BRIGG GRAMMAR SCHOOL MEMORIES: FROM BEAUFIGHTERS TO THE BEAUTIFUL GAME

Brigg Grammar School encouraged pupils learning about The Beautiful Game to keep the football firmly on the ground.
BGS-style indoor football - popular in its brick gymnasium during the late 1960s and early 1970s - used wooden benches as goals.
As these were just a couple of feet high, the only way to score was to keep the ball on the deck.
Complying with another popular football phrase "On me head, son" would have resulted in an immediate free kick to the opposition - the price paid for kicking the ball above waist height.
We can recall some annual indoor football knockout tournaments, with pupils forming their own teams to play matches in the gym at lunch-times.
Some athletic spectators climbed the wooden wall bars on one side of the gym to watch these encounters.
'Quad football' was played in the area bordered by the toilet block, the cloakrooms and the old physics lab until this space was swallowed up by laboratory and staff room extensions.
Teams selections for inter-house matches and friendlies against other Lincolnshire grammar schools were written out on paper notices and posted on a wall near the woodwork room. It was good to see your name on the list - even if it was only for the 2nd or 3rd XI.
'Games' lessons were usually spent playing football on the school field, with added interest when masters joined in.
There would be a rueful smile from John Alcock - a goalkeeper who played to a high standard locally - if a pupil managed to chip the ball over his head and into the top corner. He wasn't the tallest of keepers!
There were also midfield encounters with chemistry/PE master Gerry Longden who refereed in addition to taking part in these games lesson encounters.
He was also a top all-round cricketer with Scunthorpe Town and had perfected the most difficult delivery of all - 'the googly' - which spun in the opposite direction to the standard leg-break.
Some of us faced him many times in the practice nets on the edge of the school field and a few even claimed to be able to spot the slightly different way in which the googly left the back of his hand.
A cricketing highlight of the year was the annual match between the Staff and the School 2nd X1 - played on a July afternoon shortly before the summer holidays began. Pupils not selected for duty were required to watch the fixture, resulting in a crowd of several hundred around the boundary.
The picture above, taken around 1973/4, shows some of the Brigg Grammar staff with a number of sixth formers - lined up outside the original 17th century school entrance.
Headmaster H. B. Williams is on the centre of the front row, with Gerry Longden on the extreme right.
Also on this row are long-serving masters Harold Stinson (maths), Geoff 'Shoddy' Jarvis (geography) and Ray 'Doggy' Barker (German).
Ex-BGS pupils reading this post will remember Harold for the many maths lessons in which he went off at a tangent - not to talk about trigonometry but to recall his war-time exploits in Beaufighters!
Brigg Amateurs Football Club veterans may be able to spot young teacher Mike Stevenson on this picture. In the 1980s he was player/manager of the Amateurs 'A' Team - earning him the nickname Hannibal, after the character played by George Peppard in an all-action TV series that was popular at the time. (Hannibal was in charge of TV's A Team). Brigg Amateurs fielded three teams in the Scunthorpe & District Saturday League for a number of seasons, such was the interest in playing local league football back then.