My early memories of attending St Chad’s primary school in Whittle-le-Woods are scarce. I believe that there were about 60 or 70 children in the entire school during my time there. The infants (known as classes 3, 2 and 1) were taught by Miss Fletcher and took pupils from the age of five until seven. Junior classes were split into four year-groups: Standards 1 and 2 shared a classroom and were taught by Mrs Snape whilst Mrs Entwisle, who was the head teacher, took the top two years, Standards 3 and 4.
Odd facts stick in my memory, like when the rest of the class were reading or writing, each child was individually called out to have a reading test with the teacher. When I was about eight years old, I remember Mrs Snape asking me to read out words from a list and I struggled with the word ‘fatigue’. I would read ‘fattigyoo’ or something like that, and the teacher would nod, and then give me the next word to read. A few months later, it would happen again, and I’d get stuck on the same word. I was never taught how to pronounce the word fatigue, so how was I ever expected to progress? Even so, I see now that my reading age was consistently higher than my chronological age.
I remember Geraldine from primary school, although we were never friends. It was a small community, so everyone knew each other, and since both our parents sang in the church choir, they knew each other very well. We managed to get through that period without ever being romantically linked. By the time I was eight, both our mums worked at the school. Geraldine’s mum, Teresa, was the school secretary, while my mum was a dinner lady. At this time, my dad was a labourer who worked nights loading lorries for a firm in Adlington, but in 1967 he switched to working ‘days’. His health wasn’t great, and in early 1968 he took a job as school caretaker which was a less strenuous role. This job was part time, perhaps 8am until 10am then 3pm until 5.30 each day. The short hours were supplemented by him also taking a second job as a sexton at the church, maintaining the church grounds and digging graves when needed. He did these jobs until he retired in 1979 when he was 65.
Health and safety in the 60s was not as it is today. I have a scar on my knee from an episode on the school playing fields when I stepped on a flat piece of metal about 2 inches wide which was curved into a ‘C’ shape. I hadn’t noticed it lying in the grass and when I stood on one end, the metal swung up like standing on a garden rake and whacked me on my knee, taking out a lump of flesh. I still have the dimple to show. I know we go on about health and safety these days, but what on earth was that piece of metal doing lying in a school playing field? The boys often played a game which would probably not be allowed today. There were elder trees on the edge of the school field, and slender branches from these made very whippy sticks which we would cut down and mould a blob of mud on the end. We then used the stick like casting a fishing rod to propel the ball of mud to our ‘enemies’. This was great fun, and probably relatively safe, but awfully messy. We called the game ‘blob-sticks’. It never made it into the Olympics.
I was a polite, well-behaved child, who was rather shy and prone to getting ‘all hot and bothered’ (a phrase frequently used by my teacher) if I found myself struggling with the answer to a question. My school reports were straightforward affairs, and often seemed to be the same words with just a new date added. I’ve provided a summary of each year below:
| Year | Age | Reading age | Comments |
| 1966 | 7.2 | 7.9 | Bernard is interested, works hard but has untidy writing |
| 1967 | 8.3 | 11.5 | Interested but can be careless |
| 1968 | 9.3 | 12.5 | Likeable, but sometimes careless |
| 1969 | 10.3 | 14.0 | Hardworking and sincere. Sensible & intelligent. Can be nervous, and lacks self-confidence |
| 1970 | 11.3 | 14.5 | Sensible and a good conversationalist. Mature for his age. Must guard against carelessness |
I never got over the untidy writing, although I now have the carelessness under control. I don’t have any reports from secondary school, although I suspect if I did, they would read, “Hmm, Bernard Kellett. Now which one is he?”. I think I may have been the original Mr Cellophane.
My group in the final year of primary school consisted of just eight pupils; four boys and four girls. I sat next to a boy called Christopher Yates, and my main recollection of him was that his desk was always very untidy. We had desks with lids, beneath which we stored all our books, pens and pencils. Whenever we were asked to remove a certain book, Christopher would spend an inordinately long time rummaging through his desk to find the item, only succeeding long after everyone else, and usually after the patience of the teacher had expired. Christopher was always keen on local radio, and as a teenager, he was a presenter on hospital radio. He did this for several years before joining Radio Blackburn (which has since become Radio Lancashire). I remember being very envious of him one day when he told me that he was interviewing Dana, an Irish singer who won the 1970 Eurovision Song Contest singing “All Kinds of Everything”. At the time, I found Dana very attractive, although now I’m not sure what I saw in her. I lost contact with Christopher as we grew older, but I now ‘see’ him occasionally on the TV news when he is brought in as an aviation expert whenever there is a major air crash.
