Onto the promotion ladder

In the previous installment, (Chapter 4: Graduation, Separation, Consolidation.), I recounted my university days and my skirmishes with the British Armed Forces.

When I started teaching in 1952, I actually taught history for the first two or three years. My first job was at Linskill High School (it was called Linskill Second Modern school at the time). I came to realise that I was much more interested in English literature and as both had been part of my degree there was no difficulty in switching. The head was perfectly happy for me to do that and so for a lot of my career I taught English.

Much of it was English Literature which I found quite time consuming. In the early days we could choose the books ourselves. The boys liked a lot of different things (for instance HG Wells, "War of the Worlds") even if the vocabulary was difficult and they didn't mind a bit of poetry as long as it was an epic such as "Charge Of The Light Brigade". By the time we reached O-Level though, we had a certain number of set course books like "Pride and Prejudice" which we had to get through within two years. I enjoyed teaching Shakespeare, and Julius Caesar was a great favourite with the kids.

At the beginning I was earning about £25 a month and while Irene was teaching she was on about the same. Things worked out pretty well for us but as we were very organised people we decided that we would not have a family until we had a house with a garden for the children to play in, we had paid for all our furniture and every room was furnished. The day eventually came when Irene said she thought that now was the time to start having a family. She reasoned that children born in the spring have the whole of the summer and autumn to get themselves well established in good weather and it was better than having them in December just before several months of terrible weather. So I said: "Right ho!, that's fine then ... we'll do that." I aimed to be towards the end of the tax year, because then you got a whole year's tax allowance back. So Mike, our first born, was born on March 30th. When Irene suggested that we should have some more kids, I said (and I know this might sound improbable) "Well look, we should have two anyway because they'd be mates with each other." Again we decided that we should have the baby in the Spring and sure enough Andy, our second, was born on April 1st. The boys always got on very well together and he didn't mind having his birthday on April 1st as he's not a sensitive lad.

We had become established. Our social life was always a strong point. We had dozens of friends from the church and the youth club that had we belonged to and Irene had a large circle of friends because she had lived in North Shields all her life. We had a very full time.

Life at school was very busy and time consuming. I ran a school football team every Saturday morning. I organised a club for people who were interested in theatre. We put on plays and various other activities which was a very successful business, although I was a terrible producer! Nevertheless, one of my boys in that group went on to become the producer and director of the Benny Hill Show, so I must have had some effect on him. For five years I was the secretary of the Teachers Union and then for two years I was twice its Chairman. With all this going on I was hardly ever home. Irene was Secretary of the Town Choir, organising concerts and events. We were also in the Church Choir and involved with the Sunday School. I must have been out five nights a week and it was sometimes difficult to find an evening that we could spend in the house together. I don't think the kids even saw me at Christmas for three years.

Help from Uncle Ozzie

When my father died very suddenly in 1955 the Tyne Commissioners told mother she would have to find another house because it was needed for whoever was taking up father's job. Harry was away living in Sheffield, Peter was in the Army and Brian was too young to do very much about it so my mother and I decided to see if we could find somewhere. I went to various estate agents and found an upstairs flat which mother thought particularly good. The stairs were a bit of a hazard but at least Brian was able to have a room to himself where he could keep his arts materials. Mother had very little money saved up so I visited my father's brother Joseph (Uncle Ozzie). He was reputed to be quite well off. He had been a Prisoner of War for the duration and when he came back from the war he had been given a very good pay out by the oil company that he worked for.

My father had paid for Ozzie's insurance premiums right through the war. Our family was never one to discuss money and so it was never repaid. I told Uncle Ozzie that we wanted to get this house but we needed a couple of hundred pounds as a deposit. I suggested that if he would lend it to us, we three boys would pay the mortgage between us. He agreed without turning a hair. Mother and Irene set to and for about six weeks they worked on the house, cleaning and decorating. I managed to go down in the evenings and weekends to see to the carpets and painting. Anyway that was the house she went into and Harry, Peter and I paid the £2.50 a week each, which was tough because we had all mortgages of our own.

Uncle Ozzie was quite old when he got married. She was a nice lass but she got cancer and she died. After that he went to live with his sister's family in South Shields. During the 1960s, they moved up to Scotland where they opened a hotel on the Fair Isles. I think Harry and Dorothy stayed with them a couple of times. Ozzie never really got over his POW experiences and he used to have nightmares about the camp. Towards the end he suffered from terrible hallucinations, believing the nurses were Japanese guards.

Harry comes ashore

Harry left the sea because he wanted to be with his family. They had two children. He started off working as a boiler inspector in industrial plants. Then he got a job with the Electricity Board examining the safety and efficiency in power stations. He would have to go around deciding when a place was to be closed down and a lot of his time was spent travelling many miles by car from one of these places to another. They went down to Sheffield to begin with and I think they were there for four or five years. Then they moved up to Guisborough in North Yorkshire and they were there for a few more years. They spent a short time in the Tyne Valley before they finally came into Whitley Bay. Harry very sensibly played the game so far as property was concerned and changed his house two or three times and ended up with a very nice place.

