Episode 1 The Grammar School: A Secret History

This is the story of a dream.

The dream of giving the very best education to Britain's brightest children,

however humble their background.

The grammar schools were set up to deliver this dream,

and in the 20th century they made it come true for many children and their parents.

It was enormously liberating from the really rather narrow horizons that had inhibited my parents' lives.

They wanted me to move out of that orbit and I certainly did,

and I went zooming into a much wider world where things became possible.

But the success of the best pupils was in stark contrast to the fate of the majority of children.

How to create a fair schools system

that would give all children their best chance in life became a burning issue.

It is still at the heart of the debate about education today.

I was called to the headmaster's office.

He said I had more or less disgraced the school

because the examiner had looked at my paper - just looked at it,

didn't read it - and said "This boy will not pass!"

For the grammar schools,

the key to success lay in the pursuit of excellence.

To achieve this, a high premium was put on strict discipline

and a competitive spirit.

But not everyone embraced this demanding regime.

I was just an average lad who doesn't take to discipline all that easily,

and I had rotten reports until I was 16.

The grammar schools provided five consecutive prime ministers,

as well as many high fliers in industry, science and the arts.

Yet, at the height of their power,

the grammar schools were phased out by the very people who had benefited from them most.

This two-part series uses revealing testimony to tell the untold story of the grammar school.

Britain's oldest grammar schools date back to the 14th century.

Founded by wealthy benefactors,

one of their aims was to provide free places for poor children.

In the early 20th century, funding from the state helped them provide a quarter of their places for free.

This was the only secondary education available for working-class children.

In the 1920s, winning a grammar school place

depended on passing a scholarship exam when children were 11.

Some elementary schools in working-class areas tried to inspire their pupils to aim high,

like the one Charles Chilton went to in London near King's Cross.

Our headmaster, he rather thought that our Church of England elementary school

was really another Eton, or Harrow or something,

because he wanted us to behave in that way.

We had a motto,

and our motto was "play the game".

Course, playing the game to us meant something quite different.

Playing the game in the west, you know,

is quite different from playing the game that he had.

But anyway we had this song, I can still remember, it was:

# Play the game, play the game, all true Britons do the same

# Win your goal by honest work, never sham and never shirk

# Play the game, play the game, play the game!

But for the children of the generation who fought in the First World War,

the heavy loss of life cast a long shadow over their educational prospects.

Charles's father was killed

and his mother died in abject poverty shortly afterwards.

The orphaned Charles would be brought up by his grandmother.

Nevertheless, at school from a young age, his gift for writing shone through.

We all had to write essays and the subject of this essay was hygiene in the home.

We lived in a slummy place, about eight of us in three rooms,

you know, and really I wouldn't know much about hygiene in the home.

But nonetheless I won this essay competition for hygiene in the home!

In the aftermath of the war,

the trauma of loss touched almost every family in the country,

and for some, the grammar schools appeared as an escape from their problems.

Mabel McCoy's shell-shocked father could only cope with the post-war world

by losing himself in the Beethoven piano sonatas he loved,

but he tried to inspire Mabel with visions of a different world.

When he came back from the war,

he used to get on the piano and sit for hours.

My father was depressed a lot of the time because of the war.

We used to go on walks together, and he was always very helpful to me

in pointing out flowers and natural things and birds, particularly.

I can remember him taking me to an area near Rochdale

and we were lying on the hillside, watching the skylarks.

Helped by her father, Mabel was top of the class almost every year in the run-up to her scholarship exam.

I'm very pleased about it because I loved school,

and I wanted to get on particularly.

It says here that I had, er, reading 48 out of 50,

dictation 100 out of 100,

composition 98 out of 100,

er, and arithmetic 100 out of 100!

During the Depression years of the 1920s and 30s,

poverty and unemployment added to the disadvantages endured by many working-class families.

Jim Humphries' father escaped the war as he worked as a miner,

but he was later injured and invalided in a pit accident.

Unable to walk, he taught Jim skills to help the family survive,

skills that would also prove valuable at school.

My father had taught me a lot about mental arithmetic.

From as long as I could remember, I was doing shopping for the family.

My father couldn't walk, my mother was at work.

The main shopping was on a Friday at the Co-op, which I did.

And the assistant, as he was getting them out,

I'd be adding it up with him because my mental arithmetic came in really good

because I knew the price of everything.

With the encouragement of his father,

Jim did well at his local elementary school in Burslem in Staffordshire.

I was the top boy in my class.

On one occasion, the teacher asked if anybody could say the alphabet backwards.

I couldn't but I told this to my father when I got home,

and he said, "I'll teach you to say the alphabet backwards."

It was a little song that he knew, I can't remember the song

but it started off ZYXWV UTS RQP

ONLMK JIHGF EDCBA.

Unfortunately they never asked that question again!

To help avoid a life of hardship,

many self-taught parents were desperate for their children

to enjoy a better education than they had had.

