THE 2ND TEACHING APPOINTMENT: PART ONE...

 Firs Junior School (1974-81):

General Stuff…

I am writing this article 48 years on from my time teaching at Firs and I have to admit that apart from the memories which will be stored about working in the school in further articles on this blog, my own life experienced upheavals at that time too. During that spell my first car was destroyed, I was married and moved to a newly built house in Glascote, Tamworth for two years and then returned to Birmingham to reside in Hodge Hill, close to the Bromford schools my three kids would eventually attend.

I think when Firs’ headteacher Trevor Rees visited me at Audley, he was desperate for someone to take over the boys’ PE and sports post which had become vacant. He called me for interview very quickly and I was duly offered the post with no opposition from any other candidates. It was a Scale 2 post at that time… 

Rees had likely heard about my two cricket teams’ exploits at Audley and also how much effort I had put into helping the younger lads with their football skills. But who knows? 

HEADTEACHER REES IS SEATED, CENTRE & I'M FAR RIGHT, STANDING.
LONG HAIR, TOO...

Looking back now, it was clear that once again teachers were left to themselves to put together learning plans for their pupils but it could be quite haphazard. I know that a good deal of the teaching I did at Firs was based on communication with the children, talking about what they and I had been doing and trying to make maths and written learning as enjoyable as possible. 

Geography…

One Monday morning the kids asked me where I had seen a football match over the weekend and it had actually been at quite a distance from Birmingham. I tried to explain where the town was but the children were unable to understand the geography. However, I had sent for the local newspaper from the place I had travelled to, simply to read ‘the other view’ of the match I had witnessed, which was always totally different to the reports in the local Birmingham newspapers. 

I took the newspaper into school a couple of days later and cut out the newspaper’s name from the front page. I had placed a large, sugar-paper map of the UK on a classroom wall and with Birmingham and London already marked, I stapled the newspaper heading to the approximate position on the map it had been sent from.

Incredibly, the pupils then began to bring in more titles, picked up by parents who were perhaps truck drivers, or who had relatives living in other parts of the country, or from places they went for a holiday at Easter and Whitsun until we had quite a collection. The children began to realise where a number of places they had maybe heard of actually were…  

The Rochdale Observer, the Nottingham Evening Post, the Aldershot News, the Evening Herald from Plymouth and many others appeared on my map…

Registration…

Each child had a number on the register in chronological order but ‘1 Mr Ray, 2 Mr Ray…’, etc, became boring, so the children were asked to learn their own number in French, Spanish and German, which led to most of the pupils knowing all the other numbers too and they could manage to count to around thirty in three foreign languages. That made morning registration rather interesting for them… ‘Un, Monsieur Ray’, or ‘Acht, Herr Ray’ could be heard regularly in my classroom…

Maths...

I used graphs a lot to illustrate simple economics, like perhaps sending the kids to other classes to ask what shoe sizes the children were. After making a graph of all the results we were able to discuss what the most popular shoe sizes were for junior school children at that time in that school and we then progressed to suggest how that would affect stocking a shoe-shop for children in the area. At least maths made a little more sense in those situations.

The natural world…

Every day the children were allowed to eat snacks in the playground and I noticed that pied wagtails and sparrows would invariably hover until the kids had returned to class and pick up scraps. I would remark on the birds but I was greeted at first with puzzled looks, for the pupils simply hadn’t noticed them. 

So for a few weeks, I spent a Friday lunchtimes chalking an image of one bird from my copy of The Observer’s Book Of Birds, which was common to the area, on my blackboard. The children then  attempted to copy the illustration into their workbooks. Then we chatted about what the particular bird ate and where it nested, as well as what its eggs looked like…

All I am trying to say is that those Firs kids communicated with me and with each other and if nothing else, they knew where Aldershot was and what a starling’s egg looked like…

Sports: football…     

I had my own football team at last…

Right from the very start, one boy stood out: Delroy Whyte… He was the heart of the team, which I had to scramble together from lads who showed interest in playing during my first few days at the school.

