Jimmy C writes:

"
Robin,

What makes you think your workmates were illerate?. just because they left school at 16 ?.
"

That was a bit of a deliberate exaggeration -- the persona of (most of)the piece is meant to be a slightly smug and naive young middle-class Protestant. Which, alas, I was age eighteen.

It concludes (in a bit I didn't originally include as I was simply selecting the bits relevant to Sean South):

++
Then I left ...

One of the only two times in my life I ever felt completely at home.

The other thing that stuck with me was that two of the kids were brighter than me. Wasn't anything I could do about it at the time, but that was always in the back of my mind later when I looked over the apparently no-hopers whom I was interviewing for a university place. So I tended to make more than my quota of offers to underqualified applicants. Who more often than the norm ended up with good two ones or better.

So that's the story of The Dear Green Place.
++

But Glasgow split (still does?) three ways -- class/area/region. And you could stir in education, varieties thereof, the division between The Four Grammar Schools and the rest, which was money as much as anything else so in a way simply reflected class. Being (by the time I reached the site) middle-class Protestant West side [though I had earlier spent seven years living on the second floor of a Denniston tenement] all three divisions applied. Which made it all the odder we all got on so well.

"
The education in Ireland and in most parts of England, Scotland and Wales at that time was very high. I left school 6 months before my 16th birthday and I guarantee I am better educated than a lot of high school and even university students.
"

That's a factor, and I wouldn't go a bundle on the merits of "conventional" education. But that's maybe another story.

"
Sean South may have been deemed to be gay, I doubt it, but so what.
He was bespeckled and had the studious nerdy look about him but that does not make him gay or even a sissy. For right or for wrong he did his part and unfortunately lost his life because iof it, like so many others, both gay and straight.
"

I'm beginning to think that mibee the kids +were+ winding me up, as someone suggested. But I think more likely they were influenced by British black propaganda, a la Roger Casement. Dunno -- can't go back in time and ask.

Dunno if anyone would be interested in my posting the whole of The Dear Green Place? As it stands, I might try blaming the Black&Tan mistake on the ignorance of the eighteen-year old speaker [g].

Robin