Whitstone School 1970's

A Memory of Shepton Mallet.

I attended Whitstone during the changeover from Secondary Modern to Comprehensive. It was quite a shock to me. I'd always been to small, private schools, & it seemed huge. I was also amazed & shocked by the bad language - 4 letter words were not what I was used to, & they were in constant use by the pupils.
I was very well spoken, which got me tagged & bullied as 'posh', & as I had lived in London, was used to a multi racial school. Apart from TV, many of my school friends had never seen anyone of colour. Strange, seeing Bristol was 20 miles up the road. Then again,many had parents who had not been out of the villages where they lived since they were born. The change to Comprehensive did noone any favours. Previously,the classes had been 'streamed' according to ability/results. Halfway through my education, classes were mixed. The intention was, I think, that putting the less able pupils in with the better achieving would encourage them to improve. But the result was the opposite. Some of the less able were disruptive, & those in the 'better' stream were influenced to take it easy, as they could get away with it.

It wasn't all bad, I'm still in touch with a couple of people from Whitstone. We had some very good teachers who really seemed to care. One of the best was Mr Nott - who later, I think, became headmaster. He had a reputation as being very strict - but I found him to be fair. There was Mike & Ena Feebrey, he was woodwork, she took RE & Humanities. The Headmaster was 'Larry' Lowings, his deputy Mr Beale. Apart from being carpeted by them for my hair being too long, dangerous cycling & retaliating to bullying, didn't have much to do with them. There was 'Pop' Martin, who took Maths. Looked like something out of 'Goodbye Mr Chips', but not so nice. Later on we had a younger bloke taking Maths, 'Red Adare' Had bright red hair. Mrs Stevenson did French. Metalwork was a lovely old bloke, 'Dicky' Dyson, who turned up at work on an ancient motorbike outfit. Mr Saxon, a real old school teacher - we came back from the summer break one year to be told he'd died falling out of a tree he was pruning.PE teachers - there was a Mr Williams, won't mention his nickname! The female PE teacher was a Miss or Mrs Burns. She would walk into the boys changing room when we were in the showers - hard to imagine that happening nowadays.

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