Ella Wright's dad missed out on a grammar school education,

but after leaving the Army at the end of the First World War,

he educated himself whilst working as a shoemaker in Northumberland.

My father had been deprived of a good career

but he was a very learned man.

He knew an enormous number of words,

an enormous amount of facts,

but when I asked him something he always said,

"See if you can find it out for yourself from those books we have here."

Ella's mother won a scholarship to a grammar school

before the First World War and became a supply teacher.

She had high ambitions for Ella.

My mother was the disciplinarian behind it,

making it quite clear that if I passed the 11 plus

and went to the grammar school, then the world was my oyster.

But if I didn't pass the grammar school and I didn't go to the grammar school,

then my future could be pretty dodgy.

Ella still remains haunted by the questions she got wrong.

But to her great relief, she managed to pass in 1936.

I have no recollection of which questions I got right,

but I have forever memories of the ones I got wrong,

and in all innocence, "All old men have...?"

And Mum said, "What did you put?"

And I said bald heads because all the old men I knew had.

She said, "Oh!" And I was really beyond the pale.

And the answer was ribs.

Growing up in the suburbs of Manchester,

Geoffrey Stone's parents were well aware of the presence

of one of the most famous and high achieving schools in the country, Manchester Grammar School.

I felt all the time that I was given total support

but I was never bribed.

I never felt there was excessive expectations of me.

The situation was do your best

and we're proud of whatever you do.

In 1929, Geoffrey passed the fiercely competitive scholarship exam

and began at Manchester Grammar.

My father took me. The whole thing was a bit intimidating.

It's a big jump from primary to secondary but it made it all the more so

with going into the middle of town and going to somewhere which obviously knew it had some prestige

and was proud of itself, and, er, was rather grand.

MGS was an example of a new 20th-century development.

It was one of around 200 centuries-old grammar schools

that from the 1900 onwards received a direct grant from the government,

which guaranteed that a quarter of their 1,200 places

were given free to talented scholarship children.

The school had been founded in 1515 by Hugh Oldham,

the Bishop of Exeter, and there was a song that began "Hugh of the owl".

"Hugh of the owl was a scholar bold, born with the gift to rise.

"His mitre sat well on his crown when old, for his motto was 'Dare to be wise.'"

There's the motto - Sapere Aude.

And that is worth bearing in mind

because it's one of the great things that MGS taught me.

Think for yourself, be independent, don't follow the crowd,

dare to have your own opinion.

However, academic brilliance didn't always guarantee a place at the best grammar school.

Mabel McCoy did exceptionally well in her scholarship exam

and was invited for an interview at the prestigious Manchester High School for girls,

but there was one hurdle even she couldn't overcome.

When we went to see the headmistress, she was charming,

she was very, very good, but then of course you have to face the reality.

The reality being that I had no way of paying for transport to get to the school.

It would have meant either a tram or a bus, and then a second bus.

And the cost, because my father was out of work,

the cost was impossible to pay for any extra money for transport.

But on top of that, because it was, you know, an upmarket school,

they had other extras that also had to be paid for.

But for Charles Chilton, a talented writer of essays,

the marking of the crucial scholarship exam proved to be his downfall.

One of the things we had to do was write an essay,

and I was carried away with it.

Writing was something I really liked doing.

And I handed all my papers in and they were checked and so forth,

and a few days later I was called down to the headmaster's study,

and he said I had more or less disgraced the school

because the examiner had looked at my paper - just looked at it,

didn't read it - and said, "This boy will not pass."

I said, "Why not?" He said, "Look at all the horrible writing, can't read it."

And that was it. That was my scholarship gone down the drain!

The boy from the Potteries, Jim Humphries, passed the scholarship exam in 1932

and entered the new world of Hanley High School.

Hanley High was one of a new breed of grammar schools

introduced by local education authorities in the 1900s

which gave around half their places for free.

Despite winning a free place, Jim was held back by the many disadvantages

of a working-class background.

I didn't do very well at the grammar school, not as well as I ought to have done

and could have done, but a lot of that was due to the fact that, er,

my home environment wasn't very brilliant.

It was almost impossible to do homework,

and that let me down a little bit, not doing my homework properly.

At the same time, I wasn't unduly worried

because I knew I was only going to be at the school for two years

because my family financial circumstances were such that I knew I'd have to leave and start work

to help my mother out, who was doing a man's job

and working too hard for her health's sake.

In fact, sometimes I didn't see her for several days

because she'd have gone to work in the morning before I got up

and I'd have gone to bed at night before she got home.

Grammar schools were sex segregated

and girls' schools had particularly strict rules on proper dress and behaviour.

Though she couldn't go to the top girls' school in Manchester,

Mabel McCoy started at Levenshulme High School for Girls in 1934.

We had a very strict headmistress, absolutely dedicated to the school.

At the beginning of each year, you had to kneel down,

and your gymslip was measured, how many inches it was from the floor.

