The day when 200 schoolgirls ran amok in the grounds of a city school
TODAY’S teenagers don’t always get the best of press – but surely that has often been the case over the decades.
Forty-five years ago, the Chronicle was reporting how hundreds of youngsters went on the rampage in Newcastle. And, the troublemakers on this occasion were all girls.
It was January 1976, and there was rebellion in the air at Heaton School in Newcastle when headmaster Henry Askew announced it had been decided to punish “uncouth and nasty” female pupils by using corporal punishment – the same as applied
to unruly boys – for any wrongdoing.
At a time when strikes and industrial action were rarely out of the headlines, the girls immediately walked out of their lessons and staged a noisy demonstration.
Two hundred of them went on the rampage for an hour, smashing eight windows and chanting “howay the lads”, hoping their male classmates would join the fray. In the event, the boys stayed at their desks.
The girls even ran around the sports field and interrupted a football match by stealing the ball.
The boys apparently left the pitch in dejection.
The demonstration, we reported, had the support of parents who shouted encouragement through the school railings.
“No-one is going to beat my daughter. I’ve lost sleep over this,” shouted one mother. Three police cars finally arrived to restore order.
The story made headlines in newspapers around the country, which reported: “Anxious parents at a riot-hit Newcastle school called for peace talks with the head to thrash out the school’s punishment problems.
“200 teenage girls staged their astonishing demo because of unwanted equality – the threat of getting the strap, just like the boys.”
News of the trouble was even brought to the attention of the Labour government’s Education Secretary Fred Mulley, who said he was “surprised by reports that schools in Newcastle were equipped with the strap”.
The story and the issue of corporal punishment in schools would spark a lively exchange of views on the Chronicle’s letters pages 45 years ago.
One reader from Newcastle
wrote: “Care should be taken to get ‘strong-arm’ women teachers to cope with badly brought-up children, but when necessary these girls should get the strap, the same as the boys.”
Another, also from Newcastle, declared: “This country is far too soft and it will take something drastic to deal with it. At least this school has the right idea.”
And a third, from Gateshead, recalled how pupils in her younger days at the town’s Oakwellgate School “were ill-clad, barefooted and hungry – but their manners and the courtesy to their teachers is something to recall”.