KBGS Old Boys' Forum

A place to discuss Keighley Boys' Grammar School. 


Terms of use.  Anonymous, offensive, or malicious postings will  be deleted. School-related topics only please. If you need to add a "family notice" reply to any of the current messages in that thread, and remember to change the Subject to the name of the newsworthy person.

 

 

KBGS Old Boys' Forum
Start a New Topic 
Author
Comment
The History Boys

Just watched this gem.
There weren't too many KBGS lads up to Oxbridge in the '50s. Old Nick was proud to announce them from the platform - especially if they were to read History.
Alan Bennett clearly knew his Airedale when young Akhtar proclaimed his career as "Headmaster in Keighley near Bradford."
Here are some quotes - maybe out of context - which stir some thoughts about the KBGS ....
"F##k the Renaisssance".
"This is a school and it isn't normal".
"They're clever but they're crass."
"I'm a jew. I'm small. I'm homosexual and I live in Sheffield. - I'm fu*#ed"
"If Halifax had had better teeth, we might have lost the war."
"History is just one f*c#ing thing after another."
(This quote is not attributable to Spike.)
"What's truth got to do with it? What's truth got to do with anything?"

Years at KBGS e.g. 1958-1964 (optional) 52-60

Current location (optional) Lincoln

Re: The History Boys

Alan Bennett lived a couple of hundred yards from where I now live, in a house which retained the butcher's shop until only a few years ago. The family had moved from Armley when he was quite young. He attanded the grammar school on the Leeds Ring Road which became Lawnswood High School when the comps were introduced. The play was loosely based on the school as he knew it, but had to be filmed in a variety of other locations because the new building (4 or 5 years old) would have been incongruous in the context. I've seen him speak a couple of times about his school days and, though he is only a few years older the I am, the pictures he conjures up seem to be of a very different era.

Years at KBGS e.g. 1958-1964 (optional) 58-65

Current location (optional) leeds

Re: The History Boys

Terry- I too, saw 'The History Boys' on TV recently and recall your 'observations'! Absolutely brilliant! I shall cetainly think twice if and when someone asks me 'if I'd like to go out for a drink' in future!!!

Years at KBGS e.g. 1958-1964 (optional) 45-50

Current location (optional) Keighley

Re: The History Boys

I saw the trailer, made a mental note then completely forgot. If anyone gets wind of a repeat, I'd be grateful for a posting. In the meantime, here's my own version:

[voice over from corridor]
Close all books, put y'name on this paper and answer the following questions number one.
[enter Neville]

I found Nev, teaching History in the fifth form,reasonably congenial: he once related with glee, a tale about a lad answering a history question with:
"The Battle of Old Nick's Cross."

Years at KBGS e.g. 1958-1964 (optional) 53-58

Current location (optional) Brighouse

Re: The History Boys

Ah yes, history, I seem to remember someone saying to Nick that they wished they were born 100 years earlier, there would be less to learn !

Years at KBGS e.g. 1958-1964 (optional) 43/47

Current location (optional) Steeton now west wales

Re: Re: The History Boys

Terry, thanks a lot for putting me on to the History Boys, I saw it yesterday and could not stop talking about it.

Years at KBGS e.g. 1958-1964 (optional) 59-61

Current location (optional) Haworth via Ble Mountains, Australia

Re: The History Boys

Just noted your comment, Shaun - 12 months later! - Your dates put you some 6 years behind me (ie at KBGS)There do seem in these columns to be some variations in perception of what kbgs was like between 2 "generations" of posters - and the division appears to me to equate roughly with the onset of the "post-war bulge". I saw the effects of this in my last 2 years when there was 6 form entry for the first time. Comments about staff conduct towards pupils indicate that things were changing after my time. I don't offer any reason why things should have changed - but then also there was the Mechanics fire in 1962 and the "suburbanisation" of the campus.

Years at KBGS e.g. 1958-1964 (optional) 52-60

Current location (optional) Lincoln

Re: The History Boys

I think, Terry, that "1968 (though earlier in the sixties, in reality) and all that" was the key factor. The post-war poverty and grind were finally behind us, and whatever we thought about 'Super-Mac' and his politics, he was right. In financial terms we had "never had it so good". I think kids in the late sixties certainly had more money in their pockets than did out generation, just by virtue of their parents' greater affluance, if not also by their own efforts. But attitudes were changing - and that is the vital factor here. Irreverance had gradually gained over conformity. Suddenly everything was questioned. In the few years I taught in a Grammar School (early sixties), I tried to drum into the kids that everything should be questioned, nothing be taken at face value. I thought I was being original, and quite daring, not realising it was the 'zeitgeist', it was already in the air. You can see it in the development of TV in the late fifties and sixties - Hancock, TW3 and the like; in the theatre and cinema - Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, This Sporting Life, Roots, A Taste of Honey, Look Back in Anger, Pinter, Beckett; in pop music, perhaps most significantly of all - in the mid-to-late fifties, Bill Hailey ('Rock Around the Clock' at the Regent in 1956), followed by Presley, then, in the early sixties, the Beatles and the Rolling Stones (and many others I can't name...). Politically, Britain was entering a new era - Wilson's 'white heat of technology', Powell's 'Rivers of Blood', MacMillan's 'You've never had it so good', all, in their way, reactions to the collapse of the Empire and where the hell do we go from here?

