appointment to go and see them.
Teaching EFL made me realise that communication was what was important - it didn't matter if you made mistakes. If you could get the sense of what you wanted to say across.. I had French, and Germans, and South Americans, Indians.. it was great fun. And the joy of it was that we had a textbook but you didn't have to follow it. As long as you got them talking, it didn't matter. We used to go for a drink afterwards. It was very subtle - in the class I was the one that was deciding what we were going to do, but going into the pub, the roles reversed. I was the woman, and they were the men, and they probably did more talking there. And so it was good. I really enjoyed that time.
We were there at the time of the IRA bomb in New Street. The adult Education Centre was very close to the town centre. I used to wait for Conrad to finish for the evening (he was deputy principal) and that particular evening, one of the other chaps rang home for some reason and his wife had the TV on and saw the news flashes. We'd heard police sirens earlier but obviously didn't know what had happened. We decided we weren't going to let this stop us going for our drink for the evening - at The Dublin Man o'War, would you believe. It was the most uncomfortable drink I've had in my life. There was a queue for the phone, everyone calling home to say that they were all right, everyone was looking at bags on the floor. Really strange. In the end I said look, Con, we'd better go home. If my mother sees this on TV and phones and we're not home, she's going to worry. So we went home. It was very uncomfortable.
We next lived in Kent, my husband got a job as principal in the Adult Education centre in Folkestone. We bought a house in Hythe. I learned to crochet - because it was dead boring before I got a job! I was thinking that because I'd enjoyed EFL that that was the way I was going to go. Folkestone being what it is, with all the language schools there was plenty of opportunity. However, I went to an official function with my husband at the Leas Cliff Hall. I was sitting next to the Chief Education Officer, and just making conversation, I told him I was a teacher. The next day Con came home and 'Bren, how do you fancy teaching at Hythe Infants school? Because there's a job going there.'And I said, "No way! I'm not trained for infants. It's not me. Why?"He said that the CEO had asked him if I might be interested, as it was the week before term started and they hadn't got a teacher. And he came back the next day, saying 'Tom says please don't say no, think about it, because we're desperate.'I thought about it on the Thursday and said 'I'll do it for the summer term, to give you time to find somebody else'. So I started on my first infant class the following Wednesday, absolutely terrified, and at the end of the summer term the Head teacher asked me to stay on. And by that time I was enjoying it. I was taking the middle infants; there was a brilliant teacher in reception, and I learned a lot from her.