I didn’t go straight into teaching after doing my degree. I actually didn’t want to be a teacher, I wanted to be a writer; I applied to go to journalist’s college, and didn’t get in; I applied for every job that had anything to do with writing, not just journalism, but anything at all including writing abstracts for the British Rubber Company. I had various jobs while I applied to all these different places, including working in a hotel and working for a charity shop. I applied for the Civil service and actually got a job working in an office… unbelievably dull and I hated the hierarchical organization and felt very uncomfortable watching the training films about the ‘Red’ threat… I walked in one morning and wrote my resignation… I worked at Manchester Airport for a year which I really enjoyed but I realised that whatever my academic qualifications, I had no actual skills… well I did, but none recognized by that important documentary evidence… so I went back to college to train to be a teacher.
A year later, my first job was at Birley High school, sadly no more, but it was an inner city comprehensive in the heart of Moss Side, Manchester. My first job, and it was not teaching straight English but English as a Second language as it was called… how fortunate I was. E2L became my specialist subject and I taught it at various schools for the next nearly twenty years. Birley was a tough school, a hard school, but the kids were amazing, and the staff, my colleagues fantastic. The school was organized into houses and I was in Hilary House, named after Sir Edmund, and my head was Bernard Barry. Bernard was very old-school, very strict, but a decent, caring, kind man who only wanted the best for the young people – and young teachers in his house.
I was at Birley for three years – it started off as a bit of a baptism of fire, but it gave me the best foundation possible for a career which I went into reluctantly (because I wanted to be a writer) but ended up as quite a good teacher, having met and worked with incredible and talented teachers and students… through my nearly thirty years I often thought of Bernard, Mr Barry, and thought what a lot I and so many others owed him.
Bernard died last year at the age of ninety-four but I have only just read his obituary… and discovered that he had an extraordinary history, one I had no idea of.
He was born in Manchester in 1920, and his mother-tongue was Yiddish; his parents were Reuben and Annie Babinski. His father’s parents both had been born in Russia. Bernard was very politically aware from his teenage years and when he was only fifteen he joined the Youth Front against War and Fascism. This organization merged with the Young Communist League and he continued to be a part of the campaign throughout the 1930s against fascism and for Spanish republicans. During the war he became an interpreter, but with the peace he started work in a textile factory, and true to his socialist beliefs he became the shop steward of National Union of Tailors and Garment Workers.
Bernard came into teaching in a very different way from mine and my young colleagues who’d been through Uni or Polytechnic or training college; the shortage of teachers in the 1950’s meant that able people were recruited and went through emergency teacher training. I have worked with many older teachers who came into the profession via the same route and I am sure their experience in a world outside education made them better than those whose only life experiences have been school college school. Bernard continued his political activity, and campaigned for peace in Vietnam, and raised money for the child victims of that terrible, dreadful conflict.
I only knew him as a colleague, But I am very proud to have known him for those three years I was at the school, he was a great help to me, and to many, many hundreds, if not thousands of others.
Read his obituary by his son-in-law:
http://www.theguardian.com/theguardian/2014/dec/17/bernard-barry-obituary?CMP=twt_gu
Lois Elsden 