Martin-Bailey

I thought very hard about this, The-e-dealer, but felt that truth about the past is a very complicated matter and Heber Road School in the 1950s was no exception. I've always thought Mr Hatton was (for me at least) one of those very few teachers that can unlock their pupils' potential. He was also a much more complex man than one might have thought. Please note I am not retrospectively claiming he actually molested anyone, but that there was a dark side to his character just as there was a dark side to the School. On the whole I enjoyed life at Heber Road; I had challenging teaching from Mr Hatton and made some good friends. Indeed, where are they now, David Weedon (nephew of Bert, the famous guitarist), Neil Evans, Roger Cook, Paul Vining...

Everyone seems to remember their time at Heber Road through an affectionate mist. I was there 1950-54, and certainly wasn't unhappy; Mr Hatton could be an inspirational teacher when the mood was on him. When it wasn't, he could show a vicious temper. East Dulwich was a deprived part of a very shabby London, and we came from homes that would seem miserably poor and uncomfortable by today's standards. There could be a hidden, nasty side to life at Heber Road. The teachers plainly thought theselves a cut above the children. Physical punishments were frequently and arbitrarily imposed on pupils - boys, at any rate. Casual wallops and cuffs by some of the teachers, canings by the headmaster Mr Hester, were commonplace. I still have a vivid memory of a scene I didn't understand at the time, and about which I have never spoken to anyone - not my parents, not my wife from whom I have few secrets, not a glum psychotherapist whom I saw many decades later (not that it was relevant but it would have cheered him up professionally). At the end of each summer term a party would go to "school Camp". I went, with many of my year, to a shabby dump in Surrey called Sayers Croft. It was like a grubby, run down military establishment with buildings like Nissen Huts. A teacher slept in each hut, and we children had bunks in long dormitories. One evening we were ordered to shower, and Mr Hatton supervised a dozen naked little boys while we sploshed about cleaning ourselves. Very necessary, no doubt, but I have never forgotten a look of extraordinary fascination that came over Mr Hatton's face as he watched us oh so intently. I felt horribly uncomfortable. As far as I know, he did nothing to anyone; I didn't understand what it was about; I mentioned it to no-one. He was a very musical man; in his spare time he was a church organist (first rate) and choir master. No doubt he had dealings with many little boys. I hope he kept his feelings under control, and maybe this in some way explains his temper. I also recall another teacher called Mr Welch who made a practice of terrifying and ridiculing his pupils. He had been a sub-mariner during the Second World War; no doubt he'd seen some terrible sights just a few years before I first encountered him, but that was no excuse for such bullying behaviour towards small children. Hard to imagine a less suitable person to allow in a class room. To my horror, he turned up at my secondary school, where his behaviour remained as unpleasant as at Heber Road. At least he was consistent!

The building on the right, in the early 1950s, was Heber Road's pride and joy. It contained a well-equipped science laboratory, and we were told Heber was the only primary school in London to have one. There was a specialist science teacher called Mr Funnell (Spelling may be wrong) who taught us about magnetism and electricity: we constructed electromagnets, made simple electric motors, watched magnesium being ignited... I guess the school was well ahead of its time in that respect. Heaven knows why the laboratory was closed... cost-cutting, probably.

Oh my - that photo brings back the boys' playground, with the science lab on brick pillars. I don't think I have any school photos from my time in the early 1950s.Timeless, your picture: it could have been my kids in their North London school in the early 1980s, smiling at the camera, filled with an innocent optimism...

I'm glad Mr Hatton didn't mellow as he grew older! I'm also glad that my recollections of his violent temper seem to be accurate: it's hard to know what is a real memory, and what has become embroidered in your own head. I can still remember an incident that left me feeling very hard done by: knowing I was interested in such things, he gave me a shoebox of chalk fossils. I put it under my desk. At going home time, he shouted at me for having a messy box of rubbish under my desk, and kept me back until last. Oh, the miscarriages of justice that follow us down the years! Like all my teachers from those days, he must be long dead - but he was certainly a very vivid character who lives on in his ex-pupils' heads.

I went to Heber Road between 1950 and 1954, and still have some very vivid memories, mostly of things happening against a very dreary background. I can clearly remember getting into fights, both in the playground and on the way home - but I haven't the faintest recollection of what any of them were about. I can still picture the scene during an especially bruising encounter with a kid called Billy Reckitts (I believe), and excited boys formed a ring around us in the playground, cheering us on. My first two years were passed in a kind of haze: I had several women teachers (including supply teachers) who seemed to dislike me - one, Mrs Perkins, told my Mother I was supercilious. It may have been true, but I had no idea what she meant. I then had a very exciting and rather frighteningly unpredictable man for two years, who really got me excited by subjects like history, English, music, and science. I still remember his full name: Alfred Frederick David John Hatton. He was a church organist and choir master, and a superb pianist. But his temper was both very fragile and violent - and I mean violent. He would lash out at boys who annoyed him, and indeed once crashed a desk down on someone's foot - a boy from Glasgow called John Connor, who seemed often to incur Mr Hatton's displeasure. He had an astronomical telescope, a huge brass affair, that he brought into school (how? No car... did he lug it on a bus?) so we could witness a partial eclips of the sun. Perhaps most excitingly of all, he once had a ferocious row with the aforementioned Mrs Perkins, in front of the whole class - and pursued her down the corridor, roaring and shouting. Heber Road was a pretty rough and ready place. The boys' lavatories were a sordid, smelly disgrace, open to the skies and seemingly never cleaned. I can't vouch for the girls', but I bet they were as bad. School dinners were uneatably dreadful - cold, congealed fat, and lumpy jelly made from some sort of powder, were the main themes. Boys were regularly punished with the cane, a fate I managed to avoid. Many kids came from very poor and deprived backgrounds. Only one kid in our class (3HT and 4HT) had a car in their family, and his Dad was a commercial traveller who had it for work. I remember that the rather grim headmaster, a Mr Hester, had a Vauxhall that was parked in the playground sometimes. Food was indeed in short supply generally, and we kids used often to buy bags of chips from the chippy (three old pennies), or lumps of thick stodgy bread pudding from a very flyblown baker's shop. I'm talking about life more than sixty years ago. Only one child had a television in our class, sweets were rationed for most of my time there. The greatest event of our lives to date was the Coronation, on June 2nd 1953. Every kid had a small pack of freebies from the LCC, the then London governing body: a cup and saucer with murky pictures of the Queen and Prince Philip, and a royal blue ballpoint pen. My pen snapped in a week, and the cup and saucer soon followed. I bet none survived very long. The actual day was a national holiday, and it poured heavily. Later that summer, the whole school was marched to Dulwich Village to watch the Queen drive past. The street was cleared of all traffic, we waited for ages while nothing happened, a couple of coppers on motor bikes drove past to loud cheers, and then finally a posh car whizzed by with someone waving a gloved hand. That was it - a swindle! I think I became a secret republican on that hot, dusty, afternoon in 1953! The eleven-plus was the great worry that hung over us all. Under Mr Hatton's ministrations I was lucky and "did well" (for which I should have thanked him, I suppose), but many of my friends were counted as failures. Fancy telling a child of ten that he or she is a failure in life. It was a very cruel and wasteful system - and I'm not sure that we have a system that's significantly better at educating our children sixty years on. Wake up, Britain - we're still divided and held back by a menacing class system.