School Disco Fever

Many of the old school buildings, in particular the State or Board Schools found in most large towns and cities have done well to survive.

There have been many threats to their existence from a declining urban population to wartime bombing, from simply falling apart as inevitably happens to an old functional building to just being obsolete for the educational demands and requirements of our infants and junior pupils to equip them for a modern world. The buildings have little alternative use apart from another educational sector such as an adult education college or as a community resource. A few in better locations have been converted into residences although the majority are not at all suitable for such a fate. The rest have just been bulldozed.

I grew up attending just such a State School. It was built from a hard red brick to a true corporate specification under a blue/grey slate roof and in a regimented layout in the form of a 'U' shape with the central area being paved and landscaped into a courtyard with the then obligatory flag pole and a white louvre shuttered weather monitoring station which classes took it in turn to open up and record the air pressure, rainfall, minumum and maximum temperatures.

The information would form part of perhaps the largest climate monitoring programme ever although I doubt that there was any meaningful collation and analysis of any of the data from our school or every other establishment in the country. If there had been any concerted effort to draw together the combined data then I am convinced that the trends of climate change and global warming would have been first noted by Class 4a of Glebe Road County Primary School as far back as the 1970's.

A dominating feature of the old State Schools was the intentional segregation of Boys and Girls for the purpose of entering the school. I do not readily understand the reasoning behind separate doors with the carved sandstone or granite headers for Boys and Girls because all of our classes were of mixed sex. There may, in an earlier era, have been a bit more streaming on sex grounds with the then fairer sex directed towards domestication and the boys, real young men, encouraged to take up more of a vocational basis if they were destined for heavy industry, manufacturing and manual labour.

My school even in the 1970's did not appear to have embraced enlightenment and equality of the sexes and this was no more apparent than at the time of the school disco. The idea of a disco was revolutionary. Up until the exciting announcement of a disco and out of school hours we were usually entertained by country dancing displays, choral singing concerts, a bit of very amateurish drama or if a fight broke out between the older pupils, male or female and for no apparent reason.

We were not sure what to expect at a disco at the tender age of 10. Those with older brothers and sisters were a bit more familiar with the latest pop music and fashions. Those who went to the Youth Club in the town were well versed with a disco because every weekly session finished with a bop to music brought along by its members. My own experience of such an event was limited to hearing my parents talk about dances in what was a busy social circle for them. The dances they spoke of were the formal waltzes, tango's and foxtrots and with a bit of rock and roll or jiving thrown in if feeling energetic. The record collection at home reflected this with standard classics and Alvin and The Chipmunks singing the early hits of The Beatles.

I admit now that I was musically inept as a ten year old which was astounding given the emergence of glam rock, power ballads and powerful vocalists of the time. My fashion sense was equally abysmal. For my first school disco I wore a shirt with collar, elasticated tie and smart trousers. Footwear was my best black plimsoll gym shoes. Fortunately my elasticated dickie bow tie was nowhere to be found as I would surely have worn it. My fellow pupils arrived in their Oxford Bag trousers with coloured snake belt, V neck pullovers, white socks and brothel creeper shoes. Some attire had obviously been begged , borrowed or stolen from older siblings as it did look comically oversized. With the outfit there went a considerable amount of aggessive attitude, and obligatory hands in pockets- there was a good choice from the multiple pocketed Oxford Bags. Some had gone to the trouble of a grown up hair cut, feathered layers, spiky fringe, long and tapered at the neck. At a glance there appeared to be something akin to a freakish outbreak of David Bowie clones, but in child size. My mother trimmed my hair with the Ronson family cutter. I was truly a very square and geeky kid.

The disco was in the school assembly hall. A proper mobile DJ had been hired although the equipment was, by todays standards, very basic with a single turntable, a few tons of vinyl albums and singles in shipping boxes, three sequential flashings bulbs although probably operated manually rather than automatic, a glitter ball that had definitely seen better times and a couple of amplifiers/speakers. The DJ may actually have been in his early 20's but to us he looked at least 40 and over the hill.

The entry price was as much as 5 new pence but that did include a free bag of crisps and a mini bottle of hyperactivity inducing pop. The segregation began as soon as the  hall was entered. Teachers, giving up their own time for which we were of course grateful, patrolled the room making sure that girls did not dance with the boys or get within any possibility of what would be any form of physical contact. A senior male teacher had brought along one of his slippers for just this purpose. This inevitably led to a lot of showing off, at a distance, by the boys with extraordinary dance efforts to the pop tunes from Mud, Slade, The Sweet, Bay City Rollers and all the Top of the Pops. The girls, already showing a maturity gap, would not be at all impressed and congregate around their coats and bags, dancing in a slow motion from one leg to the other whilst showing boredom and indifference. They would be thinking about the senior boys from the secondary school who would hang about outside the school gates on their push bikes or that great puller of a Yamaha moped.

One moment the room would be quite crowded and the next there would be a rush for more pop and crisps or a mass evacuation if there was the chance of a fight , scuffle or a pushing and a shoving out in the playground or spilling out on to the street.

The most embarassing thing was being collected by parents and being asked if you had had a good time. I was usually quite hot, sweaty and bright red cheeked by the end of the night, well, as much as you can call 7.30pm the end of any night.