"Toms Schooldays" . . . . . Horror stories from your school days please?

Don’t flatter yourself. It was only hanging out.

Eh?

Our local secondry had a typical 1970’s built setup. Its crowning glory was a 4 story block which housed the science dept on the 1st floor and then history, geography and finally languages.

Lad in my year decided it would be a good idea one night to go to the local petrol station. Buy a gallon of petrol and set it on fire. He didn’t just burn the class room (Science). He burnt the entire 4 story building to the ground.

I lived about 1/2mile from the school and remember my mum waking me up to see the biggest bonfire ever.

Lad was caught and did time in young offenders institute. He was caught on cctv buying the petrol 🙂

That one caused a few YEARS of disruption for 1000’s of kids.

I feel quite guilty about this one, but we had a geography teacher who had a habit of leaning on his filing cabinet – one day we moved it a foot to the left, he missed the cabinet, and knocked himself out on the wall.

I can’t think of anything to match some of these stories, but awesome thread.

We had a combined cadet force at school which we were all in

CCF at our school too.

Kids from the local comp – mostly from the wrong side of the tracks in Peckham and Brixton – used to pop over to our playing fields every once in a while, just vandalise the squash courts that sort of thing. They happened to do this one CCF day and the School Serjeant, fed up with these incursions, grabbed 4 of the 6th Form Army Cadets, all in their combat jackets, issued them with an SA80 each from the school armoury and marched out across the fields to confront them. Unsurprisingly, the kids decided they were no longer interested in graffiti-ing the squash courts and scarpered but the Serjeant bellowed “YOU BOYS!” STOP OR WE’LL OPEN FIRE!”. Surrounded by his armed guards (the rifles weren’t loaded but the kids didn’t know that) he then delivered the mother of all bollockings and we never had any problems from them after that.

I suspect if that happened now, the School Serjeant would be looking at a court appearance for threatening to shoot kids. Back then he just went up in everyone’s estimation.

issued them with an SA80 each from the school armoury

😯

If we’d had a school armoury with assualt rifles maybe we could have made 2nd or 3rd place in the league table.

Potassium Permanganate in the pool was a regular end of term jape.
The occasional bomb made out of sour milk bags & fireworks another.
Hiding the teachers cars by bouncing them out of their space & behind a building.
Jumping off the 1st floor gym balcony onto a load of mattresses.
Raiding the cheese & wine party – we were 12.
Being chased across the roofs of the school in the dark.

It’s a long list!

😆

We had a rather dim (but nice) science teacher who we always convinced to let us tidy his cupboard at the end of term. Of course we only did this so we could raid it of magnesium, potassium, basically anything that could be used to make explosives.

He went on to do a great many things such as lighting the gas coming straight out of a bunsen burner nozzle

who didn’t do that?

just remembered, we also had a thing in the 6thform affectionately known as jon the mould. It had started off when one of the lads had a dump in a jar that was going to thrown at one of the girls, then decided against it and said dump was left in a little warm corner. Over time it went furry and had things added to it, peoples lunch, old yoghurt, banana skins etc… It grew until it had big fury tendrils that reached out the jar and down the sides. Every year it was passed on the next sacred keeper of Jon, who had to feed it and keep it secret until the next keeper was found. considering what was in it and how long it had been cultivating it was remarkably odour free in its little corner under some shelves in the cloakroom..

….until someone knocked it over when feeding it. What followed can only be described as coming from the very arse of Beelzebub himself and caused spontaneous vomiting and evacuation of not only the 6th form block but over half of the adjoining school.

Also in the same common room there were complaints that the coffee and tea from the vending machine were a bit “off” upon inspection it was discovered that one of leaving students had left a massive skiddy filled pair of undercrakers in the water tank 😀

My record for being sent to the year head was three times in a day (which then triggered a trip up to the school head).

1 – Sliding a piece of marble up and down the main school corridor (also marble, and marble on marble slides beautifully) which resulted in a glass door being smashed.

2 – setting off a fire extinguisher in a temporary classroom’s cloakroom. We couldn’t get it to switch off so jammed the nozzle with chewing gum. At the end of the lesson we went out to find a cloakroom flooded with water.

3 – throwing a condom full of water at the school matron as she was sat in her office eating her lunch (no idea why I did that – I had nothing against her at all, she was lovely).

