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In no particular order!
Have you any memories of Winteringham School?
From the 1950s:
The wormery
The aquarium tank filled with alternating layers of sand and
soil, to show how worms worked the soil. It was placed on a table outside the classroom on the veranda. At other times the tank was used for its intended purpose and we’d bring minnows and
sticklebacks. Unfortunately they didn’t survive the summer, when a rather nasty pong developed!
Sports Days at Winterton
The local schools gathered at Winterton for an inter-school
sports day. I don’t think we ever did all that well, but I’m told it was fun.
(If I hadn’t been told, then I wouldn’t have known how fun it was). We certainly did all the traditional races - sack, obstacle, potato, egg and spoon, as well as “flat” races.
Open Days
If I remember, the open day and school play were normally
held on the same day. We usually had a supply of those tiny tins of polish given out as free samples to our mothers by the travelling salesman, generally a purple colour, and Miss Brown would get
us to polish the tops of our desks with these ready for the big day!
Italic Writing
Apparently italic writing was in vogue during the mid to
late fifties.
We all had dip and scratch pens, and inkwells filled in a small cupboard off the boys cloakrooms, and we’d practice our handwriting frequently. Scores: Miss Brown 10 out of 10 for effort! Me: 0 out of 10 for achievement.
London Arithmetic
There were some arithmetic books, a sort of dirty brown
colour with blue title and skyline of London near the bottom of the cover.
Now it seemed to some of us that it would be an exciting idea if we asked for homework! How grown up would that be eh? I discovered that actually homework stopped me footballing, playing out, playing in, and everything else I liked doing, so wasn’t the best idea I had ever had. As it was voluntary, I chose to de-volunteer, something I chose to do whenever possible for the rest of my school career!
The bike sheds
For almost every day of the year, the bike sheds had no
bikes as far as I can remember. We were banned from going in them anyway.
I think maybe Tony biked to school, but that was all, except when we had cycling proficiency. I’ve still got the certificate. The school got rid of the old iron desks just as I was going into Miss Brown’s class and they were stored in the girl’s bike shed for what seemed to be years, but was probably only a month or so. The new chairs had plywood seats with suitable curves to make them really comfortable! I still remember the first day that we had them. My! I was impressed! That would be about September 1956.
Name on the board!
If you were naughty, Miss Brown would write your name on the
blackboard!
Oh, the shame! That soon sorted us out! What if your parents should come into the classroom and see it there! I can’t actually remember any parents ever coming into the classroom apart from Open Day, but the nightmare scenario always seemed an impending possibility!
Tapwata
I spent weeks, months, years, pondering what that box of Tapwata actually was.
It sat in a glass-fronted cupboard to the left of the blackboard, above the sink, in its orange box, just daring me to ask what it was. I’m sure that everyone else in the class knew exactly what it
was, so no-one ever asked the question! I’m not sure that I ever found out the answer until years afterwards! Isn’t that frustrating?
Knitting
Miss Malone taught us all to knit - boys as well as girls.
My knitting was a little on the tight side (I couldn’t get the needle in for the next row), whilst some others’ knitting barely hung together because it was so loose. We also made raffia baskets, miniature rooms in old shoeboxes, and boats out of balsa wood.
Warm milk
Now this one wouldn’t go down well in today’s health and
safety environment!
On cold winter days Miss Brown gave us the choice of warm or cold milk. Those who liked it cold (just a couple of us usually) left our’s in the crate outside. All the other children placed their’s by the fire to gradually warm through between the start of school and the beginning of morning play. Of course, we have to remember that there were milk monitors who sorted out the right number of third pints for each class, and coal monitors who stoked the classroom fires. Being a coal monitor was the best job as far as I was concerned!
National Savings
Every week we had the chance to buy a savings stamp and put
it in our savings book. The cheaper stamp had a picture of Princess Anne and the more expensive stamp had a picture of Prince Charles. A full book had a strange value of 8 shillings I think.
School uniform
Miss Brown introduced a school uniform. I can only remember the blazer - which might be the one being worn here by Margaret Potts, I think it was purple, and the badge included a tree, and a wavy line to represent the Humber. I think we also had black shorts with a purple stripe. I usually put mine on OVER my short trousers, to avoid the embarrassment of undressing! Usually though, none of us wore uniform, a system I heartily endorse!
Coffee
The teachers had a very exotic drink each day - it was
coffee.
