By the late 1950s, those schools had become havens for misfits, truants, and strays, financed by local and government grants available to anyone who could hold a paintbrush. Among the Education Act’s extensive reforms, two had impacts for the working class no one could have anticipated: Students were required to stay in school until they were 15 and school fees were eliminated, making British education free to all.Īs part of this scheme, the Ministry of Education accredited more regional art schools and greatly loosened entry requirements. England’s schools had withered, due to years of German bombs in World War II, evacuations of children, and general neglect a study found Dickensian conditions in village schools, more than half of which still used buckets as lavatories. Yes, the great flowering of British rock in the 1960s began, obscurely, with the 1944 Education Act.

Neither could have afforded college if not for England’s post-war education reforms. Both Ferry and Eno felt rat-trapped by an impermeable class system, perpetuating privilege for the wealthy legacy students at Eton and Harrow.

Roxy Music keyboardist and troublemaker Brian Eno grew up in rural eastern England, where his dad worked as a postman and augmented his meager salary by repairing clocks on the side. His father tended to pit horses in the local mine in Washington, where the glum employment options for men were the mine or the steel factory.

Roxy Music singer and mastermind Bryan Ferry grew up in the sooty industrial North.

Roxy music discography torrent 320 main