Harold Hill Grammar School

What is a Grammar School?

In 1944, the UK Government passed the Butler Act, which defined how post-war education would be structured. As implemented, it meant that eleven-year old children took an exam called the Eleven Plus, which decided whether they would continue with an academically-oriented education. This took place at a Grammar School, and was aimed primarily at sending them to university or other further education.  Otherwise, they would attend a Secondary Modern School, whose goal was to give a basic education for children who would for the most part leave school at 15 and end up doing manual jobs (yes, they still existed in 1944, and even in 1964).

In theory there was an intermediate level, leading to Technical Schools which would produce future engineers and technicians. In practice very few were ever created, though as it happens my sister did attend one.

The system ended up being very controversial - it was true that once a child had failed the Eleven Plus, they were pretty much on the scrapheap, educationally speaking. A tiny handful managed to escape (including my first wife) and proceed to university, but this was very much the exception. In the 1970s it was abolished, along with the Grammar Schools. But since I was 11 in 1964, I got the full advantage of a system which, for all its injustices and failings, did an excellent job for the 10% or so it was designed to benefit.

HHGS

I grew up on the largest of the London County Council's housing estates, Harold Hill, just east of London. This was a completely planned, largely self contained community, of about 30,000 people. It included numerous schools, one of which was Harold Hill Grammar School (HHGS). Just across the street was one of three Secondary Modern schools, Broxhill, but we had absolutely no contact with them except the occasional sports match.

In 1964 I took and passed the Eleven Plus exam. From then until 1971, I attended HHGS.

It had been open for about eight years by then. The headmaster, George Armstrong (universally referred to by pupils and staff alike as George) had created it very much in his own image. He was a language teacher by training (and still taught some Italian). At 11 years old I was terrified of him, somewhat justifiably since in those days the cane was still in use. Being "sent to George" for some breach of discipline invariably meant a stroke of the cane. It happened to me a couple of times. I remember being a bit underwhelmed by the experience, more daunting than painful.

From the school he created, it was obvious that he was a great leader. In about 1968 he moved on to become a Schools Inspector, to be replaced by a Mr Bracken. The latter was a huge disappointment, regarded with contempt by staff and pupils.

Every morning at 9am there was a full assembly of the whole school in the main hall. This consisted of a short morale-building address by one of the teachers, some prayers (strictly Church of England of course), a couple of hymns, and the reading of the school notices. I think we all enjoyed the hymns, whether religious or not - all those magnificent jingoistic words with their military tunes. Our school was very unusual in having an electronic organ, contributed by the Parent-Teacher Association, and a music teacher who could actually play the thing. I can still remember the sound of 400 teenagers singing "To Be A Pilgrim" (the official school hymn) accompanied by a full two-manual organ. It was magnificent, and the words are still in my head even today.

The catchment area of the school was much larger than just the Harold Hill estate. Pupils came from as far as ten miles away, from distinctly middle-class Brentwood, Gidea Park and Hornchurch as well as our very working-class area. One of my best friends came from sunny Shenfield, travelling for an hour on the bus every morning and afternoon. His Dad was something important in the UK nuclear power station industry, unlike mine who scraped a living selling zips and buttons. When I first went to HHGS, my mother threatened me that now I would have serious competition, I would have to struggle to keep up with all these privileged kids. For better or for worse they were no smarter than us street urchins, as it turned out.

George and his Acolytes

George was a distant figure, mostly seen only at school assembly in the morning or occasionally swishing around in his black gown. Many of the teachers still wore these, straight out of Goodbye Mr Chips. But his two deputies were much more visible. Miss Davies was the Headmistress and seemed to actually run the place as well as taking care of all the "girls' affairs" side of things. She was frankly a very unsympathetic character, a dry, small-boned woman in her 50s with frizzy grey hair who never had a kind word for anyone or anything. All the pupils called her Daisy, though her real name was Winifred. Little was known about her private life, even by the staff. In keeping with her character, she drove an elderly Morris Minor.

The Deputy Headmaster was a bluff Yorkshireman, Mr Bracegirdle (what a wonderful name!). Everyone called him Percy - and his son, who was a couple of years ahead of me, Young Percy - though his real name was Philip. He taught maths - including two years of my A Levels. He was a very kind and sympathetic man behind that exterior, who would sometimes drive me home from our visits to the Royal Liberty School's computer in his Ford Anglia. He smoked a foul-smelling pipe, whose miasma filled the car to the point that you could barely see the windscreen from the back seat.

