BIRKENHEAD
SCHOOL
0014 The Sixth Form
The highlight of my school career was, I suppose, the sixth form; when I took my A-levels and (Scholarship) S-Levels. I suppose it was also the time of my life when I put in my most intense scholarship activity. Certainly, working up to the exams in May/June, I spent a month or more roaming backwards and forwards through the first floor of our house; learning – by rote - all facts over and over again, so that I could do my best in the exams.
In the exams my weakest subject was chemistry. There was the important matter of the practical, which was not necessarily a foregone conclusion. You didn't know what was the material you were going to be made to analyse, and to that extent the result was potluck. The theory, in addition, was made up of what seemed to be lots of disconnected facts -- especially chemical equations -- which did not appear to have a great deal of logic linking them together. Though I was able to learn these by rote, I wasn't totally happy with my understanding of the links between them, and this made my learning difficult. In any event, I got a reasonable exam mark, of 55. Fortunately this ultimately didn't matter, as we will see later.
Similarly, maths - though it had a bit more logic to it at that level - was still a matter of learning all the various elements; and the links between were again sometimes quite tenuous. I scored something like 60 on A-level and 55 at scholarship level. At this stage I should explain that the scholarship (S) level was then done by some pupils as a route to getting scholarships; especially the state scholarship. But it was also taken into account by universities when they were selecting their students.
The one thing that I was confident about, and still very much enjoyed, was physics. There was a natural logic -- or at least there was for me -- to all the facts involved. You could look at them and see - more or less - why the various things happened. The laws of motion, for example, were almost self-evident. Accordingly I learned them well and obtained a score of 75 with 60 at the Scholarship level.
The saving grace was, in fact, a sideline. In a lower sixth I had done Economics as an option; merely out of interest. I had done it at a low-level but had become fascinated by the subject, and had eventually taken – and passed – the O level exam. In the sixth form I decided to do it at A-level as well. I hadn't hope in hell of getting it, because I was only studying it for one lesson a week, say three-quarters of an hour, with a little bit of study at home. In fact I had considerable difficulty getting the school to allow me to take the A-level examination in the subject. In the end my father had to see the headmaster, saying that he would pay all the costs. It was only at this stage the school grudgingly gave in and allowed me to take it. The end result, however, was that I got 90 in the subject! That was enough to pull my overall result up to state scholarship level.
I well remember that I was in the middle of my vac job in Butlins when my mother telephoned the results through to me. I quickly calculated the totals, as she was reading out the results, and at the end quite happily said "Oh that means that I've got a state scholarship”. My mother nearly fainted at the other end of the phone, because the state scholarship was a great honour in those days. Despite its high academic rating, the school rarely got more than four or five state scholarships each year. I had certainly not been expected to get one of them.
It was only years later, when I studied Economics at an undergraduate level with the Open University, that I found out why I had done so well. The economics master, called Tom Hockton mainly taught history. He also was a left-wing contender to be an MP – albeit in a hopeless constituency for Labour . He took me under his wing and pushed my development in the social sciences. For example he sent me on a weekend residential school, with other high-flying teenagers, at Burton Manor; a local residential college. Incidentally that was a great social education; for half those attending were girls! Never was playing cards so exciting. He also took me to the Liverpool Economic and Statistical Society to meet Harold Wilson, who was then Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer.
But, to cut a long story short, as preparation for the A level exam, he'd given me a textbook to read. This was the first edition of Samuelson. I loved it, for it was one of the first really well written textbooks. But the sting in the tail was that – unknown to me at the time - it was a textbook for undergraduates, not for sixth-form students. That presumably was why I scored so highly, since my answers were at undergraduate level, not A-level.
Thus I sailed out of the sixth-form and went on my way to the upper sixth, where I was to spend a year sitting the Oxford and Cambridge entrance exams; of which more elsewhere.
Not everyone was party to this decision though. At the end of the year, along with my compatriots, I turned up at the RAF hut carrying my uniform and waved them a tearful farewell, on the basis that I was leaving the school. It took most of the following year for them to realise that I hadn't left after all. But it got me out of the hated CCF!
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