Mabel thrived at grammar school,

doing particularly well in science subjects,

but she soon discovered that even the merest hint of defiance

would not be tolerated.

The teacher was called Miss Williams. She said...

SHE LAUGHS

"I suppose you're resting on your laurels,"

because I'd done very well in my previous physics exam,

and I very cheekily said, "Yes, miss."

And I was out of the door.

She actually stamped her foot at me! She sent me out.

It sounds a simple thing, really, to get rid of you like that.

I regretted it, because I would miss the rest of the lesson,

but you'd regret it worse if you got in the hands of the headmistress

or one of the seniors that was passing.

There was a healthy body, healthy mind philosophy, and this,

combined with strict discipline, was prized as highly as academic achievement.

This was a perfect fit for the many children of the time

who were taught absolute respect for their parents,

like Tony Pickering,

who went to Market Harborough Grammar School in 1932.

I was always taught at home with my father,

an ex-Royal Navy warrant officer,

to respect elders and how to behave.

For instance, I will say to you that when we sat down for our lunch

at the table, and we were a large family, we sat at the table,

no-one picked up their knives and forks until such time as my father picked his.

He was the leading man of the family. Even before my mother,

he picked his knife and fork up and we could all then start on our meal.

In an era of economic depression and widespread malnutrition,

physical fitness was regarded as vital to children's development.

So, too, were competitive team games based on the house system -

cricket, rugby, swimming, hockey and football

were an important part of school life for boys.

And to play for the school team, in whatever sport,

was a badge of honour.

Tony Pickering's passion was for football.

I started off in the third team, but I quickly went through the second,

into the first team, at still only about 14 years of age.

I was promoted quickly through the ranks, as one would say,

into the first team, because I was a tough little boy.

Hard. I could take my knocks.

Home or away, the team was an ambassador for the school's values.

Playing well and good conduct were more important than winning.

Then you had to show that you were a credit to the grammar school.

That was most important.

We were taught that we must never let our school down

in front of another school.

We must show them that we were an old grammar school

which had been preserved for 300 years

and we had to maintain that standard.

The competitive spirit was carried over into the classroom. Every piece of work was graded,

and children were given class positions in every subject.

It not only motivated some pupils, like Ella Wright,

but the parents, too.

Ella's mother was ambitious for her daughter,

and not being top of the class was definitely not part of her game plan.

I got 47% for arithmetic.

I was 17th in the class, and 17th out of 32 struck my mother as pretty bad.

I never got down there again. I remember my elevation.

The next time I was from 17 to 11th,

and I got up to 7th and then I got up to 4th.

I was always good at history, and frequently at the grammar school presentations,

I got the history prize.

And I got the geography prize.

There were three of us ranging... I never got top. Never got top.

But I was 2nd and 3rd, 4th. 2nd, 3rd, 4th.

The imperfect subjunctive of fero -

-ferem, feres, feret, feramus, feratis, ferent.

-Yes, that's right.

Streaming on the basis of ability went to the heart of the grammar school ethos.

There was a bias in favour of Latin over science,

so children who showed promise at languages could be rapidly promoted to the top streams.

The brightest scholarship children were also fast-tracked,

like Manchester schoolboy Geoffrey Stone.

This is condemned by people as hot-housing, but it didn't seem it at the time.

I didn't feel under pressure at any time. Just the way things were.

You did what you were asked to do, to the best of your ability,

and it seemed to be good enough.

So I did School Certificate, as it then was, matriculation at 14,

after four years in the school,

so that took me into the sixth form, then, at the ridiculous age of 14.

Despite their emphasis on academic achievement, the grammar schools

also provided a huge range of outdoor extra-curricular activities.

There were five Scout troops in the school.

We had a summer camp, a fortnight's camp, every Whitsuntide.

Obviously, from the point of view of the school,

academic standards were high and exams were important,

but they didn't seem so. They never seemed so to me.

And I was much more preoccupied with my out-of-school activities than my academic activities.

Grammar schools went to great length to treat all children the same.

There was no distinction between rich and poor,

or between fee-paying and scholarship children.

This notion of equality appealed to David Attenborough's highly educated parents,

and David and his two brothers were sent to Wyggeston Grammar School for Boys,

in Leicester, in 1936.

It didn't occur to me that the school was selective,

or had been selected,

because there was a huge range of boys in my school.

Clever ones and less clever ones,

and some that clearly came from poorer families than others.

But the grammar school educational bias which emphasised

the importance of Latin and classics,

was not quite as even-handed as their attitude towards social background,

and there was little choice when it came to the subjects studied.

The school took that view that if you were really intelligent,

you did classics - Greek and Latin -

and if you were really not very intelligent at all,

then you did practical things like woodwork and French,

believe it or not!

And in between, if you weren't one thing or the other, you did science.

And I was in between. I did science.

I would like to think that I would have chosen science anyway, had I been given the choice.

