A trip down Memory Lane- School Exhibition 2020

 As we are not sure when we will be able to mount the Exhibition we had planned for June this year, as a trailer, we have put together the following snippets from the memories shared with us by Enid, Louise, Peter and Chris Lloyd and also Carol Dutton. They all attended Barrow School in the 1950s/early 1960s.

Getting to School

‘Each morning a green Crosville bus came down Long Green, stopping at Middlehurst Farm, heading for the village. Fare was 2d to the village school.’

Lessons

‘There were about 50-60 pupils divided into 3 mixed age classes, the youngest children sat at tables in one end of the room, taught by Mrs King the headteacher; it was a large room where assemblies, school dinners and the annual nativity play took place.’

‘In the classrooms were large stoves surrounded by fireguards…you could be chosen as coke monitor which meant you went across the yard to the coke shed to fill the bucket.’

.‘we sat at those old double wooden desks with an ink well each, they were quite messy and the nibs we used were rather scratchy on the paper. There was a lifting lid for books to be stored.’

‘Some of the lessons were taken with the BBC Schools Service on the radioeg Music and Movement, Geography and History.’

, in the top class, we chanted times tables and wrote rows of addition and subtraction sums, i.e. Maths was mostly arithmetic exercises. I was once asked to read out a spelling test for the oldest children and mispronounced fatigue as “fat.. i .gew” much to everyone’s amusement and my embarrassment.’

‘Each year, in the top class, we were handed out descant recorders and began music lessons, but they were never followed through – I suspect Mr Cummins couldn’t stand the squeaks’

‘I was in (the top class) class for 3 years and we did lots of new things, like woodwork, and science

Getting into Trouble

‘Another teacher was Mrs Enoch who lived on Long Green. I will always remember her as once she spotted me climbing over the fence to get the football from the field at the back. We had been told not to climb the fence but to walk round. This was quite a long way and through nettles and brambles, but no one was brave enough to disobey orders apart from me! I was hauled in front of the head the next day, where she told me that because I was a girl, she wouldn’t give me the cane. So, my punishment was to be banned from playing football for a month. Lucky for me it was February.’

Special Events

Auntie Nora the Nit explorer” visited from time to time to weigh and measure us and do a lice check of our heads;

Possibly on an annual basis we held a charity Oxford vs Cambridge boat race. This entailed chalking the parallel lines, for the riverbanks, on the playground; and supporting one’s chosen team by placing coppers, (pennies or halfpennies) on the lines until one team won when the end of one line was reached.’

‘Usually we would go to Church or somewhere in the village, but once we went on a day trip on the Manchester Ship Canal. There was a coach to take us to Liverpool docks under the Mersey Tunnel. We had great fun on the ship whilst it sailed all the way to Manchester, and we had to take our own packed lunch. It was special because it took all day and we saw things that you can’t see from the road. ‘

‘We went to Church fir Empire Day and Commonwealth Day. We carried the flags of the different countries.

Games

‘Outdoors we girls played ball, jacks, skipping and old circle games such as In and out the Dusty Bluebells or What’s the time Mr Wolf?’

‘PE lessons outdoors were something like the mass Chinese exercises one sees on TV these days- i.e. all in rows copying the teacher’s stretching and bending actions.’

‘Other things I remember were sports days where we did egg and spoon, sack and wheelbarrow racing and maypole dancing.’

School Dinners

‘Every morning we got a small bottle of milk and the older children shared it out with a paper straw and washed the bottles afterwards. Sometimes the birds had pecked a hole in the top to drink the cream, and in the winter the milk might freeze and burst the top off. ‘

‘Every day we had to clear the room so that the dinner tables could be set up for the whole school, and the dinner was delivered from Chester in a cream and brown Comma van. Whatever the food was we had to eat it all up. ‘

‘After dinner each day, (meat, potatoes and veg, pudding and custard), 2 pupils were chosen to take the scraps, pigswill, to Blackburn’s farm. A task we performed unattended by any adult.’

                                                    Many thanks to Enid, Louise, Carol, Peter and Chris.

We hope your memory might have been jogged by some of the reminiscences above and we look forward to hearing your stories and memories of Barrow School soon. We shall also look forward to the contributions from the children currently at the School. They will truly have a unique story to tell!

Please contact Julia Frew (741661) or Susan Higginbotham (740592).