It’s weird to see a place that dominated your life for five years – setting parameters on how you spent most of your time, determining most of the people whom you met and became friends (or enemies) with, and having a considerable bearing on how the rest of your life would turn out – in rubble. I’m talking about my old alma mater Peebles High School, which I attended from 1977 to 1982. Most of it has now been demolished. I visited the remnants of it when I was back in Peebles, in the south of Scotland, two months ago.
Okay, Peebles High School isn’t really a pile of rubble. It lives on in a new form. Since November last year, a brand new school, built at a cost of 46 million pounds, standing where some of the playing fields used to be, has been open for business. (“A bit IKEA,” was the verdict of my two nieces, who’ve been pupils there.) I’m talking about the old Peebles High School. A third of it got destroyed in a fire in November 2019 and for the next half-dozen years, while the new school was approved, planned and constructed, it limped on in a moribund condition. Now it’s almost completely gone.
I made a pilgrimage to what’s left of the old school one afternoon and spent five minutes peering through the mesh on the copious barriers, placed around the site to keep the curious public at bay, and thinking such melancholy thoughts as: “Jings! That hillock of debris is the spot where I once had a fight with Roy Kilner!” It looked desolate and depressing.
The few parts of the premises still standing that afternoon included the four-storey tower – once the tallest structure in Peebles – which contained an entrance hall, cloakrooms and toilets (on the ground floor), the maths department (first floor), the business studies department (second floor) and the geography department (third floor). It was as a fifth-year student that, one day, I exited the late John Cornwall’s geography class rather too enthusiastically and tripped coming down the staircase from the top floor to the second floor. I sprained my right ankle so badly that for the next month I hobbled around on crutches with my right foot in plaster. The reason the tower hasn’t been demolished yet is, depending on whom you speak to in Peebles, because bats, a protected species, have been discovered roosting inside it, or because it’s been found to be riddled with asbestos.
Also still there was part of a building to the north of the tower, which if I remember correctly contained the home economics department and which you passed through to get to the (now flattened) science labs. Did the side of that building facing onto the playground also contain the home of the school janitor, who was affectionately known to pupils as ‘Johnnie the Jannie?” I can’t remember now.
There’s a Facebook page dedicated to past times in Peebles, one that’s popular with the area’s older folk. A vintage black-and-white photo of the town, or a reference to something in it that no longer exists, frequently attracts nostalgic comments – about how Peebles was so much better when, for example, it still had a railway or its edges didn’t sprawl with new housing developments. I was surprised, then, when someone recently posted photos of the ruins of the old school and many of the comments underneath – frequently from people who’d been pupils at it in the 1950s and 1960s – were decidedly not nostalgic.
One wrote, “…for me seeing the rubble certainly doesn’t encourage any tears.” Another described a lot of the teachers in her schooldays as “cruel bullies”, which prompted somebody else to reply, “back then they were the very worst you could find. Most of them should have been sacked for what they did to us.” Yet another commentator stated, “I would quite like to go up and throw a couple of bricks at what’s left of the windows…”
Well, I have certain memories from my five years at Peebles High School that would make me happily undergo electroconvulsive therapy if I thought it would erase them from my brain, forever. But generally my recollections of the place aren’t bad. Some of them are quite good, actually. I think the fact that by the 1970s the school contained some younger teachers with more humane and principled ideas about what teaching involved – i.e., imparting knowledge to juvenile minds and maybe even trying to instill a love of learning in them, as opposed to acting like cops on riot duty and herding, containing and controlling them – made my experiences there better than those of the older Facebook commentators.
That said, in the late 1970s and early 1980s there certainly were a few throwbacks left in the teaching staff. I remember a decrepit old science teacher handing back exam papers one day and a sleepy pupil failing to hear his name being called out repeatedly. When the pupil woke up and hurried forward to belatedly collect his paper, the teacher flung it on the floor in front of him and ordered him, “Well, pick it up, lad!” The pupil crouched down and the teacher started kicking him about the floor. Another time, that teacher lost the rag at a pupil who, at the end of an experiment — heating a solution over a Bunsen burner — had made the mistake of pouring the solution down a sink. He chastised the kid by seizing him by the hair and shaking him like a ragdoll, which must have left his scalp in agony. That old git was an incredibly shite teacher, by the way.
I should add that a few of the older teachers were good. I liked Mr. MacPherson, the art teacher, who was a kindly soul. I belonged to the local scout troop and one Remembrance Sunday us scouts were made to attend a Remembrance service in Peebles’ Saint Andrews Leckie Parish Church. There, Mr. MacPherson gave one of the Bible readings. He turned up with a bunch of medals fixed to the breast of his jacket, signifying that in addition to being kind he’d been brave during his days in uniform. Meanwhile, Miss Spence, one of the maths teachers, was a fearsome disciplinarian and ran her classes with military precision. But she was an excellent teacher. Despite being crap at maths, I scraped a pass in the Higher exam after a year of her tutelage – a great achievement on her part.
But it was the younger teachers who were responsible for most of the good memories I have of Peebles High School. And some of them taught us stuff I actually still remember. When I read news reports about the current, catastrophic wildfires in Spain, France, Greece, Canada and elsewhere, I recall Mr. Roxborough telling my second-year, general-science class about the Greenhouse Effect. That was the first time I ever heard the term used. “I won’t be around to experience it,” he said, his eyes twinkling mischievously, “but you young folks probably will.” Or when the news that a mouse had been cloned made the headlines in 1979, I remember our biology teacher Dr McHardy explaining to us just what exactly cloning involved – and when asked the inevitable question about cloning humans, replying, “Oh, it’s certainly possible to clone a human. We simply haven’t developed the science to do it yet.”
Who else? I have fond memories of Ian Jenkins and Dick Thornton teaching English, Sandy Boak teaching modern studies, Midge Jenkins and Dave Mallon teaching languages… At the end of my schooldays, I was accepted as a participant on a European Economic Community scheme whereby young people were given grants to allow them to visit an EEC country and do a project about some aspect of the local culture. Dave Mallon went out of his way to fix me up with contacts in France and arrange accommodation for me there for three weeks. Doing that project was first time I’d ever set foot outside the United Kingdom and Ireland and I was grateful to him for helping me have that experience. Alas, while I was back in Peebles, I learned that he’d passed away in 2025.
Anyway, all this proves that it doesn’t matter how financially well-off or well-resourced or high-tech a school is. It’s useless if it doesn’t have decent teachers. My old high school might be rubble now, but at least it had a few of those.
My apologies to any teachers whose surnames I may have misspelled. I think my memory’s good, but it’s not that good…
