And now for some old-school PE!

BELIEVE it or not, there’s a lot of fun to be had by standing on your head during a hot Summer’s day. Just ask these young ladies from The Girls County Intermediate School in Harold Road.

Admittedly, you’d need a time machine that could rewind the clock some 70 years or more, but this is P.E. as it used to be in what is now Cantref Primary School.

Physical Education, hey! It certainly has changed over time. Who can ever forget the ‘Sergeant Majors’ of the windswept and rain-sodden playing fields of the 1980s?

This rare breed would take great delight in dressing head to toe in waterproof clothing before marching an unenthusiastic straggle of freezing teens to some desolate waste ground, generously described as a pitch for a ‘little excursion.’

And as the Heavens opened and the cold North wind blew, these stoic gatekeepers of our well-being would bark endless orders to jump, to hop, to crawl, and to run and run and run in perpetual boredom, until we were ragged.

But we’re not in the 1980s in these pics. No! We’re in a more refined and sedate era, where 50 press-ups for not trying enough, and then 50 press-ups for showing off, was seen as a tad demoralising.

Just look at the fun these youngsters are having. I bet no-one forgot their P.E. kit in their day or had the brass neck to brandish a forged sick note from mum.

Before school kids were organised into two teams, called the ‘skins’ and ‘shirts’, and ordered to go at each other in a game involving a ball and little in the way of rules, apart from the P.E. teacher’s book of whims, there was gymnastics.

In the 1980s, of course, a lot of school kids thought gymnastics was something that only the Russians did, but it has a rich pedigree in British schools and is an ancient art.

The Greeks, when not busy philosophising about the nature of butterfly wings, considered it a most noble way to facilitate body development.

Fast forward a few centuries and a man in a tracksuit with a red face and a moustache had a better idea. He though kicking a hard leather football at kids and making them dodge it worked wonders in a way exercises to develop body control, coordination, dexterity, gracefulness, and strength just could not, but we digress.

As you can see from these black and white pics from a time gone by, synchronised pointing, letting a good friend have a kip on your back, and that old chestnut, standing on your head to get the blood flowing, proved just the tonic by anyone’s standards.

The Girls County Intermediate School was founded in 1898, and from its Harold Road base it served the whole of Monmouthshire.

When its doors initially opened, it housed 60 fee-paying pupils, rising quickly to 168 by 1919, and that number rose to 250 in subsequent years.

During these years the school buildings were expanded and extended to take into account the increased educational subjects and sporting and artistic facilities offered to the girls.

Eventually, the staged merging of King Henry VIII Boys Grammar School, the Grofield Secondary Modern School and the Girls’ County High School resulted in the establishment of a large comprehensive school, known today as King Henry VIII School.