Teachers

Our first year form teacher was an attractive young woman who would sit on her desk showing off her stocking tops (no tights back in the pre-miniskirt era). I confess I'd forgotten that (well, I was only 11) until reminded recently by a fellow pupil. She disappeared mysteriously at Christmas, with a widespread rumour that she was pregnant. She was replaced by Michael Hursey, in his first year of teaching and determined to be a "character". He wore a red bow-tie to teach, and wrote everything in brilliant turquoise ink. His subjects were English and Drama which was, well, dramatic. I'm not really sure what it was for, neither then nor now, but we would prance around the stage pretending to be teapots or bananas for 40 minutes. It never extended to anything remotely resembling actual theatre.

The other first-year teacher who made a huge impression on me was Mme Julien, in French. At George's direction, the school was a testbed for a new way of teaching languages, the Nuffield Method. This was remarkably similar to the modern Rosetta Stone, where a mixture of graphics and recorded speech are used to avoid misleading exposure to the written language - a huge problem for English children learning French (and vice versa). Mme Julien injected her own unique twist to this. She wanted to write, yet wasn't allowed to use written French. Her solution was to use the International Phonetic Alphabet, a language-independent way of writing phonetically absolutely any language in the world.

This illustrated very well a characteristic of the entire school. Everything was aimed at making the best of the best pupils, and doing an OK job with the rest. Probably most of the pupils were completely baffled by this bizarre writing system with its unique characters like ə and ʃ, but I loved it so much that I studied phonetics as a minor subject at university.

Classes

It was a small school. There were three entry forms, of about 20 pupils each, organised alphabetically in the absence of better criteria. Tony, my best friend throughout school (we're still in touch today) was sitting behind me, simply because his name differed from mine only at the third letter.

For the first two years, we studied every subject: sciences, liberal arts, and foundations like English and maths. Or almost, because I dropped art (I was hopeless) and geography (boring beyond belief) at the end of the first year. It was decades later before I realised that geography is a fascinating subject - when it isn't focussed entirely on knowing the principal towns and industries of every county in the British Isles.

For the second year, we had to choose a second foreign language. We had a wide choice: German, Italian, Russian (very unusual for a school) and Latin. In practice what you asked for made little difference. If you were good at French you did Russian, if you were bad at it you did Italian (I guess on the basis that it's quite similar to French), and in the middle you did German. You did Latin if you were mad enough to ask for it. One of my friends was selected for Russian and his parents had to make a huge fuss for him to be allowed to do German, which they considered more useful.

Russian was taught the same way as French, using slide projectors and reel-to-reel tape recorders which would be in a museum now. We were allowed to see written Russian - had to be, because we had to learn the Cyrillic alphabet. Fortunately written Russian is quite phonetic. I can still remember господин кирш (Citizen Kirsh) and his dog.

An oddity of the British system then and for another couple of decades was that pupils had to have one lesson a week of Religious Studies. There was a teacher who taught nothing but this. He was very odd. His name was Mr Farnell, but everyone (I suspect including the staff) called him Creeping Jesus. I think he really did make an effort to make his subject interesting, utterly useless though it was. It wasn't just a case of pouring Christian dogma down our throats. But I'd been a convinced atheist since I was 10 (as soon as I realised that while "God created everything", there was no good answer to the question "So who created God?"), and I did everything I could to make the lessons at least slightly interesting by asking unanswerable questions. There was a very dogmatically religious boy in our year (he was insufferable in a number of other ways too) called Roger, who would always leap to the defence of both Christianity and Creeping Jesus as I quibbled with the lesson. It at least added spice to an otherwise unbearably tedious 40 minutes. Later on I learned that Mr Farnell lived, with a wife and child, in an almost completely unfurnished council flat, determined to live an ascetic lifestyle in accordance with some religious principle.

We were also required to do two lessons a week of physical education and sport. I hated both and the teacher, Jack Wilsmore, knew it. We did not have a good relationship, at least not until at 16 I went on a school ski trip and astounded him by being reasonably good at it. My report book consistently contains his entry, "Makes little effort". From time to time we would get sent on that classically useless English exercise, the cross-country run. Tony and I regarded it as a great opportunity to chat with each other while ambling through the mud, returning to school long after everyone else was showered and dressed.

