Waverley © Birmingham Evening Mail

Waverley was OK. The school had a strong tradition of music and had produced a couple of minor pop stars and groups. It had a more relaxed and easy-going reputation than the other two local grammar schools, Saltley and Yardley, so that, allied with my inherent lack of drive and the fact that Cynthia was there, made it an easy decision to go to Waverley. An additional attraction was that Cynth had told me they did Fencing, and the 11-year-old Colin quite fancied himself as Small Heath’s answer to Zorro or one of the Three Musketeers.

Cynthia – a VERY bad, but useful, influence

Cynthia, being a ‘life and soul’ type of kid was at the hub of mischief at the school. She had a little gang of friends who seemed to model themselves on something out of St Trinians; there was Lynn, Mockey (Maureen Lockley) and Sara Mohamed at the core of things plus a few other miscreants. I’d got used to them all hanging around at our house in the front room, listening to Beatles and Kinks records on the Dansette when they, and indeed I, should have been at school. Unfortunately, it wasn’t until I got to Waverley that I learned my sister’s reputation had preceded me.

In the weeks leading up to the start of this new phase in my life, Mom frantically scrambled around trying to scrape the money together to buy a school uniform from the official outfitters in Yardley, somewhere up by the Good Companions pub. She got some extra cleaning jobs, my granddad chipped in with what he could afford, usually borrowed off his mates from the pub, and we began to assemble the get-up. A major dispute arose over the topic of trousers, this was 1967 and junior schoolboys in those days wore shorts, so Mom thought it would be best for me to have a pair of grey flannel shorts. Cynthia was mortified by the thought of her brother turning up to the ‘big school’ wearing shorts, but Mom wouldn’t budge – shorts would last longer than trousers, I’d only have the knees out of trousers in a few weeks, and she couldn’t afford to replace them when I tore them. Eventually a friend, Robert, who was about 13 and went to the local Oldknow Secondary Modern, stepped in and took firm control of the situation:

“You can’t do that, Mrs Carberry. If he turns up in shorts, I promise you he will absolutely have the piss taken out of him. Nobody except the weediest kids wears shorts to a secondary school. They’ll think he’s a mommy’s boy. You just can’t do that to him”

Mom folded under pressure from Cynthia and Robert and I became the proud possessor of my first pair of long trousers, to a backdrop of dire threats as to what would happen if I came home with the knees torn out of them from playing football.

The first day incident

So, I turned up at Waverley. They’d put me in the top stream with all the clever kids from better homes. The form master was a very nice man called Gilbert Hassall. On the first morning, after assembly Mr Hassall opens the register he’s just been given and starts to take the first roll-call of the new year:

“Adams?”

“Here sir”

“Baker?”

“Here sir”

“Carberry? Hang on – Carberry??. You’re not by any chance HER brother are you, boy? Cynthia Carberry?”

“Yes sir”

“Oh good God, no, please let this all be a bad dream. You know, this morning I sat down to breakfast with my wife and said to her that I was really looking to this year because we were finally going to see the back of Cynthia Carberry and her wretched little gang. I only had one more year to stick it out and then she’d be gone forever. The staff room this morning was quite a cheery place, I might tell you. Now I find that I have to go back in there and tell my colleagues that there’s a new one come in to take her place. How many more has your mother got tucked away, ready to unleash upon us at cunningly timed intervals?

“None, sir, I’m the youngest”

I was really shaken by all of this. He was jesting, of course, but this 12-year-old boy on his first day at the big school, more than a bit overawed, found himself sitting at the back of the class with all the other kids turned around to gawp at him, wondering who the hell he must be. It was an inauspicious start to what was supposed to be a glowing academic career.

Lunchtime on the first day arrived and we filed down to the dining room. The dinner ladies had dished up the slop and we were sitting at long trestle tables trying to fathom out what it could possibly be when we became aware of a minor rumpus at the far end of the hall. It was Cynthia and a gaggle of classmates, both girls and boys. Fifth-formers. Big kids. They swaggered up to our table:

“So this is him, here. He’s my brother Colin”

“Allright mate?”

“Er, yes, thanks”

“Does he fight?”

“Don’t think so, well not often anyway, he’s pretty quiet at home”

“If anyone picks on you, mate, you come and tell us, OK?”

“Er, yeah, OK”

“See you then, mate”

“OK”

By now, half the embryonic class had decided I was someone they should stick close to, the more sensible half had decided to steer well away from me. The die was cast.