For many working-class children, the scholarship offered merely

a glimpse of a world they couldn't enter.

In the 1930s, over half left grammar school as soon as they reached

the official school-leaving age of 14.

Their extra income was needed to support families suffering in the Depression years.

Jim Humphries had always known where his ultimate duty lay.

It was no disappointment for me to have to leave school,

because I knew it was inevitable.

I went before a committee in Burslem and explained why I wanted to leave school,

and they agreed, and I was allowed to.

Jim had already been for an interview at the factory

where his mother worked.

It was agreed that he should begin at the earliest opportunity.

I can remember the last day of school.

The school finished at 12.35, and I rushed to the bicycle shed,

got on me bike, rode home to Cobridge.

Father got the dinner on the table, ate that, got on me bike again

and got to Stoke, and the factory, just in time for two o'clock.

So I started work then.

Jim became the junior office boy.

It was a weekly wage. It wasn't a salary.

A weekly wage. Eight shillings was just the right amount to pay the rent,

and I felt really good that I was contributing to the family.

Inspired by his brief taste of grammar school, Jim educated himself at night school,

and later in life became a company secretary.

But in the 1930s, over three-quarters of Britain's children educated at elementary schools

left school at 14.

Many of these young people entered dead-end jobs

and only a few were able to climb the ladder to professional success.

One of them was Charles Chilton who, in 1932,

was looking around London for work.

I suddenly realised that I was quite close to that new BBC building,

Broadcasting House, which had just been opened by King George V,

and I thought, "Well, they must need boys in the BBC to do something.

"Why don't I go in and ask for a job there?"

So I went into the Broadcasting House,

through those great bronze doors, went up to the reception.

Charles was soon given his marching orders, but as he left,

a commissionaire gave him some advice that would change his life.

As I was walking out, there was a commissionaire.

He said, "Listen, son, if I were you, I'd go home and write a letter."

I thought, "All right," so I did. I went home and I immediately wrote a letter to the BBC,

asking if there was a vacancy in their firm for a bright young boy who's just left school,

and I got a reply, for an interview. I had the interview.

A week or so later,

I got the offer of a job as a messenger boy in the BBC.

Charles was one of the lucky few who was able to truly educate himself.

When I got to the BBC, I was most impressed by the people I was working with.

They were educated, friendly, kindly, generous people.

There was one man there, particularly,

who used to compile the serious music of gramophone records,

and I used to go and talk to him in his office.

He used to give me lessons in music and tell me what books to read,

and things like that.

So, slowly, I began to accumulate some knowledge

and appreciation of higher things, which eventually paid off.

In spite of missing out on a grammar school education,

Charles Chilton worked his way up to be a radio producer

and presenter, as well as the co-writer of Oh What A Lovely War.

But in 1930s Britain, opportunities were minimal, and children from a modest background

needed the spur of a grammar school education to progress.

It not only encouraged academic achievement

but also leadership skills, through the prefect system.

Geoffrey Stone was made a prefect at the age of just 15,

in the sixth form at Manchester Grammar.

One of the first things you had to do was buy a mortar board

to wear when you were on duty, and I still have mine with me.

I have it here and...

Lo, it still fits!

And every time you went on duty, you had to wear it

and keep it on all the time you were on duty,

which of course was an incentive to the rest of the school

to make sure that they took it off you if they could.

But even for Geoffrey, there was a harsh social reality he couldn't escape.

-I wish you success and I hope to keep your job.

-Thanks.

-Cheerio.

My father had been works manager, and the firm went bankrupt.

He suddenly found himself unemployed.

Now, there was still expense in being at school,

and things that I was accustomed to do, like going to camp

and so on, suddenly became expensive beyond their means.

The school was very good indeed with the purchase of books

and going to camp, in providing for that, without anyone knowing,

and looking after me until he was employed again.

Geoffrey's achievements continued to be a source of pride for his parents,

but he knew that part of his Manchester Grammar School dream had slipped away.

The normal route was to go to Oxbridge,

and that was what I'd been hoping to do,

and you really needed something like three different awards -

a university scholarship, state scholarship, as they were called,

a local authority award, something like this, that would meet your costs.

And the notion of staying on for another year at school

with the expenditure involved in books and everything else,

it was decided that I should instead have a go at scholarships at Manchester.

So I took the modern language scholarship there

and went up to Manchester, where I read French and German.

But for many of the younger generation of 1930s,

getting a job, earning money and enjoying the new life that was opening up,

was more important than education. One of them was Mabel McCoy's elder brother.

When Mabel was studying for her School Certificate in 1938,

this led to a clash of interests.

The radio would be going all the time he was in the house, with dance band music.

It was impossible for me to do homework in the living room,

so the only place I could go to do my homework was upstairs in the bathroom,

because it was the only other room that was heated by the hot-water system.

And so, I did spend a lot of time in the bathroom, studying.

Mabel was one of a new generation of young women breaking the mould.