I managed to fix a friendly game for my lads in their awful orange shirts, up the hill at Bromford whose team was very strong and in Division 1. We were in Division 3 but Del was superb in a defeat and scored a fine goal.

Del would be selected for the Saltley area team, a proud moment for him and for me because he was to wear one of the very shirts which I had worn 13 years earlier…

DELROY, PROUD IN HIS SALTLEY SHIRT...

The Whytes…

Sadly Del was bullied in secondary school, I believe and moved from Hodge Hill School to a Castle Vale school, where he again found himself in trouble. I am guessing he was racially abused in both institutions. I believe that his football progressed no further, a fact that I am still extremely sad and angry about. He was a bright boy too… 

Pamela was a really great kid and she was not only bright but also good at games. The next sibling down was the splendid Jason Whyte, whose name was incorrectly spelt when he became, er, a professional footballer…

He who would become Jason White…

Jason displayed a beaming smile and at the age of eight won the school's standing long jump event against boys three years older than himself. He was a talented gymnast, a raw footballer at first but skilled by the age of eleven. He was intelligent too but also a total pain. Despite his inexperience and recent transfer from the infants' school, he pestered me daily to give him a chance in the ‘B’ football team. 

This badgering became so intense that I was forced to include him in a squad of players to visit Timberley School, near my parents’ house in Shard End on 20th September 1979. Unlike our school it had its own soccer pitch, whereas we had to train on a grit-littered playground. Timberley had its own proper long jump facilities too… We had a playground and mats to leap onto, hence our event being the standing long jump.

JASON, 2ND FROM LEFT, STANDING...

 

This was the type of game in which I could assess the younger lads and fourteen of them piled into just two cars for the late after-school friendly match some three miles away. 

The game ended in a 2-2 draw but Jason had nagged at me for much of the duration of the game, constantly wanting to know if or when he would get a chance to substitute for one of the players. He was obviously bursting with eagerness, pace and energy, so when there were just a few minutes left I made the key replacement. He had never played on a full-sized pitch before and it was not long before he took possession of the ball. 

The scenario became one of comic book proportions, as he raced goalwards with the ball. His speed exceeded his control, however but he still broke clear of the defence, ignorant of the touchline advice ringing from the Firs contingent. It was maybe only when he was approaching the penalty-box that he looked up and saw Lee Walsh, who was our own goalie and then sudden confusion set in. He was going the wrong way… 

Fortunately Jason was bright enough to realise his mistake  before shooting and he stuttered to a stop. Although puzzled, he had the presence of mind to turn and set off in the right direction, racing down the field until he was swamped by opponents and the chance was lost. 

Jason was very speedy and many of his subsequent goals for the school were created for him to run onto and beat the ‘keeper one-on-one.

Jason, like his brother became a district player at eleven and was a prolific goalscorer for me but then I didn't see him again until one day in Birmingham’s city centre when he was about sixteen years old and he was proud to tell me that Derby County had taken him on as an apprentice. He didn’t make it there but managed a football league career, including missing a sudden-death penalty at Wembley for Scunthorpe United and handing promotion to Blackpool in 1991, before eventually leaving these shores to study for a university degree and play football for Sengkang in Singapore. 

JASON IN ROTHERHAM KIT...

JASON IN A SCARBOROUGH SHIRT...

I saw Jason play for Rotherham and Cheltenham. He even featured on A Question of Sport's 'What Happened Next?' when out on loan from Derby, I think at Shepshed. He scored a totally daft goal…  

JASON MISSES THE SPOT-KICK WHICH HANDED PROMOTION TO BLACKPOOL...