I went to an ‘interesting’ school in the late 80’s early 90’s. Here is a taster of the stuff that happened in just our final year.
1) All the gas taps lit, bye bye Science lab.
2) Two teachers fighting in the ‘quad’ (broken up by third teacher who sparked them both out).
3) One of these fighters subsequently had a News of the World expose on him due to him sleeping with half the 6th form.
4) Teacher on French skiing trip beat the carp out of three French lads.
5) School window smashing completion leading to arrests.
6) Major came to visit and someone stole the little bonnet flags from his car.
7) At least four arson attempts.
8) Two stabbings by one lad with a chisel
9) One stabbing by a lad with a knife
10) Someone (not me, no) got a copy of the school master key. I had better not elaborate on that.
11) DOCs were E’s/LSD and weed, in retrospect the school had a bit of a problem.

perchypanther – Member

If we’d had a school armoury with assualt rifles maybe we could have made 2nd or 3rd place in the league table.

Have you suggested this to the Scottish F.A?

Local Tesco caught fire over the weekend when I was in 4th year, went into school Monday and everyone was saying it was Jamie and Darren. Another dick from another school was mentioned.
They had set light to a wheelie bin which they spread to the wooden fascia of the newsagents and then the attached supermarket

Darren and the other dick were scared of Jamie and he was a pains to point out he didn’t do it but at other times was boasting about it. The other two went on trial at the Old bailey but wriggled out of it on a technicality.

One teacher really sticks out. he’d been a trainee at Glasgow Rangers but never made it I think because of injury and ended up teaching in a Kent sinkhole.
1) School football match after school, I was first changed. The decent leather match ball was kept in this massive cupboard in the office of the gym, I opened the door without knocking to see one of the teacher with his trousers round his ankles taping a binliner to his waist. I grabbed the ball and bolted.
He came along to play in the warm up and I noticed his tracky bottoms had a massive wet patch, me a naive 14 YO though he must have pissed himself but now realise he’d done it to sweat off a bit of weight.

2) He’d bite himself really hard in particular on the fingers. I watched himn once in our Careers lesson staring out the window and biting his knuckles and back of his fingers very hard. Another time ha walked past me in the corridor and then as we passed I looked round and he was gnawing at his wrist.

3) School trip to Chessington for one of the years below me, story goes he got pissed and fell asleep on the coach coming back, the kids were throwing little balls of paper in his mouth and he woke up and assaulted a couple of them. this was the end of the school year and after an investigation he was promoted to head of year.

My brothers mate got expelled and came back in and broke the jaw of the deputy head, one punch which was amazing as he was a skinny little bugger.

As far as I know I went to school with 2 murderers.

Once glance at my username will affirm that I was at primary school during the late 1970s/early 1980s. The primary school in question was situated in rural East Anglia, with an ex-army headmaster who is (still, but he’s probably going to die very soon) a respected member of the community.

However, he had it in for me.

Firstly, I’m dyspraxic and had a harder time than most with physical co-ordination and balance. We had weekly country dancing classes and an unequal number of boys and girls, so the extra boys had to wear a yellow lanyard, become a girl for the class and relearn the steps.

Every single week, I was hit across the backside for “not paying attention”.

Secondly, at the age of eight I was involved in an out of school dispute with another lad, which escalated when the other boy’s father made an allegation to the police that his son been hit by an adult relative of mine. I only found out when the police turned up to tell us that the boy’s father had subsequently broke down and admitted that he’d made a false allegation when police tried to corroborate the story with two witnesses who’d been present at the time. That didn’t stop our headmaster dragging me into his office for what can only be described as a military style interrogation which lasted for two hours. I think I endured three of these shouting sessions from him, over the course of the fortnight. I was absolutely terrified and unable to understand what I’d done wrong.

Thirdly, our school had a new sports hall built with a short corridor linking to the main school building, separated by two glass doors…bear with me, you can obviously see where this is going.

Anyway, on the day in question, the glass doors had yet to be fitted into the frames. Everyone spent their lunch break running through the frame and out into the playground. Anyway, just as lessons concluded, a lad dared me to run through the frame and I refused, so he belted down the corridor and was most surprised when his nose made contact with a solid glass surface (the door was installed just after lunch, apparently). The glass shattered into large shards, the boy in question merely turned by 180 degrees and ran out of the school, blood streaming from his nose.

No-one had thought to place a warning sticker on a large non-safety glass door placed in a primary school. Someone would’ve been sacked for this oversight, had our deputy head not driven straight to the boy’s house and promised him immunity from punishment if his parents agreed to not make a fuss.

One young entrepreneur, Simon Solvent, a test pilot for evostick, had a business nicking Porsches to order from Ringway.

We had a kid who stole to order. Stopped doing it after hospitalising himself after panicing when a policecar drove by him and he accelerated rather than braked and drove into a shop front.