She passed her School Certificate with excellent results in chemistry

and then went on to study chemistry at Manchester College of Technology

before becoming a research scientist.

I didn't get to the best girls' grammar school in Manchester.

And I have no regrets at all.

I don't know what would have happened

if I had gone to the Manchester High School for Girls.

I don't think it would have been much different from

when I went to Levenshulme High School.

On the eve of the Second World War in 1938,

a flood of young men,

many of them former grammar school boys,

volunteered to join the RAF.

NEWSREADER: The RAF's enormous expansion is being carried out according to plan

and there will certainly never be a shortage of manpower in that service.

Fit, keen and efficient, that's the RAF.

Tony Pickering had left grammar school with a School Certificate

and was desperate not to be rejected by the RAF.

The first question they asked me was,

what school did I go to?

I told them, Market Harborough Grammar School,

they'd asked me what my father did in the First World War,

and I was able to tell him warrant officer of the Royal Navy,

a regular.

And what sport I played.

Now, I must be quite honest with you,

I didn't tell them I played soccer,

because I didn't think the RAF would welcome a soccer player,

so I had actually picked up a rugby ball once,

so I said, "Played rugby, sir."

And I got full marks for that,

but it wasn't strictly speaking correct.

"Methinks I see in my mind...

"..a mighty and puissant nation

"rousing herself like a strong man after sleep...

"..and shaking her invincible locks."

For Tony Pickering, the grammar school virtues

of loyalty, pride and courage served the RAF and the country well.

Sergeant pilots like Tony played a vital role

in the RAF's success in the Battle of Britain and throughout the war.

We were sent in to attack the bombers coming in towards London,

and we went in on a head-on attack

and it was essential that you reacted very quickly,

because there were streams of fire coming from these bombers to you,

so you had to position yourself quickly, you had no time to think.

And this was something which I had been taught when playing soccer,

and cricket at the grammar school,

you must act quickly.

And I moved quickly up to a position where I could get in to attack,

and that was the speed of reaction, the speed of thought.

Tony Pickering worked his way up through the ranks

from sergeant pilot to flight lieutenant

before becoming squadron leader.

The war dramatically changed the prospects

of all school children in Britain.

It started with the evacuation of three million children from the cities to the countryside,

to escape the danger of imminent German bombing.

These were the first steps of a journey that would lead to

a revolutionary change in educational policy during the war years.

Terence Frisby was evacuated with his elder brother

from London to Cornwall in September, 1939.

My mother had the most brilliant idea when we were being evacuated.

She turned it into an adventure for us.

She showed us a postcard and said, "We'll have our own code,

"our own secret code like the Secret Service."

And she showed us this postcard and it said,

"Dear Mum and Dad,

"arrived safe and well, everything fine.

"Love Jack and Terry."

And on it was my mother and father's address, and a stamp, and a space.

And she said, "In that space there

"you write the name and address of the people where you are going."

And we said, "Is that the code? Is that it?"

She said, "No, no, this is the code.

"If it's horrible you put one kiss, and I'll bring you straight home.

"If it's all right you put two, if it's nice you put three."

In fact, Terence and his brother

were safe, secure and well looked after.

And they thrived on the freedom and adventure the countryside offered.

The education provided by village schools was basic and undemanding.

SONG: "Land of Hope and Glory"

For would-be grammar school boys like 10-year-old Terence,

the pressures of homework

and the impending scholarship exam were quickly forgotten.

There was, however,

one slight problem.

Evacuee children and the local village children

were themselves at war.

I'm afraid the vackies wiped the floor with the village kids

on practically everything except possibly country knowledge.

I mean, we played sport against them and just walloped them,

cricket, football.

And we were much better at lessons.

We had various songs that we used to taunt each other with,

and I've got one here that we used against the village kids.

# The turnips are thick

# The turnips are dumb

# They use stinging nettles

# For wiping their bum

# They eat mangelwurzels

# And live in a shed

# They're dotty and spotty

# And soft in the head. #

Schoolchildren who remained in the towns and cities at a low risk of bombing

were engaged in a different kind of warfare.

The ever-present undercurrent of rebellion

against the regimentation of grammar school life was made worse by the war.

Morning, boys.

At Wyggeston Grammar School in Leicester

David Attenborough and his classmates

used a junk room next to their class to cause trouble.

We climbed in

and rearranged the whole piping into a pile,

so that if you pulled the bottom part the whole thing would collapse,

and then took a wire from there and put it through my desk.

And so in the middle of the class when we were trying...

I yanked it

and there's an explosion next door.

Hurray!

It was a great do.

But we were silly and of course tried to repeat it and then we got caught.

Wartime shortages put most schools under severe pressure.

One of the problems was increased class sizes.

NEWSREADER: The pupils of a dozen different schools

are often brought together in one school building.

Here, teachers successfully battle with wartime obstacles to give their pupils

the essentials of secondary education.

