This is a follow-up to The Queen of Mean and one of a series about Headlands Grammar School and what I remember and learned in my seven year sentence.

By the time I got to the sixth form I had learned to keep below Miss Jacob’s radar and anyway she had younger fish to fry. Hundreds of them – all busy backsliding, back talking and backcombing their hair and wearing mascara to look like Dusty Springfield and smoking in the toilets.

Nail varnish to be scrubbed off and girls to be told what will become of them if they dyed their hair. Skirt lengths to check. Constant stream of girls complaining about period pains, lazy idle little schemers, and refusing to shower after games and parents to be called about accidents and mishaps. Four girls caught talking in assembly and one without proper daps. Go wash that disgraceful mess off your face now.  “I be” is not proper English. No-body intelligent speaks like that”. And lunch duty and these young teachers these days just don’t have any manners.And the way they dress. Shocking. They are just as bad as the children. Write 100 lines “I must not run in the corridor”. Chewing gum on the ceiling. You can’t wear those socks. What is the world coming to? On the bus without a hat and sucking sherbet through a straw! And the lazy way they speak and the slang. You look ridiculous in those shoes. Nothing will become of you. And these wretched girls who never do their homework. Always some excuse. You will end up working in Woolworths. And why are they always sniffing? Disgusting. Don’t they have handkerchiefs? Too many advantages and too much money. No more giggling in class. One more lateness and you will have detention. Whatever next? Parents these days. If I had gone to school looking like that. Hair all over the place. And those boys. So noisy and I know they are breaking the rule about no big balls on the playground. Must talk to Mac about getting something done. Oh! Hello Doris. Have a digestive with your tea. Have you seen Beatrice? These girls are so silly with their pop stars and lipstick letting themselves down. Drooling over uncouth long haired louts. Letting themselves down. Call that singing? Wasn’t like that in our day. They don’t know how lucky they are. Another cup? 

Social change was in the air but standards were to be maintained and all manner of slovenly habits of dress and language policed. There was no nurse, psychologist, learning specialist, dean of students, or any kind of school support system.  She was it. She also taught English – and she may also have served as the careers teacher for those leaving at sixteen. It was a full plate.

Coal and Teachers

The biggest exports from Wales for much of the C20th were coal and teachers.

At Headlands we always seemed to have several on the go at any time which meant that most of us could do a passable comic Welsh accent, look you.

Cheap shots that usually reeked of ignorance and arrogance or both.  

And it always seemed OK to make fun of the Welsh – after all Shakespeare had done it centuries before in Henry V and making fun of others for the way they spoke was just part of the tribal territory of the UK – a rivalry now carried on primarily via sport.

And of course the Welsh made fun of the English although it would be hard to know – being in Welsh.  All part of the geographic snobbery and a hierarchy of assumed superiority inherited from the past. A linguistic pecking order focused on geography but based on class and power. 

Local yokel West Country and Wiltshire I be a moonraker – ooh, aaaarh – were also fair game.  Plus Cockneys, Yorkshire folk and all the rest.

As a growing overspill town, Swindon had its fair share of people with distinctive regional, and foreign, accents.  Irish, Poles, Scots, Welsh and all kinds moving west from London for the new industries. And later new immigrants from further afield. Wiltshire’s first Indian restaurant – the Khyber on Victoria Road – came in 1962 and is still owned by the same family. It’s where in April 1966 I had my first taste of Indian food beyond a Vesta Prawn Curry. Bombay duck was on the menu.

Decades before, the GWR works had workers from the local towns and villages but also from Wales, across the west country and elsewhere. It is said that this mix contributed to a distinct Swindon accent as well as a unique work vocabulary. The poet Edward Thomas’s grandparents were Welsh and Welsh speaking. They lived on Cambria Place in an area of the railway village that before WW1 was known as the Welsh Colony. 

And then of course there was “posh” – that old Romany word for money. The posh were those with the middle and upper class speech defects who, for the most part, spoke in remarkably similar accent wherever they came from. 

Miss Jacob was from Wales

Miss Jacob would have known that prejudice first hand and clearly she had worked on her accent: “posh”, “prissy”, “a mix of BBC, Welsh and a sparrow with bronchitis” – some of the more uncharitable descriptions.  And the truth was probably that Miss J had a perfectly pleasant voice. It’s hard to find kind things about a voice that is tearing you to shreds.

We called her Aggie, short for the Agatha we assumed her A stood for. Her real name was Martha Adella Jacob. Her mother’s name was Martha and somewhere along the way she dropped it. It seems that to her family and friends she was Della.

