Steve Brazier
I am sometimes asked if I attended Wolverhampton Grammar School. "No"' I reply, "that's a boys' school - I was luckier - I went to a co-ed." In my view, mixed schools provide the most essential socialising ingredient of a good education. Like most junior schools, Graiseley Primary was also co-educational but at that age, girls seemed less appealing. Among the embarrassments was having to hold girls' hands in country-dance classes. I was only the reserve in the school team because then as now, I had two left feet. What I lacked in ability was made up by enthusiasm and I occasionally danced in inter-school competitions.
When the letter arrived on Saturday morning in July 1958 to say that I had a place at the Municipal Grammar School, my bewilderment (I had expected to follow my brother to the boys' Grammar School) was tempered by the fact that I had at least visited the school a few months earlier when the WMGS hall was the venue for a country dance competition.
I recall no country dancing team at the Muni. However, while games periods in wet or icy weather were usually spent playing "Shipwreck" in the gym (great fun except for the time I fainted), as Christmas approached, the boys and girls were told to put on pumps and assemble there to be drilled in dancing. The waltz with its ¾ time particularly confused me and to this day, I just cannot maintain the two forward and one sideways sequence for more than ten seconds.
Once more I had to deal with holding clammy hands and mutually distasteful proximity to girls. As I got older, distaste gave way to a wish to impress and soon, holding a girl's hand while not dancing became a seemingly unattainable goal.
For several years, Christmas parties at the Muni had only this kind of sub-ballroom dancing, with games and jelly. But by 1963, with the Beatles et al. ruling the airwaves, enlightened school management allowed us to have pop music and cavort around as if we were on Top of the Pops.
The Twist had probably caused the breakthrough with "Let's Twist Again" being one of the biggest hits of 1962. I always found it a ludicrous dance but at least everybody could have a go. And 1962, when I was 15, was my introduction to party-going and all the excitement that meant.
That was the winter of the Big Freeze. In February a group of classmates attended a Valentine's dance at the boys' Grammar. As usual, the music was provided by a feeble Dansette record player. But as we knew of nothing else, it was quite adequate. Our WMGS contingent consisted of both boys and girls - mixing socially was a healthy commonplace. I was electrified by the Beatles second single "Please Please Me" which had just reached No.2. Helen Watkin patiently showed me how to jive, though I was not a fast learner.
I realised that this was a way of actively participating in the music rather than passively listening to it. It was also an ideal way to meet girls. Richard Cliff and I began to meet in town on Saturday evenings, buy five Craven A and go to the Dance held at Wolverhampton Tech. Again, the music was from a small record player and the drinks were non-alcoholic. Developing chat-up lines and coping with rejection provided basic training for the next few years attempts to acquire a girl friend. There was a lot more to a grammar school education than "O" levels.
At the school's Christmas party in 1964, the Kinks' "You Really Got Me" caused a mild scandal as Ray Davies seemed to shout something slightly obscene as he introduced his brother Dave's manic guitar solo. During most of the evening as we jived, twisted and gyrated in the dimly lit hall, Miss Mountain prowled around the balcony, scowling disapprovingly and occasionally peering pointedly over the handrail at anyone who got too enthusiastic. She was powerless to re-establish any sort of decorum. To many of us, it was a taste of rebellion. To this day, whenever the Muppets Show's Sam the Eagle appears on TV bemoaning society's moral decline, the memory returns.
I scraped together the annual membership fee for the Milano coffee bar, opposite Darlington Street Methodist Church and attended dances at the weekend in the small steamy cellar. Tuesday evenings saw four or five of us at the (then glamorous) New Market Hall on School Street. Here alcohol was available. Like the Milano, it had live bands. Some of them were very good (do you remember "The Atoms" ?). I was enormously impressed. Such exciting music did not have to come out of a radio set. I acquired my first guitar from Eric Pullen's brother for 4. I recently wrote to Eric after his piece in this Newsletter to thank him for his role in my musical awakening. He wrote back and asked if I had paid him yet.
