Category Archives: Heaton Grammar School

F R Barnes: Heaton head

We have written in the past about the opening of the school that was recently renamed Jesmond Park Academy. We mentioned that the first head teacher of Heaton Secondary School for Girls was a Miss W M Cooper and that of the neighbouring boys’ school a Mr F R Barnes. 

Frederic Richard Barnes didn’t retire until thirty years later and so Heaton History Group’s Arthur Andrews decided to find out what he could about a man who was an influence on a generation of local boys.

Family

Frederic Barnes was born in 1890, the first son of Richard, a carpenter, and Mary, who had both been born and brought up in Salford, Lancashire, where the family still lived. By 1911, Richard had become a ‘manual instructor’ for Salford Education Committee and Frederic, who had recently graduated from Manchester University with a First Class Honours Degree was a ‘student teacher’. His younger brother, James, was a ‘Civil Service student’.

In 1915, Barnes married Alice Gertrude Holt, an ‘elementary school teacher’, who grew up very close to Frederic’s childhood home in Salford. His first teaching job too was in Salford.

Barnes was a historian. His article on taxation on wool in the 14th century, published in 1918, can still be read on line. 

After the war, Barnes was appointed to a teaching post in Coventry before moving back to the north-west to take up the post of headmaster of Barrow in Furness Secondary School for Boys, Lancashire. 

To Heaton

Ten years later a prestigious opportunity arose in Newcastle with the building of the Heaton Secondary Schools, which, it has been said, had been designed to resemble an Oxbridge college. The state of the art schools were officially opened to a great fanfare on 18 September 1928 by Viscount Grey, the former foreign secretary, and, just three weeks later, the head teachers, F R Barnes and W M Cooper, were presented to King George V and Queen Mary when the royal couple visited the new school on the day that they opened the Tyne Bridge.

On becoming headmaster of Heaton Secondary School for Boys, Frederic Barnes and his wife and two children, Frederic Cyril and Gertrude, went to live at ‘Bowness’, 55 Jesmond Park West, a  newly built semi-detached house overlooking the school and its playing fields. At that time the entrance to the boys school was on Jesmond Park West so Barnes had a very short walk to work. A newspaper article at the time said that F R Barnes named the house ‘Bowness’ because his children had enjoyed excursions to the village on Lake Windermere, close to Barrow in Furness.

Sleepless

One of the concerns we know Barnes had in the early years of his headship was the inadequate amount of sleep that Heaton boys were enjoying.  At the school speech day in December 1934, he presented the results of a sleep census, commenting on the ‘alarmingly’ inadequate amount of sleep that many of his charges got each night. Some things don’t change! The research revealed that 74 boys aged 13 years old and younger went to bed at 9:30pm, 79 at 10:00pm and 28 at 10:30pm. 

Youth unemployment was another worry. The school’s opening in 1928 had coincided with the start of decline in the heavy industries so important to the north-east’s economy. By 1934, the situation had worsened. Barnes expressed a hope that ‘after negotiations’ more school leavers ‘would obtain a prompt start in industry’. He also appealed to parents not to restrict their sons’ choice of profession or rule out the ‘adventurous careers’. No examples of exactly what he meant by this have been recorded. The armed forces, perhaps?

Evacuee

On the date of the 1939 Register of England and Wales, a snapshot  of the civilian population which was used during the war to produce identity cards, issue ration books and administer conscription, Frederic and Alice Barnes were back in the north-west with their daughter, Gertrude. The family was staying with 35 year old ‘householder’ , Dorothy I Field in Whitehaven, Cumberland. Perhaps they were on holiday? But the register was taken on 29 September during school term. In fact, the whole of Heaton Secondary School for Boys, including many of the teachers, had been evacuated by train to Whitehaven in the very early days of the the second world war.

There are a number of vivid accounts of pupils’ experiences in the public domain, including that of Colin Kirkby, who some 56 years later, remembered being given a carrier bag containing a gas mask, an identity card, a tin of corned beef and a tin of condensed milk, then being taken to Newcastle’s cattle market and then the station to be put on a train to Cumberland. Once they were in Whitehaven, he had to sit in a school hall ‘with thousands of other children from Newcastle’ waiting to be chosen by a local host. ‘I and a few others were left till last, and I think it was because we were the scruffiest.’ Luckily, he went to live with ‘a kindly old couple’. ‘I moved from a house in Newcastle with no electricity and a toilet in the back yard to a house with everything. It even had a garden.’

