I started school you had to pay a penny a week, and my old mother often didn't have the penny to give me for school. But while I was in the Infants, 1905-6, they came out with free education. Boots or clogs – we wore anything we could get. The old woman used to get a pair of old uppers off somebody and you used to get them ‘clogged’. If they were good uppers, you'd get them clogged.
Tom Murray
I have good recollections of my school days at Tornaveen in Aberdeenshire. I went to school in 1906 with my sister Margaret, who was a year and a half younger than me. I was kept back a year before I went to school so that the two of us could go together. We had three teachers that I recall particularly. One of them was a drunk and was always in a bad temper. He used to thrash the children with a strap, mercilessly, because he would be sitting in the room and fall asleep while he was supposed to be teaching us. We were so incensed we decided – I must only have been eight or nine years of age – we would wait till he went away at night and pinch the strap and throw it away. And we did.
James Lewis
Being a church school, there was a strong accent on religion, and the headmaster, Mr Weston, opened school with prayers in the morning, and closed school on Friday in the same way. We learned the Church of England Collects, the Apostles' Creed, and the Confession, and I enjoyed the Scripture lessons under Mr Allen. Our Geography lessons demonstrated the greatness of our empire, and our History lessons the greatness of our military and naval victories, and the prowess of our explorers. The portraits of King Edward and Queen Alexandra decorated the walls, and at the end of the hall was a large Union Jack with the caption ‘For God, King and Country’.
Our misdemeanours were dealt with by being sent to Mr Weston, to be caned across the palm of the hand, which was quite painful, but not degrading or brutalising. We were usually proud to show our weals to our classmates and I never saw anybody taking it out on another boy. Mr Burgess, of Standard 5B, was the only teacher who didn't send us to the head for punishment. He administered it himself, with a hardwood blackboard pointer, which he referred to as his ash plant, but we liked him as well as respected him. My favourite teacher was Mr Birkbeck. He was the only teacher other than the head to wear his gown. Mr Birkbeck was a master of sarcasm and was quite cutting, but his wit brought humour to the lessons. He once told me that my writing looked as if a spider had come out of the inkwell and crawled across the page. Mr Birkbeck took Standard 6B, and he developed our musical knowledge. Up to this we had sung traditional songs such as ‘The British Grenadiers’, ‘The Vicar of Bray’ and ‘The Lincolnshire Poacher’ – but Mr Birkbeck taught us to sing treble and alto parts, and Schubert's ‘Greeting’ and Gounod's ‘Nazareth’.
On one occasion the class was divided into two halves. One half was taken to visit the Cunard liner Franconia,' while my half were taken to Hightown. We walked the five miles there through the countryside, and then we made tea on a fire in our billy cans on the sand hills at Hightown, then walked back along the shore.
H. Eccles
We'd have a week's holiday at Easter time. Before the school closed for Easter, the shops in the vicinity used to throw these biscuits into the crowd of schoolchildren, and there was a scramble for them.
They used to roll eggs down the hill in Preston. They used to come up to the park and sit on the guns that were captured in the Crimea, on the gun emplacement, and you could go in to those shops – the little cottages adjoining the Park Hotel. One of those used to sell little red cakes, and the cost was only a halfpenny, and you also got a halfpenny bottle of mineral water. That was the thing done among schoolchildren.
I went half-time at twelve, when I went in a grocer's shop as an errand boy. Then I went into the mill, where I started at six in the morning. You finished at noon and had to go to school in the afternoon. After that, when I became full-time at thirteen, I went to Bank Top evening school, and there I took up continuation studies in arithmetic, book-keeping and accounts, and general correspondence. From there I went to St Barnabas Preparatory Technical College – I was about fourteen. I was there two years, and then I went to the Technical College for commercial classes. I sat for the various examinations – London Chamber of Commerce, Lancashire and Cheshire Union of Institutes – and I joined up. I got work in a solicitor's office for about twelve months, and then a mill office, John Thompson's. John Thompson was a well-bearded man. He used to come up every day in his carriage and pair, and from the office I could hear the harness rattling.
Jackie Geddes
At playtime we used to run round chasing one another, and we often used to jump over a wall in the schoolyard, and there was a good drop on the other side. And I remember I had just got over this wall, when there was an explosion. And when I came back, they were carrying this boy out, and there was a rare commotion about it. He had had a detonator, you know, what they fire the shots with in the pit. He'd been poking it to fit it onto his pencil and it had gone off and burnt his hand off. Reddick was the manager of number six pit and it was his son that had somehow got these detonators. It was quite a shock that.
Mrs Colclough
When the twins were born, a little boy was a big thing – Granny Collins' family was mostly girls. Dad used to say if you go out with the twins take them up to see your gran, and of course they made a terrible fuss of Basil. Mother kept him smart, with a little walking stick and covered coat, beautiful dressed, but they never took any notice of Barbara. One day I went up the back street and I upset the pram. Aunty Kate came and picked up the little boy and took him away, but left the little girl and never looked at her. We soothed both of them, but they didn't take the bonnet off her.
When I went to see Granny Collins I was given a slice of cake and a glass of milk, Flora wasn't, she was put in Grandad's study and that was it. I used to be upset about that too because there was no need for it, but Flora wasn't like them to look at, and I was.
Mr Jordan
The girls were in separate compartments – they never intermixed with the boys. It was all silently, secretly done if you met a lass. You dare not let your parents know. They were kept apart – in churches and chapels the girls sat one side and the boys sat the other side. But we courted. You daren't tell your parents till you were about eighteen or nineteen and then you were more open with it.
Emma Ford
When I was three years old, I ran away. Mother came out and said, ‘Has anyone seen a little girl?’ Of course there was nobody about in those days. Although it was a town it was just like living in a village, because there was no traffic, there were no cars. All you saw were coal carts and horse traps. She looked round the street and someone told her a little girl was toddling into the schoolyard. And I'd toddled up and gone to Parliament Street and of course the headmistress kept me in. Mother came in and I was sitting on the floor with my head down. I wouldn't look up because I didn't want to go.
Mr Patten
We always set off in a gang. Farms in those days had more people and so more children on them, and there were no school buses, children walked. You were either in a happy gang or you were in a fighting gang – you know what children are, one day so-and-so was pals with them, the next day, not. It was a common sight in the nineteen hundreds to see the schoolchildren coming to school in gangs, some from Kimmerston, some from Hay Farm. And there would always be the odd one or two who didn't gang up.
You carried your
