Olive Spicer
(Class of 1955)
I first went to George Square as we called it, in January 1946 in the middle of the school year. I suppose a place had become available and I passed the entrance exam.
Buildings
The buildings were very different from my local village school. Of course, the school had originally belonged to Admiral Duncan, the victor in the Battle of Camperdown in 1797 during the Napoleonic wars, and transforming it into a girls school involved much reconstruction. The Admiral’s Kitchen was presumably the original. At break, those girls with funds could buy a mug of Bovril. In the Court adjacent to the Admirals Kitchen, the free one third pint of milk was given out at break and buns were on sale 1d for plain, 2d for iced. The Central Hall was where we assembled each morning for prayers and where our dance classes took place. Visitors to the school entered via the Central Hall and gaped at us doing what was called Modern Dance dressed in our white blouses and navy knickers. Girls who had really misbehaved were sent to the Tiled Hall, just off the Central Hall, there to await their fate at the hands of the powers that be.
Room 19 was a crossover point from one side of the school to the other. It was the domain of the music department and where a small stage allowed small-scale dramatic productions.
In the bowels of the school ran the Dark Passage, home to cloakrooms with toilets at either end. All the toilets were Victorian, literally so.
Uniforms
In 1946 clothes rationing was still on going and the uniform had to adapt to the realities of the difficulty of sourcing the correct uniform. Gym slips could be made to last a number of years by altering the buttons at the neck. Box pleats front and back allowed for developing bodies and the absence of a waistband was an additional benefit. Gym slips were worn for games. I remember wearing mine up to 3rd year, by which time it was very short. In senior school, gymslips were replaced with navy skirts – no particular pattern. No special uniform for Dance or PE, just blouse and navy knickers. We played hockey at Field as the Liberton Playing Fields were known, wearing the same gym slips. Team matches involved black stockings, held up by suspenders. No wonder we attracted voyeurs over the hedges. One year it was decided that the House match players were to wear coloured stockings in order to identify the different teams. Of course coloured stockings were impossible to buy so we were issued with white stockings and knickers which we had to dye the appropriate colour and then sew the pants and stockings together to produce makeshift tights. My house was Falconhall and our tights were bright yellow. So flattering.
Teachers
The Headmistress Miss Nicolson was seen only at morning prayers.. She did not emerge often from her office. Modern heads drop in on lessons informally and are to be seen about the school. They try to know by name as many children as possible. Miss Nicolson was not of this ilk. On the plus side, she took the sixth form for ‘RE. We read the Koran, not a long book, and learned about Hinduism and Zoroastrianism.
Unusually for a girls school, GWLC had 4 male members of staff. Mr Miller was Head of English. He was a saturnine and charismatic teacher. I cannot have been the only girl who thought herself in love with him. His was the lean poetic consumptive look. Not just a look as it turned out. In our 5th year he was off for 6 months with TB. I suppose it had been diagnosed during the mass radiography campaign if the early 1950s which led to the eradication of the endemic TB. He had taught us so well that we survived the temporary replacement teacher. He must have been a retired teacher but there were few signs that he had ever been competent. In 6 months we never got beyond the first scene in Hamlet! Mr Miller told us frequently we were ‘the elite of our generation', that only one in 10 of our age group went on to higher education. Nowadays almost 50% go on to some kind of further education, but in the 1950s it was different.
Mr Langdon taught singing. He thought singing was for everyone, not just those with a voice. At Christmas, Easter and Prizegiving we all sang demanding works such as the Te Deum, the Easter Hymn from Cavalleria Rusticana, Gilbert and Sullivan and Bach. Although my inability to hold a tune is legendary in our family, this music has stayed with me and brought joy.
Mr Henderson was Head of Art who regretted that the more academically able girls abandoned his subject after 3rd year. A group of us celebrated his 90th birthday. He was able to recall the names of all the girls he had ever taught together with information about their families.
Mr Bogie taught Physics. He had a coterie of adherents who would gather in his Lab before Prayers. Nowadays this might be frowned upon.
Having men teachers was a great benefit. An all female establishment has its drawbacks.