In March 1940, the ‘Evening Chronicle’ ran an article, headlined ‘Boys’ Comic Opera – hosts entertained at Whitehaven’. It reported that, members of the Heaton Secondary Boys School Dramatic Society had given two performances of ‘H.M.S. Pinafore’ to crowded audiences in the Whitehaven Secondary School premises, one for those who had been looking after the boys during their time in West Cumberland; the second for the remainder of the school and staff.

F R Barnes introduced the members of the society and gave details of the school’s achievements, including that the boys had won the Whitehaven and District Schools’ Association Football League Championship, with their captain, Cunnell, scoring an average of a goal a match. Like his successor, Harry Askew, Barnes was a very keen sportsman and in particular, a footballer.

 ‘The Heatonian’  

In his foreword to issue 32 (summer 1944) of the boys’ school magazine, Frederic lamented that a whole generation had had their education disrupted during the war years. He felt that the revival of the school magazine was one more sign of pre-war normality returning, writing that for five years the achievements of the school’s scholars and athletes had gone unsung.

The 20 page issue give us a feel for the time: the school notes section concentrates on the ‘Old Boys who gave their lives in the cause of freedom’, along with those reported missing and those in prisoner of war camps. The list takes up almost 2 pages.

There were also reports of Literary and Debating Society events (A Miss Mary Robson and a Mr Simpson from the People’s Theatre had given an informal lecture at one meeting); the activities of the Historical Society; achievements in cricket, football and athletics. There were poems and stories about war, the evacuation to Whitehaven and hiking in the Lake District. The editor regretted that, because of the paper shortage, caused by the war, not all contributions could be printed.

The final page has two additions to the killed and missing and also mentions eight former pupils, who had been decorated for bravery. On the copy we have, ticks have been pencilled against two of the names: Arthur Cowie DFM and Arthur Scott DFC. Perhaps they were known to William Hedley, the original owner of the magazine. Colin Kirkby left school that year and joined the Navy, perhaps one of the ‘adventurous careers’ that F R Barnes had urged parents not to rule out ten years earlier.

Retirement

Barnes retired in 1958, after a 30 year tenure as Headmaster of Heaton Secondary School for Boys which, by this time, was known as Heaton Grammar School.

It was reported in the ‘Newcastle Journal’ on Wednesday 12 March 1958 that the school’s Musical and Dramatic Society were going to perform ‘The Mikado’ by Gilbert and Sullivan as a tribute to him. The choice was Barnes’ as it was his favourite opera and it was the first work ever to be performed by the society ten years earlier.

The account stated that Barnes had been the inspiration and encouragement behind everything the society had ever done and that everyone – the 50 boys in the cast and chorus, as well as the masters producing and managing it, were determined to make this ‘Mikado’ a show Mr Barnes would long remember. A team of pupils under the supervision of Mr Waldron, the woodwork teacher, and Mr Loughton, the scenic artist, had built all the sets.

At his retirement at the end of the summer term, former pupils presented Barnes with a television set, a gramophone and a book. Alumnus, Newcastle solicitor Brian Cato, presented the gifts and spoke with gratitude of Mr Barnes who, he said, had inspired generations of school boys and shaped their future lives.

But Frederic Barnes wasn’t quite finished. In December 1958, it was reported that he was ‘coming out of retirement’ to put the case against comprehensive schools in Newcastle. He had accepted an invitation from Robert William Elliott, the Conservative MP for North Newcastle (later Baron Elliott of Morpeth), to speak at a public meeting at the Connaught Hall. It was emphasised that his speech would not be party political but ‘solely a headmaster’s view of the Newcastle Socialists’ plan’. Barnes had previously said that he was not opposed to experiment in education but he was utterly opposed to the scheme for comprehensive education proposed by Newcastle Education Committee.

Frederic Richard Barnes died at the age of 73, on 3 December 1963.

At the time he was living at 7 Swalwell Close, Prudhoe. His wife Alice outlived him by nine years. The family grave is in Jesmond Old cemetery.

Barnes family grave, Jesmond Old Cemetery

Postscript

It has been suggested by a number of nonagenarian alumni, that Raymond Barnes, the well known school outfitter of 92 Grey Street, was a brother of Frederic Barnes but our research has found no family relationship between the pair.

