Started 29 July 2013
I haven’t said anything about the boys’ playground yet. The girls’ and infants’ school yard had brown flagstones I seem to remember (ideal for hop-scotch), whilst the boys’ was grey tarmac. There would have been about a hundred boys, (five classes, 20 boys per class) aged from seven to eleven playing in it every day, before school in the morning, during the morning and afternoon playtimes and after dinner in the dinner hour. The default activity was a permanent never-ending game of kick-and-rush football with a tennis ball, with up to 30 or 40 players per side. There were always a few star players, I remember Brian Isherwood, one year ahead of me, for example, who would dominate those games. In addition there was a continuous progressions of crazes, conkers, marbles, cigarette cards, paper aeroplanes, … (nearly) always something. We also played a lot of chain tig; if you were caught you joined the chain of people holding hands till the last person was caught, who then started off the chain for the next game. When the chain got long the people at the ends had to run very fast to hang on. (It’s hard to know how much to say; was it very different for you at primary school? Or more or less the same?)
In any case, there were no marbles to be had in the shops during or just after the war. All the marbles that kids had were from before the war. My friend Keith Eckersley for example had a largish white canvass bag , with a draw string, full of marbles which he occasionally brought to school to show off, but he never played with them or parted with any of them. By contrast, I never had any marbles except when some kind person gave me two or three, and then I would play at marbles with them and very quickly lose them. Playing marbles was for keeps. (Only total wimps refused to play for keeps, and I did not want to be like that; better to lose and have no marbles). Do I have to describe the different marbles and the rules of the game (we always played the same game) or do you know all that? There were clay marbles around during the war; totally unacceptable. Only glass ones counted. There were also steel balls from ball bearings, which were sometimes reluctantly accepted.
All the cigarette cards were also pre-war; and they didn’t start again after the war either. They were nicely made, good quality, in sets of 50, and I think the footballers and cricketers were the most popular. People also played at skimming cigarette cards, so that the person who skimmed their card the furthest won the others. Somehow I accumulated some; I had almost the complete set of “Railway equipment”, not the most in demand but interesting and not bad. I also build up an impressive collection of different cigarette packets, which I stuck into a photo album. There were a lot of different brands about, Irish and American as well as British; I had dozens and dozens of different ones. At one time, Kensitas had a sort of double packet, a packet of 20 with a little packet of 4 stuck to the side, labelled, “Four for your friends”. All that stuff, cigarette cards and cigarette packets can be found in profusion on Google images, and on e-Bay.
In the morning, in the boys’ yard, there was a bell (a hand bell), to signal the start of school. We would line up in five lines, one line for each class. We then had to stand to attention, looking as smart and soldierly as possible Often the teacher from Standard 4A, Mrs Marsden, the only teacher you didn’t call Miss, organised a sort of drill, with standing at attention (chin in, shoulders back, … ) and doing about-turns, etc. We can’t have done much of that in the morning because assembly started promptly at 9h05 or so. We must have also been drilled at another time but I can’t remember when.
There were times when we were given a lift to school by one of the dads. At one time the father of one Paul Snook (more later) gave us a lift to school every day. He had a Riley sports saloon car, as in the photo but black, and about five of us would cram ourselves into the back. Mr Snook was always running late and we would arrive in good time and then get more and more desperate as Mr Snook was rushing around getting ready.
The school yard was overlooked by the school buildings which had lots of windows, but I don’t ever remember a window being broken.
So a move from Standard 2 to Standard 3 you were now upstairs. I would have been in Standard 3, Miss Eaton’s class, in 1944-1945. Miss Eaton was also a super and very strict teacher. Also very serious; the teachers in those days were just all dead serious, never a joke, hardly ever even smiled; Miss Yates in the Baby Class perhaps was the exception; no jokes but she did smile a lot. But it seems that this was fine by us. We knew nothing different. The exception was Mr Hacking, the headmaster, who sometimes took us, the boys, for games and who prepared us (crammed us) for the 11+ exam in our last year. Example of a Mr Hacking joke: Teacher: Say a sentence using the word “wisdom”. Child: My mother bought some chips and my father wizzed’em into the fire. We only gave one of our teachers a nickname; we called Mrs Marsden “the old nag”. But Mr Hacking for example was always Mr Hacking.
