1. The Death of Eltham Green

Eltham Green 1956

This is the Eltham Green that I remember, a shining example of the prototype London comprehensive schools that aimed to change the world. Opened by Lord Hunt (the conqueror of Mount Everest) in 1956, the building embodied the ambition of London County Council's (LCC) planners and architects. They envisaged a first class democratic and egalitarian education for everyone, regardless of ability, gender, creed and ethnicity. The school represented a fundamental break with a past where young people were discarded at age 11. It was modern, futuristic and exciting. From the very beginning, I loved it.

But the LCC was murdered long ago, and now the schools it built

are being destroyed, with ruthless contempt for the past. There has been little fuss in the newspapers and no noisy campaign to save comprehensive education or the handsome buildings that once expressed the post-war dream of a more equal Britain. 

Sir John Betjeman fought for Victorian Gothic, St. Pancras Station and the Euston Arch but no contemporary writer, poet or artist has launched a crusade to save the soaring modernist towers of the comprehensive era. This may be due to the careful management of the destructive process.

Imagine you did not know that Eltham Green has gone, expunged from the south London horizon forever. Suppose you returned from life somewhere else, Australia perhaps, and strolled down Eltham Hill. When would you realize that Eltham Green has disappeared?

Right now, you wouldn't really be able to tell until you reached the gate. Your eye scans for Eltham Green School and you get this instead. A 'Welcome' mural mounted on steel bars that introduces you to the strange powers that have taken charge of the site and building.


Next year (2015), the truth will dawn as you descend the hill from Eltham. Where's it gone? You won't find the old place, hunt as you will.

The bulldozers are booked, the demolition is arranged and soon the school will cease to exist in this world. You may sense the chill air of ghosts and shadows, haunting, hair-tingling reminders of your youth and of the people you knew here. But there will be nothing tangible left behind.

Even now, the Eltham Green name or crest is hard to spot. I discovered 'Eltham Green School' on the Lift B service plate, apparently left by the new masters for fear of the electrical dangers that lurk beneath.

The famous oak tree emblem, from which all the little acorns were supposed to grow, has also survived in a single unexpected spot. There, top left in a health and safety notice, is the instantly recognisable symbol of a very great school.

For Harris, the well-known carpet brand, the very words 'Eltham Green School' are toxic. The name, the crest, the building and the history must be eliminated. There must be nothing to link the magic carpet that is Harris with this predecessor school. EGS's recent struggles against loaded dice have become a source of shame, a story to be lost as soon as possible.

A fine example of public architecture must be demolished. The memories of former students must be buried in dust and broken masonry. We must forget the LCC and deny the ambition and achievements of the post-war period.

Assembly Hall Interior photographed in 2014

I lack the networks to mount a successful campaign to have the Assembly Hall preserved, listed and admired. I'd love to rescue the comprehensive experience, to save the school that inspired my life. I still hear the orchestras and choirs, still remember the words of my teachers, still love the vision of education the school embodies. But I'm not that kind of campaigner.

Instead, this blog records my impressions and memories of Eltham Green School. I travel on one last journey to EGS and report my thoughts, past and present. I draw on the images that are available to me (with apologies if the copyright is yours, not mine - let me know and I'll put it right) and remember as best I can the people, scenes and events that happened around me.

Dan Dare (Pilot of the Future) in The Eagle comic
captured the spirit of modernity

This is memory work about EGS, therefore, not fragments of autobiography. Your stories and lessons are different from mine but are every bit as important. None of us is a typical student though we have shared a common experience of uncommon power. We were part of a Brave New World, part of the space age, part of the Festival of Britain, and as part of the comprehensive experiment, we were the first properly educated generation in English History.

Memory and history are important for their intrinsic interest and significance but also because they contribute to an inevitable struggle for life and meaning between social groups. Our EGS experiences are woven into our identity and we have to remember them to sustain our distinctive voice against the siren calls of carpet salesmen and their allies at Westminster who claim the past was a failure.