Miss Jacob was born in 1907 in a Welsh mining village in the Rhondda valley. She was one of the eight children of Abel and Martha Jacob who had moved to Ferndale in the late 19th century from Pembrokeshire. They lived in a three bedroom house at  29, Brynhyfred Terrace and her father was a miner who worked at the Ferndale colliery. 

At the time of the 1911 census the adults and older children were listed as bilingual and Miss Jacob undoubtedly knew Welsh. Her two oldest sisters at 17 and 15 were still in school, but her brother John,14, was already working at the colliery. There were three adults and seven children listed at #29. An eighth child was visiting a neighbor. Imagine the laundry and the cooking!

Ferndale was the first community to be intensively industrialized in the Rhondda Valley and the first mine shaft was sunk in 1857. The official Welsh name for Ferndale is Glynrhedynog – the name of one of the old farms before the coal.

Glynrhedynog is made from the words “glyn” meaning valley and “rhedynog” meaning ferny, and so coal from the Glynrhedynog pits was marketed as Ferndale coal, a much easier name for English buyers to assimilate.

Incidentally, Roderick John – who was one of three who came up to Headlands with me from Clarence Street Juniors in 1959 – was also from Ferndale. I doubt that either of them relished the connection. The others were Alan Forrest – winner of prizes for neatness, and Bryan Pready.

Before he was a miner, Abel Jacob was a teacher assistant and education was clearly important to the family.

He was extraordinarily active in the local community. He held office with the South Wales Miners Federation on behalf of Ferndale miners. Here’s an ad he placed in the South Wales Echo in 1899. The union (not the mine owners) was looking for a colliery doctor:

Union militancy and political activism in the Rhondda Valley led some of the towns to be known as Little Moscows. As a Union leader, Abel Jacob was a spokesman for workers’ rights and better wages and conditions. His children would have grown up surrounded by talk of the local and national politics of the day. 

Abel Jacob served on the Rhondda Urban District Council as a Labour Party councilor for 21 years. He was at different times Chair of the Education and Finance committees and he feature prominently in the newspaper stories of the time. 

In 1919 a Ferndale boy passed the Entrance’ exam and won a place at the Ferndale Higher Grade School (the old name for the Grammar School). His parents could not afford the fees. Abel Jacob was part of a deputation from the RUDC that went to London to lobby the government. They succeeded. The Ferndale Secondary School was the first – and for a time the only – free secondary school in England and Wales thanks in part to his efforts.

It was opened in a new building in 1937 and became Ferndale Grammar School. Secondary education was available for working class children provided that parents could meet the additional costs.

Abel Jacob was an organizer of the Ferndale Eisteddfod, a JP and a deacon of the Penuel Calvinist Methodist Chapel. He was a busy man.

Education was prized in the Rhondda as a means of social mobility and the communities strove to ensure that their brightest and best were able to continue their education at secondary school and beyond. In the course of digging into all this I found a fascinating dissertation:

Women in Rhondda society, c.1870 – 1939. by Lisa Jane Snook

Amongst other things it describes in detail the educational  and employment opportunities of Rhondda girls and women with extensive discussion of the role of teachers and their struggles for job protection and equal pay.  

I don’t know if Miss Jacob attended Tonypandy Secondary School but she passed the entrance exam. She graduated from University at Cardiff fin 1929 and it looks like she then returned home to teach. It rather seems that all five of her sisters also became teachers. 

An Army of Teachers

In the years between 1891 and1911 the number of full-time teachers in Wales went from 5,000 to 14,000 and by 1931 there were over 17,000.

It was a veritable army of teachers many of whom were women concentrated in the less prestigious/ lower paid sectors of elementary education. Men dominated the higher status secondary schools. This shifted during WW1 as women filled the gaps of serving men. In 1939, 45% of Wales’ secondary school teachers were women. Miss Jacobs was one of them  

She was one of a very small proportion of university graduates who taught in the secondary schools and who were comparatively well paid although not on an equal footing with men. ,

In August 1933 she was able to afford a first class P&O passage to and from Gibraltar, traveling with another Ferndale teacher. 

Discrimination

All women teachers earned less than their male colleagues for doing exactly the same work and this inequity was not fully remedied until 1961. They had fewer promotion opportunities and their pensions were lower. It was common for teachers to return and live at home after their training so that they could supplement the family income and help younger siblings pay for school. Sometimes there were loans and grants to be repaid. 

