In this, his third piece, Eric Dale, who lived in Eighth Avenue Heaton from 1939, remembers his schooldays:
Primary School
‘I attended Chillingham Road School from 1942 until 1949. My form teacher was Miss Whitehouse who I mainly remember for wearing a long white warehouse coat and slamming the desk lid whenever she needed to get our attention.
Whilst in the mixed gender juniors, I had a distant schoolboy crush on two girls: Mary Hunter and Pat Dent. The latter lived on Rothbury Terrace. I’m sure that at no time had they any idea of my interest, which wasn’t surprising considering that I was too shy to speak to either of them.
Mr Sturdy was the headmaster of the seniors who remarked when sent a note from my father excluding me from the imposition of homework that ‘well, we’ll certainly know who to blame when you flunk the eleven-plus’!
School-yard games included (for those of us who wore boots protected with metal studs to save shoe leather; and that was most of us) being hauled by a long column of boys around the smooth concrete, sliding at great speed whilst on hunkers. This generated a great many sparks and had the added advantage of warming the feet! In winter we looked forward to snow and ice so that we could create long glassy slides in the yard.
Swaps
Those were the days of door-to-door milk deliveries and each dairy throughout Britain printed their identity and town of origin onto the cardboard lid or top. We used to collect these and carry them around on long strings. Some of the more exotic ones, for example from the south of England became much sought-after and were used as ‘currency‘ or for swaps. A game developed pitching or skimming them in turns against a wall; the opponents top being lost if overlapped. We also played marbles (three-hole-killer) in the school gardens. Very serious this. Highly prized marbles were lost!
The Grammar
In 1949 I began attending Heaton Grammar School in form 1c and stayed at ‘c’ level until the fourth year when I became a ‘d’, not exclusively due to my own lack of application. My form teacher was Mr Whitehead. F R Barnes was headmaster. Teachers I remember from my time there: Clapperton, Hutton, Nicholson, Rowell, Bambrough, Waldron, Walker, Friend, Taylor, Henderson, (Adolf!), Simpson (Satan!), Quickfall, Tansley, Tunnicliffe, John Healey (a brilliant musician who used to play us out at assembly with Mozart). However, his influence wasn’t strong enough to dissuade us from singing the following at the Christmas service:
‘We three kings of Water-logged Spa are selling toffee threepence a bar; matches tenpence, Fags elevenpence, that’s what the prices are. Ohhhhhoooo…….star of wonder…etc.’
Well, what’s school for if you can’t have fun? We were kept well apart from the girls next door to the absurd extent that when every year we staged a Gilbert and Sullivan musical we were obliged to play all the female roles ourselves. How barmy was that!
Dinner-time
Money was received from parents for school dinners, not all of which was spent as intended. Most days we conformed, sat down with everyone else and noshed our way through the usual meat and two veg menu with the likes of frogspawn or concrete ie tapioca and a half-inch thick rectangle about three inches square made from two layers of rock-hard pastry between which a thin layer of an apology for jam resided. So, in search of something more palatable we came up with three taste-bud tickling options from which to choose:
1. Buy and eat a Walls Family Brick (yes, I know!) from the ice-cream van always parked outside the school gates.
2. Run pell-mell up to the baker’s on Newton Road and try to be first there for the best choice of yesterday’s cakes at one penny each.
3. Newton Road again but this time to buy a small loaf, scoop out the middle and eat that, then fill
the cavity with chips, salt and vinegar. Approval rating ‘Edgy!’ or better still ‘Darza!’
I’ve seen our local kids committing the same food crimes at lunch-time and many seem to be quite a bit heavier than we were at the same age. Maybe the crucial difference is that sixty-five years ago we ran around a lot more and burned the extra calories off. Maybe we need to reintroduce food rationing.
Despite a much less than laudable academic record my memories of the school are very fond indeed and I was more than sad when I heard of its demolition. Especially as it was only built as recently as 1928, so wasn’t exactly ancient. Admittedly it was draughty and the wind would regularly sweep the rain across the linking corridors surrounding the quad which must have contributed massively to the heating bills. But it had character and presence, which is more than can be said of many more ‘efficient’ buildings today.’
Acknowledgments
Thank you to Eric Dale. We’ll be including more of his memories of growing up in Heaton shortly.
Can you help?
If you have memories or photographs of your Heaton schooldays, please either post them directly to this site by clicking on the link underneath the article title or email them to chris.jackson@heatonhistorygroup.org