Then, I was informed that the school had stopped teaching Fencing, so the whole Zorro idea went flying out of the window.

In that first afternoon, we had a Geography lesson. I think the teacher’s name was Mr Beasley or something like that. He gave us some homework to do. It was August, so who in their right mind would sit at home doing homework on a summer evening when they could be playing football in Digby Park with their mates? I elected not to do it. The following day, Mr Beasley came around to collect the homework. I blithely informed him that I hadn’t quite got around to it just yet, but rest assured I would most certainly do so when my busy schedule permitted. He promptly put me in detention. Word quickly got around and pretty soon, Cynthia and her crew were crowding into our class:

“He’s set a new school record – detention on his second day! See, I told you he was good”

“Certainly is, Sniff (her nickname was Sniff). He’s got off to a cracking start! Well done, Col.

So, there we are, only on the second day and already famous for all the wrong reasons I reckon by now, the school had realised that putting Cynthia Carberry’s little brother in the top stream had been a major error of judgement. He might be bright, but he’s trouble. After the first year, I was demoted down to the middle stream where, to be honest, I was much happier. Not least because I wouldn’t have to do Latin. Only the clever kids did Latin.

The shock of being chucked into detention on that second day made me grow up a bit, tough love, if you will. From there on, I generally did my homework as expected and tried not to cause too much trouble. In the middle stream I teamed up with the likes of Tony, Stephen, Julia, Steve, Viv, Pat, Dave and Chris to form a less troublesome replica of Cynthia’s little band. We were never really much trouble for the school, but our imagination and sense of fun would sometimes run riot. I always used to dread Parents’ Evening because mom would go along, speak with the teachers and come back crestfallen and disappointed. Not angry with me, just disappointed. I remember Mr Mills, the Deputy Head saying to her:

“He’s very frustrating, Mrs Carberry, because we feel he has real potential, but he squanders it. He and his friends seem to spend all their time dreaming up new stunts rather than concentrating on their schoolwork. I don’t mind admitting they make us laugh in the staff room when we talk about the latest elaborate routine they’ve dreamt up, but as I say it’s so frustrating because they could all do so much better and I’m sorry to have to say that Colin seems to be the main protagonist and the organiser, dragging the others down with him. He seems to be at the hub of everything”.

Me and a few of our little gang at the age of 15. I’m second from the right.

School Dinners

During that first year, while I was trying to work out which way I was pointing and struggling to keep up with the work rate of my more intelligent classmates in the top stream, Cynthia was dedicating herself tirelessly to ensuring that she left the school with some material to sustain her future as a gin and tonic-fuelled raconteur. A couple of examples:

As implied above, the school dinners at Waverley were absolutely disgusting, in fact the school eventually made the front page of the Birmingham Evening Mail with a photo of some meagre scraps that had been served up to the kids. It later transpired that the catering staff were stealing the food. One day, Cynthia sat down to eat her chocolate concrete pudding but found that she couldn’t get her spoon to penetrate the thick crust on the pink custard. It had been reheated many, many times. She took the dish to the Duty Teacher, turned it upside down, shook it and said:

“Look at this, Miss. The pudding is glued to the plate. It won’t fall out”

“Good Lord, this is disgraceful. Let’s take it to Mr Shirley”

Samuel Shirley, the headmaster, was a very clever man and profoundly academic. He’d read Classics at Balliol College Cambridge, taught Latin at Cardiff University and had translated the Enlightenment Political philosophy works of Benedictus Di Spinoza. Somehow or other he’d ended up as headmaster of an underfunded inner-city Birmingham Grammar School. He deserved better than to have to deal with the likes of Cynthia. It’s a funny old game, innit?

Cynthia processed in the direction of Mr Shirley’s office. En route, she and the teacher accumulated various kids and teachers, with Cynthia repeatedly holding the pudding plate upside down and showing them what they intended to show the headmaster. By the time they arrived at his office, they were about twenty strong. They knocked on the door. Mr Shirley said ‘Enter’, so they did. The deputation crowded in, cramming themselves every corner of the small study.

Mr Shirley had frizzy grey hair and thick lensed spectacles. He smoked a pipe pretty much all the time and whenever you entered his office, a cloud of aromatic pipe smoke would billow out. He was invariably polite and gentlemanly. He was busy reading and signing end of term reports which were neatly piled up on his leather-topped desk. He spoke in his lovely Welsh brogue:

“Oh hello, Cynthia. What can I do for you?”