2. Eltham Green in 1957

Bernard Barker

This is my school photograph, from about 1958. I'm wearing, of course, the school uniform, with the bottle green blazer, flannel shirt, grey pullover and official green tie. We wore short trousers until we were fourteen; the girls wore gym tunics until they switched to skirts for the GCE years. My wiry, untidy, ungovernable dark brown hair, inexpertly cut by my mother to avoid the song and dance my brother and I created at the barbers, became a trade mark. Other boys would enquire whether I was a toilet brush, standing the wrong way up, or whether I had been thrown through a hedge. 

I did not mind this very much because I always felt different in some indefinable way. Peculiar with my toilet brush hair, peculiar with my skinny build and dread of the showers, peculiar with my precocious eloquence, peculiar with my socks drooping from my long thin legs. I didn't like drinking the free milk with its thick creamy texture and was scared of the toilets, with reason as it turned out. 

I first visited EGS with my mother in the summer of 1957 for an admission interview. We lived outside the catchment area, so I was eligible for entry only because I had passed the eleven plus and Eltham Green had not recruited its quota of more able students. Although I was used to large buildings and large numbers (there were 45 in my final year class at Kidbrooke Park primary), I was impressed by my first glimpse of EGS. 

Unsure where to go, we entered the building through the steel and glass doors that led into the lower ground floor cloakrooms. 

Eltham Green School viewed from
the Middle Park Avenue entrance in 1988

We climbed the stairs to the office suite, where we met with Mrs Betts, the deputy headmistress, an austere, unsmiling woman whose brown eyes seemed to communicate the wisdom of good conduct. I remember talking about playing with my soldiers on the carpet at home and was embarrassed by this childish admission afterwards. But it made no difference, I was accepted and joined the school in September 1957.

The Assembly Hall 1956 (LMA)

On our first day the new girls and boys were assembled in the Hall to be sorted into classes. Our names were called, in ascending order of presumed ability (i.e. 1CX first). We followed our form tutors in neat crocodile lines, apprehensive youngsters wondering what was to come. 

The Headmaster, at first invisible, was R.H. Davies, M.Sc., who had moved south from Sheffield City Grammar School in 1956. His challenge was to open a new comprehensive school to serve the full 11 - 18 age and ability range. He had few models on which to build, so chose an essential structure based on his experience in grammar schools. The 2000+ students were placed in forms, streams and sets (e.g. A1, B3, C4) with twice-yearly examinations in every subject providing opportunities to rise and fall.  

We were also assigned mixed age tutorial groups within a house system, each named for a virtue, with the first letters spelling out ELTHAM G(reen) S(chool). The houses were:

Endeavour

Loyalty

Truthfulness

Honesty

Ambition

Modesty

Generosity

Sincerity

Your house was selected according to the first letter of your family name. B for Barker placed me under Mr Sidney Buckley in Endeavour House.  

Copying Timetables on the First Day 1957 (LMA)

We were not aware of the 1950s education policy context to which we belonged. But it shaped our lives, whether we knew it or not. The school leaving age remained at 15 throughout our time at EGS, with a significant cohort departing for work without qualifications while the rest ploughed on with examination courses. 

The General Certificate of Education (GCE) examination, against which our school's success was judged, aimed at about 20% of the ability range. There were no credible examinations for the remaining 80% of pupils, beyond the vocational certificates offered by the Royal Society of Arts and City and Guilds. Only 118,000 students were at university in 1962, compared with over two million in 2013.

Florence Horsbrugh
Conservative Minister
of Education 1951 - 54

Grammar schools dominated secondary education in London throughout our time, with the result that Eltham Green always struggled to achieve a balanced ability profile. Nearby Eltham Hill, a selective girls' school, also had a negative impact on the gender balance at EGS. Nationally, comprehensive reorganisation was not encouraged until 1965 and was not fully developed until the 1970s.

Eltham Green in 1957 promised equal opportunities for all but the entire education system was organised quite deliberately and purposefully around inequality and unfairness.