But the biggest problem of all for the wartime grammar schools was the absence of young male teachers,

many of whom had been called up for military service.

Women and retired teachers were drafted in to take their place.

Some of the teachers were in their late 60s,

and we were a handful, you know.

If it was a boring lesson

they had a job on their hands to keep us in order,

and they didn't always succeed, either.

The lack of young and charismatic teachers to inspire the children

exposed the weaknesses of grammar school teaching methods,

and its narrow curriculum.

I was just an average lad

who doesn't take to discipline all that easily.

And who found a lot of the lessons profoundly boring.

French irregular verbs still don't actually turn me on.

Neither does Latin.

The established career path for grammar school girls

was to become teachers themselves.

Ella Wright completed her teacher training during the war,

realising her mother's dreams.

Ella's first job as a young teacher

was in a tough mining village in Derbyshire.

The first few weeks I got home,

mother just used to say,

"How have you got on today, pet?"

And I'd burst into tears.

And wept for about half an hour.

Then she says, "It will get easier", and it did.

She says, "You will get tougher."

And I did.

Taking strength from the inspirational example

of her history teacher, Ella gained in confidence.

My favourite teacher at the grammar school, history.

She made history alive for me.

Everything she said, I hung on her words and was inspired,

and she interested me, and I think I did a lot to try and be like her.

And by the end of the first year I was relaxed and happy.

Ella soon imposed the strict discipline

of her former grammar school and took control of her class.

I talked to them,

and I pointed out they were punishing themselves

by behaving so badly.

They would never get a good job,

they wouldn't get a good report or recommendation,

so they were doing themselves no end of harm.

And then I said if you ever do that again,

you are going to stay with me for half an hour after school

and you are going to write down an essay

of all the things you are going to do.

I'd learnt.

I've become a really qualified teacher.

The battle of the Atlantic between Britain and Germany

reached its height in 1941.

This life-and-death struggle

motivated patriotic grammar school children to join the war effort.

It gave boys like David Attenborough a taste of the real world.

Someone came to school and said that

British lands were dying

because there weren't submarines and British submarines

because they lacked a particular kind of part

in which plastic was bonded to metal

and only this factory could do it

and without it we couldn't build submarines.

Who would volunteer to go and make it?

I put my hand up and I went into this appalling factory.

I remember it vividly.

The noise, the barrage of noise,

hurt you physically, of huge presses.

They said, shrieking, "That's where you're going to work."

There's a great press coming up.

And you have to do this, and then out comes a thing.

What came out were buttons, and I said, "There's a mistake.

"I'm here making vital parts for submarines,

"I'm not making fly buttons."

They said, "Well, the chap who was making fly buttons

"is now doing that and you're making fly buttons."

But I remember that very well.

The spirit of patriotism which infused the wartime grammar schools

encouraged children to appreciate how fortunate they were

to be enjoying an extended education.

CHILDREN SING

This was a lesson not lost on Joan Bakewell

who attended the prestigious Stockport High School for Girls.

The headmistress was very, very exercised

about us being part of a privileged group of girls

who were getting a huge opportunity.

I've always loved learning things

and I have been brought up to enjoy learning.

So the prospect of learning lots more stuff was really great.

I wasn't afraid of it, I was absolutely thrilled by it.

The constant threat and disruption

in wartime added urgency to the message.

The Blitz on the major British cities cost almost 60,000 lives,

and the bombed-out buildings provided a constant reminder

that life could be cut brutally short.

I've always been haunted by time.

I had a sense that there was no time to be wasted,

the world was full of interest,

and how was I going to ever get round at all?

How was I ever going to read all the books and visit all the countries?

So I did have an idea that time mustn't be wasted,

and it was passing, it was fleeting.

It might be something to do with the war

and the fear of being killed,

because children dramatised the war.

I was only in a town that had a few bombs,

and we weren't hit at all.

But the talk about the war was that you could be killed.

The harsh realities of war seemed far removed

from the lives of evacuated children,

growing up in the countryside.

But in 1943 everything was about to change

for Terence Frisby when he turned 11.

Everybody said, "You must take the scholarship to grammar school,

"you'll sail through it."

And there was a teacher there and my parents paid her some money,

not much I'm sure, to give me extra lessons to make sure I took the exam.

And then the day came when I had to take the scholarship for grammar school.

There was an intelligence test.

I'd never seen one of those before.

I remember having to think about that.

But the writing and arithmetic and all the other things

and sums that we had to do,

I was quite good at that.

For Terence, passing the 11-plus meant leaving behind an idyllic country childhood.

In autumn 1943 he went to Dartford Grammar School near London.

Having been the cleverest boy in the village school

I was put in the B stage at the grammar school,

and discovered that there were 90 other boys in my year

who were equally as clever as me,

if not a great deal more so,

and that was the end of my great scholastic achievement,

having been the star of the village school

and I went very quickly from the first year to the second year,

from the B stage to the C stage,

and there I stayed throughout my grammar school years.