Uniforms

Like all secondary schools at the time, we wore strictly enforced uniforms. For boys it was completely unremarkable - dark grey trousers, white shirt, and the inevitable blazer (a kind of summer jacket) with the school badge taking up the entire breast pocket. A simple striped tie completed the outfit. Sixth form boys had a different tie, and were permitted to wear straw boater hats in 1964, though sadly this completely archaic custom had ceased by my time in the sixth form,

Girls had distinct summer and winter uniforms. I remember little about the winter one, maybe a dark skirt, but the summer one was a very 1950s full-cut dress, below the knee, of a blue fabric with white spots. Even in 1964 it was distinctly retro. The rules laid down everything girls should wear, even the colour of their underwear (white, of course - what would you expect, black with red trim?) But very suddenly in about 1968 it changed, to the mini-est of minidresses, in either citrus yellow or electric blue. To a hormone filled young lad, the spectacle presented by a nylon-clad thigh as a girl sat on one of the high benches in the science labs was something to behold.

Architecture

The school's buildings were quite imaginative considering they were part of a giant post-war estate, with sweeping rooflines. There were five parts to them. My own memories are mostly of the science block, with dedicated labs for each of chemistry, physics and biology, and three more general purpose labs. And what labs they were! They had vast teak benches with all the trimmings - gas taps for Bunsen burners, water, sinks. Mr Pryke insisted that the each and every session concluded with polishing the benches using vast drums of wax polish, so they always shined. Down the middle were bottles of ten common reagents, including both dilute and concentrated sulphuric, nitric and hydrochloric acids. It was a health-and-safety nightmare, but I don't recall any accidents beyond the occasional hole in a shirt.

There was a three-floor general purpose classroom block, the only part with more than a single story. Its staircases were very narrow, a constant source of congestion in the brief interval between classes. We were told that this was done deliberately to encourage people to mix, or something equally bizarre. Adjacent to that was the main hall, large enough for the whole school, and various offices. Leading from that was a wing with the "arty" classrooms - music, art, cookery, and at the very end the workshop for metal and woodwork, with a generous array of heavy machinery.

At the back of the hall were the changing rooms and gym, from which you could access the very generously sized sports fields with pitches for football and rugby, tennis courts, and large amounts of just grass.

Specializing

At the start of the third year we had to choose whether to be artists or scientists, dropping several subjects. That's a surprise to most non-Brits, who generally study a broad range of subjects up to at least 16. The French (and International) Baccalaureat takes about ten subjects right up to 18. In Britain even now, past 16 it's normal to focus on just three or maybe four subjects. At 13 I chose the science track, meaning I could forget about music, history and geography for ever. History was taught in strict chronological order, so my knowledge of the subject stopped somewhere around Henry VIII. 

From then on I studied chemistry, physics, biology, French, Russian, English and maths. I was good at all of them but some were more interesting than others. I think it depended entirely on the teachers. Our chemistry teacher, Colin Pryke, was extraordinary. He loved his subject and, if you had natural talent for it, transmitted it effortlessly. He eschewed all traditional chemistry teaching, learning great lists of compounds and their properties. His view was that if you understood how chemistry works - the periodic table and electronic configuration - everything else followed by itself. And he was right.  I have loved chemistry ever since, though my attempt to study it at university came to a rapid end when I realised how badly most people teach it. I was saddened to learn that he died just a few months ago.

It has to be said though that he was quite a strange chap. He lived with his mother, in fact he lived in the same house in Goodmayes for the whole of his life, all 82 years. All of us were perfectly sure he was gay, or "queer" as we said then since the word "gay" had yet to be appropriated. Most likely we were right, though he never did anything even slightly inappropriate. His passion was making  amateur movies, at a time when this meant special cameras and fiddly Super 8 film, edited by splicing bits together with sticky tape. In 1966 he and Michael Hursey made a docu-drama called Sugar Nightmare, about the perils of using LSD. It won several awards though I think it did nothing to endear him to the local education department.

Every summer he would go on a holiday, often with one of the other teachers, and make a film documenting it, which he would show later in the year. The most memorable was when he and our physics teacher, Norman Bacrac, drove all the way to Turkey in his ancient-looking black Rover 75. The film was called "Istanbul or Bust", which indeed his car did, throwing a connecting rod on the autobahn and disappearing forever. He never took to its replacement, a very distinguished Rover 3-Litre, in the same way.