Teacher wise at junior school we had the random violence guy (tore a kids ear so badly dragging him up the stairs for some imagined infraction he needed stitches) and the molester (used to feel up the girls when they were at his desk, stroking their legs if they wore skirts) and a couple of generic bullies.

Secondary school was better, we still had a pervert (lots of shirts and skins and watching boys in the showers to “make sure you got washed”) but we had a certifiable chem teacher who let us make “indoor” fireworks if we finished our work off quickly. He made nitroglycerine with one class a few years above us but it earned him a visit from the constabulary so “fun” pyrotechnics were the only thing he made with us.

Ok, so at my school there was:

Nine underage pregnancies (that I know of) during my time there – a couple were to lads of the girls’ own ages (in one case, one girl had an abortion because her boyfriend said he’d leave her if she didn’t, he ditched her the day after), most were fathered by blokes in their mid-20s to mid-30s. Grooming of teenage girls by blokes 10-20 years older was pretty common.

Quite a few teenage neo-Nazis, who would tippex Swaztikas, 88 and Combat 18 onto their bags. As the town was overwhelmingly white, they’d kick the crap out of anyone who was different – nerds, metalheads, etc.One kicked a baby rabbit to death on the school field, he was later done for attempted murder and arson (he set fire to a corner shop with the Asian family in the flat above, they all survived).

A young teacher who was forced out of the profession by his students being cruel little shits.

Several drug taking lads who exchange packets during physics, one became a murderer, another died of an overdose.

A music teacher with anger management issues – he broke a filing cabinet by punching it when a lad (the aforementioned racist arsonist) lit up a cigarette in class and swore at him.

A CDT teacher who was blatantly a pervert, all the girls knew not to be around him alone.

One lad was really angry and vicious, a complete bully. Turned out years later that his dad had died when he was younger, and hid mom was dying of cancer – he never told anyone. He actually turned out to be a nice bloke as an adult!

Cambridge University’s 1958 car on roof prank secrets revealed

Linky

Grooming of teenage girls by blokes 10-20 years older was pretty common.

At 14 my mate and I sat there while Linda from our class told how she and her 2 friends used to wander up and down the dual-carriageway getting picked up and shagged by older blokes. Being the naive, didn’t know what a dildo was type, I was utterly stunned and disgusted. A conversation etched into my memory 100s* of years later 😡

*feels like it anyway

Our RE teacher once held a boy out of a first floor window by his ankles.

Our maths teacher used his martial arts skills after a kid threw a desk and chair at him. Up until that point everyone viewed the teacher as a bit of an old hippy but after that word got around and he got a lot less grief. He also got in trouble for taking the entire maths class to the AV room to watch films as a bit of a treat once a term.

A girl in my class managed to crack her skull on a lamppost by hanging off the handrail on the back of a bus. She made a full recovery and was one of only two kids from that year to go to Uni (I’d guess there were about 250-300 kids per year, so she did well)

A boy in a different class ended up in a constant vegetative state by diving into the shallow end of a swimming pool.

A teacher had his Fiat 500 turned around and positioned an alleyway so it only had inches between the front/back of the vehicle and the walls. it wasn’t there the next day so no harm done.

Various classrooms/buildings were set alight, only once severely though and on that occasion it put 4 classrooms out of action for the best part of a year..

A PE teacher challenged a boy of (I guess) 14 to a boxing match at lunchtime for being disruptive. The teacher took it very seriously and gave him an absolute battering in the name of sport. looking back that really should have been reported.

Playing murderball at break time my mate got three in a row which meant an extra hard beating and that also coincided with the last touch before the end of break which also required a more severe beating. He was still unconscious on the playground when were were a good few minutes into the next lesson and a teacher spotted him out of the window.

One kid had read something about pheromones and entirely got the wrong end of the stick. He wouldn’t shower for weeks at a time and would run everywhere to get a sweat on because he was convinced this would make him irresistible to girls. Despite evidence to the contrary he kept this up for quite a long time.

Of the half a dozen school pregnancies the only notable one caused the father of the child to barely utter another word in public from the middle of the 4th year until he left school. Best part of two years no one heard him utter much more than a grunt.

One of my group of friends had the same lunch everyday for 5 years; egg, chips, beans, Italiano ice cream and a carton of milk.

A lot of the kids that received lunch tokens used to sell them for less than face value (obvs) so they could have the cash instead. If you liked the canteen food you could eat at a 15-20% discount by utilising this service.