Peter and the Queen

Unfortunately Peter would not acknowledge that he was ill. When he was 18 he had a severe pain in his chest. He saw his family doctor who put him to bed for a month. After that he was allowed out but I think he still had occasional twinges. When he was called up he had to go for a medical. The Army Medic was not happy at the time and asked Peter whether he really wanted to be in the Army. (I mean which person in their right mind says "Yes!") But Peter did say yes. He didn't say no! because he thought that if he declined he would be ruled unfit with permanent heart trouble. This could have been something which would have affected the whole of his working life. So he said, "I don't mind" and found himself in the Royal Army Service Corps.

As he was a Marine Engineer by trade his first job involved taking a small ammunition boat from Southampton to somewhere in France. For several months, with a crew of four, they would load up, cross the Channel, unload and then repeat the process. According to Peter on one trip they saw this huge ship (probably the Queen Elizabeth) going out and he had never been that close to such a vessel. He took a little boat out and they went round the ship several times. Peter said: "The people were very nice, they were all waving to us from the decks!". Sometime later the Commander received a furious letter from the Company saying that they had been held up and had missed the tide because of this damn boat. Peter was taken off that job and he was sent to the big Army base at Osnebruck in Germany. They had a depot full of millions of pounds worth of war time military equipment, most of which had never been used. Peter was Chief Storeman serving under several officers. When people wanted something they had to go to Peter. He had been told: "You just sign for it, Peter." All the time he was there he kept on signing these chits for huge machinery and then the stuff was disappearing. He never saw it again. Peter said all it needed was for some regimental bloke to take over and want to know where everything was and he would have been right in the mire.

Peter was asked several times whether he would like a Corporal's stripe but he always refused. It would have given him an extra couple of pounds a week and could have used the Corporal's mess and bar. He had no sense of self advancement. In the end he had an interview with his Commanding Officer who told him: "Simpson, I have been commanded by the War Office to encourage special servicemen to stay on in the Army, but in your case I am making an exception". With that Peter took a train down to Calais and got the boat back to England

Continued in column 2...

Marden

I mentioned previously that Peter hated the years of his apprenticeship. He also became very disillusioned with his job designing desalination plants. Even so, he had a very good salary and bought a rather larger house than ours on the same estate. This would have been in 1954 when he was about 24 years old and he had married Lilian.

I remember that he came over one evening to ask me about going into teaching. He qualified at Huddersfield College and went on to teach Maths, Technical Drawing and metalwork skills. He was appointed to Marden High School in North Shields. He was a good teacher but he wasn't ambitious. He did not apply for promotions and just got on with the job in a quiet conscientious sort of way.

During most of his time as a teacher his heart condition didn't affect him too badly. Around the age of 50 he started to have trouble for which he was prescribed tablets. Once again he would never tell his doctor what was really happening. He would say: "Oh I'm great, doctor. I walk along the sea front about 3 or 4 times a week. I've been out on the Cheviots with my brother".

I guess if he had been sent for tests then, the level of his problem would have been discovered. As it was, the first time he was examined he was sent for an angiogram the following week. He never made it. A group of us, including Peter, and our wives used to go for regular walks which would finish with a tremendous lunch and bags to drink. On that Tuesday, we went out as usual but I noticed that Peter was very quiet although he seemed to be enjoying it. He put his hand over his glass when another drink was offered. I said cheerio to Peter around 5 o'clock that evening when they were going home. At about 11 o'clock Lilian phoned me and asked if I could go across. Peter was really ill and that she'd sent for an ambulance. He was in the bedroom and he looked really, really terrible. I took his hand and he said to me: "Don, I'm not going to get out of this". I saw the lights flicking through the curtains as the ambulance arrived. I told him not to give up and that I would open the door to let them in. They spent half an hour trying to revive him. He was taken in the ambulance but he was gone very soon after he arrived at the hospital.

Brian

Brian was of pretty average ability at school but he was unfortunate that my father died very suddenly when he was taking his school certificate. It was a terrible winter that year and Irene and mother took weeks and weeks and weeks to decorate the house. Brian only got Art at school certificate. He didn't get enough A levels to go University but he did have the basic qualifications to get into training college and he trained as a primary school teacher.

He was very artistic and consequently he decided he would make use of this skill and teach Art which he did throughout his life. He married Jennifer who was also a teacher. He was quite ambitious and became Headmaster of a little school out in the sticks; Kielder Forest way. However he soon discovered that the Head of the school had to live in the school house and they put up with that for a couple of years doing a lot of work on the house. They also realised that it was all very well having a school house with a small rent but the price of property was soaring and unless they got on the ladder quickly it wouldn't be any good in the long run.

So Brian turned in his Headship (which was an action nobody in authority ever forgives you for doing) and took an ordinary teaching job in Haltwhistle in Northumberland, a job which he had for the remainder of his career. He also had a supervisory job which was linked with a sort of young people's activities. He used to go round in his car, during the winter at night, and check on the various schools within his catchment area where evening classes and youth clubs were being run. He had to check that the teachers were turning up and that the number of pupils justified the work. Jennifer was also in teaching and she became Headmistress of her school further down the Tyne. They lived in Corbridge and Brian drove from there everyday. I think he had Thursdays free from school to compensate for the evenings that he put in.