The abiding memory of Standard 3 is that it was the year we learnt to spell. We were drilled and drilled and tested and tested. If I can spell well now, it’s thanks in a large part to Miss Eaton. She must have been in her forties, well organised, really OK. Sometimes she gave the better spellers an extra difficult word to spell; I remember (seem to remember) once, I was the only one to get “reservoir” right. Otherwise I don’t have many specific memories of Standard 3. The classroom was well lit, the windows were on the left.
One or more of our teachers and I don’t remember which, used to return work that she’d marked with a rectangular sticker added at the end of the work to give it a rating. There was a yellow sticker marked “excellent”, a red one for “very good”, a blue one for “good” and a pale green one for “well tried”. If you were messy and untidy, it was impossible to get an “excellent”. I never did. I remember best the thrill when I got my first sticker, a “well tried”.
Miss Eaton was one of my grandmother’s regular customers for having dresses made. The other thing about Miss Eaton is that, soon after I left HG, she became Mrs Hacking. The talk in the school in the last year that I was there was that she and Mr Hacking were having an illicit relationship while the first Mrs Hacking was dying of cancer. Everyone disapproved of that very strongly. I also remember that when it got round that they’d got married, in 1948 perhaps, it was said that Mr Hacking was 54 and Miss Eaton was 45.
In Standard 4, the teacher’s name was Miss Atkinson. As with Miss Eaton, I can say that I thought her to be a super teacher, kind, friendly, competent, fair, capable of explaining things well so that I could understand them. But also never jolly, hardly smiling, mostly very serious. Perhaps a bit younger than Miss Eaton, also always smartly dressed and nice looking. Always in a dress or skirt and top, blouse or jersey. Never in trousers; no women teachers wore trousers at that time. Again, it’s difficult for me to remember what we did in which year and with which teacher.
I think that all the teachers (except Miss Yates) sometimes hit us when we’d done something wrong. Sometimes a smack on the thigh, sometimes on the hand with a ruler, or two, two rulers held together, that is – that was Mrs Marsden. Always in front of the class with everybody watching. I have no memory of being hit by any of the teachers, but I think I was once caned, just one hit across the hand with a cane, by Mr Hacking. I can’t remember what for.
I can remember a lot of interest at one time in wild flowers, both learning the names of the different sorts, ragged robin, white campion, bugle, ragwort, …, how to recognise them by their leaves, stems, etc. as well as their flowers, and learning the names of the different parts, calyx, sepals, pistil, etc. There were always girls, never boys, bringing wild flowers in to be identified. And the teachers generally did a good job with their identification.
I guess your primary school was not so different. Frog-spawn and tadpoles, caterpillars and chrysalides (apparently the plural of chrysalis) in the spring, the distribution of seeds in the autumn, different sorts of fruit …I remember drawing lots of things like this, year after year, in my Nature Study exercise book.
I only remember getting into one fight at HG, probably when I was 9 or 10. I’d been invited to a birthday party straight from school, and so was sent to school in my best clothes which included short white socks. These were greeted with much derision at playtime by a (small) crowd; then people decided to stamp on my shoes – it was still more silly than malicious but I selected a suitably small member of this crowd and pounced on him and knocked him over. Then I sat on him and was punching him till we were separated. We were sent to Mr Hacking who heard out our stories, and then he told us not to let it happen again .End of fight. Actually, I also once had a fight, with a kid called Brian Collins, the younger brother of Tony Collins, see later, in Blackburn Road on the way to school, which I quickly lost.
During my last two or so years at HG, my best friend was Derek Westwell. How do you analyse what was going on? We really felt we were the best of friends, we hung out together very regularly over at least two years. Yet the only thing that I remember that we had in common was an extreme interest in buses and trams. He lived nearer to the school that me, so after school I often (I seem to remember) stayed at his house to play before continuing to go home. His mother was always welcoming and there was an older sister Kathleen and a younger brother Geoffrey. Yet from the day we left HG in July 1947, we never saw each other again or had any contact. Neither of us made the first move, though we parted good friends when we left school.
His family was a mystery for me; at first they lived in a very modest terraced house, at the Sunnyhurst Wood end of Harwood Street and his dad was a bus driver for Darwen Corporation. Then all of a sudden they moved to a big detached house on Earnsdale Road backing onto the woods and his father was no longer a bus driver. Perhaps they inherited some money. But I seem to remember Derek telling me that they already owned the big house when they were living in the smaller one.