Physics, by contrast, was just boring. I have always thought of physics as a ragbag of odds and ends, all the bits of science that aren't something else (chemistry or biology).

O-levels

The first formal school qualification, taken at 16 years old after five years of secondary school, was officially called the General Certificate of Education Ordinary Level, universally abbreviated to O-levels. That is still true today, although it is now called the GCSE. At that time you could leave school at 15, without any qualification at all, and probably half the population did, going on to manual labour or menial jobs.

That meant that teaching started to get serious in the fourth and fifth years. The Nuffield French course had been quietly abandoned after two years. We had been taught formal French grammar by the formidable Miss Davies for one year, whose knowledge of the theory of the French language was matched by an appalling pure-English accent - our French language assistant (a French lady studying English and on assignment for a year) said she was completely incomprehensible when she spoke French. As a result we got good results in French.

Russian was a different story. For some reason our Russian teachers (we got a different one part way through) had stuck rigidly to the slide projector and ancient tape recorders. As a result nobody really knew any Russian at all. It turns out (this is equally true for Rosetta Stone) to be a great way to get an initial ear for the language, but a terrible way to get anywhere close to mastery or fluency. You just have to do the hard work of learning the vocabulary and the grammar, all those irregular verbs and case endings and all the rest. I'd realised this in my last couple of years and thanks to my local library's extraordinary breadth of books, I'd borrowed some Russian grammars and textbooks and got my head around them. (I can still remember the Russian case endings, most of them anyway, 50 years later and despite having practically never used the language).

As a consequence I was the only pupil, out of twelve, to pass O-level Russian. Even then I only got a bare pass grade. but it was better than failing. I don't know what happened to the Nuffield method after that disaster, but I certainly hope it was rapidly abandoned.

For chemistry Mr Pryke insisted, over and over, that even though I was good at it, it was vital to revise, to learn all those inorganic analysis reactions that he had never actually taught us - "white powder A reacts with green solution B to form purple precipitate C, which dissolves in hydrofluoric acid... and so on and so on, identify A to M". So, in my usual contrarian way, I never spent a single moment doing chemistry revision. After I got the highest possible grade, I told him. I don't think he was amused.

English was taught as two subjects, language and literature. I can't for the life of me remember what we learned in English Language, other than writing pointless essays. For sure it wasn't English grammar, which I have never been taught in my life. Literature consisted of reading three or four novels and plays each year, with an exam consisting of a comprehension test. It was nearly as boring as geography, and completely useless as far as I can see. It gave me a lifelong distaste for Victorian novels. All I remember is tedious, uninspired readings of Shakespeare in our twice-weekly lessons. 

For one year we had an English teacher who was really rather a sad case. She was called Miss Mavor and she had a very strong Scottish accent, which (sadly) made her a bit of a laughing stock in southern England - apart from her, none of our teachers came from further north than Lancashire or Yorkshire, and most were from the home counties. It didn't help when the class learned that her first name was Morag - a perfectly fine Scottish girl's name but as foreign to us then as something in Chinese or Arabic. She simply could not control a class of 14-year olds and on one occasion ran crying from the classroom. She only lasted one year and I wouldn't be surprised if she abandoned teaching.

I managed to pass all nine of my O-levels, with Russian being the only one that was marginal. And now it was time to move to the next level.

Sixth Form

The last two years of secondary school, for those who stayed on past 16, were spent on just two or three subjects, in preparation for the GCE Advanced Level (A-level). That's still the case today. For some reason these last two years have always been the "sixth form", the "lower sixth" (16/17) and the "upper sixth" (17/18). The reason no doubt lies in the arcane history of the English public (i.e. private) school system.

At this stage, school was no longer mandatory. That meant all kinds of relaxations of the rules. For example, Religious Education and Games were no longer obligatory. Most people did three subjects (some only did two), meaning lots of free time in the Portakabin-like sixth form lounge that the Parent-Teacher Association had generously funded a couple of years before our time.

I was one of the few who took four subjects, Chemistry, Physics, and Maths taken as two distinct A-levels, Pure (mainly calculus) and Applied (mechanics). That meant practically no free time and a lot of homework. Each subject set us a past A-level paper every week for two years. That sounds impossible, until you understand that Britain had numerous GCE boards, which each set their own papers.