3. Outside (Back)

Shooters Hill photographed from Eltham Green in 2014

The view from the seventh floor reveals a 360 degree panorama of south London, an urban landscape that includes hills (Eltham Hill, Shooters Hill), woods (Oxleas Woods, Castle Wood, Jack Wood), open spaces, parks and sports grounds (Sutcliffe Park, Queenscroft Recreation Ground, Middle Park Field, Eltham Green). Also visible are Eltham Palace and Eltham Church. Vast acres of private and council housing stretch south east towards New Eltham, Sidcup and Bexley; and north west towards Lewisham, New Cross and Camberwell. 

Eltham Palace photographed from Eltham Green in 2014

We lived in Woolacombe Road, close to the Rochester Way, about half an hour's walk from Eltham Green. For an eleven year old, this was a significant distance and my brother and I never settled on a best route. 


The main options were to catch the 108A bus from the stop opposite the Dover Patrol, ride to Well Hall, then trudge towards

Dover Patrol (off Rochester Way)

Eltham Hill via Sherard Road and Prince John Road. The alternative was to cross the Rochester Way (not the new A2) and walk down Birdbrook Road and Eltham Green Road. Sometimes we tried the route past Kidbrooke Station and the wooden RAF buildings, since demolished to make way for the Ferrier Estate, itself now bulldozed. This meant traipsing round two sides of the Sutcliffe Park railings, with the school's blue lift towers seemingly no nearer.

Ten Shilling Note (withdrawn)

There was an incentive to walk. Mother gave us ten shillings per week (50 pence in today's money), allowing 1/- (shilling) per day for lunch, 6d (half a shilling) for the daily bus fares and 2/6 (two shillings and 6d) for pocket money. Today you would need at least £20 a week to meet these costs.  

The quirks of the journey, especially the relatively long walk, separated the school from our home territory. We used to play on Blackheath and from 1957 were regulars at the Valley, supporters of Charlton Athletic in the era of Billy Bonds, Peter Reeves (also Eltham Green pupils) and Eddie Firmani (ex-Sampdoria). We bought toys at Raggedy Ann's in Blackheath Village. But Eltham seemed a remote place and we visited only when Mother insisted on a trip to Hinds' department store, usually to kit us out with school uniform.

Eltham Green photographed in 1988 - the craft workshops are on
the right of the entrance road where the railings end

The grounds were extensive and were divided by buildings and paths into well-marked areas that created different impressions and atmospheres. The school seemed smaller, more functional and more ordinary from the Middle Park Avenue entrance (above). 

On the way home after my first day, a rough-seeming youth knocked the cap from my head on this very spot. There was an outside toilet somewhere nearby. I remember an apparently crazed individual bursting in on me there shouting: 'Stand up, turn round and let's see your old jam roll!' After that shock, I squeezed my buttock cheeks tight rather than visit the school toilets. 

Lower Ground Floor Piazza photographed c. 1970 (LMA)

The main playgrounds faced towards Middle Park Avenue. There were sheltered piazzas and trees with circular wooden seats around them on either side of the Assembly Hall. Nearby, in the lower ground floor lobby, a tuck shop sold ice cream and sweets. Tennis courts were placed between the school's five gymnasia (see below) and doubled as football pitches at break and lunchtime. 

Tennis Courts at Eltham Green, photographed in 1988

I did not like being outside and started to join clubs and societies that met indoors at lunch time. I played little football with the other boys but remember that there was no organiser and no picking of teams. You just joined in by sticking out a foot and propelling a tennis ball towards the goal, usually marked with a jacket or two. 

There were other, less wholesome games. Hidden from patrolling teachers in shady corners, groups would gather to flip penny coins against a gym wall. The owner of the penny closest to the lowest bricks would scoop the pool. For a while I was addicted, and would hazard my bus fare in a vain effort to recoup my losses. We also played odd man out, tossing coins and hoping that our head would collect the tails, or vice versa.

Pre-Decimal Pennies

Despite my schoolboy impersonation of the ten stone weakling in the Charles Atlas advertisements, I could be bold, especially with quick retorts that a wiser person would have stifled. Once, when I was walking through the tennis courts, a rocker-like apparition shouted at me from the other side of the high wire fence. 'Who are you looking at, son?' he hollered. I considered myself well-protected by the wire and calculated that if he came after me there would be plenty of time to run for safety. 'You mate!' I chirped, returning his gaze.

