From Christine Bate’s document titled A Council School Education.doc
A Council School Education
Contents: Brinsworth Council school – teachers, organization, walking to school, the dentist, the nurse, influence of early musi,c Brinsworth and Woodhouse Grammar School
My education was at state schools and I consider myself very lucky to have spent the first six years in the Infant and Junior departments of Brinsworth Council School. Although the population of the village was mixed, from well-motivated working class to impoverished ne’er do wells, the teachers and the educational methods were forward-looking. I say that I was lucky because the school at the next village, Catcliffe, was much inferior. The buildings were old and the teaching was old-style. Of course, much of the teaching at Brinsworth was learning by rote, especially in arithmetic that was divided into “mental, mechanical and problems”, but much of what I memorized then and understood later has stood me in good stead. We even had a geography teacher, Slogger Williams whose discipline with the boys could be harsh, but who had large boxes with real objects to handle. Of those, I especially liked the one to do with Malaya and rubber. Slogger affected a posh accent at times and talked about rubbah. In history, Mr. Clayton used a brayer to print interesting pictures in our workbooks and I loved colouring them, especially the pages of mediaeval workmen. They were taken from a series of books sold in Woolworths and I still treasure the copies I acquired later. In nature study, I remember colouring blackberry, or bramble, flowers and seeds when we were studying seed propagation.
Brinsworth Council School was really two schools, the infant school and the “big” school in two separate buildings in the large school yard. It was under the authority of the West Riding of Yorkshire based in Wakefield, a town I have never visited. The schools were built in 1907 and replaced an old tin hut at the bottom of Atlas Street that opened as the Atlas Street Temporary Infants Board School in 1901. The new schools were built of red brick with stone corners, window ledges and other decorative additions. The windows were large, the roofs and gables steeply pitched and the stone trimmed doorways were imposing, one for the boys and one for the girls with appropriate lettering. Just inside the door was the cloakroom with a row of hooks assigned to each class and then the door out of the far side led into the central assembly hall. The classrooms all led off the hall. All the floors were oiled wood blocks kept clean by sprinkling them with disinfectant-impregnated sawdust and sweeping it all up. I can still remember that smell.
Everyone walked to school. We probably had the furthest to walk from Whitehill, but how exciting and adventurous it was. We chose between theMain Road, the Old Lane and across the fields. I used to call for my friend Jean Wyld and then off we went, walking in the ditches in the summer, rolling in snowdrifts in the winter, peering down storm drains and playing on our favourite tree in the hedge that had a horizontal branch that we called our aeroplane. We were often late home or had to run the last hundred yards or so in order to get back to school in time. We walked to school twice each day because we had from 12:00 to 1:30 to go home for dinner and then come back. There were no school lunches. Mother was often out at the gate looking for me while Sheila was in the house eating her dinner and many times, I am told, I was sent back to school with a clean dress on because the morning dress was so dirty. One day, on the way home at 4:00 oclock, Jean and I were playing in our aeroplane and I caught my dress on a branch and ripped out the seam joining the bodice to the skirt. I knew I was in trouble that day.
I started school at Easter after my fifth birthday.
Our day began in the playground until we were summoned by a bell to line up at the entrances, boys separate from girls,
Slides on the ice. School milk
The Big Boys to us were the ones who had not won a scholarship to Woodhouse Grammar School, but stayed at Brinsworth Council School until they left at age fourteen to go to work, often in the pit or the steelworks. I was always in awe of them and watched from a distance as they engaged in their amusements inherited from past rural youth. One thing they did was to make nick nacks out of sheeps’ rib bones and play them just as in the song we all knew, “Nick nack paddywack, give a dog a bone, this old man came rolling home”. They also made what I think they called damper tins, that is tin cans with holes pierced in them and then packed with bark. Some how the contents were set alight and then when they were swung around on strings, they made a roaring noise. The worst pastime from which I averted my eyes, was to catch frogs, blow them up and them throw them like balls. Oddly enough, I have no recollection of “Big Girls” who also stayed on until they were fourteen and then went to work as shop assistants or in offices. Since I won a County Minor scholarship to go to Woodhouse Grammar School, I left without working my way through all the classes. “Niff” was the teacher of the top class. He was an older man and we were very much in awe of him.
Slogger Williams, Niff, Mr. Tindell Miss Firth, Miss Richardson, Mr. Clayton
Miss Lakin, Miss Hill
A break in our routine occurred when the District Nurse paid her visits. As she entered the classroom we were all told to put our heads down on our desks and then she came around, lifting the hair on the nape of our necks, checking for biddies or nits. A frisson always passed down my back when it was my turn to feel the scraping of the tongue depressor.
Paying my dentist’s bill this morning set me thinking about how well my teeth have lasted me. I recently turned down an offer of dental insurance from AARP because I know I have so many crowns already that there’s not much to pay for except for “having them out”, as we used to say. Mother had all her teeth taken out before I was aware of such happenings. I do remember her talking about giving a neighbour girl the money to go to the shops for a strip of aspirin tablets because of the pain from her neuralgia. I remember how brown and decayed Father’s teeth were before he had them all out and got his false teeth. Many times I considered what a wonderful time it was for anyone with false teeth. No more toothache and no more visits to the dentist, ever. I can recall sitting at my desk in school and warming my handkerchief on the heating pipes so that I could try to ease my toothache. In retrospect, I was probably cutting my later molars.
We weren’t as deprived as it may seem since the WRCC (West Riding County Council) had a peripatetic dentis t who set up his shop in the men’s staff room and treated the pupils. He operated a foot treadle for his drill and put the teeth he extracted into an enameled mug.