Acknowledgments

Researched and written by Arthur Andrews, Heaton History Group, with additional material by Chris Jackson. Thank you to William Brian Hedley of Heaton History Group for sharing the contents of his father, William’s, copy of ‘The Heatonian’; to Friends of Jesmond Old Cemetery for help with locating the Barnes family grave and to Ralph Fleeting, a Heaton Grammar School ‘Old Boy’ for his memories.

Sources

Ancestry

British Newspaper Archive

Findmypast 

‘The Heatonian’ Issue 32 (summer 1944)

WW2 People’s War: an archive of World War Two memories – written by the public, gathered by the BBC

Royal visit to Heaton Sec Schools

Heaton Secondary Schools: the beginning

You may be surprised to learn that Heaton Secondary Schools were officially opened  by the Right Honourable Grey of Fallodon, Chancellor of the University of Oxford. Surprised because a visit some weeks later by the King and Queen is often mistakenly referred to as the opening. Here’s what actually happened!

The schools. which had provision for 500 boys and 500 girls,  were erected at a cost of £140,000 and claimed to be the most up to date and best equipped in the country. The opening ceremony on 18 September 1928 was big news and covered in newspapers from Aberdeen and Belfast to Gloucester and beyond.

Quadrangle

The original plan, agreed before World War One, had been to build the school on 25 acres of land adjacent to Ravenswood Road but this project had to be shelved due to the war. Afterwards, a price could not be agreed with the landowner. Compulsory purchase was set in motion but eventually the council decided that this would mean unacceptably long delays so a site of equal size opposite the housing estate being built on the other side of Newton Road was negotiated.

The original buildings of what became Heaton Manor School

The original buildings of what became Heaton Manor School

The layout of the school was said to be reminiscent of a Cambridge college with the design of open loggias around a quadrangle.

HeatonsecWestGateway

Heaton Secondary Schools West Gateway

The classrooms were ‘of the open air type, with sliding partitions along the sunny side, the north side being used for science laboratories, gymnasiums etc.’

HeatonSecOpenAirClass

Heaton Secondary Schools’ ‘open-air classrooms’

There were two schools each with their own hall, dining room, library, labs, a commercial room, staff room and classrooms but the two halls were adjacent and so could be ‘thrown into one to form a great hall 80 feet long by 90 feet wide’. There was a craft room in the boys school and needlework and domestic science rooms in the girls’.

The first head teacher of Heaton Secondary School for Boys as it was first known was Mr F R Barnes, formerly of Barrow in Furness Secondary School for Boys. He started with a staff of 17 graduates and five specialists.  Miss W M Cooper, formerly of Benwell Secondary School, had 13 graduates and four specialists working for her in the girls’ school, Heaton High School as it became known.

As for pupils, initially there would be 291 boys and 414 girls, 455 of which would be free scholarship holders. The remaining pupils were fee-paying. At the outset, their parents were charged £8 a year. The programme for the opening event announced that ‘Mrs Harrison Bell has very kindly endowed a history prize in memory of her husband, the late My J N Bell, who was elected in 1922 Member of Parliament for the east division of the city. The prize will be awarded in the boys’ and the girls’ school in alternate years.’

Viscount Grey

At the ceremony, there were prayers and songs including ‘Land of Hope and Glory‘ and Northumbrian folk song  ‘The Water of Tyne’ and lots of speeches, not only Viscount Grey’s but also those of numerous local politicians, including the Lord Mayor, and presentations by the  architect, H T Wright,  and the contractor, Stanley Miller.

Viscount Grey is better known as the politician, Sir Edward Grey, who was Foreign Secretary from 1905 to 1916, the longest tenure ever. He is particularly remembered for the remark he is said to have made as he contemplated the enormity of the imminent World War One: ‘ The lamps are going out all over Europe. We shall not see them lit again in our time.’

ViscountGrey

Viscount Grey

In his speech in Heaton, Viscount Grey, a Liberal, said ‘The ideal system would be one in which the highest, most advanced and most expensive education was devoted solely to the youthful material of the country who were most capable by their abilities to profit from it. We have not reached that point today. A great deal of the highest and most expensive education in the country is given…. to <those> whose parents are able to pay for it… but… every school like that at Heaton is bringing higher education within the reach of those whose parents cannot pay for it. This is an advance towards a better system’.