The goalie Lee Walsh, who was an avid Wolves fan as a kid, died after almost recovering from leukaemia when he was in his mid-teens. He was such a bright and pleasant lad, whose sad funeral I attended…

Jason Whyte/White’s professional career was interesting and here are some of the highlights: 16 goals in 68 Scunthorpe matches and 20 goals in 63 games for Scarborough (also voted Clubman of the Year there…)  

Next came Northampton, where Jason netted 18 times in 77 matches, before scoring 22 times in 73 appearances for Rotherham. Sadly he only scored once for Cheltenham (against Leyton Orient) in 31 outings.

After his spell in Singapore, he returned to the UK and played for Grantham Town… 

Mark Kennie & Nathan Bird…

Mark Kennie was another decent footballer, whose temper maybe prevented him succeeding at the game. However, I met him in a car sales showroom a few years back and he was really pleasant towards me and told me that he had played a lot of rugby as he had progressed into his teens.

MARK KENNIE IS 2ND FROM RIGHT IN THE FRONT ROW...

Nathan Bird was a very smart footballer too, who was also capable in goals but he found himself in a fair bit of trouble at school and seemed unfazed at making himself unlikeable to staff members. He wasn’t slim but he had some good soccer skills. I believe he has his own roofing business in the Birmingham area these days and has been very successful, so credit to him… 

Getting rid of the orange shirts…

I simply had to replace the awful orange shirts which Firs wore, so I managed to get a good deal with Dick Taylor, who ran a sports shop near Villa Park. Taylor was an ex-Villa manager and when he had played pro-football, the young lad who cleaned his boots was, er, future England manager Graham Taylor. It was Dick who convinced Graham to become Villa’s manager…

DICK TAYLOR WHEN VILLA MANAGER...

GRAHAM TAYLOR GETS THE VILLA JOB...

Whenever I went into Dick’s shop he would chat on about the width of Villa’s Scottish goalie Jake Findlay’s feet and how tough it was to acquire boots for him… Findlay would never realise his potential, partly because Villa bought John Burridge just as Jake had got into the first team. I never rated the diminutive Burridge but Villa had paid out money for him, whilst Jake had been the goalie in the club’s FA Youth Cup winning team, along with Brian Little and John Gidman.

JAKE FINDLAY...

I believe that Findlay became a driving instructor in the Sutton Coldfield area…

However, back to the Firs soccer kit…

I raised money for the kits by asking the players to get sponsored for a penalty competition, which was successful and we bought a sky blue and black kit which the kids loved…

THE LADS WITH ONE OF THEIR TROPHIES...
JOHN MORRISSEY, 4TH FROM THE LEFT & SEATED, WOULD SADLY DIE FROM INJURIES SUSTAINED IN A CAR CRASH SHORTLY BEFORE HE WAS TO JOIN THE ARMY...

LEE WALSH, STANDING, WHITE TOP, WOULD SADLY PASS AWAY IN HIS TEENS...

The Alderlea School 5-a-side football tournament, 15th March 1980…

My favoured Year 6 ‘A’ team struggled and were knocked out by Rosary by 1-0 but my Year 6 ‘B’ team won 3-0 v St Benedict’s ‘B’ before losing on penalties to Highfield, after a 0-0 draw. 

Incredibly though, my Year 5 team which was totally not fancied as a threat, beat favourites Bromford 1-0, then Guardian Angels 1-0 to reach the final, which they also won 1-0 v Timberley. Skipper Jimmy Brown was simply brilliant on the day… 

THE ENIGMATIC JIMMY BROWN...

Shinty…

Oddly there was a stock of shinty sticks at the school too, with wooden balls and we were encouraged to use them in games on our paltry grass area but it became a clashing, painful experience. The sticks we had resembled walking sticks.

Shins were bruised, yet no-one complained…

I soon hid the equipment away…

Crab football…

My classes were so good at crab football, for we sometimes played games in the school hall instead of a ‘proper’ PE lesson. The kids loved it and some of the girls were brilliant at it. Children went home with aching arms and legs from the awkward playing position of the body but parents were really happy that their children were enjoying PE… 

Life is strange…

More to come about the characters I recall from my time at Firs and also when we took the children on holidays…