Ryhope Comprehensive School

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In this interview, we welcome SAFC Historian, author, broadcaster and ex-Ryhope School man –

Rob Mason.

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​It’s great to finally catch up with you Rob. Can we take you back to the beginning – the very beginning. You are part of the first-year intake at the newly formed Ryhope Comprehensive School in 1969 – what was your experience of life in Mr. Copland’s brave new world of progressive education – from a pupil’s perspective?

 

I loved it. It was the making of me and I consider myself exceptionally lucky to have been both a pupil and a teacher at Ryhope. I was born in Thomas Street which is barely 100 yards from the edge of what were then the school grounds. By the time I started as a pupil I’d moved to Esdale which was just as close, but at the top end of the school fields next to the pumping station. I went to Ryhope Juniors which I mostly enjoyed but I was bang average there. I once ran away from home when my mam found out I’d been put into the bottom stream within our class after I had a poor result in our weekly tests.

 

I was relieved not to have to take the 11 plus because I’m sure I would have failed it. I remember in the final term of the juniors attending a meeting at the ‘big school’ with my mam and dad. The newly appointed head teacher Mr. Copland was explaining what to expect when we started at the comprehensive school which was replacing the old Robert Richardson Grammar and Ryhope Secondary Modern. The most immediate impression was Mr. Copland’s voice which was high pitched and deemed effeminate by many in what was still a mining community. Ryhope pit had closed three years earlier and Silksworth Colliery would remain open until 1971.

 

When I arrived at Ryhope School, to start with we did have a uniform. I think it was just in my first year. As with all pupils transitioning from primary to secondary I had to get used to having different teachers for different lessons and also moving from one classroom to another between lessons, sometimes crossing the brand new bridge linking the North and South blocks. The start of the comprehensive school must have been a culture shock for many of the teachers. A few of the old Grammar school teachers were still wearing their black teaching gowns. My world entered a new phase when I got moved into Mrs. McColl’s class for English after my first term. More about her later.

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You mentioned a school project called The Young Volunteers – what did that entail?

 

It was Mr. Hughes the R.E. teacher. This was before he had his stall in Park Lane that earned him the nick-name ‘Hot-dog Hughsie’. Mr. Hughes set up a group of pupils called The Young Volunteers. The aim was to help old people and build bridges between the generations. It was a great idea and I volunteered immediately. Groups of two or three pupils would be assigned an elderly person to help. We would do jobs like keeping their gardens tidy, doing their shopping or keeping them company. I ended up doing the garden for an old lady who lived near St. Patrick’s School. Later I became Mr. Hughes’ assistant. I remember going around Hollycarrside with him after school knocking on old people’s doors, explaining who we were and asking if they would like Young Volunteers to come and help them.

 

Many years later when I was teaching I got a job at Southmoor where Mr Hughes was working. On my first day he took me out for a drink at lunchtime at the Alex in Grangetown. I’ve never been a big drinker but we must have had three or four pints that lunchtime and it didn’t help me create a good impression with the head and deputy heads on my first day!  Nonetheless I’ve got good memories of Bob Hughes and I hope other former pupils of his do too.

 

You’re a popular broadcaster now Rob (TV, Radio, Podcasts) – but it was in your school days that you gained broadcasting skills in being part of Radio Ryhope. Can you please share your memories of this venture? (sadly, our students of the 1980s missed out on this radio experience).

 

Ryhope School Broadcasts was the school’s internal radio station. It had been set up a couple of years before I got involved and I believe it was a teacher called Mr. Manchee who was largely responsible for it. When I started it was being run by a pupil called Dave Allan who taught me a lot although I never acquired his love of Demis Roussos or Earth, Wind and Fire, whose records he played frequently on the school radio. Ryhope School Broadcasts had the slogan (and jingle) ‘RSB is Good For Me.’  I’ve still got the seven inch single of the station’s identification tune, ‘Man of Action’ by the Les Reed Orchestra. That was the tune we played at the start and end of broadcasting each day. When Dave Allan left school I took over the running of the station and we had a number of people doing programmes such as Derek Harvey and my big mate Dave Lish who sadly passed away in 2009.

 

We used to broadcast from 8.00 a.m., at breaktimes and lunchtimes. Every classroom had a speaker in it. During lesson times we used to relay BBC broadcasts for schools so teachers could switch their classroom speakers on and let their class listen to those if they wished.

 

I used to present a lot of programmes. In particular on Tuesday lunchtimes I did an hour long programme called, ‘The Tuesday Connection’  The theme tune was a piece of music called ‘Classical Gas’ with a snatch of ‘King of the Rumbling Spires’ by Tyrannosaurus Rex and the commentary of Ian Porterfield’s goal in the 1973 cup final spliced into it. I imagine it would be what they would call ‘sampling’ now. ‘The Tuesday Connection’ was a magazine programme which would include music but also discussions of whatever was topical. I plead guilty as charged to making the school listen to exceptional amounts of Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Wishbone Ash and T-Rex. Dave Lish used to play a lot of The Beach Boys and Elton John, while Derek rarely failed to feature a short-lived band called ‘The Arrows.’

 

I ended up with a small part in Stardust. There was a character who was a DJ in a couple of scenes and I was the obvious person for the part as I was running the school radio station.

 

Rob, you have the unique ‘honour’ of having attended Ryhope as both a pupil and a member of the teaching staff. How did that happen and what were your experiences of being on the other side of the fence?