Colin Pryke continued to teach me chemistry, with much more emphasis on organic (carbon related) chemistry - his real love - than before. He was a bit worried by my approach to practical work and tried to scare me by saying "you won't survive the course". I took it lightly, but it certainly got my parents worried when he said it to them. In truth we never did anything very dangerous, although the abandon with which mercury, sodium, hydrofluoric acid and such were handled would never be accepted today. He once had us handle some potassium cyanide, saying it was the safest substance in the lab precisely because everyone was so scared of it - which we most certainly were. Yet we would cheerfully prepare the much more toxic hydrogen disulphide (bad egg gas) without any worry.

Pure Maths was taught by Percy. For Applied Maths we had another odd character, Malcolm Snow. He would often give me a ride home after our weekly computer sessions at a nearby school (the subject for another whole article), then we would sit outside my house for an hour or more while we talked about all sorts of things - though nothing inappropriate. It used to worry my mother, no doubt imagining all kinds of unhealthy goings-on, but there was no such thing. But he was most definitely an odd chap.

The GCE system had one odd feature, the S-level (scholarship) exams. I think these were originally intended to parallel the special entrance exams for Oxford and Cambridge, but they really had no practical use. But they were there, so I decided to tackle two of them - the maximum permitted - in Chemistry and Applied Maths. They were just a bunch of harder questions based on the same syllabus.

Finally the A- (and S-) levels came around. I did work hard for these, with lots of revision, so it was gratifying to get the highest possible grades in all of them. And that despite my Lower Sixth form teacher's report that "Harper does not appear to be making much effort and will probably struggle with his A-levels". That remark annoyed me enough that I persuaded my parents to insist on a formal retraction, which was grudgingly produced.

Friends and Colleagues

There was a little clique of four or five of us who hung around together in the sixth form. My friend Tony had saved up enough to buy himself a car, a pale blue Mini, and we would go out together in the evenings and at weekends when we weren't working. A handful of times we dared to go at lunchtime to a pub a few miles out in the country that would happily sell us pints of beer, completely illegally and obviously so considering that we were wearing our school uniforms.

In my science stream, there were just six girls. Then as now, most girls were in the arts stream.

This was the Swinging Sixties, when teenagers were supposed to be living wild sex lives. All I can say is that if they were, they were jolly discreet about it. There were a handful of boy/girl relationships (any other kind was most definitely not spoken of back then), but I suspect they were mostly pretty innocent.

Postscript

The Grammar School system did not survive the Labour governments of the 1970s. I left HHGS in 1971, the same year my brother joined, and it was merged with the adjacent Broxhill to become a new-fangled Comprehensive (i.e. for everyone, of all ability levels) school in about 1975. George Armstrong would surely have been turning in his grave, except that he was still very much alive.

The buildings survived in various local government roles until about ten years ago. The whole thing has been flattened now, and new houses built on both the school site and the very extensive grounds and playing fields. Sadly, not even Google could find a picture of it in its heyday.

Zetters

In the Clerkenwell district of central London, there's a very up-market hotel called The Zetter. It's an odd and unique name for a hotel. There must be some history behind it.

When I was 16, I needed a weekend job to make some pocket money. The typical job was in a shop, but my mother had another idea. While my brother was small, she had worked on Sundays, checking football pools coupons at what was then one of the biggest pools outfits in Britain, Zetters in London. This paid a lot better than working in a shop, so it was obvious for me to try it.

Football pools are a uniquely British institution (though they have spread to some of the former dominions). The basic idea is very simple. Of the 55 or so matches played on a Saturday, the objective is to predict 8 which are draws, i.e. where the two teams have equal scores. The coupon is a grid, where each row is a game. In each column you put 8 crosses, and if those 8 matches happen to be draws, you win a big prize. There are secondary prizes if just 7 of them are draws. That's why it's called the Treble Chance - you get a first dividend for 8 draws, a second dividend for 7 draws and an away win, and a third dividend for 7 draws and a home win. You pay a fixed amount (a fraction of an old penny back then) for each line.

