Good riddance! Things you don't see anymore, thank heavens!

I too remember flying board rubbers. I also remember a small, shy boy in my class of '49 having the most distressing stammer .... and the old bitch of a teacher who regularly picked on him to come to the front of the class and read aloud. My lasting memory of him is his crimson face, and the struggle he had to even get one word out , and Mrs. M (a town councillor when she wasn't employed as a so-called infant teacher,of whom people such as my mother were in awe) encouraging the class to laugh at him. On one such humiliating occasion he wet himself. Despicable woman..... good riddance to teachers like her. I often wonder what happened to him.

Oh no the cubicles for changing after swimming. We had to share a cubicle and it was so difficult to get changed and dry in a cubicle designed for one person. We were all about 12 so not little children.

We would really struggle and in no time a sort of intercom would announce that the coach for our school was waiting outside.

I had long hair and it used to be soaking wet along with my damp clothes and skin.

I caught menigitus some weeks later and some of the parents put it down to us all being wet and cold and complained to the school.

Personally I don't think my illness was to do with being cold and wet after swimming and - when I went back to school and swimming we were still two to a cubicle.

Oh lucky girl that made me laugh !! But I'm sure that kind of prudery did go on in convents.

I was not bothered by school showers - without my glasses I could not see what anyone else had got that might be of interest and did not think they might be able to see much of me!

One of the schools I went to was run by nuns, and they told me they were not even allowed to look at their own naked body and had a bath with a sort of cotton tent on. How pathetic!

School showers weren't around when I went, between 40s and 50s, and if they had been our nuns would not have allowed them. We had roomy cubicles for changing after swimming. Had we shared, we could all have changed in one go, but the nuns told us that would be " wrong", so we had to stand shivering waiting for a vacant cubicle. At the leisure centre nowadays I still prefer to use a changing room. Or if I can't I get dressed super quick. I blame those nuns.

I was also brought up to feel very prudish about being naked and I detested school showers. These feelings were very much down to my mother's prudishness/ embarrassment at all things bodily. I still have that feeling and I resent it.

This thread brings back these memories still loaded with a degree of horror at what we went through.

Things in schools do seem to have improved, particularly with the ban on corporal punishment.

I think teaching was one of the few options open to women. An awful lot went into teaching who really didn't like children. I have a friend who really must have disliked children although she became a headmistress of a junior school. She insisted her DH had a vasectomy. The head at our infants(we went to the same one) used to throw board rubbers and beat the boys. He was ex army and was a truly vile man. You would have thought she would have wanted to make a difference.

I was once caned, aged about 9, because the teacher spotted that I had a tiny little doll, about 3" high, sitting on the front of my desk. Granted it shouldn `t have been there, but the cane? The same teacher caught a boy passing a note, brought him out to the front of the class to cane him, stood him in front of the blackboard, one of those that revolved on a frame, raised the cane up, brought it down, but caught the blackboard and it came down and hit poor Gordon on the head. He cried, she comforted him..........then caned him a few minutes later!

My school, 1940s - 50s, didn't have the luxury of showers and, having read some of your accounts of these, I'm very glad we didn't. I don't recall that we were specially malodorous.

At Junior High we had a teacher who would stand behind a boy's chair. Tell him to stand. Then tell him to sit and as the boy sat down he would pull the chair away from under him.

The boy always ended up hurting his back. Sheer brutality.

I can remember the leather strap at school as well. I remember getting it because I was not in my seat but happened to be standing on the floor talking to another girl when the teacher returned to the classroom after going out for a few minutes.
I started school on the same day as a boy.After our mothers had left us the boy started to cry and tried to follow his mother and the headteacher slapped him across his legs.I must have looked like doing the same because she turned to me and said ''You start to cry and I will smack you as well''.Imagine that happening today.
My brother had a teacher who was a priest and he used a metre stick to hit disobedient boys.

Oh yes - nuns at school. They terrified me when I was little. I thought they were witches.

