'Wash your mouth out!' - the well-known Rugby schoolmaster who challenged 'Sam the man'

My late father was a teacher at Rugby’s Eastlands School for nearly 30 years.

Dad was a ‘Marmite’ character as far as his charges were concerned. He was either liked or loathed, although both camps agreed that his unerringly accurate aim with a blackboard rubber was quite something.

Anyone who has read Rugby historian David Howe’s excellent history of Eastlands will quickly realise this.

I would imagine that there will still be quite a few Rugby people around who can readily recall that strange blend of school masterly strictness one minute, and kindness the next, the latter often prefaced by the quick burst of a tune on his ever-present fiddle.

One thing is certain, however. Whether in the classroom or the living room, he was always the schoolmaster. After all, I should know.

Take this example. There used to be a farm labourer by the name of Sammy Smith who lived in a house near the Gibbet Garage, where the Leicester Road crosses the A5 Watling Street.

Most Saturday nights, Sam and his drinking pal would spend the evening in Rugby’s oldest pub, The Squirrel, and then catch the 10.10pm last bus home.

In those days, the Lutterworth bus called at Churchover, and so that was the one caught by our family if we’d earlier had ‘tea’ at my grandparents’

home in Percival Road.

Sam was always slightly the worse for wear and much of his conversation – English, but not as we usually know it – tended to be punctuated with expletives of the milder kind.

One Saturday night, as the bus gathered momentum up the incline near Brownsover, my father decided that he’d heard enough.

He got up out of his seat, strode purposefully up the bus aisle, stopped when he drew level with Sammy, and boomed: “You should wash your mouth out with soap and water, mister. There are women and children on this bus!”

I always smile to myself when I recall that long gone winter’s night travelling along the Leicester Road on the last bus home. It’s so typical of a bygone age when men, wearing gabardine macs, collars, ties, and trilby hats, acted without a thought for the possible consequences, just doing what they thought was right. Imagine that today.

As it turned out, Sammy Smith toned it down a bit, although he did shout something at my father a few days later.

Quite a few men worked on farms in the Rugby and Lutterworth area during the days of my childhood. In my home village of Churchover, there were four farms, two smallholdings, and over the River Swift was Harborough Fields Farm, where I spent two happy years as a farmer’s boy during the holidays and at weekends.

Heading in the direction of Rugby, there was Lower Lodge Farm on the right-hand side, and two others quite close to each other on the left, just before the descent down the hill to Rugby.

All this was once green fields, and sadly – as far as I’m concerned – they are now swamped with over-sized warehouses and other developments.

In those days, farms were far less mechanised than they are today. And whenever a crop such as potatoes required gathering in, the farmer’s ‘man’ would knock on village doors hoping to recruit likely lads eager for some extra money.

Not long ago, I saw a present-day potato field with the crop being brought in entirely by mechanised means. When I was a temporarily enlisted son of the soil, the job involved following a rotavator carrying a sack with one eye on the ground and the other looking to the front, watching out for flying clods and stones, some of which could be quite lethal.

It was the same with haymaking, which still required no small degree of effort and sweat to accomplish.

Anyone who has ever hoisted a bale impaled on a pitchfork up to the ‘loader’ on top of a trailer will know what I mean. Then there’s the physical toll of the entire operation… the aching muscles, blisters on your hands from the baling twine, and grass seeds lodged in every nook and

cranny of the body.

Sometimes, if no one was around, I would take off my clothes and ‘skinny dip’ in the Swift, which proved to be a thorough, refreshing wash like no other.

Of course, all this is now lost in the mists of time. Foreign workers now fill the jobs that were once done by our own young people. Today’s youngsters just won’t work on the land like they once did, and thousands of acres that once felt only the tread of that little grey ‘Fergie’ tractor are now covered with houses and roads.

And Sammy Smith? Well, he’s long gone to that eternal mowing meadow, no doubt dreaming of another Saturday night in some celestial pub called The Squirrel… but at the same time perhaps wary of another encounter with a certain schoolteacher.

John Phillpott’s latest book Go and Make the Tea, Boy! is now out and available from the usual sources.