Reading these threads, I've always sensed that the sixties lads had (and many retain) a chippiness that we didn't have when at school, college and university. By the time this revolution in attitudes was in full flow, I was an administrator of education (i.e. teacher) and no longer an imbiber. But I was fully supportive of notions like 'workers' control', student participation in decision-making committees, a much greater democratisiation in schools, colleges and universities, the breaking-down of class privilege, equality of opportunity etc. An exciting time (certainly in Cambridge, where I was). I worked for a few weeks every summer in a 'posh' language school (to pay for our camping holidays in Italy!), and it was really quite surreal taking privileged kids from all over the world to 'Hippy' communes and watching how they were, for the most part, bowled over by these new, irreverent ideas put into practice. To me it was incredible that in the space of fewer than (apparently) ten years the world could have turned upside down.

Now, of course, I see (too late) it all had a price -Thatcher, the destruction of the Unions, the breakdown of the family as the keystone in our society, the loss of a working-class consciousness of itself, the chaotic free-for-all in transport, education and health, the loss of our industrial base, de-regulated, rampant capitalism and the mass exploitation that has brought. And out of this soup, the loss of belief in or respect for anything other than acquisition of material goods and the despair and violence that has left in its wake.

The history of our times has indeed been eventful, but (from where I stand - and I make no special or privileged claims for this) I cannot help feeling that, in the main, the great majority have been and continue to be, losers.

Years at KBGS e.g. 1958-1964 (optional) 1951-58

Re: The History Boys

Doug, I thjink you have completely spoiled 2009 for me. ;)

Years at KBGS e.g. 1958-1964 (optional) 58-61

Current location (optional) Blue Mountains, Australia via Haworth

Re: The History Boys

Tell me more, John, and I'll try and repair it - there's a long way to go till 2010!

Years at KBGS e.g. 1958-1964 (optional) 1951-58

Re: The History Boys

The best time to live is ALWAYS 50 years ago!

Years at KBGS e.g. 1958-1964 (optional) 55-60

Current location (optional) Harrogate

Re: The History Boys

Quite so Doug. Can't argue with anything you say.
I'll really have to go see "The History Boys" now.
P.S. I thought 1968 was nearer forty yaers ago.

Years at KBGS e.g. 1958-1964 (optional) 58-65

Current location (optional) leeds

Re: The History Boys

1968 was when it all fell from together

Years at KBGS e.g. 1958-1964 (optional) 55-60

Current location (optional) Harrogate

Re: The History Boys

Doug, that is some interesting counselling jargon

Years at KBGS e.g. 1958-1964 (optional) 58-61

Current location (optional) Blue Mountains, Australia via Haworth

Re: The History Boys

Doug. Your summary of our present woes is so accurate. I have through my professional life and private political life sought to bring about some change for the better at least inside the microcosm of my own circle of influence.
OK so we can now holiday abroad, fly across the Atlantic, live in nice homes with gardens, own a car, a television, refrigerators, automatic washers etc.etc. all the trappings of what makes life easier and better for us all.
The NHS that does not rely on Galas and Fetes to finance it, a society that tried to live by the truly altruistic principle of giving according to our ability and receiving according to our need. Yes there were strikes and demonstrations and unions whose aim was to improve the lives of the working man and woman, better homes and better schools and better hospitals. Wonderful ideas that were good and honest ideals. Many things seemed possible.
All we did was create a greedy society. The banks are epitomes of that greed, sure, but everyone who used a credit card to make themselves debtors, took out mortgages they could not afford, bought a car too big for their needs, and a second car so the wife could go shopping, and a third for the son because everyone else has one, who went on a holiday to the Maldives because Blackpool was boring.
They are all greedy too.
Worse than that is we have created a massive underclass that is unemployable, will not work, cannot work. Our NHS spends millions treating those who binged themselves senseless and ill.
Everything we wanted to eliminate we have made worse. I despair.

Woolworths Adams Ethel Austin
chain stores closing one by oe
the high street puts on a brave face
with a gap toothed smile.
Arthur

Re: The History Boys

'History Boys' is on TV again this evening!! BBC2, 11.35pm. Try and 'record' it. Well worth watching.

Years at KBGS e.g. 1958-1964 (optional) 1945-50

Current location (optional) Keighley