Yes, I was a Dux medallist at Liff Road Primary School. My achievement may
not have been as meritorious or as heroic as it sounds. I'll explain all about
that a little later. It is true I had been a high flyer throughout my primary
school years. In my last two years at Liff Road School my class was Primary 6a
and finally Primary 7a. Our class teacher was Miss Cameron. I was good at
mental arithmetic - always the first to put my hand up and click my fingers,
stand up and edge down the aisle between the desks to draw Miss Cameron's
attention to me when she posed mental arithmetic problems for us.
"What do 23 half crowns make in pounds, shillings and pence ?"
"Miss! Miss! £2 - 17s - 6d ! Miss."
For anyone born after the decimalisation of our currency
this was spoken as two pounds seventeen shillings and sixpence. I never found
out why the symbol for a penny was "d", but as you'll discover
I was not at that time very good with codes or symbols.
"If 3 oranges cost one shilling and threepence how much
would 7 oranges cost?"
"Miss ! Miss me, Miss, me Miss ! two shillings and eleven pence, Miss."
In numbers this was written as
2/11 and in common usage you'd say "two and eleven."
I not only made Miss Cameron aware of my prowess in mental
arithmetic. I always got full marks for spelling tests and I was excellent in
my grammar lessons and particularly at sentence analysis. For instance, I would
always spot a very useful truth like "this is a subordinate adverbial
clause of time qualifying the verb 'travelled' " as well as other such
exotic 'grammartalia'.
Keen as I was to impress Miss Cameron with all my work, I
was also a fidgeter and a whisperer and a sender out of love notes to girls.
Custom, and I think shyness, had it that these notes were never sent directly
to the object of one's romantic affection but were circulated around the
class so that others could inform her or him that she or he was loved by
the sender. My notes were like this....
and later
and also I sent notes out to spin the idea
that this love was mutual.
I drew in the heart to show that this was
a note that could only be written by a girl.
Thinking back about the punishments
we received, the teacher our class had before Miss Cameron, Miss
Gilchrist, who taught us in Primary 4 and 5 had a different
disciplinary method. I always remember Miss Gilchrist as being very old.
She was a stocky, quite powerfully built woman whose grey hair was always cut
short and she wore a wrap around Paisley pattern overall which was the uniform
of women of a certain age at that time when they came to do their domestic
chores. Her method of controlling the pupils in her class was singular. She
would put any of her pupils whom she thought recalcitrant face down and
fully horizontal over her knee and skelp them five or six times on the
bottom with her right hand. When she'd finished administering her particular
kind of corporal punishment she'd say, (and she spoke always in Scots
with a Dundee accent), "Woe betide ye if ye dare tae dae that again for
Eh'll gi'e ye a bare bummer !” Perhaps fortunately for the sake of all our
dignities I can't recall it ever reached the stage of anyone getting a
"bare bummer." On one occasion IB had his "doup
skelpt" by Miss Gilchrist and he threatened to bring his father to school
to sort her out.
She retorted, "Eh, an' Eh'll
bring meh faither here tae sort yours oot!" This stopped us in our
tracks. Even IB, the second best fighter at the school, was gobsmacked. We were
all, everyone of us in the class room that day, awestruck that someone as old
and as fierce as Miss Gilchrist could have a father. What kind of fearful
monster would he be?
Having said all this I can't really
remember anyone complaining to the authorities about Miss Gilchrist. I
don't think there was one of us in our class who had any thought that she
was unduly cruel. I think we respected her. We would not have been
able to put this in words but she had our respect because she, more than our
other teachers, had experience of, and understood, the kind of life most of us
were living in the Lochee community. Much of the time she spoke the Dundee
Scots that we spoke out in the playground, on the streets and with most of our
families. We accepted her and the things she did, though even for those
times these seemed a little bizarre. In punitive terms her "doup
skelping" may have been less painful than being strapped though no doubt
it was much more embarrassing. I have to say that during the following
years I was belted regularly by Miss Cameron, but I had always managed to
avoid Miss Gilchrist's punishment. This may have been because I was better
behaved than I was eventually to become, and I have a suspicion that this was
partly so because I could not bare (oops, Freudian slip)....... I mean I could
not bear even the thought of the indignity of having my bottom whacked in
public.