And tackling another topic which has resonance today, the former tennis champion and keen fisherman and ornithologist spoke about the variety of entertainment available to young people, reminding the audience that  in his day, there ‘was no electric light, no motor cars, no telephones, no wireless and no moving pictures’. But he reminded his young audience that the things which interested people most through life were those in which they took some active personal part. ‘Take part in games, rather than be mere spectators’ he urged. ‘It will give you more pleasure than all the other entertainments that come to you without trouble.’

Live Radio

For any locals lucky enough to have one, the whole ceremony was actually broadcast on the wireless from 3:00pm until 4:30pm. Radio station 5NO had been broadcasting from Newcastle since 1922 and its signals could reach up to about 20 miles. With broadcasting still in its infancy, many newspaper listings came with detailed technical instructions on what to do if the signal was lost: radio was still far from being a mass medium but it was catching on fast and those early local listings make fascinating reading. You can view them here.

Royal Visit

Just over three weeks later, 23,000 pupils from all over Newcastle were invited to Heaton for the visit of King George V and Queen Mary to the school before the royal couple went on to open the new Tyne Bridge. And it’s this historic event which many people assume to have been the official opening. It was certainly a momentous occasion – and an excuse for more speeches!

King and Queen open Heaton Secondary Schools, 1928

King and Queen open Heaton Secondary Schools, 1928

‘Their majesties will drive round the school grounds where 23,000 children of the city will be assembled and on entering the school hall, the loyal address from the City of Newcastle will be presented by the Lord Mayor. Numerous public representatives will be presented to their Majesties, who will be asked to receive gifts from scholars.’

There were also displays of physical drills and country dancing by pupils.

HeatonSecRoyalvisit

Every school pupil present was given a commemorative booklet which included a photograph of the new school at the back but which was mainly about the opening of the new bridge.

‘To the boys and girls for whom these words are written, who have just begun their passage on the bridge of life, and who will go to and fro on the bridges of the Tyne, there is the lofty call to carry forward to future generations the progress which has brought them their own proud inheritance.’

A bouquet was said to have been presented to the Queen by the head girl and a book to the King by the head boy.

This made a lifelong impression on pupil Olive Renwick (nee Topping), who was 12 years old at the time, but at the age of 98 recalled;

We were all gathered in the hall and Miss Cooper, the head teacher, told us that the queen would be presented with a “bookie”. What on earth’s a bookie, I wondered. Only later did I realise she meant a bouquet!’

Olive (middle) & friends in Heaton High uniform, late 1920s

Olive (middle) & friends in Heaton High uniform, late 1920s

Again the event was broadcast on the wireless. A full day’s programming began at 10:50am with the ‘Arrival of the royal party at Heaton Secondary Schools’. And the excitement of arrival of the king and queen’s carriage pulled by four white ponies in front of thousands of handkerchief waving school children (along with hair raising footage of workers on the still incomplete Tyne Bridge) was captured on film by Pathe News.   

And it shows a girl presenting a book (rather than ‘a bookie’) to the royal party. A last minute change of plan or an extra for the cameras?

After World War 2, the boys’ schools was renamed Heaton Grammar School and the girls’ Heaton High School. The two schools merged in September 1967 to form Heaton Comprehensive School. In 1983, this school merged with Manor Park School on Benton Road to form Heaton Manor. And in 2004, after the building of the new school on the Jesmond Park site, the Benton Park site closed to make way for housing.

The next instalment of ninety years of school history will have to wait for another day.

Can You Help?

If you have memories or photos of any of the above schools or know more about notable teachers or pupils, we’d love to hear from you. Please either leave a reply on this website by clicking on the link immediately below the article title or email chris.jackson@heatonhistorygroup.org

Acknowledgements

Researched and written by Chris Jackson, Heaton History Group. Thank you to Brian Hedley for a copy of the official opening programme and the family of Olive Renwick for the souvenir of the royal visit. Thank you also to Muriel La Tour (nee Abernethy) for correcting the subsequent names of the schools.

Sources

British Newspaper Archives

Heaton Secondary Schools: official opening Sept 18th 1928 programme

Visit of their majesties King George V and Queen Mary, October 1928 (souvenir booklet)

Miscellaneous online sources

 

Heaton Schooldays in the 40s and 50s

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.

 

Chillingham Road School

Chillingham Road School (1960s?)

 

 

chilliroad-school-ninth-avenuewebrev

Chillingham Road School, 1994 (Copyright: Eric Dale)

 

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’!

 

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Chillingham Road School interior (undated)

 

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