Mary Connell

After Unley, in 1941, I was sent to Thebarton, to a dreadful woman. I’ve only hated one person in my life but I hated the way she treated children. She found out that I used to buy the kids’ books for them. She used to make a profit on the sale of books from the book room. She would take the children’s money, tell them the books weren’t in, and when they went back to collect the books, she’d tell them they hadn’t paid, saying, ‘You didn’t give me the money at all.’ If they argued, she’d scream at them and children can’t stand that. Schools were allowed by Rigby’s to put five per cent on the texts, exercise books, pens, pencils and rulers to help with school funds. Rigby’s had a monopoly on school books and gave very good service. Most of the heads of schools were meticulous and sold the books at the right price but she made a profit for herself.

She used to come into my room every morning and start screaming at the children. I would walk out because she was really screaming at me. I remember a nice little table that was in the hall at Thebarton. That disappeared. So did a typewriter. The head of the school at this time was still the primary headmaster. At Thebarton it was Bert Hand who had gone there from Black Forest. I think he did something because I was moved to Croydon and then to Port Adelaide in 1952, I think, where Mavis Watkinson tried to get rid of me. I remember her sitting there looking sweet as if she was going to a garden party. My mother came from Adelaide before she went to Mt Gambier. My mother remembered Mavis’ grandfather who used to go around with an ice cream cart and say, ‘Sally Lunny loves the money – ice cream and jelly, good for your belly.’ That was her grandfather so it was no wonder she was so lady-like.

I escaped from her and went to Nailsworth in 1953 where I worked with Miss Howard who was a very fine headmistress.⁹ She was a very humane person, with an aptitude for maths, and one who was willing to encourage and help young teachers. Nan Aspinall was with her there and with me later at Whyalla. When she left I worked with the next headmistress, Fanny Ada Rodgers. By this time I had been promoted to deputy head. When she left I worked with a good woman from Northern Ireland. She was a woman with the best of intentions who tried to be fair. To help her I used to intervene with the staff. She wasn’t an intellectual. Who am I to be talking of intellectuals!

There was another North of Ireland woman on the staff, a senior and a strong sort of person but the principal was different. One day I was talking to her in the playground and a youngster came up and pulled my sleeve.

‘Miss Connell?’ I turned around.

‘Yes, what is it dear?’

‘Some dirty words in the lavatory.’

I said, ‘All right dear, I’ll go and have a look at it in a minute.’

So she said, ‘What were you saying?’

‘Oh, she said there were some dirty words in the lavatory. I’ll go and have a look at it in a minute when I’m free.’

She replied, ‘I shall go and see it.’

‘You can deal with the lavatory, if you want to,’ I said and went off to my class. At recess time she came out and said, ‘Mary, I had a look at those words in the lavatory. They’re not dirty at all, they mean nothing.’ I went down and looked at them myself. I think a lot of women’s misunderstanding and so on was because they were so divorced from the opposite sex. The girls’ techs were set up to turn out nice, polite girls who could be reasonable mothers and they were studious in avoiding serious contact with the world. It was more important that their hair was tidy than that they learned anything. But I did try to encourage them to think and the girls responded very well.

After Nailsworth I went as deputy principal to Norwood Girls Tech. I thought I needed a change and I very foolishly changed. The principal there met a friend of mine who knew nothing about me as a teacher. He asked her if she knew me and she said, ‘Oh yes, she’s a Communist’ and that was that. I remember the witch hunts of the 50s very well. I remember when I was at Whyalla I was very friendly with the Lovedays because they were the only people, practically, who spoke my language. Ron Loveday was well into the Labor movement and became a Labor MP and, of course, anyone who was Labor was dimissed as a Communist.

I was looked on very doubtfully by some people. I never was a Communist. Communism was a very dirty word in those days and if you were at all ‘left’ you were a Communist and that was it! No one ever challenged me because Johnny Walker told me to teach as I liked. He knew that I knew what I was doing.

