Can't remember the uniform. It wasn't the current one "Black Jacket with violet braid and school logo." It was certainly the best girls' grammar school when I was in secondary education. I seem to remember a school called Sacred Heart (?) for girls who had yellow berets. But it may have been a junior school.
The family next door to us in Marfleet Lane (4 boys,2 girls) all went to Sacred Heart Juniors in Southcoates Lane. Cannot remember if they carried on their education there or not.
Jack ("Bill") Sykes was an unbelievable teacher - one of those who could make learning an enjoyable experience with his wit and mnemonics he invented to help you remember stuff. He spoke both German & French fluently, apparently in several regional dialects, and the stories were that during WWII he had been parachuted into enemy territory, both as a spy in Germany and to assist the resistance in France. He was rather short & a little rotund if I recall (a bit like Capt. Mainwaring in Dad's Army), and he often stood in one of the drawers in his desk to give parts of his lessons. In our extra year in the 6th form a mate & I took scientific German which he held in the stock room, which he was in charge of. He'd hand us a few German glossy magazines (some were borderline racy) which had nowt to do with science and he buggered off to do other stuff (smoke his pipe etc). He often wore an army camouflage jacket when he "marched" around the school corridors. Memorable indeed.
I still remember his "pronoun" song, the Golden Rule of German word order and his Ten Mounted Police mnemonic. He would, as you say, often lead the chants whilst standing in a drawer and, when he was feeling low, sitting in the waste paper bin. We were in his lesson when the Cuban missile crisis was coming to a head and a couple of jets flew over just ten minutes before the official deadline - he checked his watch, looked to the skies and said they were "starting early then". Also, he was so used to handing out books from the stock cupboard that he could immediately detect if someone had torn a couple of pages out to disguise some botched work. Legend.
