Hutchie at Crown Street
Crossmyloof: eat your heart out.
I read somewhere a description of the old Hutchie Boys' school at 211 Crown Street as "an island locked in a sea of post-war drabness", the kind of outlook that cocooned the 1950s in shades of grey, dull grey and off-grey.
Yet the Hutchie to which I was introduced as a Primary V intake on a September morning in 1952 reeked in noisy colour. It's where Mrs Kinnear proudly introduced "my twin sons Charles and Christopher" to my mother, while we three boys stood awkwardly in short trousers and school caps. I couldn't wait to be admitted.
And when I was, it was for a life experience of seven years in Gorbals where immediate colour came from neighbouring Watson's Home Bakery and the Rainbow Cafe; where the recent tram replacement by the "silent death" of trolleybuses glided over the cobbles of Crown Street; where our lives were heated by the open fires at each end of Room 20; and where three sets of teams sharing the same single playground area as a pitch played to rules that FIFA never knew about.
I don't suppose we bothered that every classroom bore uniform livery of heavy gloss burgundy-and-cream, or that masters (as we termed our teachers) sported academic gown as daily dress. What really mattered to us was the terror of skelfs in the bum from an ancient wooden floor during Roy Smith's weekly gym classes until modernisation of the assembly hall in 1956.
Crown Street - where economics meant that the salary of my police sergeant father covered school fees, and discipline was enforced solely by the belt - presented a classically symmetrical architectural elevation to the world. Hidden behind lay a rabbit-warren of stairs, landings, mezzanines, connecting rooms, cellars, balconies and rat-runs. If you knew where to stand, you could keek through two windows right into the rector's study.
Lessons echoed to the mournful cries of "coal briquettes" from coalmen on their horse-drawn cart in Florence Street, and a gym period concluded with mass class coughing from running round the playground through the reek of a lum on fire.
Gordon Casely (C1961)