Braithwaite used his own experience as a teacher in London’s East End in his first novel, To Sir With Love, published in 1959.
As a well educated man who’d been ready to die for his country during war, Braithwaite had looked forward to a career in engineering after leaving the RAF. But every interview ended with the same result — rejection.
The problem wasn’t lack of experience or lack of skill; it was his colour. During World War 2, neither his black skin nor the place of his birth (British Guiana) had mattered but in the Britain of the late 1940s, he encountered racial prejudice and bigotry.
He turned to teaching out of necessity, finding an opportunity in a profession badly in need of educated men and women. He’d expected something appropriate to his skills, never expecting a posting in one of the worst schools in the East End of London.
To Sir with Love charts his relationship with the class of 15-year-olds he is expected to teach. This smartly-dressed man with impeccable manners is initially dismayed and shocked at the unruly bunch with their uncouth manners and relaxed attitude to hygiene. It’s fair to say that his initial responsedoesn’t paint him in a good light.
Though he has no experience of education he quickly dismisses the headmaster’s doctrine of disciplined freedom. The head believes that giving the pupils the freedom to work, play and express themselves without fear, is the best way to prepare them for a life beyond school. What Braithwaite sees however is that those in his charge are rude, disrespectful and insolent.
Towards his class he’s haughty and judgemental in his first encounters:
The girl who rose to comply was fair-haired and slim. with a pair of heavy breasts which swung loosely under a thin jumper, evidently innocent of any support. I wondered at the kind of parent who would allow a girl to go out so sloppily dressed.
Braithwaite eventually establishes a close bond with the youngsters in his charge but only when he appreciates that he has to change his approach. Lessons on mathematical concepts and measurement systems are cast aside in favour of practical arithmetic and real-life issues — household budgeting; weighing and measuring food and measuring travel distances. The real breakthrough happens when he decides to treat them as adults in waiting:
Most of you will be leaving school within six months or so … in a short while you will be embarked on the very adult business of earning a living. …When we move out of the state of childhood certain higher standards of conduct are expected.
It’s a risky strategy to tell a group of unruly teenagers to call each other Miss or Sir, brush their clothes, shine their shoes and turn up with clean hands. But surprisingly it works. By the end of the school year,
his students feel as attached to him as they do to him.
If the plot of To Sir with Love sounds familiar, it maybe because you’ve seen the 1967 film adaptation with Sidney Potier in the lead role and the singer Lulu played one of the pupils. Though the film does represent the changing teacher/pupil dynamics really well, there is one significant difference from the book.
Prejudice lies at the heart of E. R Braithwaite’s novel, an element which is largely downplayed in the film, much to the author’s dismay.
In the novel. the teacher earns considerable respect in the community for the way he treats his students, expanding their horizons, and turning them into decent, mature members of society. And yet he is still shunned in the streets and insulted by strangers. He’s made all too aware that he’s not entirely considered “one of them” and one mis-step could easily undo everything he has achieved.
I read To Sir With Love in 2024 as part of my second Classics Club list. I’m reviewing it now as part of a desperate attempt to catch up on my review backlog.
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