George, 85, recalls teacher Mary Whitehouse

Mary Whitehouse came back to life on TV last night and stirred memories for an ex-pupil of the Wolverhampton teacher, writes Women's Editor Maria Cusine.

She was Miss Hutcheson when he was a schoolboy more than 70 years ago but when Mary Whitehouse was brought back to life on TV screens last night it was a trip down memory lane for Wolverhampton pensioner George Griffiths.

The formidable woman who became the guardian of the nation's morals with the launch of her Clean Up TV campaign in the sixties started her teaching career in Wolverhampton 30 years earlier.

She was an art teacher at the then Lichfield Road School in Wednesfield - and Mr Griffiths was one of her pupils.

And the 85-year-old has fond memories of the tireless campaigner, who was brought back to life in the BBC Two drama Filth: The Mary Whitehouse Story last night.

"Seeing her back on TV took me back to my schooldays," said Mr Griffiths, who lives in Wednesfield.

"She was my art teacher at Lichfield Road School back in the early 1930s when I was aged about 11. She would have been in her 20s and I thought she was a wonderful woman."

Mary Whitehouse, who was formerly Mary Hutcheson, taught at the Wednesfield school from 1932 to 1940. The school is now the Edward The Elder Primary School.

"I was in the infants from 1927 and then joined the senior school from 1933 to 1936," says the father-of-two who has two grandchildren.

"I remember being a prefect for the last six months I was there but I certainly wasn't a brain box at school," he laughs.

"I did like art and I remember Miss Hutcheson being a very friendly and approachable woman. She wasn't a strict disciplinarian and wasn't nasty at all.

"I think a lot of people got the wrong impression about her," said Mr Griffiths, who was a keen boxer and cyclist in the 1930s and '40s.

After leaving school at the age of 14, Mr Griffiths trained as a plumber - and he still had a minor connection with the woman who went on to be a tireless campaigner for all things good and proper as he often did work for the man she went on to marry, Ernest Whitehouse, a sheet metal worker in Wol-verhampton.

"Ernest worked with his brothers and they were all very nice people," said Mr Griffiths.

After leaving the Wednesfield school, Mrs Whitehouse spent the next 20 years bringing up a young family. In 1960 she returned to teaching as senior mistress and senior art mistress at Madeley School in Shropshire. It was during the 1960s when she embarked on her mission to stop "filth" entering family homes via television screens.

It was this period, during which the Whitehouse family lived in Claverley, near Wolverhampton, that last night's TV drama focused on. It highlighted her long and fiery battle with the then director-general of the BBC, Sir Hugh Carleton Greene. Black Country actress Julie Walters starred as Mrs Whitehouse, who died in 2001.

And what did Mr Griffiths think of the clean-up crusade? He said: "I'm certainly not a prude, but I think she was correct.

"I really don't like bad language on TV and it's a shame there's so much of it.

"She'd be outraged at what's on TV today. It really is terrible."