CONTENTS:

Introduction | In the Beginning... | Fleetwood | Cleethorpes | Wilson Street Days  
Elliston Street Secondary Modern School | A Pop Career? | Marjorie Elizabeth Robinson | Our First House

Elliston Street Secondary Modern School

I attended the Elliston Street Secondary Modern School, Cleethorpes, from 1960 to 1964 and have mixed feelings about the school. The building was an early 20^th century brick monstrosity and the teachers were mainly ancient and from the 'old' school of teaching. One of them taught my dad! Names I remember are, Mr Cockerill (Headmaster), Mr Rawson (History), Mr Woodlife (Geography), Mrs Hill (Biology), Mr Hotchkin, Mr Birtles. Corporal punishment was not unusual and it seemed that if you did anything which could be called spontaneous or the result was you were caned. On the whole, getting the cane was painful and it instilled a certain respect or perhaps more accurately a regard for what the teachers were capable of. One new (and young!) teacher was Mr Pete Barker (PE) who was refreshingly modern but not of the 'call me Pete' brigade. I quite liked him and met him again later in life when he became a local councillor for the Gilbey Ward of Grimsby and I was working as a Town Planner for the Council. Peter is now retired from teaching but is still an active Councillor for North East Lincolnshire Council.

Strangely, looking back, the school did not offer any kind of final examination or qualification for its pupils whatsoever -not for us were the rigours of 'O' or 'A' level studies, though we did have end of year exams to see if we'd learned anything. 'O' and 'A' levels were the exclusive province of the grammar schools though contemporaries have said that they got 'O' levels at secondary schools. Perhaps no-one had told Elliston Street that there were such things! The 11 Plus Exam had passed me by when I was in Fleetwood as the Lancashire Education Authority had tried a form of assessment experiment instead of the11 Plus exam and I was obviously not assessed highly enough for grammar school. I'm sure the assessors just took the kids with names beginning A-E. Still, I wasn't particularly academic at the time and having just seen the film "A Hard Days Night" my prime goal in my last year at school was to be in a pop group like the Beatles!