There are some internet sites about Darwen trams and buses: http://www.petergould.co.uk/local_transport_history/fleetlists/darwen1.htm
http://www.darwentransport.org.uk/
but I also have some print outs of other sites which no longer seem to exist, e.g.
http://www.meikleriggs.totalserve.co.uk/darwenbus/history2.htm
Very frustrating. So I now know lots of things that I would have loved to know when I was 9 and 10. Derek and I sometimes hung around the tram sheds in Lorne Street. There was tram no.16 there all the time; it never moved and we wondered if it would ever be in use again one day. In fact it never was. It was new in 1924; I have an article that says it was withdrawn in 1946, but it must have been a good bit earlier. We watched those trams you could say intensively, passionately, like hawks. So at the time when I was interested, there was only one tram route left, Darwen centre to Blackburn centre, and the trams in service were numbers 3, 5, 7, 10, 23 and 24. One of the articles I read said that there were seven trams in service, but I really couldn’t say which the seventh one was. They were all enclosed double deckers (earlier there were open top ones, and later the driver was still open to the weather). They had controls at each end so didn’t have to be turned round. The upper photo shows tram 24. Numbers 23 and 24 were the newest ones. They were ordered from English Electric in 1935 and went into service in 1936. They cost £2,750 each. They were streamlined, and we (me and Derek) called them Queen Mary and Queen Anne. There is an article that says that they were both called Queen Mary. Another one, that they were called Queen Mary and Queen Elizabeth. Well, I know what we called them. They were the most fabulous thing you could imagine. Modernity in Darwen! They were essentially the same as the newest Blackpool trams which added to the glamour. On the left, one of the older ones, no. 7, I think. There are not many photos of Darwen trams on Google images, far more Blackburn ones (Hiss, boo!) The trams were scrapped and replaced by buses soon after the war, the articles I’ve found say 1946. We were equally passionately interested in the Darwen buses. I won’t go on about the buses; I’ll just mention that during the war one ancient bus was put back into service. Perhaps there was a greater need for buses because people had no petrol for their cars. This old bus was number 10, it was a single decker and it first went into service in 1930. The other single deckers, numbers 20 to 23 were from 1938 and looked much more modern. Anyway, the old number 10 was always called the bone-shaker by us kids, and was certainly noisy and rattly. It was a Leyland – we were convinced that Leyland buses were the best in the world.
The photo (left) shows roughly how it looked. It was often in service on the Sunnyhurst route on Saturday afternoons, when a gang of us would be going to the pictures to see the afternoon matinee. It must have been at something like 2.15 pm that we caught it, and it would be crammed full. Surprisingly, there were no buses in Darwen till the mid 1920s. The bus depot was on Blackburn Road, next to the tram sheds, but we were never allowed anywhere near the buses.
So to my last year at HG, 1946-1947, Standard 4A, Mrs Marsden’s class. I would say that Mrs Marsden was also an excellent teacher, a bit older than the others, in her 50s, very tough but she taught us an awful lot and taught it well. How grateful I still am to those primary teachers who taught us with so much dedication!. Standard 4A was the class where we were prepared for the 11+ exam, which was in the February of the school year. There were three sections to the 11+, maths, English, and intelligence tests. Mr Hacking regularly coached us, especially to recognise the different sorts of intelligence tests, where speed was essential. In my HG report book, my IQ is given on two occasions, presumably towards the upper end of the school; once it was 142 and once 135. Whether that is genuine or just through being coached, I’m not sure. Mr Hacking once told my parents that I was the brightest child in my year. One thing is sure though; my brain is a good bit slower now than when I was 10! In that last year, we also, for the first time, were given regular homework. Most things were not a problem for me, but in English homework, we regularly were given exercises to do which involved writing sentences to show that we understood colloquial expressions. Things like, “the biter bit” or being “a dog in a manger”. I didn’t understand a lot of these expressions, and neither did my parents (my dad was back from the war by then). I remember agonised moments when I was stuck and no one at home could help me. We still had no telephone then (I think) and we didn’t think of asking neighbours for help.
Once we had a visit at school from a speaker from the Lancashire and Cheshire Band of Hope, a temperance organisation, who lectured us on the evils of alcohol. I remember hearing that Captain Webb, the first person to swim the channel, was a teetotaller. (At that time there was a Captain Webb brand of matches). We then all had to write an essay on what we had learnt, and the best essay, for which there was a prize, was written by Richard Kay. I was one of the runners-up who got a certificate of merit. Apart from the nit nurse, the only other regular visitor to the school was the policeman who gave us road safety talks, and occasionally, road safety comics. Typical joke: “Which is the quickest way to the hospital?” Answer, “Just cross the road without looking.” Some kids were seen by the school dentist at times but I never figured out who and why.