 

I was at the school as a pupil from 1969 to 1976. After my ‘A’ levels I went to Sheffield to train as a teacher for four years and then returned to Ryhope School as a teacher in 1980. I was chuffed to bits to get my first job, especially as I had just got married. The school were really pleased to have me because I think Mr. Copland saw it as a feather in the school’s cap to have a former pupil back as a teacher. Many of the teachers were people who had taught me, although there were some new faces.

 

I was trained as a teacher of English but I only had one class for English and found myself teaching about nine different subjects. I was grateful for the job, but on reflection I was thrown in at the deep end to have to teach so many subjects as an inexperienced teacher. Ironically the only class I had any trouble with was the one class  I had in my specialist subject. They were third years and getting them to shut up even for ten seconds was nigh on impossible. At first I thought it was me being useless but I learned that every teacher bar one was having a lot of trouble with them. The exception was Mrs Mair, a geography teacher. I looked through her windows when she was teaching them and this class were heads down with pens to paper. She told me her way of coping was to provide them with ridiculously easy worksheets that needed filling in and she wouldn’t let them go until the work was done. There was next to no educational merit in this but it got them to behave and so was a survival tactic.

 

I copied her style and there was a big improvement, but I was always so disappointed that all of the much more interesting lessons I had planned in my own subject could not get off the ground because the class would never listen at all. It was a real learning curve for me though because in all of my teaching career at various schools I never had a class that were anywhere near so difficult. The other classes I taught at Ryhope were not a problem but as a young teacher I learned a lot about how to cope. In that sense I did survive Ryhope School.

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Did this teaching experience have any adverse effects on your attitude towards Ryhope and Mr Copland or do you hold them both in high admiration?

 

As mentioned, I think it was a mistake to ask a teacher fresh out of college to take so many subjects and I should have had more support. Mr. Treweeke was a big help to me and there were many good teachers such as Mr. Sunderland (Great name) and Mr. Hepplewhite. I’m still in touch with Mr. Hepplewhite now. My very positive impression of Ryhope School was strengthened overall. Years later I went to Mr. Copland’s funeral. I always had a lot of respect for the courage he showed. Like him I became an active member of STOPP. This was the Society of Teachers Opposed to Physical Punishment as we successfully campaigned for the abolition of the cane.

 

Can you tell us more about that surreal time the teaching staff performed Black Comedy (a farce by Peter Shaffer) to the kids? (personally, I was not aware of this little gem).

 

While I was there teaching we had a great drama teacher called Bill Speed. He was an actor who did some TV work and later came to do some supply teaching for me when I was Head of English at a school in Durham.  Bill put on a farce called ‘Black Comedy.’ This was performed entirely by teachers and I had a role in it, although it’s so long ago now I can’t remember my character’s name. The idea of the play was that when the stage was lit the characters were meant to be in pitch black darkness and when it was dark on stage the actors were supposed to be able to see each other.

 

So, Rob, you went on to forge a successful career in teaching – who was your greatest mentor? And did the teaching philosophies at Ryhope put you in good stead to form your own teaching methods and practices?

 

My mentor not just for my teaching career but for life generally was my English teacher Mrs McColl. Outside of my mam and dad she had a bigger influence on me than anyone. Not only was she the best teacher I ever had she was the best teacher I ever saw in any school – and by a country mile.  Until I moved into Kath’s class when I was 11, English had been a boring subject. In the juniors all I remember is learning absolutely nothing from having to tackle mind numbingly boring exercises from a textbook about grammar. Once I was in Mrs. McColl’s class I couldn’t wait for my next English lesson. I’d have done English in every lesson if I could. Lessons were about talking, thinking and reading stories (and Mrs McColl always chose great stories). More than that, lessons were about filling you with belief that your opinions mattered and that in order to give strength to your opinions you had to know what you were talking about by learning things. I absolutely loved Mrs McColl and still do. I last spoke to her on the phone less than a month ago, well over 55 years since she first taught me. Mrs McColl taught me in five of my seven years at the school. I left my teaching job at Ryhope after four terms when a job came up at Oxclose School where Mrs McColl was head of English. I eventually became her second in department and later after becoming a head of department myself I worked for her again as a visiting lecturer when she moved into university education. I used to spend every Thursday late afternoon working with trainee teachers, trying to show them how to teach poetry in secondary schools. All I ever wanted to be as a teacher was to be a quarter as good as Mrs. McColl. I learned so much from her both as a pupil and as a colleague, but most of all as a friend. There were other really good teachers at Ryhope as well such as Mrs. McColl’s husband and a history teacher called Mr. Lloyd.

 

Of course the teaching philosophy at Ryhope hugely influenced how I was as a teacher. When I was training I had spells in three comprehensives in and around Sheffield. They were ‘normal’ schools and might as well have been on a different planet compared to Ryhope. They were nowhere near as good. Later when I was at Oxclose in Washington for much of the eighties the ethos was very much a continuation of Ryhope but in a modern building. There were a number of former Ryhope teachers such as Mrs McColl as head of English, Mr. Howe who was head of Maths and Mrs. Sandy who if I remember rightly was Head of Home Economics. To a considerable extent Oxclose carried on many of the good things that had been in evidence at Ryhope – but as we all know there was only one Ryhope School!

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