Into retirement

It was a long time coming before I got fed up with the magnitude of it all and I decided that something had to go. Ironically, it was Irene's father, Stanley Georgeson, who helped make the decision. Years before, I had sold him a ticket for the "rag day" at University and they won. It was a ticket for a holiday in France, Switzerland and Italy worth (in those days) £80 for him and £80 for his wife. As it happened, the following year the student who sold the winning ticket was given £100 but not that year as they hadn't brought that rule in. Anyway Stan was a very nice bloke and remembered this. One morning Stan said "You will be coming along Saturday morning with the kids won't you? I want to buy myself a TV set, so will you come down to the shop and maybe give me your opinion". So we all went down and Stan picked an elaborate one with dozens of buttons which cost about ninety pounds. Then he turned round to me and said: "Now you pick one". I could have fallen on the ground!!! I wasn't greedy, so I picked a very nice one around about fifty pounds. An aerial was put up and they came and installed it and suddenly I became less interested in doing all these evening activities!!! Many of them were handed over to other people and I also passed on the Saturday morning football team. I'd done it for 10 years and I thought that was quite enough.

In 1960 or 1961 I got a job at the Grammar Tech (Tynemouth Technical College) where I had somewhat more marking to do so I couldn't get involved with the plays and things like that. I was there for eight years. After that I went back to my first school as Deputy Head and became the Head four years later and I was head for about 15 years.

I think most people go into education, and certainly I did, because of the teaching and I can say with absolute honesty that I had enjoyed the contact with the children. The job of a head teacher is very different. There is the man management of the staff, the budgets, the criticism, the parents who came in for some reason or other or were not happy their children are being bullied and we very seldom got time for anything else. The high point of my career was teaching O level English at the big Grammar Tech. I didn't enjoy all these others things which got on my nerves in the end. You could only get a relatively generous salary in education if you got as far as a Headship.

Then in 1983 the local Education Committee decided that they were going to have to close one of the schools in my area because the number of children had fallen so badly because people just weren't having families. When I started at the school we had 1,000 pupils and this went right down to 400. They decided that the school had to be amalgamated with two others and that would save all the staff and heating. So they asked me if I wanted another school.

Irene had been suffering from heart trouble for some time before this and she had already been sent away for a variety of tests. At one point, her doctor told her that her condition was such that she could not go back to school. All she did was go and pick up her personal belongings. He agreed to her having the customary farewell tea, where they all turned up to tell her what a good girl she had been and then she was gone. She was getting more and more angina, especially after every meal. She went up for an angiogram. After the test she was not allowed to go home and was taken in "to be fixed up" within the next fortnight.

I told the Education Committee that my wife had retired the previous year with heart trouble and that I was quite anxious to keep her company. They said: "Well, we'll come to an agreement because actually we have to give you a job. It's just one of the rules of North Tyneside, nobody has to be chucked out. So if we give you half pay plus so many percent and we give you a lump sum with two years salary and so on and so forth then would you accept that?" I told them to put it down in writing. I had a word with the union people and they said it seemed a very fair offer, so that was it. I was only 55.

Irene was OK after that and she decided to do an Open University degree. It took her about eight years but she thoroughly enjoyed the study. She was always going off to Summer Schools in Sterling, Manchester or somewhere like that. She was one of the first people to get an Honours Degree. However, a week before the graduation ceremony at the Newcastle City Hall her doctors wouldn’t let her go on the stage for the degree presentation. They thought it would be too much for her. After all that time she felt rather let down by that.

The last of the few

So, my three brothers are gone, and none of them were very old when they died. Apart from Peter, we have all been troubled with cancer. Harry had it in the colon and died in January 1991. Brian developed prostate cancer and died some five years later. Peter was the last in 1997.

I have exceeded all that by having prostate, liver, kidney and lung tumours and I haven't finished yet!! There was an interesting article in the Daily Mail recently (I don't normally read that newspaper) by this doctor who's got some form of rare cancer in one lung. The symptoms he described are exactly what I've got: exhaustion, difficulty breathing and so on and so forth. He went on to say that 80% of people who are diagnosed with this die within a year and then after to that, 20% get 3 years.

So I thought that's a good bit of news, I think I've got a year!!! So that's about it ....

Footnote

Donald Simpson died peacefully on August 16th 2007, barely two weeks after completing his recollections for this article.

References

1. Benny Hill: BBC Guide to Comedy: The Benny Hill Show.
2. Photograph of Tynemouth Technical College (1959) - now John Spence Community High School: "Images of England - Around North Shields: The Second Selection" - Tempus Publishing 2000

Please contact us

If you have any questions or comments about the information on this site in general, or you have further information regarding this article, please contact us at Alan. We look forward to hearing from you.

Page added: August 7th 2007
Last updated: March 24th 2012

Return to Top of Page