Along with two girls in my year, I passed my eleven-plus exam, which entitled me to a scholarship at a grammar school. There were two opportunities: St Mary’s College in Blackburn or Preston Catholic College. Mum didn’t want me to cross the busy Preston Road (the A6), since my brother Frank was knocked down crossing that road coming home from school as an eleven-year-old, and so the decision to go to Blackburn was made. The grammar school debate still rages today, but I feel privileged to have been educated at one of the last traditional post war grammar schools. I have always believed that schools should be streamed to give each pupil the best chance in life, although I fundamentally disagree that people with lesser academic abilities should receive a poorer quality education. I feel even more strongly that wealthy people ought not to receive a better education, but I suspect that this will never change. I never felt that I made the most of my education, although I can’t pinpoint why. I didn’t receive much encouragement from my parents, for a start, and I always felt that others were better than me and had much more confidence. St Mary’s took several fee-paying pupils, but these boys were generally identified through their innate self-confidence and ‘posh’ accents, but also, interestingly, in their position in the lower academic sets.
One of my school friends, Peter Evans, moved to Whittle-le-Woods in about 1969 and although he didn’t attend St Chad’s, he did start at St Mary’s College on a scholarship at the same time as me. He lived very close to the bus stop, whereas I had a half-mile walk, but he was always the one on the last minute, sprinting down the road to jump on the bus just as it was about to pull away. In the early years, we spent some time together, although we soon realised that our interests didn’t really align, and so we never became very close friends.
I met two other boys who also travelled from the Chorley area and became closer friends with them. Sean Flanagan lived off Park Road in Chorley and David Coxhead lived in Abbey Village. David was a close friend for several years, and Sean sort-of tagged along with us. Looking back, we were unkind to Sean who was very trusting and could never really break into our shared sense of humour. My friendship with David lasted well into our 20s, even though after we left school at sixteen, our interests diverged. We both took up engineering apprenticeships, David at Leyland Motors and me at the Royal Ordnance Factory (ROF) at Chorley, but David became a keen motorcyclist whereas I stuck to the self-powered variety. When we both found girlfriends and later, wives, we realised that we were drifting apart and the four of us simply weren’t that close. David and I appeared to have too little in common to remain friends and I saw very little of him after I moved to Brindle and they moved to Lostock Hall, and we now just send each other Christmas cards.
A chance meeting in autumn 2013 led to us receiving an invitation to a Christmas party at their house. We didn’t know anyone (we barely knew David and Pauline by then!) and a busy party wasn’t the time to catch up. I felt embarrassed to be introduced as David’s best man from his wedding 28 years earlier. “So how come we haven’t seen you in all these years?” was a common question from his contemporary friends. “We drifted apart” seemed such a weak response. We have not kept in touch since then. I suppose this aspect of my character – maintaining relationships – needs more consideration, so I will try to address it in a later chapter.
I never enjoyed secondary school. I wasn’t dim, usually being selected for the middle stream and always being ranked roughly halfway down the class of 32, but I simply never found a subject that I really liked. It always seemed that what I was good at, I didn’t enjoy, and yet couldn’t obtain good grades in the subjects that interested me. As an example, I was quite good at Latin and my teacher was very disappointed when I gave it up to take Geometrical and Engineering Drawing (GED) at age fourteen. I didn’t regret dropping Latin at the time, and my O-level mark at GED was the best of all my results. However, I now often wonder where my life would have gone had I continued along a more academic route.
I appreciated art, but I was never a natural with a paintbrush or pencil. I could reproduce paintings and drawings to some good effect, but I didn’t enjoy doing it. I was also quite good at English language, but I didn’t enjoy writing at the time and so didn’t apply myself, as demonstrated by my O-level results. This is surprising, since I do enjoy writing now, although I need a reason to do it. Set me an essay to write on virtually any topic and I’ll produce acceptable work to a deadline. I don’t think that I could ever write a novel, because I know that it would never be as good as the excellent books I have read over the years. Oddly enough, I barely read at all during my teens, and, unless forced, I rarely picked up a book. I hated English Literature. As a young boy, I read avidly, devouring all the Enid Blyton books, and in the early days at secondary school I remember taking many books from the library (Jennings stories by Anthony Buckeridge and The Hardy Boys adventures were my favourites), but this didn’t last long. I’m also quite embarrassed to admit that I read The Beano for many years, even when I was in my teens. I tell myself that I read the comic to appreciate the excellent skills of the cartoonists, but even to me that sounds like an excuse for some teenage escapism. I only began reading proper books once more in my late teens.