First school in Scotland to have CCTV. Bus monitors to try and avert the number of pregnancies caused on the bus trip, mainly to Valleyfield. Mass fights. Baseball bats banned, cricket banned as was anything that could be a weapon. I’d say 25% of my class are either dead or in the clink.

When my Brother was in the 6th form of highschool, him and some mates had to do a 6th form assembly.

Their chosen topic……..Masturbation!

It included using a Dildo as a blackboard pointer…

I don’t know how they didn’t get expelled. It was the talk of the school for a good while

Can’t believe some of the stuff that went on at your schools. 😯

I went to a bog-standard secondary school in Devon and the most exciting thing that I can remember happening is a kid being gaffer-taped to the top of a lamppost. He was a knob though so I don’t think anyone got punished.

Health and safety was fairly lax though, I was in the theatre technical crew and we used to mess around with massively heavy equipment at the top of a 25ft A-frame ladder. I don’t think anyone ever fell off and I think the only rule was that someone had to stand on the bottom step.

The whole thing was relaxed to the extreme. I did all the lighting for the sixth-form performing arts projects and at one point had the keys and alarm code to the whole school in my possession.

There was an awesome trip to France, though. Can distinctly remember the teacher pointing out that the drinking age in France was lower than the UK and that while they’d have to confiscate alcohol if they saw us with it, there were “lots of bars” and they’d be “in that one”.

There was a limestone quarry the other side of the (small) hill from my school and when they were blasting the whole school would shake. I can clearly remember seeing a large lump of rock sailing vertically into the air and back into the quarry but we also quite regularly found smaller bits (big enough to injure you if they landed on you) in the playground.

In a French lesson with a notoriously crap teacher (met him on the Severn Valley Railway about 15 years ago and he’s a retired vicar now…) one kid climbed out of the first floor window, walked along the window sill and, after a delay while someone initially refused to open the window, climbed back in at the other end and went back to his desk. The teacher studiously writing on the blackboard throughout – he must have known.

Science block burnt down after someone put a lit splint in the waste bin.

Body of man, 29, found on Tunstall bench

http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/fugitive-prisoner-froze-death-pond-4322214

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/staffordshire/7083623.stm

http://www.stokesentinel.co.uk/news/stoke-on-trent-news/longton-thug-30-beat-up-276622

Just a few of the people that I went to school with…..I don’t look back on my 5 years at high school with much fondness.

I went to a school on a British Army base in Germany. On occasions we had armed soldiers wandering around the playground.

There wasn’t much trouble.

Jeeze.. that’s some illuminati 😆

I used to be horrified by the French teacher who used to thrust his groin into the desk as he was marking our efforts.
& bandaging “kenzie’s” fingers after a particularly brutal fight . They had been bitten to the bone . 🙁

GCSE end of exams party at my history teacher’s house. All the other teachers there, along with a load of 16 year olds loaded up with booze and drugs. Cue lots of snogging/shagging/vomiting and lots of extremely nervous teachers worried about getting the sack. Actually that’s not a horror story, it was bloody brilliant! 🙂

On the horror side I remember it was fairly common in my first school (5-9 years old) for girls to be dragged into the boys toilets and stripped/sexually assaulted. I swear I never took part, but was there on occasion when it happened. 😯 And people wonder why sexual abuse and mysogyny is endemic?

Well I’m glad my post amused some people. Other stories hey? Be patient, I wrote this on my phone so its a bit crap.

Okay, we had an art trip to Florence, the group of girls on the trip were actually quite nice and middle class. Anyway – the book ys were comrprised of an assorted mix of weirdos, stoners and sociopaths, the idiot teachers basically let every kid who sat at the back of the class with a shit eating smirk on their face… along. Anyway, 4 of us find ouselves in a hotel room overlooking the Santa Croce square.

Anyway, within five minutes we’d heckled some hippies out the window for weed. We giffied down some lead piping, as were were doing this we said hello to some blonde Australian girls in the room below of our own age. Once onto the street we picked up said weed and bought cheap wine from a small shop. Anyhow, over the next several days we obtained a shitty air rifle, weed, cocaine, alcohol, porn, knives, a blow up sex doll and a gigantic dildo. Imagine the scene, 24 degrees in May in Florence – some of the boys had convinced a girl on the trip to get her clothes off. Now keep in mind that some of them had watched Platoon a week before flying out, so some of them had now gotten into bands like the Rolling Stones.

Well, this culminated in a teacher walking in at just the right time to catch two boys trying to smoke weed out of the barrel of a gun, one boy fooling around with said naked girl and the others were glugging bottles of wine. All to the hilariously apt tune of “Sympathy for the Devil”.