Rhondda was known for its industrial militancy but it was not so progressive when it came to issues of gender and sex discrimination. Married women teachers were actively discriminated against. In most local authority areas women had to resign their posts on marriage and could be fired at any time..

When newly trained teachers returned to the Rhondda and found it hard to find a position, many – including Abel Jacob – advocated that married women should give up their positions to the younger single teachers. Rhondda had supported their education and it wanted its return on the investment. If you wanted a career in teaching and keep your job you had to stay single.

A 1923 case brought by a group of married women teachers who had been dismissed – Price v. Rhondda –  resulted  in the acceptance of the principle that married women could be dismissed if this was deemed to promote the efficiency of the education in the district. When the National Union of teachers failed to support the women, a large number of Rhondda teachers left the NUT and joined the strongly feminist National Union of Women Teachers. They broke away from the NUT in 1919-20 because the mixed union would not make equal pay and other women’s issues priorities for action.

The highest-paid women were the headmistresses of intermediate and secondary schools, but because most of these schools in Wales were dual rather than separate single sex schools, the headmaster of the boys’ section was often in authority over the head of the girls’ school.

Single women teachers were subject to all kinds of negative stereotypes and active hostility from some of their male counterparts. The  National Association of Schoolmasters – a single sex male union – even had a slogan: “Men teachers for boys!”

Equal pay for equal work

After many years of tireless struggle, not least by members of Wales’ two strongest NUWT branches, Swansea and Cardiff, equal pay was eventually won in 1961, but even then was only introduced incrementally.

Other courageous stands by the NUWT for a fair deal for women in teaching included opposing the marriage bar, the “men teachers for boys” policy, and the financial cuts in education which led to combining single sex schools under one (always male) head teacher leading to the demotion of headmistresses.

Women teachers were involved in liberal and socialist politics and were prominent advocates for the health and welfare of students  in and out of school, In times of distress, in times of strikes and lock-outs they served meals and collected and distributed boots and clothes.

They were active members in the social and  cultural life of their local communities and often worked on weekends in local Sunday schools, taught in adult evening classes and helped run youth clubs.

During WW2 they served as volunteer Red Cross workers, Air Raid Wardens and billeting officers. 

And when falling birth rates and economic crises led to a decreased demand for teachers in Wales they emigrated to England in their thousands. 

Between the mid -1920s and mid -1940s, most newly qualified teachers and especially, women, had to move to England to obtain their first post. In Swansea in 1941 almost three quarters of all newly qualified teachers left Wales to teach in England. 

Back to Miss Jacob

I don’t know where Miss Jacob stood on any of these issues but in 1933 she was living at home and working locally. In 1939 she and two of her sisters – also certified teachers – were still in the the same house on Brynhyfryd Terrace. Another two sisters lived close by with their families and her mother – now incapacitated – was a few houses down the street. (Abel Jacob had died in 1932 .)

 In 1947 she was an English teacher at the Ferndale Grammar School.

And here is a section of school panorama taken in 1947.

There’s Miss Jacob, second from the left.  And there at the center is Emrys Howells M.Sc. FRAS.  – the head of school. Howells had attended the school himself. In 1930 he had married her sister Esther at the Penuel Chapel in Ferndale. One of her nieces is also in the photograph. 

Miss Jacob lived in a close-knit community surrounded by her family and the people with whom she had grown up. With these children she would have know their parents and probably their grandparents. Their struggles, aspirations and personal stories would have been familiar. I have no doubt she was exacting, strict and set high standards. That would have been expected of her by all concerned including the children themselves. 

But take a look at those boys. So laid back. Different jackets and some without ties? A striped scarf? What’s going on? Is it possible that this school had a culture of academic striving and respectability not based on imposed uniformity, fear and humiliation? 

1950 and Headlands

Miss Jacob’s move to Swindon may have proved quite a culture shock.

She was leaving a small town where her family was deeply embedded. She was leaving a school where she and her family was known, undoubtedly respected and probably liked. The head of school grew up in a street near by and was a member of her family.

And now Headlands –  a school that was run with a totally different set of values and expectations and with strange children and even stranger colleagues.

I’m sure there was an instant recognition with Miss Almond whose background – though Yorkshire – was very similar. And also with some of the other women teachers – Miss Wildman who also taught English. And probably Miss Whereat and Miss Jackson although who knows what she thought of their  living arrangements.

Did Miss Jacob socialize with them? Did she have or make friends in Swindon? I have no idea. I believe she lived in a house on Drove Road that backed onto Queen’s Park but all the rest is speculation.

