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Ingleton Middle School

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Life in the 1930s

Here's a little background to what life was like at this school in the 1930s, with thanks to Mr and Mrs Brown of Ingleton and Mr and Mrs B Thwaite of Bentham.

School in the 1930s

General - in school
Built in 1930, it replaced the school at Blue Hall and it was very modern with central heating (still used) which was quite rare.
Pupils sat in rows facing the front of the classroom, on chairs with double desks in which they could store their books. There was an ink well and pupils had to make the ink and wash out the inkwells on a Friday afternoon.
School always started with prayers. Parents were not really welcome at school. Blackboards were free standing and could be turned over. On the classroom walls, there would be examples of good work, maybe a map, pictures e.g. of historical figures. There was a large globe in the infants' classroom. There might be experiments going on such as mustard and cress growing on blotting paper, or frog spawn tanks.

Pupils / scholars
The school took pupils from 4 - 14/15 years old. They were divided into Infants, Juniors and Seniors. Infants and Juniors would stay in their classrooms for all or almost all their lessons, Seniors would move around the school more e.g. to woodwork, needlework, cookery. There was a separate head and entrance for the infants.
Pupils took a scholarship at the age of 11. If they passed they could go to the mixed (and boarding) school at Kirkby Lonsdale or the girls' school at Settle. If they failed, they had the opportunity of taking it again (a transfer scholarship) at the age of 12. Pupils were separated into A and B streams. There would be about 30 pupils in each class. The names of the pupils who succeeded in passing the 11+ were displayed in a book, in a cabinet outside the library. (then the Junior 3 classroom). There was no homework.
Assembly for juniors and seniors took place in the hall. It began with a hymn followed by a 'lecture' (one of which was a serious telling off of children who had been heard to sing the wrong words to 'Mares eat oats and Does eat oats' and ending with a prayer. The girls sat at one side of the hall and the boys at the other. If you were Catholic, you could choose to miss assembly and sit in the classroom.

Health
The district nurse would come into school to check general health and hair for nits.
A dentist caravan would come around from time to time and would sit on the playground for a week - 10 days checking teeth and giving treatment.
Pupils might be absent from school with chickenpox, mumps, German measles, diptheria, measles, whooping cough, polio, pneumonia or scarlet fever. Children were often given a weekly dose of syrup of figs and cod liver oil. For a chest cold, they might be treated with tallow spread on brown paper or camphorated oil. For 'the runs' a spoonful of arrowroot powder mixed with port and sugar. For an everyday tumble - cut knees etc, treatment would be a washed, cut leaf from the garden secured over the wound with a strip of clean old sheet.

Milk
Each pupil would have a third of a pint of milk a day. It was served in a bottle with a cardboard top which had a hole in it for the straw. The milk was full fat and all the cream would go down to the bottom as you drank. Boys would collect the card tops to use for skimming on the playground.
Milk monitors would give out the milk and collect the bottles.

Punishments and rewards
Girls didn't tend to get into trouble much. Mrs Brown remembered getting lines for talking in class. Boys would get the cane - usually for insubordination. The head would cane them on the hand.
Good work would be copied out and put on the wall. There was not a great deal of praise but it was always a privilege to be a book or bell monitor.

Uniform
No uniform but boys would wear short trousers a vest, woolly jumper and possibly a woollen tie and girls would wear a jumper and skirt or a dress.
They would wear leather shoes or boots, or if very poor - clogs. Rubber corks were attached to the bottom of clogs because of the noise on the corridors.

Food
Initially there was no canteen and pupils would go home for lunch. (lunch was from 12.00 - 1.30) Most mums were at home. They might have:
stewed meat and potatoes
rice pudding - or other milk puddings
apple sponge
cold meat and veg
potato hash (with cold beef, corned beef, lamb)

Lunches were later cooked in the kitchen (now the music room) and eaten in the hall. There were trestle tables which could be folded up and stored under the platform at one end of the hall. Dinner table monitors from the top class got the tables out from here. Twelve pupils sat around each table - five down each side and two at either end. A senior pupil served the meals from dishes which came from the kitchen.

Mrs Woods, the head cook, made dinners such as shepherds pie, stews, liver, boiled/mashed potatoes, turnip, cabbage. The mashed potatoes were lumpy, but it was widely believed that the teachers' mash was put through a seive and made smooth! Chips and roast potatoes were never served. Puddings included jam rolly polly, semolina, steamed puddings with custard, and a rice pudding mixed with custard, served cold.

Domestic Science
In the cookery room there was a fireside oven, a gas oven and a parafin oven. The parafin oven was used because the farmers had these and girls were expected to be able to use them and know how to clean them.

Toilets
Pupils would raise their hand if they wanted to go to the toilets - which were outside.

Grounds
The field was separated from the playgrounds by iron railings. Pupils were only allowed on the field for special events and on very sunny days.
The quadrangle was completely covered in grass.
Also, there were no outside buildings to the east of the school. The playground ended and there were railings where our current art and tech rooms and canteen are. On several occasions, boys got their heads stuck between these, and passers-by helped free them, sometimes with the aid of a block of lard!
The quad (known in full as the quadrangle) was all grass initially, but later during the war, it was used entirely for growing potatoes. This was the same for the land to the north outside room 6 - grass and then potatoes. The garden to the west contained no trees and was dug up in the same period to grow cabbages, onions and peas (the peas being eaten unlawfully by the boys!).

Tomatoes were grown in a greenhouse which could have been on that flat piece of concrete at the end of year 8 yard.

During the war, the children were regularly marched up the road carrying garden forks and spades, to Wine Warth (near Beech Terrace), which was the home of the headmaster, Mr. Stevens. There, they had to double dig what was initially a field, and make it into a garden to grow vegetables for school dinners. This was the nature of school during a war. Also, lack of decent equipment, and lack of teachers (the headmaster's wife had to step in to teach maths) was the norm.

Lessons
Arithmetic 3 types - mental, mechanical and problems. Mental arithmetic tended to be basic rules tested orally.

Reading and Writing Composition, formation of letters, finding words in the dictionary, silent reading or sometimes the teacher would read to the class. They had to memorise poetry but would never analyse it. Included was grammar and the reciting of spellings. Reading was much enjoyed. The teacher would start reading a book and then one by one, the children would read a chapter each out loud. Books read included Wind in the Willows and The Black Arrow.

Music always included singing e.g. Nut Brown Maiden, Drink to Me Only With Thine Eyes
'Nymphs and Shepherds' and 'Where'er You Walk' by Handel.

PE Seniors would do this in the hall. The school had teams e.g. for football. They also played cricket and shinty. When it rained, the boys would come inside and do boxing. In gym, leapfrogging over the horse, landing on a coir mat and doing a forward roll to finish off with, was one of the activities.

Geography Miss Woods' (J2) class was remembered as being hugely enjoyable, the class being taught all about Canada - the Rocky Mountains, Mounted Police etc., about Africa and indeed, places all around the World.
In history, the children were taught British history from the stone age to why the First World War started.

Playground Games
Trust and Wait (Weight?) Against a wall - 4/5 pupils would bend over and the others would leap frog onto their backs until they collapsed. They would also do leapfrog, skipping, marbles, hopscotch and twelves (throwing a ball against the wall in twelve different ways)