Anyway, we got hauled downstairs to get bollocked. They brought in the boxes of contraband and asked “Do you know what is in these boxes?” – well of **** course you cretins. But one lad got up and started pulling stuff out – “This appears to be a. 177 calibre firearm, sir”….. “This appears to be bondage porn, sir. I assume this was Petes”. I cracked up completely and spent about 10 minutes laughing at everything that was said. At about the same tine, one of the female teachers who I think was traumatised by the realisation of just how depraved 14 year old boys are…. burst into tears.

Remains silent.

Luckily I got away with most of that, as the ones who were caught were in a different room. By the time they searched ours we had got wind of it and managed to dump most of the contraband.

I can’t think of anything to match the stories on this thread but I do remember our infant school teacher Mrs Battison (Batterson?) who regularly used to bend kids over her knee and whack their backsides for minor misdemeanours in front of the whole school at assembly.

Thats more **** up than the rest of them Vicky!

Pretty tame in comparison, and not technically at school as it was a part time job at a supermarket, but we knew most of our colleagues from school…

Someone had moved an old ice cream freezer out to the warehouse yard, presumed broken. It was ignored but over winter it filled with rain water, and once the weather warmed up it was noticed that it was developing its own unique odour. Over the next few months it was fed with out of date dairy products and the glass lids closed to make the most of the sun. At the end of the summer it was rancid with god knows what growing in it…you had to open it with a broom and let it ventilate before going too close. Eventually a rep turned up to replace the freezer, but when he saw it he apparently ‘struck us off’ and for years afterwards our rather large supermarket did not have any decent ice creams much to the dismay of the customers. We all had to make do with the smaller multi-packs…and also the smell in the yard as the unit was overturned in the yard and hosing down the concrete did nothing to get rid of the odour!

Plenty more excitement at that place, more than school anyway. There were two older ring leaders who spent most of their time up to no good so us part timers used to get caught up in it. Throwing old fruit and veg into the chiller fans in one of the temporary freezers, pallet truck and Z cage races, ‘working’ the entire delivery of fruit and veg on Sunday mornings so the produce department was stacked head high and we could spend the morning eating a massive fryup, filling wheelie bins with water so they couldn’t be moved, and firing rows of cages off the loading bay ramp.

Along with the usual genuine accidents, the ‘overloaded cage of wine under a doorway and turning over’ happened about once a year. I came close to causing a major incident after knocking a 500ml aerosol of cooking oil into the deep fat fryer, luckily it bounced around the vat of oil and I was able to flick it away, but I imagine it would have exploded within seconds and covered the coffee shop and half the checkouts in oil…bit scary that one, enough for me to rearrange the equipment so the fried egg machine and its oil was not alongside the fryer!

Rural comprehensive. So we had Mr halls who used to get the girls to do hand stands at the front of class. He was a maths teacher.

Mr leppard who was an ace teacher and really nice guy, but sadly went down for embezzlement to feed his epic gambling problem.

Mr ratcliffe who had to have an ambulance called out after showing the sixth form chemistry class the wrong way of smelling ether.

And an art teacher who I can’t remember her name who used to sunbathe topless in the school fields at break time.

Oh and the music teacher who left his wife and shacked up with one of the pupils a couple of years after she left school. (Rumours were it didn’t start after she left)

As for kids. Mixed bag. Someone got shot in the face with an air rifle. There were fights, drugs etc all seemed normal to be honest.

There was Moakes. He was a legend. Lovely guy, totally nuts. Stole all the wheels from some guys xr2 leaving it on bricks one night. Could bunny hop a metre on a BMX. Bungee jumped from a tree using inner tubes. Developed a shocking drug habit but fit through it. Sadly died from cancer last year at 42.

perchypanther – Member
issued them with an SA80 each from the school armoury

If we’d had a school armoury with assualt rifles maybe we could have made 2nd or 3rd place in the league table.

Sounds like what the film “IF” was based on

Sounds like what the film “IF” was based on

Filmed at a shitty school, I should add.

One of my overriding memories of school was the headmaster’s daughter. 😈

My 4th year Christmas dance ended up on the front page of the Daily Record newspaper for “POSH SCHOOL GOES ON ALCHOPOP BINGE”. A complete fabrication as a) it was a normal state school and b) it wasn’t alochopops….

ended up on the front page

Yep. We had a lot of that!

“POSH TOFFS IN DRUGZ SHOCKA!” etc. At one point, the reporters were in town asking for tips and offering £20s. I made up some bullshit, took the £20 and headed to the pub. With the aforementioned headmaster’s daughter, IIRC.