'School education back then was a very different world'

What were your schooldays like? See letter

The discipline we were subjected to was, by today’s standards, horrendous.

From the start, punishment varied from vicious slaps across the wrist in the infants to caning across the palms in the juniors to cracks across the backside with a slipper at the grammar school.

This could happen for the most trivial of offences.

My junior teacher (a terrifying middle-aged spinster) secured a pass rate of 46 out of 48 for the 11-plus.

Grammar school class numbers were around 35.

By comparison with today, education was done on the cheap.

We left the grammar school with a GCE certificate which listed the subjects passed but no grades.

It was made abundantly clear to us that, if we hadn’t done well, it was our fault and not the teachers’.

Most of us started work at 16 and were given no chance to assert ourselves by our elders who made it quite clear that we were at the bottom of the heap.

National Service at 18 finished the job. Adulthood was finally achieved at the age of 21 when we were allowed to marry and vote.

Very few of us who are over 80 can be described as obese. Food rationing in our youth saw to that.

Clearly we cannot turn the clock back to the era I have just described but it does seem to me that perhaps the pendulum has swung too far the other way.

D H

via email

Ukip aren’t on the far right

I do wish all the media nationally and, sadly, locally in the Wigan area, would grow up and refer to our party with more respect as just Ukip, without having to always use the two words far-right.

This, for me, displays bias.

The only right Ukip is, is the right that’s opposite to wrong.

Also Ukip has always been a non-violent party that does not doorstep other party’s events, which is more than one can say about other groups.

We, in Ukip, love and are very proud of our nation.

There’s nothing wrong in that.

We do not wish to be ruled and be invaded by an outside unelected power bloc called the EU, which is in no way Europe as some keep calling it.

It is a tight-knit powerful rich club that operates as a dictatorship and wishes to take away our freedom, government, courts, armed forces, nuclear defence, industry and money.

David Hull

Leigh Ukip chairman