I was wrong. His hands grasped the wire and his feet found purchase in the mesh. He shinned up the fence in a few seconds and dropped upon me while I stood amazed by his agility. He shoved me hard down on the tarmac and gave me a forceful warning against cheeking my elders. 

Netball in the Sixties

This photograph (left) is the nearest I can come to the sports pavilion, site of incidents that linger in my memory long after the destruction of the building itself. Approximately 15 metres to the right of the gymnasium (bottom right of the photo) there was a long hedge that marked the boundary with the school's playing fields (see Outside: Front). There was a path from the gymnasium entrance (out of view, front of building) to a wooden sports pavilion beyond the hedge, on the perimeter of the field.  

I remember still the smell of dry pavilion timber, lingering in the air. I remember bright September sun and drops of moisture glistening on spiders' webs. I remember boys capturing daddy long legs and thrusting them towards girls who ran away, but not very far. Eventually we summoned the juvenile cruelty to pull off their wings. 

I remember, in particular, watching a group of boys two years senior to me play a game of break time cricket near the pavilion. Holding an absurdly small, if not miniature bat, was Conal Condren, a polio victim whose deft footwork and careful defensive

Conal Condren, painted by Jean Pretorius

shot were not impeded by the caliper supporting his weakened leg. 
Conal was initially placed in the C stream at EGS, perhaps because polio had disrupted his schooling. He had to work his way up through the forms, but no one who knew him doubted his quizzical, sceptical intelligence. After Eltham Green he completed a PhD at the London School of Economics and became a professor at the University of New South Wales. He is a leading authority on Thomas Hobbes, author of Leviathan.

4. Outside (Front)

Eltham Green photographed from the
Queenscroft Road Entrance, 2014

The view as you enter EGS from Queenscroft Road is gracious and elegant. Tall trees and lawns screen the glass and pebble dash facade of the main building. A gentle descending path leads towards a terrace and the main, ground floor entrance (the rear grounds are accessed through the lower ground floor). In my time, ponds with lilies and wildlife softened the stonework and added a visual focus, especially for teachers looking down from the staffroom balcony on the first floor.

The Ponds before EGS opened in 1956 (LMA)

The ponds are highlighted in this photograph (right) taken in 1956. At some point the ponds were filled in. They are not visible in the 1988 photograph of the terrace below. I used to arrive early in the morning, perhaps about 8.30 a.m. and would gather around the ponds with other children. We would study the water boat men skimming the surface but were careful not to stumble down the steps. Sometimes pupils did fall in, or were pushed. 

The Terrace photographed in 1988. The

ponds have been filled in.

Drama Hall photographed in 2014,
right of picture.

The Drama Hall, a purpose-built little theatre, is connected to the main building by a linking concrete canopy (see below) that leads to a colonnaded area beneath the teaching block. This opens to the front terrace (see above). In our youth we were told the school was asked to choose between a swimming pool and a drama space and decided on the latter because the Eltham baths were so near at hand. On the whole, we were pleased with the choice and I have the fondest memories of the productions I saw there, from Toad of Toad Hall to Dido and Aeneas and Ring Around the Moon.

Falling Leaves, photographed in
2014

On the terrace facing wall of the Drama Hall there is a sculpture called 'Falling Leaves', perhaps linked to the school's oak tree and acorn motif (see below). This has weathered badly over the last half century and no attempt has been made to repair the crumbling structure. The iron framework is exposed and rusting (see left).

Falling Leaves, photographed in 1970
(LMA)

As the school is to be demolished, it must not seem worthwhile to make good the neglect. The sculpture's decay foreshadows the bulldozer.

I shall say more about drama later on, but for now I must remember only the time when the school taught me to smoke. I was playing a prosperous business man (a seriously minor part) in Ibsen's Peer Gynt. We were asked to smoke Castella cigars on stage to signify our lordly wealth. We enjoyed this so much that we rehearsed by the colonnade, exhaling large clouds of smoke in the name of art. It was some years before I stopped taking cigars at smart dinners.