“Just look at this, sir…”

Cynthia stepped forward and turned the pudding dish upside down. Inevitably, the pudding broke free of its moorings and landed splat on top of the crisp fresh reports on the desk. The pink custard, released from its previously entombed dark place under the crust, duly flowed all over the reports and splashed all over the front of Mr Shirley’s green tweed three-piece suit. Cynthia was mortified.

“Well, I must say that’s very impressive, Cynthia. Now would there be anything else I can do for you?

Luckily for Cynthia the teachers explained what had actually happened in the dining room. The kids collapsed in heaps of helpless laughter.

Samuel Shirley, Headmaster & Gentleman.

Waddy Pranks

On another day, Cynthia organised the ambushing or Mr Wadsworth. ‘Waddy’, as he was somewhat unimaginatively called, was a gentle little Scotsman who taught woodwork. I was a great disappointment to him, I always ballsed up my woodwork. Anyway, Waddy used to steer away from the staff room and generally at lunchtimes he’d lock himself in the workshop, have a cigarette and a flask of tea, eat a ham sandwich, read the Daily Mirror and then have a kip at his desk. All the man wanted was a quiet life and edge remorselessly to retirement. Spotting an opportunity, Cynthia’s gang intervened. They obtained a key from somewhere, quietly opened the door while he was asleep, crept in and used a red felt tip pen to join up all the freckles on his bald head. They majored on stars and crescents, with the occasional space rocket here and there. Waddy’s head was left looking like Galileo’s vision of the Solar System. Job done, they crept out, locked the door and went on their way. It was about 3 o’clock in the afternoon before the other members of staff, satisfied that everyone had seen Waddy’s head, told him what had been done. He spent the next couple of days with a bright pink head where he’d tried to scrub the felt tip ink off.

Suitably inspired, my own crew also contrived a Waddy Stunt. He used to like to pop out for a ciggy when he’d set us all off on a woodwork task, usually something like making a pipe rack, (although none of us smoked pipes, more often it would be a Park Drive, bought from the local newspaper shop who would sell you one cigarette at a time, or if you were really flush a packet of five). For several weeks, every time Waddy popped out, we’d grab his chair, put it on the work bench and four lads would each measure and cut a quarter of an inch off each of the legs. As the weeks progressed, the poor fellow gradually disappeared beneath his desk as his chair got lower and lower. He must have felt he was shrinking.

The Cross-country Legends

The all-conquering, multi-championship-winning Waverley Cross-country team. Clive Whitehead (front row, left) went on to have a more than decent professional football career, playing for Bristol City and West Bromwich Albion in the topflight before moving to Portsmouth and eventually settling in the West Country.

We had a fabulous cross-country team at Waverley. The team was led by a tremendously gifted runner called Alan D’Cruz. Alan was immensely superior to anyone else I ever saw him run against at local, County or National level. He just seemed to glide across the ground. To put this in context, let’s not forget that we were in the same age group as Sebastian Coe and Steve Ovett, so there were some quite good runners around at the time. Other kids couldn’t get anywhere close to Alan. We used to cruise to victory in the East Birmingham Cross Country League every year, it was really just a case of ‘Alan will win every week, about a quarter of a mile ahead of anyone else, then we just fight for the minor placings’. We used to pick up our share of other placings and then ride home on the back of Alan’s raw talent. I occasionally finished in the top ten but would more usually be in the 11th–15th area. We were the only Grammar School in the league, so attracted a lot of resentment from the Secondary Modern schools, often leading to a street fight after the race. On one memorable occasion at Cockshut Hill, we were ambushed by a bunch of lads on our way to catch the bus home. We were heavily outnumbered and things looked pretty grim until one of our team launched himself at the biggest and most aggressive member of the opposition and sunk his teeth into the poor lad’s throat. As he pulled back, he was spitting out lumps of flesh, and the lad was bleeding profusely. The other gang retreated in horror and from that day onwards, our team member gloried in the name of ‘Fangy’.

