Forty Pence is Three and Fourpence
In this part of the country at least, the eleven-plus exam is no more: I was in the second-to-last year to do it. All classes were mixed ability until the last year of primary school, when the eleven-plus exam ruled supreme. This external exam decided whether you would go to grammar school and become a worthy upright member of society, or to a secondary modern and lead a worthless life of deserved obscurity. Of course, that was not the truth, but that's how we thought it was: grammar school was the passport to further qualifications and a Good Job and so passing the eleven-plus was all-important.
In the primary school that I went to, the eleven-plus year was streamed into three classes according to ability. If you were in 4A, that was Mr Storey's class, and nobody in his class ever failed: he simply would not permit it. 4B was Mr Robson's class and quite a few of them passed it every year. The rest were in a class with the dispiriting name of The Remove and they were written off as total failures at the age of eleven.
When I was eight or nine I was very slow at mental arithmetic and some doubts were voiced to my parents as to whether I would pass, but once I had made it to 4A and the capable hands of Mr Storey, my chances of failing grew ever slighter. In the eleven-plus exam you had to do sixty mental arithmetic in thirty minutes: by the time Mr Storey had finished with us, we could do the lot in twenty, and have ten minutes to check them.
I can still do them: forty pence is three and fourpence. (In old money, there were two hundred and forty pence in a pound: eighty threepenny bits: forty sixpences: twenty shillings: eight half-crowns - a half-crown was two shillings and sixpence. Four hundred and eighty halfpennies, often written ha'pennies and always pronounced "haypnies"). Twenty-two yards in a chain. One thousand, seven hundred and sixty yards in a mile. The dozens rule which gave rise to such sums as: I buy twelve buns for tuppence ha'penny, what is the total cost? Half a crown, since you ask. Oh yes, and we knew our tables inside out: all the difficult ones such as six nines and seven eights and eleven elevens were meat and drink to us. "Sir! I know! Sir! Sir!"
Mechanical arithmetic too: long division: long multiplication: pounds, shillings and pence, again and again and again until it was all second nature.
There was also an English paper and we practised old ones until we knew all their tricks. A book called Further English Progress Papers was our Bible. Choose the right word to fill in the gap. Is it:
None of the cricketers were hurt
OR
None of the cricketers was hurt
(all the examples were along these proud-to-be-British lines)
I got it wrong once, to my eternal shame. "None" is short for "not one" and so the correct answer is was.
They all still echo in my head. I was sent to the Headmaster, firm-but-fair Mr Aspland, with an essay that Mr Storey considered particularly good.
"Well, very good, Daphne," said Mr Aspland, "but there is no such word as alright. It is two words, all right."
I have never written it as one word since, not once.
Then there were the "intelligence tests". These came in Further General Progress Papers and the first time we tried them we were rubbish at them. But hoorah! Mr Storey could coach us in intelligence too. Lots of coded things where every time you saw an A you had to put a T. By the time it came to take the exam our intelligence had soared beyond all expectation.
We took the exam. We all passed. Our futures lay shining before us.
Two years later they abolished the eleven-plus. Then they abolished the old money and brought in decimal currency. Out went inches, feet, yards, chains, furlongs, and in came millimetres, centimetres and kilometres - - oh, um, okay, we kept the mile just to be confusing. The intelligence tests were discredited because they suddenly discovered that you could be taught how to do them (a fact that Mr Storey had worked out many years before).
So much of the work we did that year was totally wasted. But two things remain.
I know my tables, and that has been the most useful thing I learned ever in maths at school. Nothing I learned afterwards has ever been so much use. Six nines? Fifty-four! Instant! Who needs a calculator?
And I can spell, oh yes I can. If you look at all the words above you will find that none of the letters is in the wrong place. I have a good grasp of grammar (though I break the rules from time to time, such as starting a sentence with "and").
So he did a lot for us, Mr Storey. And I think we meant a lot to him, too. When I was about twenty I met him on a bus: he had retired the year after he taught us.
“Ah, Daphne - - those were the days, eh?” he said, and burst into tears.
I'm glad I managed to thank him.
In the primary school that I went to, the eleven-plus year was streamed into three classes according to ability. If you were in 4A, that was Mr Storey's class, and nobody in his class ever failed: he simply would not permit it. 4B was Mr Robson's class and quite a few of them passed it every year. The rest were in a class with the dispiriting name of The Remove and they were written off as total failures at the age of eleven.
When I was eight or nine I was very slow at mental arithmetic and some doubts were voiced to my parents as to whether I would pass, but once I had made it to 4A and the capable hands of Mr Storey, my chances of failing grew ever slighter. In the eleven-plus exam you had to do sixty mental arithmetic in thirty minutes: by the time Mr Storey had finished with us, we could do the lot in twenty, and have ten minutes to check them.
