An abridged extract from a memoir yet to be named

Me, Shirley Bassey and our school

By Susan Merrell

To say that Splott School [where I was to attend for my first two years of secondary school] was a school with a bad reputation is an understatement.

Before two years prior, when the ‘eleven plus’ exam was abolished, it was a school that the pupils who failed the exam attended. So, regardless of the quality of these schools there was already a stigma attached. If you then add a large dose of abject poverty, of which there was much in Cardiff South, then the mix became volatile.

Under the new system, introduced a year before I completed primary school, all students fresh from finishing primary school were required to attend here for two years prior to the more academically inclined going off to the more prestigious Grammar Schools in their third year.

As such, most of the students who were attending Splott School (other than the first two forms – and even some of them) were there under sufferance – biding time until they could leave (at 15) and start earning money. For many, that would have been urgent.

In the meantime, juvenile delinquency was rife and corporal punishment was used liberally to maintain control. Knife fights were common in the playground – and that was just the girls.

The school had always been segregated by gender and it still was except for the two new forms. So, even though the school was one building, the only access from the boys’ end to the girls’ was through the separate playgrounds through an archway in a high brick wall.

The school occupied a large Victorian stone building – dark and foreboding. Built in 1882, it was very Dickensian in character. The building was two storey (maybe three in parts?) and it had soaring ceilings, especially on the ground floor (maybe even 16 foot in height). The windows were also large and high. The layout of the rooms resembled a rabbit warren and finding your way around was no mean feat.

The heating system was ancient, and some classrooms still had open fireplaces (which were not still in use). Form 1 and Form 2, used parts of the whole of the school for their lessons: the boys’ and the girls’ parts and even the old, now redundant infants’ section (ie the part they used for five to seven year olds.)

Our teachers were also taken from both the boys’ and the girls’ school – depending on the subject. The school administration was very nervous of females, whether it be pupils or teachers, venturing into the boys’ domain and when our (mixed) class was using a classroom in the boys’ building we were always escorted by a male member of staff, ditto the female teachers – yes, it was that bad.

Police refused to go onto the boys’ campus alone and the male teachers were the ones usually left to break up knife fights (at least a weekly occurrence). The older boys were routinely searched when they entered the school.

On the internal wall of the school there was graffiti galore but knowing that the new school in Tremorfa [the next suburb] was due to open the next year and that the school would be demolished, only absolutely essential repairs were done, so there it remained for all to read and we were left to puzzle over just how much JD loved BH and whether it had lasted.

Yet, as I write of the reality that was Splott School, I get a lump in my throat. I loved my time there. I loved everything about it. I loved that my commute to school had halved – the school being just over the railway bridge from where I’d previously caught the bus to Moorland. What’s more, Splott School had personality galore and the atmosphere within its walls was charged with the vitality of all that had gone before. History oozed from it. Little did I know, that, as one of the last pupils to attend, I would become part of that history.

There is little information available on the internet on Splotlands Secondary Modern [its full name]. It gets most mentions in articles about Shirley Bassey’s attendance there, but apart from that, while it does not exactly get a google whack (ie no mentions at all) the mentions are decidedly scant and the school is largely forgotten.

I guess, if it was a stigma to attend a Secondary Modern School, to have attended Splott School would be considered scraping the bottom of the barrel and I cannot imagine that many would display it proudly on their Curriculum Vitae.

Teachers pet, netball and ceiling lard

Notwithstanding the stigma of Splott School, the teachers that taught there were anything but the worse of their kind, in fact, the opposite. In the main, they were committed to their work and performed their duties enthusiastically.

I had a special affinity with my first-form teacher Brian Nelson, who was a maths teacher in a context where trying to teach maths to some of the children in that school would have been a thankless and almost impossible task. He was in his mid-twenties at the time and was one of those teachers who’d willingly step in to sort out any violence happening on the playground and the boys respected him for that.

His first language was Welsh, and he hailed from the Swansea area of south Wales, as so many teachers at Splott School who were also Welsh speaking did. By and large, they were Welsh Nationalists and I credit them with my political awakening.

There’s no doubt, I was the teacher’s pet in first form. I can’t remember how it became obvious, but it was accepted both by my classmates and by other teachers. And while my classmates showed no resentment, that can’t be said of some of the other teachers. On more than one occasion a teacher would to say to me, 

“…and don’t think Mr Nelson will be able to get you out of this,” while chastising me for a wrongdoing.

