What struck me most was not just the usual “school bus chaos” nostalgia - it was how casually wedgies and debagging were mentioned, as if they were just normal background behaviour.
The original post says:
Then one of the comments underneath adds:School Bus
I got 414/415 and have fond memories of people throwing sandwiches around, chucking apples out of the window, competitions of who could climb over the seats from back to front the quickest, year 10/11 abusing the yr 7's with wedgies etc, smoking at the back of the bus.... good times.
What stands out is the tone. None of it is presented as especially shocking. It is remembered as “good times” or classic school-bus madness, but looking back, older pupils giving Year 7s wedgies and someone being forced to go home without trousers sounds less like harmless banter and more like ritualised public humiliation.I remember on the 19 to Farnham some kid in my brother's year managed to get a year 7 boy's trousers off and throw them out of the window so he had to go home in his pants...
What also stands out is that these comments appear to be from women or female former pupils, and even then the tone is casual and amused rather than shocked. That makes it more striking: this was not just boys boasting about rough school-bus behaviour, but a wider school culture where wedgies and debagging seem to have been remembered as normal, funny background chaos.
That is the part that feels especially brutal in hindsight. For Year 7s, being targeted by older pupils on a crowded school bus would already have been intimidating. But being wedgied or debagged in front of everyone, including girls from the school, must have been intensely humiliating. At that age, social embarrassment is everything, and being made the spectacle of the bus would probably stick with someone for years.
The “pants” detail is also very UK-specific. In Britain, “pants” means underwear, not trousers. It does make you wonder whether the boy was left in slip briefs rather than boxers, especially since multi-pack slip briefs would still have been relatively common for Year 7 boys at the time. That would likely have made the humiliation feel even sharper. Boxers at least had the look of loose shorts, whereas slip briefs would have felt much more exposing and childish in front of a mixed bus, especially in front of girls from school. Either way, the embarrassment must have been brutal.
It says a lot about that era of UK school culture that something like this could be remembered years later as a funny bus anecdote rather than as something pretty grim for the kid on the receiving end.
Source: https://www.facebook.com/groups/2220530 ... ently_seen - link may require Facebook login or group membership.