I really struggled with maths, and even now, I blame the teaching rather than my ability. My maths teacher for perhaps the most important years (when I was aged between 12 and 14) was a very funny man who would crack jokes continually. These jokes weren’t particularly funny, but as young boys, we thought he was great. The trouble was he never realised that some in his class (me!), whilst appreciating his humour, entirely missed the point of Pythagoras’ theorem, the basis of calculus, or even the purpose of the symbol π. I knew that it was 22/7, or 3.142 and that it was used a lot in formulae to determine the areas or diameters of circles, but I never knew why. If only I have been given a series of cylindrical objects and asked to measure both the diameter and the circumference, and then divide one into the other might I have realised that π was simply the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter. In later life, I now understand that I learn more quickly if I have a practical problem to deal with rather than a theoretical one. Perhaps a grammar school education was never right for me after all.
My parents paid for me to take private maths lessons from a tutor who was a retired teacher. I went perhaps three times before the man told my dad that there was nothing additional that he could teach me. Apparently, I understood the basic principles and simply needed to put these into practice. I can’t remember how old I was when I saw this tutor, but if it had been in my final two years at school, I did understand maths by then, and this was due to a change of teacher. Miss Popham may have struggled to keep the class in order, but she knew how to help someone like me, and once I understood the concepts, I was away. I scraped a pass at O-level, but then went on to take maths to a high level in my subsequent engineering qualifications.
One unusual thing that now stands out about my school was that although we had regular exams and tests, we weren’t given the actual results. Instead, each boy was ranked against others in the class. I couldn’t say whether my marks in History, for instance, were 40% or 80%, but I know that I usually came about 15th in the class of 32 or so. I was always between 12th and 20th. Only in the final two years when the three forms were split into five did I ever rise into single figure rankings. In the final two years, typical class sizes had dropped to 20 students, and in some of the less popular classes, fewer still. This allowed me to trick my parents into thinking I was improving because I could now say that I was 8th or 10th in the class rather than 14th or 16th. I don’t think they ever realised.
The school never publicised it, but I feel sure that the three forms (called ‘houses’ – Colin (mine), Eymard and Chanel – named for 19th century French priests) in the first three years were streamed. I always believed myself to be in the middle stream. In the final two years, I’m even more certain that boys were placed in classes based on ability, but once more, we were never told this. In the final two years, classes were named after the form teacher, so I was in class 4 Rolland and later, class 5 O’Neill which gave no indication of expected ability. (The analytical part of me wants to assess the O-level results each boy obtained from which form to confirm my hypothesis, but it’s much too late for that. I’ll just continue to speculate.)
I left school with six O-levels, but very poor ones – five grades C in Maths, English, Physics, Art and Music and one grade B in Geometrical and Engineering Drawing. Not a promising set of results, and nothing which really could point towards my ideal occupation. However, they were sufficient for me to enrol onto a mechanical engineering apprenticeship with ROF Chorley in 1975.
Further education was compulsory for apprentices (and still is), so I studied for an Ordinary National Certificate (ONC) in mechanical engineering attending day release at W R Tuson College in Preston. I almost failed the second year and had to plead with my apprentice master to allow me to continue to HNC. (It’s ironic that I am now the person to whom apprentices appeal to continue their studies!). I managed to blag my way into taking an HNC, but true to form, I failed the final year and had to re-take it. Since by then I was outside my apprenticeship, I wasn’t entitled to day release, so I signed up for a part time course at Wigan Mining and Technology College. This was for three evenings a week from 7pm until 9.30pm. Luckily three other ex-apprentices were also in a similar position, so we shared the driving. The trouble was, we didn’t all have suitable cars. I drove a Morris Marina (eminently suitable), but Mick Billington drove an MGB GT which had two lovely seats in the front, but only a tiny bench in the rear into which a man could just about squeeze if he stooped. Brian Allen drove an ex-Post Office van based on the Morris 1000 which once more, only had two seats. Additional passengers had to squat in the rear on a tool box or similar. Mick was always low on fuel and it seemed like every week, we’d have a whip round to find 50p so he could buy half a gallon of petrol to get us home.