If you want to cover a lot of possibilities, writing them all out individually would be an impossible task. You can write more than 8 crosses in one column, and you win if any 8 of them are draws. This rapidly increases the cost - 10 crosses will cost for 45 lines, while 12 will cost for 495 lines, and 14 gives 3003. (Mathematically, this is the function nCr, where n is the number of crosses and r is the number of matches - 8 in this case). This was called a "full perm" (although mathematically it is a combination, not a permutation). There were various subterfuges for trying to cover more matches at lower cost - more on this later.

I duly applied for a job, and went up to London for a test. This was fairly simple, especially under my mother's tutelage. I passed, and started work the following Sunday, arriving at 9 am. It was a lonely and quiet journey - trains that were jam-packed with standing passengers during the week were deserted on Sunday morning. Only at Farringdon station, on the Circle Line, would you run into fellow checkers all hurrying in the same direction.

Football results were announced late on Saturday afternoon (and what a ritual that was), so checking the entries took place on Sunday. Now computers can do it, but then only humans could, armies of them at each of the pools companies still in business: Littlewoods, Vernons, Zetters, and some smaller ones.

Zetters had a large five-storey building just off Clerkenwell Green. Most of the floors were one gigantic open-plan work area, with the checkers sitting close together at long, narrow tables, with just enough room to work. The building had a very characteristic smell, of stale sweat and old paint. Smoking was (luckily for me) not permitted, I suppose because of the fire risk. Coupons were brought around in bundles of 35, held together with wire and a lead seal. The only aid we had to speed things up was a piece of thin card, with the draws marked on them in red. Simple though it was, most losing coupons could be disposed of in a few seconds.

Potential winners were a different matter. Any line that had 7 or more draws in it was a potential winner. If the entry was a simple one, it could be marked immediately as a winner, by putting a coloured sticker on the top of the coupon. Many cases required further checking later on, and in that case a different colour sticker was used. When a bundle was finished, after ten or fifteen minutes, it would have a little forest of coloured stickers on the top.

Security was taken very seriously. It would have been very easy to introduce a winning coupon on Sunday, already knowing Saturday's results, and it would be impossible to search everyone entering the building. Each bundle of coupons was punched through with a unique pattern, during the week before the results were known. It would have been near-impossible to reproduce this, even with an example in hand. It was permitted, though discouraged, to visit the toilet during checking time - but the time spent was strictly monitored, so you couldn't go and hide for long enough to try and sneak a coupon into the system.

It was very important not to miss a winner. Football pools work by taking the income for the week, taking off a (large) margin for costs and profit, and dividing the rest amongst the number of winners. A missed winner ate directly into the profit margin. Punters would get their winnings during the week. If someone didn't hear by the following weekend, they'd write in. Every Sunday there was a "walk of shame" where checkers who'd missed winners would be called up to the supervisor's desk in front of everyone. It was pretty much impossible not to miss the occasional small one, but there was a cash bonus system which meant it was certainly worth making an effort. If someone consistently missed winners, they'd be summarily fired and walked out of the building, but this was very rare.

Missing a really big winner would be a different matter. The size of the payouts depended directly on the number of draws that week. Typically there were ten or twelve of them, which meant there would be lots of winners and the individual payouts would be quite small. A week with only seven or eight draws would generate the legendary "pools winner" payouts of tens or hundreds of thousands of pounds. That would make a big dent in the profits.

Fortunately, the amount of work went up directly with the number of draws. If there were very few, checking was quickly done, so there was time for a second verification pass over all the non-winning coupons. Even then we would often finish early, getting to go home at 5 o'clock or earlier instead of the usual 6. If there were a lot of draws, the opposite was true. In that case, work would go on until 10, with voluntary and well-paid overtime. I was delighted when this happened. Occasionally they would even ask people to go in on Monday if they could - though I never could since I had to go to school.

There was a a one-hour break for lunch. Some people went to the pub, but I always took a packed lunch that my mother had prepared - a sandwich, usually corned beef, and a bottle of that uniquely British concoction, Tizer. As a result I have never been able to eat corned beef since - the association with the Zetters experience is just too strong. That would leave time for a short walk around the neighbourhood, uninspiring at the best of times and completely dead on a Sunday afternoon.

A new hire started as a "grade 4" checker. There were three further grades, which could be reached by taking a test, though not more often than every six months. I passed the grade 3 test, covering some slightly more complex bets. That meant slightly higher pay, but I left before I could move up to grade 2. As far as I could tell there was never any difference in the work for grade 3. There were very few grade 1 checkers, but when I was there one of them was a certain Alan Solomon, at the time a PhD student at one of the London colleges. Later he went on to found Dr Solomon's anti-virus product and make a lot of money.