And chilblains - I had forgotten them - how grim they were. I wonder why they are not so prevalent now - central heating maybe?

Thankfully I was spared the communal shower experience - I wonder if this was because I went to convent schools and the naked body was considered shameful?

BlackeyedSusan's mention of the blackboard duster brought back one memory, not really on topic, but it was amusing. The nuns would ask one of the pupils to clean the blackboard for them at various points during the lesson. The teacher's desk was on a raised platform, and the blackboard was on the wall at the back of this platform. While the chosen girl was cleaning, the nun would invariable step down off the platform and address the class. One particularly daring girl quietly turned from the blackboard cleaning and crept up behind the nun and, holding the blackboard eraser over her veiled head, she gently tapped it so that all the chalk dust showered over the nun's habit. The nun was blissfully unaware. How the rest of us managed to keep straight faces I shall never know, especially when the nun thanked the girl (for cleaning the board of course )

Apologies for the diversion. As you were....

Oh, I hated those showers! I'd forgotten until now the embarrassment of being tall, skinny and flat chested when all the others were developing curves! Our gym mistress had an old ballet shoe (complete with wooden toe piece) and she would whack bare bums as they passed, seemingly at random. It hurt.

Do they still have communal showers? I caught a programme the other night about the Chinese way of teaching and was shocked at the way the kids are now in class. Bags on desks, texting, drinking and even eating a burger! is this normal? I'd quite like to visit a modern class room to see the changes.

Communal showers were a really bad idea.

I was really scared of them age 11 but by the time I was 14 me and my group of friends used to sprint back to the gym block after games, put our legs and arms in the shower, wet our hair and pretend to be drying ourselves by the time the Games Mistress arrived.

We had to say X if we had the time of the month when the register was called.

I'd forgotten the humiliation of the communal shower. I was brought up in a family that kept their bodies covered (I was 15 before I realised that people usually took their clothes off to have sex ) so being naked with others was horrific. Then there was the water. Nine times out of ten it was freezing. We never had soap in the shower so I still can't see the point of it. We didn't come out any cleaner than when we went in, just colder.

Glad to be rid of my liberty bodice and suspender belt, I find it hard to imagine that some men find them sexy.

Having to strip off naked for communal showers after PE, at secondary school. The one good thing about periods was that they provided a get-out, though PE itself was bad enough tight fitting shorts and bulky STs that might leak at any moment.

(I know that sounds rather feeble compared to others' experiences, but this was an all-girls school and corporal punishment wasn't allowed)

We had a maths teacher (male) who regularly threw chalk at anyone deemed to be 'not paying attention'!

Getting the ruler and having the blck board rubber thrown at you seemed to be the punishments used for extreme behaviour.

Blackboards were a dying breed when I taught, replaced by white boards on easels. Now it is all computer driven smart boards.

There would be serious repercussions if the teacher threw the blackboard rubber at a pupil, a common occurrence at my schools. Don't suppose blackboard rubbers even exist anymore.

Funnily enough, I felt no sympathy at all when the boys got caned. Just a sort of fascination, and wondering how much it really hurt.

Funny thing is, none of these things, except the sanitary towels and being hit (or threatened with it if your work wasn't good enough), seemed bad at the time. Children just accept things when they've never known anything else.

I didn't mind nylon sheets at all. (would hate them now ) I still use my, inherited-from-m-i-l, wood concertina clothes airer in the really bad weather in the Winter.

I positively crave the smell of a new gas mantle. And the ice on the inside windows made lovely patterns.

In Scotland it was a leather strap on the hand- I have never forgotten that. At home it was the same on my rear.

Having a bath and wondering whether to stay in the almost cold water for a bit longer or get out and experience the "heater" attached somehow to the light which was next to useless. I hated having a bath in winter for that reason.

Having a scratchy bri nylon carpet in the bathroom-it was cheap because a cousin worked in the factory so my parents bought it at cost price. I tried not to walk on it in bare feet.