This is the story of Mr Clegg, a basketball, and a useless Donald Kirkham.

So the story continues, part three, teachers don’t teach; do they?

or.........

This is the story of Mr Clegg, a basketball, and a useless Donald Kirkham.

During my last year of education at Hargher Clough school we had to take the eleven plus exam. This has been a sore point with me for a long time, I do believe that children develop at different speeds, and that all young people will eventually find their own level in society. How one exam at the age of eleven is supposed to do that fairly and equitably is a mystery to me. But, this was then, and then you had one chance in life and that was it. If you passed the exam you went to Burnley grammar school, received a higher level of education with the resulting better chances in life. If you failed off you went to Rosegrove Secondary modern school where you received what I call a very basic education. This school was boys only, and had a bad reputation among the locals as being where the lower fringes of society were educated. I sat the exam, and failed, I never did know my score on the exam, or if it was possible to take a retest, as an eleven year old failure I was sent to Rosegrove. Rosegrove Secondary modern school was a contradiction in terms, there was nothing modern about Rosegrove school, from the building to the teachers, age had crept into the very structure of both.

I had some interesting teachers, one of them was a former soldier, Mr Tomlinson, who dealt with us in a very military fashion. We had a middle aged female music teacher who never actually taught music, she had a make up cupboard behind a never used piano which took most of her time, and played records of classical music to a very bored class of boys. “now we will listen to Brahms", and so it began half an hour a week of classical music, my only thought was what about the Beatles? A very bald, shiny headed Mr Clegg taught technical drawing, and of course we had a metal shop and a woodworking shop. None of these shops or classes seemed to teach anything, if you had a talent you did well, if you struggled you just got you got low marks, the concept of investing time to find out what a pupils strength or weakness was and drawing out the best was missing from Rosegrove Secondary modern school.



Rosegrove secondary modern school
being demolished Mr Clegg had the classroom
immediately behind where the vehicle is parked



The emphasis was on providing the local factories with workers who could read a technical drawing and make objects using their hands, brains were optional.Further education was a non starter and never talked about. However, discipline was essential. We had a system called ‘being on report’, where if you did anything wrong any teacher could put you ‘on report’ for a week, during this time any infringement of rules was punishable by a public caning by the headmaster during morning assembly.

On one occasion, one of our pupils who was mentally challenged was put on report by one particularly enthusiastic and bad teacher, this poor boy had only marginal awareness of what was going on around him, and every day did something technically ‘wrong’ because simply put, he did not know what was right or wrong, he just did things. He was the only pupil in our class that was never ridiculed or laughed at, we all helped him, which when I think of the future inhabitants of Her Majesties prison service I went to school with, including one particularly long serving inhabitant, this was remarkable. How he got through his week of report defied logic, but he did, and the whole class applauded him.

Such was my education. Most of the teachers were of the older, well seasoned variety. Biding their time until pensions were available and not really interested. One year we had a new physical education teacher, a wet behind the ears, young, modern haircut, straight out of university teacher. He must have though he had come into the Bronx, the only sports played at Rosegrove were football and cricket, and that was that. There was no coaching, if you were good, or average, you played in a game during PE class, if not you were sent with the other 'no hopers' to mess around with a ball, and went home when the ‘big’ game was over. This young man came in, took one look at the school hall and said we should play basketball! Basketball, what was that? We all looked at each other, we had never heard of basketball, let alone seen a game, or a court, well, some of them had seen a court, but not the one needed here. In a genuine attempt to bring education at Rosegrove into the present day the school had white lines painted on the floor and two backboards with hoops arrived. So we played basketball. The new teacher tried to show us how to play, but our only exposure to balls was to kick them, holding, running and throwing them was weird, very weird. A recipe for disaster was looming. I was awful, I have no hand and Eye coordination, to this day I struggle to catch a ball, and cannot throw one to save my life. But I was tall, evidently that was a good thing for basketball, who knew?



the football team in my final year (1969),
with the new fresh faced PE teacher and
famous basketball back board behind him.



The students at Rosegrove were put into ‘houses’, this was to allow for competitive sports to be played. Each house played the others in sports, with the object of being the top house at the end of the school year. I was in Townely house, and we played our first ever basketball game against Gawthorpe house.

As a young kid I was taller than average, until the others caught up with me at least, so on I went to play in my first basketball game, suddenly the ball came to me, and I had no idea what to do with it, my mind went totally blank, I looked around for someone to throw the ball to, but I just seized. Each house had a house master, ours was the bald shiny headed Mr Clegg who was watching from the side of the court, instantly losing patience he shouted, “Kirkham, you’re useless, get off there now!” so off I slumped, still holding the large brown ball that had materialised in my hands, for some reason I answered back asking him “ Mr Clegg sir, aren’t we supposed to be taught how to play first?”, Mr Clegg visibly fumed, turned red faced and went on a tirade telling me and anyone else within earshot that it was not his or any teachers job to teach, either we knew how to play or we didn’t, and if not we were stupid!

I never played basketball again, and the following year the PE teacher left for pastures new, to my knowledge basketball was never played at Rosegrove after that one year.