Mid-afternoon, the job changed. All the coupons that had earlier been declared possible winners now had to be checked to see if they really were. Mainly, this was about "plans". As I explained above, the simple way to cover multiple matches without laboriously writing out hundreds of lines is a simple "perm". In addition, all of the pools companies and popular newspapers published books of plans. The idea was that you would mark, say, 16 matches, and if any 8 of them were draws, you'd get at least a second dividend (7 draws correct). Or maybe if 9 of them were draws. There were all sorts of associated guarantees. They didn't actually give any greater probability of winning, but they gave the punters the impression of having a better chance.

There were hundreds and hundreds of plans, but only a dozen or so were frequently used. Zetters had their own, and Littlewoods Plan 2 was very popular for some reason. Each source had its own thick book. To simplify the job, all possible winners using say Daily Express plans were put together into bundles and checked together. I've forgotten exactly how it was done.

One thing that intrigued me at the time and still does, nearly 50 years later, is just how these plans were contrived. There is a whole mathematical discipline about it, called variously the "lottery problem" or the "football pool problem", but I'm pretty sure the people who did the job didn't have PhDs in group theory. It turns out there is still no algorithmic way to construct the best way to cover say 16 matches, nor even to know the minimum number of lines required. A few years back I wrote a program, using what I thought was a fairly sophisticated algorithm. The results were close to the published plans, but not as good as what was undoubtedly done by some old guy with a fag hanging out of his mouth, using no more than squared paper, a pencil and eraser. There is no literature on the subject, so it must remain a mystery.

There were other pools besides the Treble Chance, though few people did them. But something was needed to fill up the back of the coupon, so there was the Twelve Results, the Eight Homes, and others I've forgotten. Each of these had its own special checking technique. A few entries, maybe one in a hundred, were beyond the ability of a normal grade 4 checker. There was yet another coloured ticket, buff pink and marked "FC", which meant "further checking" - i.e. "this is too hard for me". I almost never used them, preferring the challenge of figuring out something like a no-consecutive perm, but there were checkers who put them on any but the simplest of entries. Occasionally someone would get in trouble for it. But since there was a productivity bonus, for checking an above average number of coupons, it was worth trying it on.

Zetters carried on the pools business long after my 18 month stint there. But the arrival of the National Lottery in the 90s was the beginning of the end. The prizes were a lot bigger and absolutely no skill was required. Zetters diversified into other gambling businesses and sold their pools activity in 2002. They didn't need a huge building full of checkers every Sunday any more. The building was purchased and converted to a luxury hotel. As you will surely have guessed, this explains the unusual name of the Zetter Hotel.

Pensioners' Pals

My parents moved to my childhood home a couple of years before I was born, to a brand-new house on a brand-new estate just east of London. The London County Council (LCC) - predecessor to today's Greater London Authority - had an urgent program after the War to replace all the bombed-out housing in inner London. They embarked on a huge project,  building numerous estates around London such as our own Harold Hill, which was the largest. The new houses were luxurious compared to the Victorian slums they replaced, with modern conveniences like running hot water and even baths - despite the assertion by a Tory MP at the time that all the working classes would do was store coal in them.

These new estates included special provision for older people - Old Age Pensioners as they were called then, women over 60 and men over 65 (not that there were many of the latter). At the end of many of the terraces of houses were little bungalows with one bedroom, laid out for the mobility challenged, as well as what would now be called sheltered housing - and in the 17th century would have been called almshouses.

Part of the community support for the elderly was an organisation called the Pensioners' Pals, a voluntary effort to help the old people in various ways - visiting, doing shopping and odd jobs, and arranging the occasional social event. This was important because the whole estate was made up of people who had been ripped from their inner London roots, and didn't necessarily have family living nearby.

I'm not sure why my parents decided to get involved with this group, but they did. By the time I was old enough to remember anything, they were part of the leadership. My Dad loved the social events, and my Mum has naturally organised anything that moves for her whole life, so it made sense. I was only a small child, but for some reason these activities made a big impression and even now I remember a lot of it.