There was a man on our Whyalla staff and he was a pacifist. He’d been thrown out of industry because he wouldn’t work in munitions. He was a woodwork teacher who wouldn’t go to the war and he was forced out of his job. I got furious about it. I was the secretary of the branch of the Teachers Institute. Give Mander-Jones his due, he saw that the department paid the man’s fares back to Adelaide and so on.

I remember the change of name to Technical High Schools but I think the standards of the techs were pretty good, they were very good. They turned out girls who were very ladylike and so on but they did give them an idea of cooking and dressmaking and, under Muriel Paterson, they were darn good commercial teachers. Paterson and Irene Cosgrove were very good commercial teachers. English and the humanities weren’t taught so well. We had some nice women teaching but we also had some good teachers. I remember Penelope Loveday. She was a junior teacher up at Whyalla. When I was there she used to come to my economic history class. Oh, Pen was good. She had a very clever father and mother – they were very fine people.

I was at Norwood Girls for my last three years, 1959, ’60 and ’61. In ’62 after I left, science had been developing in the girls’ techs. I had done Intermediate physics at Adelaide High School. They’d had a spare spot and they didn’t have any way to fill it so they sent in a man to teach physics to this certain class and he despised us utterly. The girls in the techs had science in first and second year. There was a woman called Miss Watson and we had a man at Nailsworth who would have made a good researcher.

When I finished, I worked with Mr Coward at Norwood High with whom I got on very well. He used to look into the teachers’ room if I had a lesson off and say, ‘Come on Mary, we’ll go for a walk.’ And we’d go and walk around the grounds. He made those grounds beautiful up there. Someone had got on to me to go there after he lost one of his seniors but he wasn’t allowed to employ me after I turned 65. He could have employed me if I’d been a man up until I was 70. He was very annoyed about that so I went down to Methodist Ladies College.

I took just the English for Intermediate and Leaving. I didn’t take the Leaving Honours. They had somebody else in to do that and Miss Harris was there. I remember her. She put classes together so that she gave me three classes of 40 children and they were lovely girls and they’d had a teacher whose idea of teaching Shakespeare was to put on a record. She taught them with records but she’d got very ill about halfway through the year, some bad disease. When I got the kids I worked them down to the ground and they enjoyed it. We had a ball and I was very thrilled because I put up 120 for the Leaving and Intermediate exams and I got 118 passes and a big handful of credits. Miss Harris was so thrilled that she wanted me to go on but I wouldn’t because I wasn’t very well.

I can’t judge the change in the ’70s to comprehensive schools because I wasn’t in them but, in this changing world, I don’t think they should bring back the techs. Our schools were good in their way to make girls good mothers, good shop assistants, good typistes, but nothing else. Today I see men and women working together much more. For instance my nephew is a geologist and his wife is doing accountancy, although she’s got three kids. The other one’s just been married recently but he married a vet and they’re both working. In my day a woman did not work unless she absolutely had to. Now women want to work and that’s a very good thing. I’ve seen some big changes. My father never wiped a dish in his life. Now my niece’s husband comes home and, if she’s not home, he cooks the dinner and for that reason I think it’s much better that they learn their subjects are interchangeable.

You tell me that the technical subjects and drama and art and all the subjects which were quite important in the girls’ techs were called ‘Mickey Mouse’ subjects. In my time they were called ‘custard tart’ subjects Now I think that’s a pity. I do think a knowledge of art, a knowledge of drama and a knowledge of music makes for a broader cultural life.

I know from my own 90 years that I’m glad that I was brought up in a home where we were taught to read and told that reading was a good thing. If father or mother saw a lovely sunset they used to call us out to have a look and say, ‘Look, how beautiful that is!’ That background I think is a very important one and if you don’t get it in the home you should get it somewhere else. You can get so much joy out of music, you can get so much joy out of art, can’t you? I think it’s awful if you’re just reducing the schools to accounting houses.

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