Move this into the description of the village
The “bottom of Duncan and Ellis” streets were unpaved for many years. When it rained, there were deep puddles in the road. One pouring wet afternoon, I remember going with Mother to get Sheila from school and I was in the pram. I looked over the side to see the water in pools and the rain making patterns on the water as it fell. The street was mainly bright orange clay with some patches of hard core.
Buses began to run past
Narrow Lane and Bonet Lane
Music in my life.
This deserves a special heading because I have recently reflected on how much I still enjoy music and have looked for why this has become such a large part of my life.
To begin at the beginning, Father enjoyed music. He was a competent pianist and we always had a piano and a record player and radio. This was not always the case. As I have written elsewhere, Mother did not share this interest. She had taken piano lessons as a child and could still play her party piece, “The Gypsy Encampment”, when pressed but she had no pleasure in playing and resented the time and money spent on Father’s hobby.
My formal education in music began in the Infant School at Brinsworth Council School.At the end of the day we sang “ Now the day is over, night is drawing nigh, shadows of the evening, steal across the sky” That was when we were going to be released to enjoy the rest of the day. Walk home and then go out to play. I remember music lessons in the central hall where we sat cross-legged on the floor and were introduced to the mysteries of the length of notes, in this case crotchets, quavers and so on. The head mistress held up black cardboard squares with the different notes illustrated in white and we named them in a chorus. Of course, we sang in our classrooms most days. I remember one day we were standing in a row at the front of the class singing “Sing a Song of Sixpence” and Miss Lakin stopped us, saying, “I can hear some children singing ‘a pocket full of rice’, hands up if that was what you were singing”. No one confessed and she then made it very clear that the word was rye, without explaining what rye was. No one in Brinsworth had heard of rye bread.
Through my time at Brinsworth school I enjoyed learning and singing many old folk songs such as “Cherry Ripe”, but we also learned Mendelssohn’s Trout Song and Rudyard Kipling’s ‘The Smugglers’ set to music. We even sang “ A regular royal queen” from Gilbert and Sullivan. Mr. Tindell, the Standard Four teacher, played the piano as we marched into school, having been assembled in class lines in the playground and walked through the cloakroom together. The classrooms were around a central hall and we marched to the middle then down the centre and took a sharp turn left or right as we drew level with our classroom. I particularly remember enjoying Elgar’s Pomp and Circumstance Number Four. The music he played changed each month and on the wall by the piano there was a notice board done in coloured chalk that listed the titles and had a seasonally appropriate decorative border. He was quite artistic and used interesting lettering. After the register was called in the classroom we all went out into the hall for the morning prayers and of course a hymn. We sat cross-legged on the floor and before a prayer was said, we followed the direction, “Hands together, eyes closed”.
.
My experiences at Woodhouse were rather different in that, although I remember singing with Miss Vaughan-Davis, I was not so interested. Maybe it was because we mainly sang from the National Song Book. One song was “Sweet Polly Oliver” that we renamed “Sweet Molly Oliver” after a teacher, Miss Oliver. When Miss Vaughan-Davis (a beautiful name for a Welsh music teacher) left the school, her place was taken by an earnest young woman who played “L’aprês midi d’un faune” on a portable record player and tried to teach a classroom full of musically-ignorant pupils to appreciate it. By then I was in the Lower Sixth and about fifteen years old. I did, however really enjoy a choir that was an after-school activity after the war ended. We sang Elgar’s Songs from the Bavarian Highlands, German’s Merry England and, best of all, Handel’s Messiah an oratorio that was close to the heart of Yorkshire people. It was only when I was in the Upper Sixth and started going to the Hallé Orchestra on Friday evenings that I heard orchestral classical music.
It occurred to me the other day that I have not talked about my violin lessons. Sheila had piano lessons and I picked up what I could from her tutor book and by asking Father a few questions. One day when I was about fourteen years old, I was playing the piano and Father said, quite out of the blue, that I deserved to have lessons. We already had Edgar’s violin although I don’t remember how it came to Whitehill. Perhaps I asked for it and brought it back on the train one time. However, I said that I would like to learn to play the violin and Father was given the task of finding me a teacher. Annie Green lived in Wickersley, one of the more up-scale areas of Rotherham, although not as posh as the Worrie Goose Lane area, with her sister and family. She and her husband had moved up to Yorkshire when their house in London was destroyed in an air raid. She was an excellent classical music violinist who eked out a living by giving lessons and playing first violin in the orchestra at the Regent Theatre where they put on Variety Shows. Her husband had found a job working for Rotherham Corporation Transport. I had to take two buses every Saturday morning to get to this very crowded house. She prepared her students for the Royal Schools of Music examinations and I only got as far as the Transitional level before my school work began to interfere with my time for practice. However, the theory part of the examinations has stood me in good stead ever since. One of my most embarrassing memories is of the Sunday afternoon I shared lesson time with a boy who was about sixteen to work on music theory for our next exam. He had trouble singing the “home note” at the end of a musical phrase on key and I began to laugh, try as I might to smother it. I still don’t like to think about my unkindness.
Later in my life, I have realized just how much the hymns that we sang at the beginning of each day have stayed with me and come to mind on various occasions and often quite unbidden. We always used the WRCC hymn and prayer book that was based very much on the Oxford editions. However, compared with the music in services in the local parish churches, even including the church in Baldock that we tried once and never went back, the hymn tunes in the WRCC book were mostly very sprightly and enjoyable to sing. There were some wonderful exceptions and here I am thinking of “Jesu Lover of My Soul” to the tune of Aberystwith. At Woodhouse Grammar School some of the hymns had descants that the girls sang. We were never taught them, it was just a tradition that was handed down. Yorkshire people were known for their love of singing and we had a Welsh Headmaster. There were always a sprinkling of Welsh teachers on staff too. No coincidence.