Viewed from the field, (see above) Eltham Green looked splendid, and still does because the orientation  hides the extensive building work now under way on the Middle Park Avenue side. You'd never suspect that in the 1970s the paved area below the classroom block (on the left of the picture, above) was known as Bomb Alley. Peter Dawson, celebrated by the Daily Express as Britain's 'toughest headmaster' and admired as the scourge of Boy George, the most famous EGS student, entitled his boastful memoirs The Road from Bomb Alley.  This glamorised his exploits with gown, cane and binoculars (used to identify miscreants).   

Our secondary years coincided with the dawn of mass motoring, so when we left school in the evenings via Queenscroft Road our eyes were inevitably drawn towards cars driven by our teachers. Some younger members of staff seemed glamorous to us and their vehicles gave glimpses of private selves and worlds beyond our experience and purse.  I was fascinated by and perhaps desired a French assistant who rode a bicycle with a tiny engine. Her allure and elegance as she crested the drive and turned into Queenscroft Road on her aptly named Velo Solex is suggested by a much later image of Brigitte Bardot (above, left).

My family never owned a motor car or towed a caravan, and showed few signs of wishing to do so. This must have heightened my longing for the style and freedom embodied in teachers' cars. Brian Crowdy (Languages) and his wife Valerie (née English, History)

drove a Volkswagen camper van (see similar model right) that has since become a classic. I marvelled at the idea of a mobile home, and fell in love with Volkswagen as the epitome of graceful engineering. When I finally bought my own camper van in 2005 I remembered the Crowdys as pathfinders to an itinerant, prosperous and modern way of life. Unfortunately I was too old and discovered that sharing a four foot double bed in a tin box in the middle of a field was not quite what I had imagined. I'm sure it was brilliant 50 years ago.

John Eyers, our Religious Education teacher, drove a Morris Countryman and would often give a cheery wave as he passed. In the sixth form, a number of us would join him for  regular Sunday evening drives to London. Dr Martyn Lloyd Jones, a famous Evangelical, would preach for an hour and then retire to a room where he would receive members of the congregation. This link is to Joan Bakewell's interview with him in 1970.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-vbydx95tVQ


As a firm atheist, I was not remotely persuaded by his marvellous knowledge and talk, but he gave his time freely and we would return to Eltham in the Countryman, debating what we had heard and thought. 

5. Early Lessons

Stairs to All Floors
Photographed in 2014

These are the stairs that led to almost 10,000 lessons during my time at EGS. There were two staircases, one at each end of the school's central block, and four lifts, two at each end. We seldom took the lifts because the crowds and queues made them slower. We preferred the rush upstairs, the dash through corridors and the orderly line at the classroom door. 

Once, when pupils complained that the distances between classrooms made them late for lessons, Mrs Betts conducted her own research. She discovered that four minutes would be sufficient to complete the journey between the most distant places. This was somehow accepted as demonstrating that no one need be late. But the total time pupils spent on the stairs between lessons, breaks and lunch times must have been very great, nevertheless. Sometimes the traffic would be congested and pupils might be unruly. There were prefects on every landing to control the flow. 

This congested stairs experience taught many of us a life-long habit of rushing upstairs, even in our own homes. I still take two steps at a time up the central, not-moving staircase at tube stations, impatient with crowds and determined to be first to the top. I still take stairs rather than lifts, even when carrying suitcases, and my breathlessness reminds me of my youth when I began each day in the sixth form with a mountaineer's ascent to the top floor. 

Tannoy photographed in 2014

Our movements between lessons were regulated by bleeps on the tannoy system (left), made famous by Clockwise. This film  (written by Michael Frayn, a Blackheath resident at the time) featured a manic headmaster, played by John Cleese, who  controlled his EGS-lookalike school by barking commands into a microphone. Immediate obedience was expected. 

I mainly remember particular teachers and moments, rather than actual lessons, perhaps because of their emotional content (fear, laughter, anxiety) or larger than life characteristics.  My memories now resemble photographs left in the sun, with many areas faded and indistinct. After all, it is 57 years since those early lessons at Eltham Green.