School exchange with Lycee Camille See in Paris
Without doubt this was one of the great experiences of my time at GWLC. In 1954 about 20 of us went for a month to Paris, staying with a French family while our counterpart was with our family in Edinburgh. Few of us had ever left the UK. France seemed impossibly glamorous and excitingly different. The smell when we got off the ferry at Dieppe: Gauloise cigarettes and garlic:the cafe-au-lait and baguettes for breakfast: the school where teachers did not deal with discipline but left it to the Superintendents: the cheese with actual cheese mites wriggling in it (No, I did not eat it): the Whitsunday celebrations where a statue of the Virgin Mary was carried round the streets scandalizing my Presbyterian upbringing: the Louvre where you could inspect the Mona Lisa close up .All of it life enhancing. The great benefit was of course, total immersion in French. Our understanding and spoken French improved exponentially and proved to be of use during many subsequent holidays in France. Do they still have the John Reid prize for oral French which I won in 6th year?
Life after School
In the 1950s, long before Higher Education expanded, the majority of pupils left school at the legal age, 15. It was not until 1972 that it was raised to 16. At GWLC, more girls stayed on at school beyond 15, but our 6th year in 1954/5 still numbered only 20. 19 of us went directly to Edinburgh University. No question of choosing another university. University fees did not exist but grants for maintenance were limited and there was no incentive to move away from home. As long as you had an “Attestation of Fitness” a university had to accept you. For an Attestation you needed 3 passes at Higher level and 2 passes at Lower level. There were no National exams at 4th year, only 2 levels in 5th and 6th year. No Advanced Higher, no grades A, B or C, only pass or fail.
Remember, in the 1950s the average of marriage for women was 20. Usually children followed soon after and there being few childcare facilities, most women gave up work and did not go back. Few households had many labour saving devices: no washing machines, vacuum cleaners, refrigerators, so that running a house was much more time-consuming. So, most girls who left school at 15/16 worked for only a relatively short number of years. Office work, following a secretarial course was a common career choice for those who did not sit the Leaving Certificate in 5th year. Nursing was also a common career path. Girls wanting to be primary teachers did not need a university degree as now, but went to Morag House Training College
I have no recollection of receiving any careers advice. Apart from those who went on to study medicine, the majority of girls in my class who went to university became teachers, usually in secondary schools. The Civil Service was also a career possibility but opportunities in business and the law and the media were yet to become as open to women as they are today.
I did an Honours degree in History unlike most of my peers who did an Ordinary degree. A look at the graduation lists from the period shows that by far the majority of Scottish students took an Ordinary degree which was considered to provide a wide knowledge across arts and sciences. Every Ordinary graduate had to have studied both. I was not typical in my class group, by studying for an Honours degree.
I became a History teacher. I was offered a trainee buyers job in Harrods Department Store in London but it paid only £450.00 a year whereas a teacher’s starting salary was £680.00. And, that year, 1960 was the year that men and women teachers received equal pay and my salary went up to £750.00.
I married in 1961 and left teaching in 1964 for 9 years while I had 3 children. I returned to teaching in Glasgow where we live and in 1978 became Principal Teacher of History in Hillhead High. How different teaching History had become! At first Banda sheets enabled us to provide written notes, and then gestetner skins. By the 1980s photo-copying had arrived and it transformed our work as teachers. At the same time it became much easier and more demanding. I remember my notes when I was doing Higher History at school (you could only do Higher History in 6th year). The Rise of Brandenburg Prussia took up all of 5 lines in my notebook. The rest you provided yourself. Today's students expect much, much more.
Current Affairs
Little was said about current affairs. History at GWLC in my time stopped after the Napoleonic Wars. I was keen to learn about WWII but that was too recent. Even WWI was considered too recent. Mind you they seem to have been going on about it ever since!
One event I do remember is the result of the General Election of 1951. A board was put up in the Central Hall beside the lectern and the results were posted as they came in from the constituencies on the day after the election. There was the assumption that a Conservative win was to be desired and that is what the result was. At 13 I had no idea of the issues involved but the fact that Churchill was again P M was, I thought then, a good thing.
Olive Spicer née Lyle (Class of 1955)