The school archives / Cummersdale Primary, near Carlisle, autumn 2004
The Head Was Joking About the Goggles. The Sun Wasn’t.
In 2004 a Cumbrian head told his pupils, in jest, that conkers needed safety goggles. Within days there were seven television crews in the yard. I made a similar joke on a Tuesday.
In 2004 some pupils at Cummersdale Primary, near Carlisle, came back from a school trip with pocketfuls of horse chestnuts and no idea how to play conkers. Their head, Shaun Halfpenny, said he would show them, but that they would have to wear goggles, because of health and safety. “I was jesting, but the next day they were all playing conkers with safety goggles on,” he told Tes years later.
There is no instruction so silly that a primary school will not have carried it out by morning.
Then it escalated, in this order. A visitor to the school thought it was hilarious and suggested the local paper. The local paper ran it. The next day someone rang claiming to be from Radio 4, and Halfpenny assumed it was a friend having him on, until they asked whether he had seen The Sun that morning. The Sun had put it on the front page, knocking the war in Iraq off for the first time in days. Seven television crews parked in the school’s front yard. Newspapers from New Zealand to Thailand reported it.
The story they reported was the wrong way round. In the papers he became the overzealous head who had banned conkers unless goggles were worn. In 2009 he wrote in The Guardian that he had never banned conkers at all; he had allowed the game, and had gone to the press with his tongue in his cheek, after years of filling in risk assessments. David Cameron, months before he became prime minister, cited the goggles in a speech as a sign of a stultifying health-and-safety culture, and QI used it to illustrate the myths people still believe.
The myth went on to have a career. The Health and Safety Executive made it a Myth of the Month poster, with a cartoon of conker players padded up in helmets and visors, and said compulsory goggles were a myth. In 2012 the government published a top ten of health-and-safety myths. Conkers and goggles came first. Tenth was graduates not being allowed to throw their mortarboards.
A joke made in a Cumbrian playground went to number one in Whitehall, above mortarboards.
On a Tuesday in March I told our youngest, in jest, that he had to wear his cycle helmet to eat spaghetti, because of health and safety. The next morning he wore it to breakfast. Then he wore it to school. His teacher posted a photo on the class WhatsApp with a laughing face, and by lunchtime three mothers had messaged me privately to ask which article I had read about spaghetti.
Two families on our road now have a helmet rule for long pasta. My mother-in-law has gone over to penne. I have stopped telling people I was joking.
The last head who tried has been explaining since 2004.
Sources
- Richard Vaughan, In the eye of the storm, TES, 25 January 2013
- Shaun Halfpenny, The conkers-with-goggles story was a myth, 8/9 December 2009
- Health and Safety Executive, Myth of the Month No 6, September 2007: conkers poster
- Department for Work and Pensions, Let’s bring common sense back to health and safety, 11 April 2012
Notes from the School Gates is a light-hearted column: home scenes and family characters are invented; schools and public facts are real. About the column