On my journey from Primary 1a in
1950 toward Primary 5a in 1955 I had almost always been at the top of the
class. Then in 1955, just about the time my youngest sister was born, BD joined
the school when her family moved from Fife to Dundee where her father had
been appointed as the head gardener at a famous park and estate on the
outskirts of Dundee. BD, you may recall was to become the subject of most
of my love notes, though I always retained a soft spot for HH. Like me BD was
left-handed but unlike me her birthday was the 5th of May for I remember us
writing the date 5.5.55 in our exercise books on her 10th birthday. BD was very
bright and I found I had to share my place at the top of the class with
her.
The academic year 1956-57 was a big
year for Primary 7a because it was the year that we sat for the
"quallie", our qualifying examination, the results of which would
decide whether we went to what was called a senior secondary school like the
Harris Academy or the Morgan Academy or whether we went to a junior secondary
school like Logie or Rockwell. The latter two schools were excellent in their
own right and many of my fellows were attracted by them because they could
leave school at the age of 15 and get into the world of work and wages sooner,
whereas there was an expectation that those of us who went to the Harris or the
Morgan would be staying on at school until we were 17 and some might even go on
to university. Being from an ambitious family I was pushed to go for the
Harris Academy and I had been indoctrinated enough to think it was a good idea
myself.
The "Quallie" had three phases. First there was an Intelligence Test, second there was an Arithmetic exam which was followed by an English exam. I didn't finish the intelligence test. It flummoxed me. One question was,
"If §@$ reads as
'cat' what does the following read as? @§$ "
The answer I now realise was
"act" but my mind responded by protesting "If we already have
adequate letters to spell out "cat" why do we need to be introduced
to these new ones?" This complicated things too much for me and so I had a
failure of imagination. My grey matter would not allow me beyond the barrier
newly installed in my mind. I was blind to the code. As for the
Arithmetic and English examinations I knew as soon as I had finished them that
I had done very well.
A few days later Miss Cameron was
looking at me in a strange and it seemed frustrated way. She spoke out
what I believe she meant to keep as a thought. “ 69, 69 : how could you get a
score of 69 in an intelligence test ?” She didn’t say anything else and
neither did she mention it again but I knew that what she meant was that
I had failed the Intelligence test. I am aware now that you cannot fail an
intelligence test, it is meant to be a measure of a person’s intellectual
insight. I guess my IQ score of 69 tells you all you need to know about
me.
In any case I waited with
trepidation for the result of the “Quallie” and wondered who would be the
recipient of the Dux medal. I hoped against hope that by some miracle it
could still be me.
A day before the Dux medal was to be
awarded to the successful pupil it was announced that this year there would be
two Dux medallists, a girl and a boy. The winners were BD and me.
In August when I arrived at the Harris
Academy dressed in my brand new maroon blazer with cord trim I found that
the first year pupils were split into six classes from 1A, the brightest
end of the spectrum through to 1F, its less scintillating extreme. BD was in
placed in 1C and I was placed in 1E. This did not necessarily mean that
BD was only averagely clever because most of the pupils placed in 1A and 1B had
been at the Harris Academy primary school and may have had a certain
advantage in preparing for the “quallie.” That BD had been placed in a
class that presumably was more able than the one I was in left me to
wonder if the boy’s Dux medal had been awarded to provide me and my
parents with a consolation prize or whether it was genuinely a decision
to reward both the best girl and the best boy. "Maybe," I thought,
"I wasn't the true Dux medallist."
It doesn’t bother me now. I’ve got over
it but it is interesting that I remember it as if it all happened yesterday.
Of course, I couldn’t be anything
other than pleased by BD’s triumph after all….
___________________________________
Jan Shelley, (nee McCurrach) writes:
I have just read an article on a Dundee Memory site by Charles Sharpe. It
transported me back to my primary days as I too was awarded the Dux Medal in my
final year at Liff Road.
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Jane's Dux Medal..
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...awarded for Session 1963-64
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I could almost smell my old school as
I was reading. Wonderful! I also passed the "Quallie" and
attended Harris Academy for six years.
I suspect Charles is one year older than my brother Kenneth McCurrach who also attended Liff Road school.
Thank you for the journey back in time.
October, 2017
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Charles Sharpe comments:
After further research I have found that there had been previous occasions when both a boy' and a girl's Dux Medal was awarded but I still have doubts about mine.
January, 2015
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Jeremy Millar writes:
I was 10 years later but the culture was very similar in Stoneywood primary. Our heidie had been a desert rat and when, I presume he was bored, he would dismiss the class teacher and tell tales of his wartime exploits. I too was belted for being 'clever'. The d in £sd stands for dinarii the Latin for penny. Thanks to google and not a classical education!
May, 2013
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