As part of the new spirit of national unity, some grammar schools

began to encourage their sixth formers to cross the class divide

and teach younger children in the poorest areas.

Wyggeston Grammar School operated such a scheme in Leicester.

They asked for volunteers to go and teach

in a very poor quarter of Leicester.

Which I volunteered for.

I must say it was a revelation which I've not forgotten

that these lads, you know, from very poor homes...

charming people.

I mean, they were just lovely kids.

Of course, they were tough and so on

but you had to work to gain their interest but if you did,

you really had them in the palm of your hand.

Actually, I went... And I remember talking about fossils

because I was interested in fossils and THEY were interested in fossils.

There was a very nice kid right at the back of the class, I remember.

I noticed that as I was walking up and down,

that there was some black liquid underneath his chair.

I said, "What's that?" And it was blood.

And he was a ragged kid and his elbows were out

and he had fallen over in the playground,

which was an asphalt playground,

and he was sitting there, dripping blood from his arm onto the floor.

But he was a stoic kid, you see, sitting there,

listening to me talking about brachiopods!

Concerns about the well-being of British children

became the focus of health and education campaigns during the war.

There was a vision of a new Jerusalem.

A reward for five years of enormous effort and shared sacrifice.

The dream of the better world that a new education system

could bring about was embodied in a revolutionary piece of legislation

passed by the war government in 1944.

What we aim at doing is to give every child at every level

some form of secondary education.

That is to say some practical, some general, some what you call academic.

The effect, as I see it, will be as much social as educational.

I think it will help the result of welding us all into one nation.

The vision of Education Minister Rab Butler and the wartime government

was inspired by the ideal of free secondary education for all the nation's children.

In the forefront of the educational revolution

would be the grammar schools.

They would be the powerhouse of Britain's future,

with places offered only to the brightest pupils.

The grammar school children themselves

knew there were dramatic changes afoot

but they found the politics of it all rather confusing.

We'd been schoolgirls throughout the war and there were shelters in the school grounds.

Stockport was bombed, Manchester more so.

We knew that war was terrible and we'd won it.

We were enormously proud that we had won it and Churchill,

of course, was the idol of the nation, unqualified idol.

So we had a school election to mirror the election

and a lot of girls said, "What party are you?

"What party are you?"

So I sided with my friends and said, "Oh, yes, I'm Conservative."

I went home and I said to my parents, "There's a school election.

"I am Conservative, aren't I?" They went, "No! No, you're not."

So I went back to school and said, "I made a mistake. I'm Labour."

And I had no idea what either of them meant at all.

But loyalty to the tribe you belong to,

you see, required that I was Labour.

NEWSREEL: 'Though defeated, Mr Churchill is acclaimed as a great war leader.'

The sweeping victories throughout the country

mark an epoch in the political life of this country.

The Labour government that was swept to power

in an atmosphere of post-war idealism now had the daunting task

of delivering their promise of a better world.

'Every child must be given the chance to develop his talent and abilities to the maximum.

'We shall need more than laws to make this scheme a reality throughout the land.

'Don't say we can't afford it.

'The cost of four days of war would keep the scheme going for a year.

'We can afford anything when we are buying the future of our children.

'Let us make this new Education Act a real children's charter.'

The ideals of the Education Reform Act were carried forward

on a wave of optimism after the war,

but would take years to implement.

One immediate impact, however,

was the return of teachers who had been fighting in the war.

The younger men came back from the war and we boys,

of course, regarded them with a great deal more respect,

admiration, whatever, than the others.

One who came back from the war was a man called Holliday,

who had a big effect on me.

He taught me economics, economic history, political history

and politics in the Sixth Form,

when I did a special course in that because I wanted to be a journalist

and become a politician and all the rest of it.

This man really opened my mind to a whole lot of ideas

that were outside my own rather conventional

Labour Party views of the world.

I came into his classes, you see, and I knew everything about politics

and economics, because my dad was a member of the Labour Party

and I was a young member.

My dad was a trade unionist and I had got the world sorted at 16 years old!

And he challenged everything I said.

He just challenged it and made me think about it.

Former Manchester grammar school boy Geoffrey Stone

served in the Intelligence Corps during the war.

After the war, he was tempted by a glittering career prospect.

I did the exam for the senior branch of the Foreign Service.

And, er...

..there were just two of us who eventually passed.

And I was duly offered a place in the Foreign Service.

But Geoffrey wasn't convinced that this

was what he really wanted to do.

Hey! Excuse me!

Just a minute!

How would you like a job...

with a good salary, professional status and a pension?

Yes, but what is this job?

School-teaching. You'll get one year's free training

and a maintenance allowance if needed.

The urgent need to recruit more teachers after the war

convinced Geoffrey to change his mind.

He became a teacher.

I enjoyed teaching and I'd done a bit before the war, you see.