Sink or Swim

Fighting your corner was one of those things you had to do if you lived in Small Heath and went to the Grammar School; it was sink or swim. I used to have to walk (more usually run because I was late) up Monica Hill to the school and would occasionally encounter some trouble from the lads on the council estate. The golden rule was to make the first move and go straight for the biggest/loudest/most aggressive member of the gang that were threatening you – put him down and the rest will chicken out. One day I was facing an issue like this, steamed in, kicked the lad in the balls and felt his balls squelch as I put the boot in. I think they may have split. I never had a problem with him or his gang again.

The best football team at Waverley during my time there was in the year below us. Rather like the cross-country team, they were based around a star individual, in this instance the aforementioned Clive Whitehead. I was a full back and Clive generally played on the wing. Whenever our team played against his team, I would be given the hopeless task of marking him when he was at least 100x better than me, so I would cope the best I could, using whatever tools were at my disposal. Long after leaving school, I bumped into Clive at the Custard House pub in Bordesley Green. He was playing for Bristol City in the old Division One (today’s Premiership). I asked him what it was like playing at the highest level. He replied, “well I still haven’t come up against anyone as dirty as you, you bastard”, which made me strangely proud! Just like the cross-country team, though, the football teams would encounter problems with local schools. The most memorable incident involved a school in Oldbury:

We’d taken three age-group teams to play in Oldbury. My team (the first team) had won, largely thanks to a hat trick by a lad called Dominic. The Oldbury lads weren’t happy and after the game were gathering menacingly and trying to get to Dominic while we waited for our coach to take us back to Small Heath. We were chomping at the bit for a fight, but our teachers were keeping us under a tight rein and ordering us to stay put. It was all getting ugly. Then, one of the Oldbury lads threw a brick and it hit one of our under-13’s in the face, causing him to bleed. One of our teachers, I won’t name him, simply growled “OK lads, off you go”. Various items of weaponry were swiftly produced from duffel bags – crowbars, rounders bats, football boots with the studs sharpened, and so forth. We ran towards the Oldbury lads who were absolutely mortified and promptly fled, they’d been anticipating a fight with normal people, not something like this. One poor sod had a moped which he was frantically trying to kick-start. We got closer and closer, most of his mates had long since disappeared over the horizon, although a couple stood their ground only to be coshed to the floor and kicked around for a bit. The lad with the duff moped eventually abandoned it, ran away and hid. We turned our attention to his moped and absolutely destroyed it with the crowbars and rounders bats. Afterwards, in the coach, the teacher said “That should never have happened. I was completely in the wrong to let you do that, but I just lost my temper. We must agree that nothing is ever said about any of this back at school – it simply never happened. Do you all agree? Anyway, I have to say that was all very impressive to watch from a safe distance, but that has to be the end of it” Of course, his words were in vain, by Monday morning it was the talk of the school.

I once got sent off in a school football match. We were playing Hodge Hill, and it was a tempestuous affair. The referee was one of their teachers and we felt he was very biased against us. I was arguing with him all the time and generally acting like an arrogant little prat. Eventually he booked me for infringing on a free kick, so I picked up a handful of mud and threw it in his face. He sent me off and the schools FA reported me. I got banned for a few games.

The Tipsy Choir

On a more pleasant note (or rather cadence of notes), I got into the school choir. I had a good singing voice but never realised that this wasn’t absolutely routine – I thought anyone could sing. We held an audition, had to sing a major and minor scale and then those that could hold a note were corralled into the choir. It was a great scam because every Thursday for a few weeks we would be excused lessons in the afternoon, make our way on the No. 17 bus into Birmingham and rehearse at the Central Hall in Corporation Street, where the school prize giving ceremony would be taking place. The school took its music very seriously and ‘Daddy’ Walker, our truly inspirational music teacher, would dedicate hours of his private time to ensuring excellence in his star pupils, several of whom would go on to study at the Royal College of Music and have lifelong careers in music. I was not one of those – I was always too lazy to learn Theory and would just muddle through on what I now realise was a natural, but totally squandered, musical ability. Anyway, back to the Central Hall; we tenors realised that by being positioned toward the back of the steeply banked choir, we were effectively hidden from our conductor, Daddy Walker, so en route to Birmingham we’d buy a crate of Manns brown ale, place it on the floor and take crafty sips throughout the rehearsal. Our singing would develop more gusto as the afternoon and early evening progressed. On another occasion when were in school and sober, Daddy Walker had us singing Land of My Fathers in harmony. The door to the music room opened and Mr Shirley, our proud Welsh headmaster, walked into the room sobbing. Through his tears, he just said touchingly “Thank you all so much, you really don’t know how much that means to me. Sometimes I feel a very long way from home”

