Two Rooms And A View: 41 - Cabbage And Tapioca
...The smell of the weekly cabbage was nauseating and we always seemed to have tapioca or semolina for dessert. In addition, the lack of discipline was a major problem. Boys from the junior school came into the senior boys' hall for the meal, but there was only one teacher allocated to supervise about 200 youngsters. The result was often chaos, with pupils running around and food being thrown from table to table. Some teachers patrolled between the tables with a cane, as if controlling wild animals....
Robert Owen recalls turbulent school mealtimes.
I remember school dinners with much displeasure. The meals were prepared externally and delivered to the school during the late morning in metal containers to keep them warm. A number of dinner ladies would then unpack them and serve the respective contents to the queuing pupils. Once the main course had been served, everything would start again with the sweet. Numerous problems seemed to occur daily. Sometimes parts of the meal were cold, other times there were shortages of particular portions and some people had to go without, or be compensated by larger portions of others. The quality of the meals was also very mixed and occasionally it was difficult to recognise what we were about to receive!
The smell of the weekly cabbage was nauseating and we always seemed to have tapioca or semolina for dessert. In addition, the lack of discipline was a major problem. Boys from the junior school came into the senior boys' hall for the meal, but there was only one teacher allocated to supervise about 200 youngsters. The result was often chaos, with pupils running around and food being thrown from table to table. Some teachers patrolled between the tables with a cane, as if controlling wild animals.
I soon gave up school dinners as a bad job and either went home or to my nearby sister's house.
Something that did surprise and amaze me at Stanhope Road school, was the frequent use of corporal punishment and how the discipline of the class varied according to the teacher. In some classes, no one would speak because of the authority and often the personality of the teacher, who did not threaten or use corporal punishment. In others, the teacher would have a cane in his hand throughout the lesson and often punish half the class, occasionally with four or six strokes for talking too much, yet the chatter continued.
Many teachers threatened the use of the cane but never used it; others used the slipper and a particular teacher used the ruler on the back of the hand. On one occasion, this teacher, lost his temper while administering this crude method of punishment. The result was a shameful display of violence in front of the whole class. The next year, the same teacher went on to a senior post at another local school. Fifty years later, he would have gone to jail for a serious physical assault.
About once a week, the Headmaster would come out at random, into the schoolyard just as the 9 a.m. whistle was sounded. He would direct all latecomers – often thirty or forty – into what became known as the 'late line', and would then proceed to cane each one with the words' "Get here on time!" No questions were asked and no excuses accepted – yet no parent complained.
Punctuality was never a virtue of mine and I was often in the late line. On most days, I travelled by trolley bus around Tyne Dock to the top of Stanhope Road. Here, the bus crew always seemed to stop for a morning break. This often made me late so I used to get off the bus and run the rest of the way to school. If I was very late leaving Reed Street, I would run all the way. It was just over a mile and it would take about seven or eight minutes on a good day.
