In my last piece I realised there was so much material about my high school days that it couldn’t possibly fit into one article. This is not about reading but the staff at my high school. I dealt with a few in my last piece but there’s a lot to work on….
I liked high school – even though I was quite a small kid for most of my career there I never really got bullied or sodomised by one of the staff. In fact the teachers on the whole were a good bunch but some of the shit they got up to outside school hours made my university career and early working days look like an episode of the Teletubbies. Obviously the teaching staff were quite diverse. I don’t mean that in terms of race, religion or sexuality but by how stupid they were and what they did in their spare time. Some were barely older than us kids and some others seemed to have been raised in some kind of Victorian dystopian nightmare with Dante in the corner shouting place your bets while the Rape of the Sabines was taking place just outside.
There was an old Scottish bloke when I started nearing the end of his teaching career. Smillie his name was. Never have I met someone more inappropriately named. Mad old bastard wielded a cane like an extension of his arm and made 12 year olds tremble. 200 years ago he’d have been up at the Reformed Kirk pulpit ranting, raining down fire and brimstone and making the women crap themselves – how did they ever manage to have kids if conjugal activity was a mortal sin. Fortunately the local version of Rab C Nesbitt was on hand to address matters. He passed for a faithful and loving husband and had no such concerns He also crept into bed with them after 12 pints of heavy and a few shots of Dewars.
National Galleries of Scotland Commons from Edinburgh, Scotland, UK, No restrictions, via Wikimedia Commons
We weren’t men of the world at the time but we could spot them. The stoners were easy to identify – their haircuts and general demeanour gave them away immediately . Anyone sporting tan corduroys, long sideburns or a beard went straight in that bucket. Turning up at 1:05 for the first afternoon lesson looking slightly dazed and not able to construct a coherent sentence was a clear indication why your battered old Mazda smelt like the sort of plantation a Rasta would have enjoyed.
There were also the shirtlifters – I’ve discussed a couple of them in a previous piece. Usually identified by a lisp and being light in their loafers they generally didn’t bother us although Heaven knows what they got up to in the English staffroom after hours.
Most of the staff were good men and women. Agriculture, Maths, Geography, Woodwork, Languages, PE all sound. Art and Music – well you know what kind of bloke that sort of thing attracts.
The Science lot were a mixed bag. You’d think physicists, chemists and biologists would be straight down the line. Not them – at least 3 pulled more cones than the RTA on the M4 (I’m not going to explain that just look it up). The head of the department was quite the piece of work though.
A mid 40s divorced vamp she was an outstanding teacher. Most of them had to look after one of the sports teams on a Wednesday afternoon. This estimable woman opted to take a class for those injured or not capable of playing. I went there once and learned not to give the reason as a groin strain. Having this woman the age of your mother leering over her tinted glasses and offer to rub it for you was too much for a young man. She was also a nudist and was burgled one night while lying in bed. Lamenting the fact that the individual in question didn’t come upstairs and ravish her made me feel a bit queasy if I’m honest.
This was not the worst by any means. One of the English teachers sported balding shoulder length frizzy hair and a beard. Well known for taking drugs with students at 6th form parties he also ran the photography club. One of my friends was in the dark room and found a roll of undeveloped film that had inadvertently been left there.
Well you’re going to have a look aren’t you?
Turns out Mr Frizzy had been taking nude shots of one of the student teachers. I would have paid good money for a peek at them as she was very nice looking.
There was also a well known sportsman who decided that – just after getting married – shagging a fellow teacher would be the best way of building a lifelong relationship with his new bride. We had photos of them in a car sharing bodily fluids.
A female art teacher shagged a 5th former at a party. An English teacher was spotted by one of the other kids who lived nearby doing housework naked. We found out that a maths teacher who was a tough little bastard with a broken nose had a personal hobby of going to pubs with his brother and fighting with people
You couldn’t make this shit up.
Then there was an older teacher who the school had decided was not up to teaching his original subjects of history and English. The poor bastard had been saddled with teaching personal development. I can not think of anything much worse for a teacher in the twilight of their career being tasked with lecturing 12-15 year olds about sex. His most well known story was about hitchhiking when a young man and being invited on board by a one legged truck driver who thought he was up for a bit of rear ending in the back of the cab. One of our aims in his once weekly lesson was to try and waste half of it by getting him to recount this episode for the umpteenth time. After a couple of years of this people started to take the piss by asking questions like “Can a man menstruate through his penis?”
Although I’ve been taking the piss a bit here I genuinely enjoyed the teachers I had at high school. Certainly the two maths teachers who guided me through the 6 years were outstanding,
The lady in charge of French was also brilliant. About the size of one of the larger battleships in WWII she was strict but unfailingly kind and generous. Directed the annual musical and could make you wince by peering over the top of her glasses when you failed to answer a question or said something stupid.
Caning was a recreational activity for some of the older staff. God knows what they got up to in their private lives. I only received it once. A few of us had decided to entertain ourselves before school by stripping buds off some of the bushes and throwing them at each other. Caught by one of the woodwork teachers 10 or so of us were lined up and received one stroke across the hand. It was a cold morning and it hurt like fuck. He did left hands so people could still write – my protestation that I’m left handed cut no ice so the first few lessons were a bit difficult.
Lawrence House, chair caning (Baltimore, 1905)
There’s a happy ending to this story though. The last time I saw the bastard was at a reunion a few years later when he was so pissed the only thing keeping him upright was a death grip on the arm of a slot machine while he fed the dying embers of his pension into it with the other.
One of the problems was that the position of headmaster at the school was the most senior role at a school in the state (as I’ve said it was super academic) so after the bloke who built the place up it got a few old guys nearing retirement. The first one was relatively benign but the second – who by then was presiding over a fully co-ed school – made his name not by banning caning but by insisting that girls should receive the punishment in the same way as the boys. Cue the school making another appearance in the national press amid suggestions the head was the sort of pervert that would make Rolf Harris lose his position as top dog.
If you think shite like Eastenders has unbelievable storylines you should examine what a school’s teaching staff get up to. And this was just the incidents I knew about
To this day I can’t believe this stuff didn’t get out. I guess the headmaster at the time would have done anything short of getting bummed in public to protect the school’s reputation.
© ArthurDaley 2026
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