Birmingham Methodist Central Hall © akamaized.net

Parentally-assisted Skiving

The aforementioned cross-country team used to train on a Wednesday afternoon. One of the training circuits involved running past our house, so we’d pop in for a drink. On a few occasions, Mom would be sitting there with her sister, Aunty Rene, having a quiet cup of tea, when about ten sweaty lads would come in and flop around on the floor. Mom and Rene took it all in their stride and would cheerfully chat to us while we perspired, I think they found it quite amusing. Mom was golden, really, she was always quite happy to forge sick notes for all my mates when we’d been ‘wagging it’, in fact one day I remember our form teacher commenting on how remarkable it was that so many of our parents seemed to have such similar handwriting. I once had a genuine sick note after Keith had broken my nose – it was nothing malicious, we’d been messing around having a playful wrestle, but he caught me accidentally and cracked my nose with his forearm. I’ve seen Keith several times in adulthood and he genuinely can’t remember a thing about it! I can, though – I’m the one with the lumpy nose.

Tommy Mood

One of the few things I was genuinely good at was Technical Drawing. I had a flair for it and quite often scored 100% in mock GCE Exams. The teacher was Tommy Mood, who also taught us Metalwork, which I wasn’t as good at. I was very much Tommy’s golden boy, and we got along very well. He didn’t have a son, and I didn’t have a dad, so we filled those roles for one another. It wasn’t unusual for him to take me out of lessons in order that I could accompany him on a shopping trip in his Vauxhall Victor to buy some tools from a hardware shop. We’d usually pop into a café on the way back and have a bacon sandwich, cup of tea and a chat.

I mentioned that I was very good at TD and was Tommy’s star pupil but when the actual GCE exam came around, I completely screwed everything up and, rather than rack up the anticipated 100%, I just about scraped a Pass, with a Grade 5 result. Tommy was very sympathetic about it.

The Café and the Bookies

A couple of my classmates were quite keen on having a bet on the horses. They used to study form in the morning, pop to the bookies at lunchtime, use a transistor radio with an earpiece to hear the results in the afternoon, and, if they’d won, we’d play truant for an hour or so and go to collect their winnings. The bookies was on Yardley Green Road and had a café next door which was frequented by off-duty ambulance drivers from East Birmingham Hospital. Sometimes we’d go into the café and play cards with the drivers.

One day, I got home from school to be confronted by Mom at her most cunning.

She opened up with “Had a good day at school?”

“Yeah, nothing much happened”.

“Did you get out at all?”

“No. Stuck in all day”

“Oh, that’s odd. I was on the bus coming home from work this afternoon and I saw you, Steve, Noggin and Tank coming out of the bookies and heading straight into the café next door.”

“Ah”

“I’ll say one thing in your favour, though – you were the only one not smoking”

So, that was Waverley Grammar School. I like to think of Waverley, Saltley and Yardley as ‘working class grammar schools’, where kids like me would have a chance of a half-decent broad-based education. I thoroughly enjoyed my time at the school and feel blessed that the opportunity for some kind of pseudo-classical education was made available to a raggy-arsed kid from Small Heath with low expectations. Many of us probably never made the most of the opportunities that a Waverley education offered us, but we were lucky, at least we’d been given the chance. A friend of mine from Waverley, who went on to become a hospital senior consultant, leading transplant surgeon, professor of immunology and awarded an MBE, recently commented to me that he doesn’t believe that if he were around nowadays as a 12-year-old kid from his background, he would be able to pursue the career he has enjoyed. The working-class grammar schools were systematically dismantled, most notably by the Labour Government’s 1976 Education Act, overseen by Shirley Williams. Shirley Williams, of course, ensured that her own daughter went to the fee-paid Godolphin and Latymer private school.

Waverley blazer badge

The phrase "Virtus Sola Nobilitas" translates to "Virtue is the only nobility." This means that true nobility comes from one's character and moral integrity rather than social status or wealth. It emphasizes that goodness and virtue are the highest forms of nobility. Yeah, that sounds like my little gang at Waverley in a nutshell. If only Gilbert Hassall had known we were actually noble…

I hope you enjoyed this little stroll down memory lane. If you did, it would be nice if you could buy me a coffee in lieu of the hosting charges etc. I promise not to squander it on a single Park Drive cigarette from the local newsagents...