Our sport mistress, Mrs Hillier, was another powerhouse. She was about four foot ten inches tall and perfectly proportioned. She had a deep, gravelly voice that was a surprise in one so petite – and nobody messed with her – including the boys.

She would traverse the boys’ yard confidently and the boys would part to let her through – she was formidable. Yet she was also so very nice – easy to talk to and understanding. If you had a problem, it was to her you’d speak and there was many a time when you’d see her with her arm around a crying girl, comforting her.

Mrs Hillier’s game was netball – and she took the school to a position where there was Splott School, acres of space, and then the rest of them in the interschool competition. We were unbeatable at all levels. In winter, we played netball – all of us girls – and she trained even the worst of us as enthusiastically as she trained the elite players.

Two of her non-negotiable rules of netball were firstly, that you never pass the ball backward and, secondly, if you are within the goal circle, you shoot for goal no matter how far you are from the goal ring. To pass backward she considered counter-productive and deemed it to be a failure on behalf of one’s teammates to be available for the forward pass – intolerable! To pass within the goal circle meant an opportunity lost as far as she was concerned. The opponent could intercept the ball before any attempt had even been made to score a goal. So, if you had the ball inside the circle, you shoot for goal and she expected her shooters to be able to put the ball into the goal ring from anywhere in that circle.

And so, the most stigmatised of all schools – possibly in the whole of Wales — kicked the asses of all those elite and privileged private and grammar schools. 

I often watch international matches on the television where passing the ball backward and passing it in the goal ring is habitual and imagine Mrs. Hillier’s reaction. All of those players would have got a right bollocking.

As for the other teachers, it is often said, jokingly, that Wales has only got five surnames and when, in my Ph.D thesis, I had cause to mention five Thomas’ in the same sentence – Dylan, R.S, Gwyn, M. Wynn and Ned, I was prepared to believe it. In Splott there was similar: we had multiple Thomas’, Evans’ and Rees’ (three of the five of those surnames, at a guess). We had four (maybe five) Rees: there was old Mr. Rees, young Mr. Rees, Mr. Norman Rees (or was he an Evans?), Miss Rees and Mrs Rees – the other names came in multiples of less than five but enough to cause confusion. We children took full advantage of the confusion to create as much havoc as possible.

But as far as mischief was concerned, the very epitome took place in the domestic science room and I remain in absolute awe of the mischief maker.

Domestic Science was a new subject to us who’d been newly promoted from junior school and it was a subject only taken by the girls, the boys took wood or metal work instead – a sign of these sexist times.

Surprisingly, the kitchens of the domestic science rooms were very well equipped with lots of appliances and bench space per person. The room was large, and the ceilings were very high – one of the aforementioned 16-foot ceilings.

On those ceilings, hanging, but firmly attached, were large slabs of shortening: butter, lard and margarine. These had been there from the get-go: from the time we’d first entered the class and were still firmly attached at the end of the year. How long had they been there, who’d put them there and why? I imagine someone had thrown them up there. How else? But when and why?

Now, had this been in Australia, the shortening would have melted within days and fallen from the ceiling, but not here, in Wales. I marvelled at how strong the arm of a person throwing these up there must have been to achieve such a strong bond in a ceiling so high.

It was clearly the result of mischief – I don’t think any architect has contemplated attaching slabs of butter to the ceiling as a design feature and I was thinking what fun it would be to add some more and was mentally organising a competition amongst the class when the teacher noticed me looking at the ceiling.

“Ah yes,” she said, “you’ve noticed.”

I nodded in reply. She went on:

“Many years ago now, a particularly disturbed girl, who was wrong in the head, did that. She threw it up there. They put her away in a mental hospital.” Boy was I pleased she’d told me that before I’d organised the second shortening-on-the-ceiling throwing competition circa 1966/67 or I may be writing this from the Cardiff Institute for the Wrong in the Head.

One of our rugby teams – in the early 1960s – a few years before my time. They don’t look too fierce there.

Shirley Bassey preceded me at both the same primary school and secondary school too. Here she is at Moorland Road Primary, Cardiff – a few years before me.

The legendary (Dame) Shirley Bassey – on stage in all her magnificence.