I can still do them: forty pence is three and fourpence. (In old money, there were two hundred and forty pence in a pound: eighty threepenny bits: forty sixpences: twenty shillings: eight half-crowns - a half-crown was two shillings and sixpence. Four hundred and eighty halfpennies, often written ha'pennies and always pronounced "haypnies"). Twenty-two yards in a chain. One thousand, seven hundred and sixty yards in a mile. The dozens rule which gave rise to such sums as: I buy twelve buns for tuppence ha'penny, what is the total cost? Half a crown, since you ask. Oh yes, and we knew our tables inside out: all the difficult ones such as six nines and seven eights and eleven elevens were meat and drink to us. "Sir! I know! Sir! Sir!"
Mechanical arithmetic too: long division: long multiplication: pounds, shillings and pence, again and again and again until it was all second nature.
There was also an English paper and we practised old ones until we knew all their tricks. A book called Further English Progress Papers was our Bible. Choose the right word to fill in the gap. Is it:
None of the cricketers were hurt
OR
None of the cricketers was hurt
(all the examples were along these proud-to-be-British lines)
I got it wrong once, to my eternal shame. "None" is short for "not one" and so the correct answer is was.
They all still echo in my head. I was sent to the Headmaster, firm-but-fair Mr Aspland, with an essay that Mr Storey considered particularly good.
"Well, very good, Daphne," said Mr Aspland, "but there is no such word as alright. It is two words, all right."
I have never written it as one word since, not once.
Then there were the "intelligence tests". These came in Further General Progress Papers and the first time we tried them we were rubbish at them. But hoorah! Mr Storey could coach us in intelligence too. Lots of coded things where every time you saw an A you had to put a T. By the time it came to take the exam our intelligence had soared beyond all expectation.
We took the exam. We all passed. Our futures lay shining before us.
Two years later they abolished the eleven-plus. Then they abolished the old money and brought in decimal currency. Out went inches, feet, yards, chains, furlongs, and in came millimetres, centimetres and kilometres - - oh, um, okay, we kept the mile just to be confusing. The intelligence tests were discredited because they suddenly discovered that you could be taught how to do them (a fact that Mr Storey had worked out many years before).
So much of the work we did that year was totally wasted. But two things remain.
I know my tables, and that has been the most useful thing I learned ever in maths at school. Nothing I learned afterwards has ever been so much use. Six nines? Fifty-four! Instant! Who needs a calculator?
And I can spell, oh yes I can. If you look at all the words above you will find that none of the letters is in the wrong place. I have a good grasp of grammar (though I break the rules from time to time, such as starting a sentence with "and").
So he did a lot for us, Mr Storey. And I think we meant a lot to him, too. When I was about twenty I met him on a bus: he had retired the year after he taught us.
“Ah, Daphne - - those were the days, eh?” he said, and burst into tears.
I'm glad I managed to thank him.
posted by Daphne at 5:34 pm
2 Comments:
Ha ha I used to think it was a Second Remodern School.
I’m glad they taught me to write at school. I regularly write shopping lists and sometimes birthday cards too. So it comes in handy. But with hindsight, keeping me in at lunchtime for months on end to do extra handwriting practice was perhaps not the best use of anyone’s time. I do now spend a lot of my time transferring my thoughts rapidly and efficiently to a screen without looking at my fingers. But there were no extra lunchtime lessons for this; I had to teach myself twenty years later. Consequently, when I see my daughter struggling to learn curly joined-up writing, I can’t help gritting my teeth and thinking of ‘forty pence is three and fourpence’.
Matilda, the daughter of some friends of ours, is highly intelligent, creative and communicative, but also highly dyslexic. She is thriving at a primary school for dyslexic children. Nevertheless, she is in imminent danger of ‘failing’ the modern Dutch equivalent of the eleven plus, the CITO test. This test has actually taken on an increasingly decisive role in the Dutch education system in recent years. It largely determines whether the secondary school you go to leads to university or hairdressing school. Matilda is terrible at things like mental arithmetic. But unless she’s planning to sell fruit and veg on the market or be a professional darts player, I can’t see it standing in her way. In the sort of creative, communicative work I’m sure she will end up doing in spite of her irrelevant education, it just won’t matter. I can sympathise. Not having been drilled by Mr. Storey, I’m also pretty dreadful at mental arithmetic – the eleven plus was happily dead and buried by the time I got to school. While Daphne enjoys knowing instantly that six nines are fifty-four, I don’t really mind living with the three-second delay while I type ‘=F14*9’ in Excel.
Finally, a query about something I find curious. (Sorry this is so long – whose blog is this anyway?) The metric system was introduced entirely in schools the year I started. This means that anyone in Britain under forty knows nothing different. It's really easy to calculate with metres and kilograms and even someone like me who doesn’t know 'six nines' can do it. But to deal with stuff like ‘one thousand, seven hundred and sixty yards in a mile’ you really needed to have been in Mr. Storey’s class. So why when I come back to England do I hear, to my astonishment, all these thirty-something people going on about inches and yards and ounces and such? They don’t even really know what it means properly! Ask them to work out three foot six times four foot two and three sixteenths and it would take them till next week. Personally I’d convert it to metres first on the internet, then do it in Excel, then convert it back. But I bet Daphne could tell us the answer in seconds.
Anyway, how do British people under forty get anything practical done? What’s with all the inches, folks?
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