We went to see touring packages of singers and bands (then known as beat "groups"). Many subsequently became legends. I recall sitting next to Bob Baldwin at Cannock Danilo. He was besotted with Dusty Springfield and impatiently barracked every act preceding her, prompting Helen Shapiro to turn her back on the audience in disgust as he bellowed an ironic suggestion that she sing "Old Man River".
Girls in our class were helpful in getting tickets, happy to manifest their adulation of the bands by queuing for hours. That is how I got Beatles and Stones tickets. I was on the fourth row for the Beatles at the Gaumont but heard nothing for the screaming. I sold the Stones ticket, which I now very much regret. It was another twenty years before I saw them live and by then the magic had gone.
By the time I got to university, I had no inhibitions with approaching girls on the dance-floor and trying to hold conversations over the music, which by then had become much louder. Nowadays the nurse at my medical centre blames this when her ear-syringe fails to meet my expectations.
I went to college dances about twice a week. The excitement of getting ready, not knowing who you would meet or what parties you would go on to afterwards was extraordinary. If I could not afford a ticket to the dance, eavesdropping in the college bar, the London A-Z an Underground pass to hand on Saturday evening produced party action in obscure parts of north London. Without fail, I would find myself either on the last tube or walking in the small hours through the suburban maze back to my digs. One incident did not worry me as much as it would today. In a deserted street in Chalk Farm on one of these 2 o'clock route marches a police car stopped, four dishevelled policemen jumped out and pushed me against a wall. I had no identification (precaution against being mugged) but managed to talk myself out of the situation. They did not offer me a lift home.
Chatting up at student dances in London could be hard work. The girls always detected my accent, even over the noise. I would explain where Wolverhampton was to bemused stares, British geography is a mystery to most people but Londoners in those days seemed, well, worse. For example, living in Fulham, my three flat-mates and I got to know the lady at the till in our local Spar mini-market. "Where you from then ?" she once asked us. "One of us is from Wolverhampton, one from York, one from Darlington and one from Cardiff" we explained. "Oh" she said "I was up your way in the War". "Where ?" we asked. "Manchester" she replied.
The heady atmosphere of parties and dances, the excitement of meeting girls, the uncertainty of the evening's outcome all produced a mesmerising cocktail of heightened emotions. Study the lyrics of "Some Enchanted Evening" or "The Way you Look Tonight" for instance. Co-education had certainly given me a balanced attitude to the opposite sex during daylight hours but with or without alcohol, a darkened noise-filled dance or party could conjure up an unrealistic, romantic optimism.
I met my first wife at one of these gate-crashed parties. A mutual friend introduced her to me as "the most beautiful girl in the world" to which I responded "She looks an ugly bugger to me". Not my finest moment. So much for my years of training in repartee. During a feisty courtship she would retaliate by goading me for being too short and not as good looking as Trevor Brooking who played for West Ham. She was a Londoner. Sixteen tempestuous years later she left me for a maths teacher who looked a bit like ... Trevor Brooking. Too late I realised that heady romanticism and chance encounters are no basis for long-term happiness.
I did not meet Carol, my second wife, at a dance. We only formed a relationship after several years of working together. She is a Londoner too but knows exactly where Wolverhampton is. Although she had never seen the Wolves play, she supported them because at 14 she fell in love with Ron Flowers and wrote to him to tell him so. He never replied. Perhaps she saw me as a poor substitute. I still knew how to impress a girl and took her to Molineux on one of our first dates.
She takes the credit for my finest dancing achievement. After we had been married for ten years, I confessed that I had always wanted to learn to jive. I had failed thirty years before but it might be time to try again. We went to dance classes and can now attend Sixties Revival nights and pass unnoticed among the other retired people re-living their youth.
At a WMGS reunion in 1998 I told Helen Watkin how grateful I was for the ambition she had instilled in me but she looked blank. Clearly she had forgotten the incident. Me too perhaps.
Stephen Brazier (1958-1965)
Published in WMGS OPA Newsletter Spring 2013