In 1947 she was an English teacher. Now she was Senior Mistress (and for a while also head of the English Department). Her responsibilities were large and demanding.  

Fairness

Headlands was a very male environment  While there were equal numbers of boys and girls male teachers outnumbered women two to one. All of them taught subjects not children. And all of them were subject to the school ethos established by the headmaster and his deputy Mr. D.H. Maclean. Headteachers in those days had considerable control over the curriculum and school structure. With the move to the new building in 1952 this was very much Magson’s grammar school. The way it was run and the ethos reflected his values and educational thinking. 

It was a male environment not because it was boy-friendly. I don’t think Headlands was a friendly place for any but the favored few who made life easy for teachers. It was male dominated because that was the model in the head of what a school should be. Girls were required to be allowed to attend but how were they to be treated? 

The curriculum and pedagogy were very traditional and gendered. It was command and control for talk and chalk. Even the recruitment advertisements in the Headlandians of the time declared different pay scales and gendered opportunities for career paths.This was of course consistent with the era.

Treating children the same and thinking that’s fair is a very primitive definition of fairness. When someone says “I treat everyone the same” the questions should always be “The same as whom?”

And boys and girls weren’t treated the same in all kinds of ways. Boys were caned for example. Girls were not. 

Who was the ideal student, the standard, by which everyone was being treated? Here’s my outline: 

A boy whose parents had attended Euclid Street , had done very well in the 11+, thrived on academics, did well in Latin, wrote neatly, enjoyed science and math and had a high tolerance for sitting still and listening. Such a boy had supportive parents who valued education and provided additional cultural and academic resources. Such a boy would be at least moderately good looking, well-like by teachers who found him easy to teach and eager to please and perhaps a star of some sort in games, preferably rugby. He would belong, join in, be chosen to help out with special activities, be made a prefect and enjoy school. Such a boy would uphold the reputation of the school by wearing his cap; never eating iced confectionery on the street; never cycling more than two abreast; being a gentleman at ballroom and country dancing; never smoking behind the bike sheds; passing as many exams as possible and winning a scholarship to Oxbridge thereby promoting the good name of the school. Good lad. Pleasing progress. 

Girls were in the school but not of the school. The curriculum, the discomfort of some male teachers when faced with girls, and the gendered stereotypes about careers aspirations and choices all made for an awkward fit. It was there in the books we read, the clothes we were expected to wear and the behaviors we were expected to show. It was was all there as a kind of constant muffled drumbeat of discrimination and repression.

And there was Miss Jacob whose job it was to enforce it all. She wasn’t in charge, she wasn’t the boss nor even the deputy boss  Her job was to keep half the school in line, shaped up and conforming using the tools at her disposal. No wonder that to so many she seemed cruel, mean, sarcastic and disdainful..

Boys who stepped out of line were caned or threatened with the cane. Girls who stepped out of line needed to be lashed with the tongue. Order must prevail. Standards must be upheld. Language and dress and appearance must be policed. And that was her job.

In my 45 years of teaching I knew a few teachers who decided that being the tyrant was the way to go. But none more skilled and effective than Miss Jacob. That’s a rather backhanded compliment but I mean it. I think she may have been handed a poor deck and then she got on with it and did her job. It cannot have been easy. 

For sure there must be people out there – who – as girls found her warm and understanding at least at times. But that was not the experience of the majority. And how could it be? She was expected to maintain order in a system that was designed for conformity and obedience. She could not let the side down She couldn’t show sympathy and kindness except rarely. In the Headlands culture that would be perceived as weakness and would have been exploited. She had to do her job.

I like to think that being harsh and contemptuous was not her true self and that in a different environment Miss Jacob would have been perceived quite differently. Tough, yes. Strict and demanding, yes. But nasty, vicious and vile and all those other words she has been called? No. She upheld the system All the negative words we have assigned to Miss Jacob personally, belong more truly to the school itself. She did what was required of her.

All of that is of course pure speculation. Perhaps she really was was a Cruella de Ville and Lucretia Borgia rolled into one small Welsh packet. But I doubt it.

While doing the research for this post I confess to finding myself becoming increasingly sympathetic to the person I have imagined Miss Jacob to be I developed a wish to go back and reclaim her reputation and rehabilitate her legacy. 

Obviously I have become soft in my old age.

I have started to imagine a conversation I might have had with her if ever I overcame my detestation of all (or most) things Headlands. It takes place in the semi-detached bungalow in Penarth where she lived in retirement until her death in 1984. It involves sherry. 

But that’s another story.