I was eventually awarded my HNC, and then, for reasons I can’t fathom, I elected to return to college to take a further two endorsement subjects. Since I was able to choose these topics, I fared rather better, and actually began to enjoy education, about ten years too late. One of the subjects I studied became very relevant to me in later life, although most people will never have heard of the topic. Terotechnology is the study of the maintenance of assets and is defined as ‘the combination of management, financial, and engineering principles applied to physical assets such as plant, machinery, buildings or equipment in pursuit of minimising economic life cycle costs’. Sounds exciting, doesn’t it? I loved the course, and it certainly helped me when I was working at Warwick University fifteen years later.
It was after my brother mentioned that he was taking an Open University (OU) course that I began to think about continuing my formal education. I started researching options during mid 1984 before registering for the Open University Technology Foundation course (T101) to start in January 1985. I was rather disappointed that my HNC with endorsements only afforded me one year’s Accreditation for Prior Learning. However, I soon learned that the OU’s teaching material is outstanding and the method of distance learning supported by occasional face-to-face tutorials and summer school ideally suited my learning style. I discovered that I had the discipline to work as required, and my planning ability meant that I could complete the modules with relative ease. Unfortunately, enrolling on the course didn’t go down well with Geraldine who gave me a rough time for many months, or perhaps years. It was likely to take me five years to gain a degree at the rate I was planning, even longer if I signed up for honours. I completed the foundation course in 1985 and then signed up for two half modules at level 2 for 1986. It was harder completing two dissimilar subjects concurrently but both subjects were very interesting and although the academic standard had increased, I kept up quite well.
Over the years, five of the courses I selected required attendance at a summer school, so I spent several weeks when I should have been taking summer holidays with Geraldine enjoying my university experience almost a decade late and condensed into a few weeks. I visited York, Durham, Warwick, UEA and Bath, as well as the odd day schools at the universities of Liverpool and Manchester.
I graduated in 1990 with a Bachelor of Arts degree, which was the only type of degree the OU were allowed to confer at that time. After a few years, I enrolled once more to complete a further two modules which gave me a Bachelor of Science (Honours) degree in 1996. I always chuckle whenever I spell the word bachelor, since a boss of mine once spelled it wrong in a document, and I (inadvisably) corrected him about it. He just looked at me and calmly announced that having gained a Masters from Cambridge, he had never bothered to learn how to spell ‘bachelor’. That put me firmly in my place. The same person attended university at the same time as the TV presenter Carol Vorderman, and he wasn’t too complimentary about her academic credentials either. He delighted in telling me that at Cambridge, she was a member of the ‘Nines club’, meaning that she earned a third in each of the three years she was there, graduating with 3rd class honours degree in engineering.
I began to read regularly once more in 1976, devouring all the Reader’s Digest condensed books that my parents bought each quarter along with any novels that happened to be in the house. This led to what has become a lifelong habit. Between 1976 and starting the OU degree courses in 1985, I read about 30 books a year. Whilst studying with the Open University, I stopped reading for pleasure, and didn’t pick up a novel again until about 1997. Since then, my yearly average has risen to 45 books per year. I like the quote, “Reading won’t solve your problems. But then, neither will housework.”
My attention to detail means that I catalogue every book I read, so that I can now report that I have read more than 1136 books in my life. If that is a sad reflection on my obsessive nature, I accept it. However, since I am aware of the condition, I don’t believe it does me any harm. I tell myself that I could stop if I wanted to, but I don’t want to. My life is scattered with collections of data and its subsequent analysis. I rarely do anything useful with the information, so it does appear, even to me, as a complete waste of time. That said, how many things in life are actually useful (going for a walk, watching TV, having a leisurely meal), but we do them anyway. I simply regard analysing data as time well wasted, and no worse than doing a crossword or Sudoku puzzle.
Looking back over the past half a century, it confirms the statement that education is wasted on the young. I would love to go back to school now and do it all over again. I’d pay more attention in class, do my homework (and any background reading), ask questions and soak up all the knowledge I could. I suppose that the difference is that I now seek knowledge for its own sake and not just to pass an examination. I once worked with a couple of colleagues who quizzed me all evening when we were away on business trying to find things that I didn’t know. They were surprised that I knew a little about most subjects, and even though I mightn’t have been 100% accurate, my knowledge was sufficient to hold a sensible conversation on a very wide range of topics. I’m proud of that.