Bullying at School
You were expected to stick up for yourself
By Ted Blowers
I was at school in the 1940s.There was no such thing as looking down on someone because they didn’t have fashionable clothes. There was no such thing as designer labels - you wore what you what you were given to wear and if you had an older brother you wore his hand me downs if suitable and the same applied to the girls.
Bullying did occur but not like it appears today, where it seems to be that a large group will pick on one individual. In those days it was usually one individual picking on a weaker one, and that was usually straightened out by ourselves very quickly. I remember only one lad that was an obvious target for bullies. He was a real mother's boy who didn’t fit in with anybody. I remember coming out of school one day to find a group of girls picking on him. I saw them off and later tried to show him the rudiments of fighting. He couldn’t even make a fist - he was totally hopeless. I felt sorry for him so I let him walk to and from school with me for a while. He just disappeared. I don’t know if his mother moved him to another school. If she did, it wouldn’t have helped as our school wasn’t bad. We ourselves didn’t tolerate bullying let alone the teachers. Another strange piece of logic that I remember - it was frowned upon to call anyone with glasses 'four eyes', (though I am sure it happened on occasion), yet it was not considered fair play to hit a kid with glasses, so there was provocation on the one hand, yet a fair amount of protection should the kid with the glasses retaliate with aggression or insults of his own.
In those days you were expected to stick up for yourself, but if you were unable, then usually someone would come to your defence. The rule of the day seemed to be in sport and life in general, that fairness was important and good sportsmanship essential. It was always more fun to win in any sport but should you lose, you were expected to lose gracefully, and as long as you had done your best, you were not expected to moan about the referee or how you were unlucky or any other of the thousands of excuses that you can make. You were expected to respect the other team and acknowledge that they were better on the day. it seems to me that with that attitude it was a better world in many ways.