I enjoyed the smell, and I think it was made with milk, and developed a skin on top. The only other coffee that I can remember from the village in the fifties were the bottles of “Camp” coffee in the Co-op shop, that stood in a neat row on a shelf behind the cash till where the assistants entered our ‘divi’ number.
Hymns
All the teachers could play the piano, though Miss Malone
usually played for assembly.
Now one hymn stood out for me, and that was “God is love: His the care...” Not for the words, nor for the music in the main, but for the “dum, dum, dum, dum; dum, dum, dum, dum” Miss Malone played between the chorus and the next verse.
Grass Cutting
We loved it when the grass-cutter came. This was a
gang-mower towed by a land rover. The Land Rover arrived with the gang-mowers on a trailer, and then had to roll them off and connect all three up. It did a few circuits of the school field
and then put everything back on the trailer and was gone.
But the grass throwing, building of grass forts gave us hours of fun. It did put an end to the daisy chain creation of the younger ones for a while though. We were only allowed on the field if it was nice and dry!
Singing Together
What a great programme! We’d get the new pamphlets at the beginning of each term and look out what we thought would be our favourite songs. One eye on the pot ... Donkey Riding ... From out of a wood did a cuckoo fly ... All through the night ... Kije was a hussar bold ... All to Marie’s wedding ... Wonderful songs! Miss Brown would turn on the radio, and the green tuning light would glow. One day the school bought a tape-recorder! Now was the chance to hear our own voice for the first time. We had to practice a piece that we would read into the microphone, and then Miss Brown would rewind it, and play it back. This really was magic, as each child said in turn “I don’t sound like that!” and we all answered “Yes, you do!” Eventually it was my turn. I had practiced something about railways. “You’ll break it!” I remember one boy joked as I made my way forward. I carefully read out my piece, and then Miss Brown rewound the tape .... and the thing had died! Broken! Everyone laughed. Strange how the joke was to come true so very, very accurately! The tape-recorder never returned whilst I was at the school. Maybe it is just as well!
Posters
I remember two types of posters that were displayed
consistently at the school. One version was produced by Shell, and if I remember accurately, they were centred on the nature seen by the roadside ... not just any roadside ... but specific ones
such as the Ermine Street.
National Savings posters however were about a far more
diverse set of interests.
Two that I can remember included the Kings and Queens of England - with their heads illustrated round the borders, and the typical family tree illustration in the middle of the poster. The second one though I found far more interesting - a poster of the RAF’s aircraft!
The Trans-Antarctic Expedition
Commonwealth countries supplied the explorers for the
Trans-Antarctic Expedition, and Miss Brown’s class followed the progress of this pioneering expedition whenever news came (via newspapers). This was not the age of satellite navigation and
wall-to-wall TV coverage, so news was gleaned and cut from newspapers every few days when there was something to report, and discussed by the class.
Mothers and Babies
I think it occurred once a week, but I may well be
wrong. There would be a “clinic” for mothers and babies in the canteen, and if you were sitting in the right part of the classroom, you could watch a steady stream of mums and their young children
arrive, along with large-wheeled prams, pushchairs, and by foot, and disappear into the canteen, only to re-emerge some time later clutching bottles of of orange juice and National Dried Milk in large
white tins. These tins, once emptied of their contents often returned to the school as they made excellent containers for paint brushes and all the other paraphernalia of the art lesson.
Country Dancing
Sometimes we had country dancing just for the sake of it,
and sometimes we had it so that we could do it for the Open Day.
I think Miss Malone was the expert here, winding up a black gramophone, and selecting a 78 rpm record appropriate to the dance, taking it out of the brown sleeve very carefully as they didn’t bounce very well! In fact they were downright brittle. Generally speaking, country dancing meant taking over the large infants classroom from Miss Coggan’s class, clearing the desks and chairs to one side and lifting the sand and water trays out of the way. We all had our favourite partners of course (well, country dancing did mean holding hands quite frequently!)
Coconut mats
There were small oval woven fibre mats that were used for PE
from time to time. These were often used on the playground, and were a kind of “home base” for each child, and on and round these the teacher would ask you to do various PE activities. The
only one I can remember - and for very good, if painful reasons - was the suggestion that we did forward rolls on them! I can still feel the solid ridges of the mats on the top of my head!
There was also a large, but rather flimsy, green climbing frame, that would be erected on the school field, and which could be configured in different ways.
Needless to say, the favourite was when part of it was made into an elementary slide!
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