My Mum had "adopted" two of the old ladies. They lived in adjacent bungalows, a ten minute walk from our house. One, Miss Simpson (I genuinely don't think she had a first name), was barely older than I am now, yet she was without any doubt old. She wore old-person's clothes, she moved like an old lady - everything about her said old. It's trite to say "60 is the new 40", but when I think back to these old dears, it is absolutely true. In the 1950s, once you passed 60 you were definitively old. She was also a spinster. That's a word you never hear now, meaning a woman who has never married. It has a certain connotation, of primness and unworldliness, which exactly suited our Miss Simpson.

Our other adoptee was completely different. She was universally called Grandma. I don't think she had any actual names at all. She must have been close to 80, which back then was positively ancient, but she was still pretty active. She had a huge family who were always visiting her, and lived surrounded by clutter in her tiny house. Very clearly she had never been a spinster.

We would visit them once a week, always taking some little treat, making the trek up the hill. On one occasion I was off school sick, and I got into trouble with the school truant inspector because I was admiring his car, parked in the street outside - of course I had no idea who it belonged to. It was something very unusual, a very sleek looking royal blue French Panhard at a time when 95% of cars in Britain were British.

Then there were the social events. Maybe a couple of times a year, a hall would be booked for the evening, a band would be engaged, and things were all set for a re-enactment of the first decade of the 20th century. "Our" pensioners were typically born in the 1880s, and would have been in the full flush of their youth in the Edwardian era (1901-1910). No television, no radio, no cinema - the entertainment of the masses was the Music Hall, a kind of popular theatre with singers, dancers and comedians. And then there were dances, to the popular tunes of the day, the girls carefully chaperoned. The Pensioners' Pals' socials were an attempt to re-create some of this.

I still remember the words to those old songs - "Daisy, Daisy", "It's a Long Way to Tipperary" (from the First World War, that one) and so on. This was brought back to me forcefully when I recently visited my mother in the home where she now lives. They had an entertainer playing old songs, and I could sing along with all of them!

And then there was the greatest of them all, "Knees Up Mother Brown", a vulgar, raucous dancing song where everyone links arms and rushes in and out of a circle. What an excuse for some "accidental" groping back in those prim and proper days. Even now in England a "knees up" is a synonym for an unrestrained, noisy evening.

For some reason these events attracted all kinds of local notables. Our family doctor was often there, drinking away his sorrows - he was well known to be fond of a tipple or three. My father once said to him, "Good evening, Doctor." He replied, "I'm not a doctor tonight, not a doctor." With hindsight there must have been a lot of feeling behind that.

The mayor of Romford showed up from time to time, as well. He had a very grand car for the time, an Armstrong Siddeley - one of the many long-disappeared British marques. I think I even got a ride in it once.

The music for these events was provided by a Mr Button. He ran a radio repair shop, and brought along a gramophone to provide music when the band was having a rest. My mother must somehow have stayed in touch with him, because 40 years later when he died, I inherited his long-obsolete collection of valves (vacuum tubes) - I still have them in my garage.

Then there were the management meetings for the organisation. Along with my parents, there was a childless couple, Mr and Mrs Clark - he was the Treasurer. He had a very flat northern accent, something strange to me back then. Never an adventurous man, his favourite observation was "This is a time for consolidation" - in other words, doing nothing. Several years later, when my Dad had learned to drive, they acquired a car, an awful old pre-war Austin in terrible condition. They insisted on taking us out for the day in it. My Dad drove for some of the time, and afterwards said it was the most terrifying drive of his life. That was before Britain introduced the "MOT test", a way of weeding out the most dangerous of these old wrecks. I doubt that their car survived its first encounter with the test.

My memories of the Pensioners' Pals all stop when I was about six or seven. I don't know what happened, whether my parents just dropped out of it, or whether the whole thing ground to a halt. They didn't lose all contact though. One of the biggest surprises was Miss Simpson, the old spinster who lived in the bungalow, who got married. Approaching 70, she met a widower and they set up home together in Dagenham, a bus ride away from us. We went there to see them once. My Dad's observation was that her new husband had probably got rather more than he bargained for.

Oddly the name came back to life when I was a teenager, when I heard that some of the girls at school - we must all have been about 16 or 17 - were involved in a new incarnation of the Pensioners' Pals. But I doubt if they ever had concerts where all the old dears sung "Daisy, Daisy".