I did best part of a term's teaching between the end of my degree course

and joining the Intelligence Corps and enjoyed it.

So, to everyone's astonishment,

I turned the Foreign Service down and went into teaching.

I got a nice little letter from them,

saying they hoped I would never regret my decision.

Geoffrey spent all his working life in education.

He's pictured here on the day he became headmaster

of Heanor Grammar School in Derbyshire in 1957.

When Terence Frisby came to the end of his final year

at Dartford Grammar School in 1949,

he had no idea what he wanted to do in life...

other than to carry on learning.

I can remember now the assembly, which was our last day of school.

And I stood there and I was one of those boys who were going out.

I just felt tears running down my cheeks.

I hadn't realised I'd been so happy there,

or maybe I was frightened of the outside world, I don't know.

But I didn't want to go - I wanted that to go on.

Terence went to drama school

and in the '60s became a successful playwright.

His play, There's A Girl In My Soup, was a worldwide hit.

When his inspirational teacher came across one of his plays,

he wrote Terence a letter of congratulations.

Terence wrote back.

"What you cannot possibly know is that

"of all of those who taught me before drama school,

"you had far and away the biggest influence on me.

"Even though our paths crossed for only one year.

"Your ideas and personality left a big impression

"at a time in life when impressions last.

"One boy who passed through your hands,

"on whom you left your beneficial mark, and who is grateful.

I meant that, obviously.

And he wrote back and said to me, "I don't remember being that good."

Or something like that.

The glittering prize of a place at Oxford or Cambridge

was the ambition of every grammar school for their brightest students.

For the vast majority who came from a humble background,

this remained no more than a dream.

But a few tenacious spirits were determined to change attitudes

by making it to the top.

In 1950, Joan Bakewell became Head Girl of Stockport High School For Girls.

The idea of university came on the horizon.

No-one in my family had ever been through a university

and I don't think they knew really what it meant.

They knew there was one in Manchester and one in Liverpool,

but I found I knew that there were two really top-class ones

that were called Oxford and Cambridge.

So, with my usual competitive spirit, I thought, "Well, go for the top.

"No point in trying for anything else. Work your way there."

And I said, "I want to go to Oxford or Cambridge."

People said, "Well, to do what?"

I said, "Well, I don't know, but I'm going to find out.

"Because that's where I want to go."

I bought a book of Cambridge, which was full

of absolutely wonderful sepia photographs of the colleges.

No students in sight. It wasn't student life I was after,

I was after getting away to somewhere incredibly beautiful,

very prestigious, where you could go on learning things.

However, the number of grammar school girls

who gained Oxbridge places was less than half that of the boys.

There was still deep prejudice against women

enjoying an extended education and career,

even in the top girls' grammar schools,

as Joan Bakewell would discover

when she won a scholarship to Newnham College, Cambridge.

School believed you could achieve things in school.

And that you would go on to have a job, perhaps.

But perhaps not a career.

And I do remember, on the day that I got my scholarship

that would take me to Cambridge

and I went up to receive the scroll from the mayor or someone,

the headmistress made a speech that said the following:

"We're enormously proud, of course, that Joan is going to Cambridge.

"But I want to say to the rest of you

"that the real purpose of a woman's life

"is to be a wife and mother."

I was furious.

I was furious and, of course, I took on that message, too.

And that is also the message of the generations:

However much you might achieve,

your true inner fulfilment will be as a wife and mother.

The young Labour supporter, Joan Bakewell,

followed her successful career as a writer and television presenter

by becoming a Labour peer.

For a new generation of grammar school boys,

the prospect of entering the exclusive world of Oxbridge

after the war seemed much less daunting.

Their education and experience would stand them in good stead.

And they found they could mix confidently with anybody.

David Attenborough won a scholarship to Cambridge

to read Natural Science in 1945.

I went to Clare College in Cambridge,

where you have staircases and your own rooms.

And I met a very nice chap, erm...

..who lived on the... who'd got the room below.

And he was a modest, quiet chap, but I discovered...

that he had silver cutlery with a monogram on it.

And I'd no idea what this was.

It turned out this was his family monogram,

and he was from a vaguely aristocratic family.

And he... I think he'd been to either Eton or Winchester

and it seemed to me that he didn't know what life was about.

You know? I mean, erm...

..he described his background in a way which made me think

that it was extraordinarily restricted,

and that he had really not sort of met kind of...

..ordinary people.

So I thought that he was at a disadvantage. I didn't think...

-I didn't think

-I

-was at a disadvantage,

I thought HE was at a disadvantage!

David Attenborough, the former grammar school rebel,

is Britain's most famous naturalist and television broadcaster.

The grammar school dream of an education

that could take children from a humble background to the very top

would only become fully realised in the postwar years.

The educational changes inspired by the war

would help transform the social and political life of Britain.

But at the very height of the grammar schools' success,

the new and radical ideas of the '60s would sweep them away,

igniting a fierce debate which continues to the present day.

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