After the 11+ exam, Mr Hacking continued teaching us regularly (one lesson a week maybe) and I remember that he taught us the first elements of algebra. There are some things that you learn at school that stick with you all your life. For example, Mr Hacking once asked the class if we knew how much rain fell if it rained non-stop all day. After people had made various guesses, he told us it would be abound 1 inch (2.5 cm). So today, if the weather forecast predicts 10-15 mm of rain for Lyon, which is the situation at the time I’m writing this on 7 Aug 2013, I think to myself that this means ½ an inch, so there’s going to be many hours of steady rain, and sure enough, that’s what’s happening.
With Mrs Marsden it was a solid diet of English, arithmetic (including lots of “problems,” in other words applied arithmetic, e.g. how many tiles 6 inches square are needed to tile a room 14 feet by 10 feet 6 inches, etc.), history, geography, nature study, (usually spoken of as a triplet) scriptural knowledge, painting. In history I think we got up to Queen Elizabeth, but nothing more modern than that. I remember learning about the wars of the roses, and Henry Tudor marrying Elizabeth of York to reunite Lancaster and York. I remember colouring in a Tudor rose. (Jimmy did exactly the same 11 years later).
There was not much organised in the way of sport or games. Mr Hacking occasionally took us to the Anchor ground (where Darwen FC played) to play football, and I remember being amazed how huge full sized goals were. We didn’t have much in the way of kit. I vaguely remember that we mostly – including me – had football boots.
We all took the 11+ exam one Saturday morning in the February, at Darwen Grammar School. There was one other kid besides me whose parents were aiming to send him (James Maple) to a school outside Darwen, and we were in the same examination hall but we sat separately, and were in a different series of reference numbers for the exam from the others. James Maple was trying for Hutton Grammar School which also had a boarding house. The thing about James, an only child – I think the family was from London – was that you could see him going into Darwen by bus on his own (he lived up Sunnyhurst not far from us), to go to the cinema seemingly every evening. There were six cinemas in Darwen at the time, and the programmes sometimes changed twice a week. He was very pale and everyone (everyone?) parents and kids were horrified that James was sent to the cinema by his parents like that. I knew James a bit, but he was one of the ones who never came out to play.
When the 11+ results were given out at HG there were tears (only from girls I would say) and grief, especially where best friends would now be going to different schools. I remember finding it painful. The secondary school situation in Darwen was that there was the grammar school, the technical school (co-ed) which was an intermediate level school for the best 11+ “failures”, and three secondary modern schools, Avondale, for girls, Sudell Road and Springbank, I think both co-ed. There may have been others but those are the ones I knew about. At that time, there was new legislation, presumably the Butler Act of 1944, which among other things set up a three tier system of secondary education, grammar schools, technical schools and secondary modern schools. I don’t know what happened next, but it seems that it was found to be unsatisfactory and the technical schools disappeared.
It’s worth mentioning that when I arrived in Standard 4A, there were some kids who had been in Standard 4A the previous year and had September birthdays, who were not allowed to go to secondary school but had the repeat Standard 4A. I can remember two of them Tony Collins, whose birthday was 4 Sept. and Geoffrey Eccles. I think that at least those two had passed the 11+ already. Which means, I think, that if I had been going to Darwen GS and not elsewhere, I would have had to repeat Standard 4A a year later. Lancaster was also a state school run by Lancashire County Council, but maybe it had a different status. I think it may even have been fee paying up to 1944. When I was there it was already a “voluntary aided” school, I think, which gave it a certain autonomy.
By the way, in that last year, Tony Collins who was a big strong lad, was so good at chain tig that we wouldn’t let him play. He and the others who were repeating the year sat at the back and worked on their own, doing work Mrs Marsden set them.
And so, in July 1947, it was “Good-bye Hollins Grove”. As I think I’ve told you, Isabelle and I stopped to look at the school when we stopped in Darwen while we were on our way to Caroline and Claudio’s wedding in July 2011. The school had been closed in the 1970s, so it lasted just about 100 years. It July 2011 it was all locked up, and we could only see into the boys’ playground in Hawkshaw Avenue through the locked gate. Honestly, it looked no different from the day I left in July 1947, sixty four years earlier. Nothing had been done to it.
Greenwood family history 