Day: July 19, 2020

Clifton Infant Teachers, 1955-58

Infant teachers

‘Draw your first teacher’ is the next prompt from Mattias in the ‘Memory Lane’ section of his Art of Sketching course.

I remember a surprising amount of details of the first couple of terms of my school life, in Mrs Clegg’s class at Wrenthorpe Infants, but we moved to Horbury before the end of the year and my sister Linda and I started at Clifton Infants, a newly-built school at the far end of Manorfields Estate.

Clifton Infants School

plan
  1. Go in the main entrance and turn left and you’d find yourself in Mrs (or Miss?) Birdhouse’s class.
  2. Mrs Wallis‘ class was nearest the school entrance, overlooking an oak tree and, beyond the school grounds, ‘The Reck’, Green Park recreation ground. In my sketch Mrs Wallis is holding a couple of the large, light greyish, wooden building bricks that we used. I remember building a model church with them and surrounding it with smaller wooden bricks to represent gravestones. I was into history even in my second year at infants school.
  3. The teacher holding the flash card had the classroom that faced you as you came in the main entrance. Unfortunately, I can’t remember her name. This was my penultimate class at Clifton. She’d made several of these flash cards, on sheets of sugar paper, each with a photograph from a magazine stuck at the top to give us a clue what the first word was as she held them up for the whole class to read.
    One sheet had just one word in place:
    “You like this one don’t you?!” she chuckled as she held it up.
    I believe that she was the teacher who specialised in music and, now that I’m remembering a bit more about her, I think that she had darker, longer hair than I’ve shown. She drove a car, which resembled a smaller version of the Austin Princess. The bonnet reminded me of the Rolls Royce. I remember this because she explained musical notes – minims, crotchets and semibreves – in terms of children, adults and her in her car, making their way to school.
  4. Finally Miss Marsh, our final class teacher, who became headmistress during my time there.

A Harrowing Experience

Disk harrow

The latest in my Art of Sketching course and Mattias has asked us to draw a favourite toy from childhood. This dates from when we lived at Wrenthorpe, so I guess that I would have been about 4 or 5 years old.

A disk harrow might seem an obscure object of desire but for children at that time agricultural implements were probably the equivalent of diggers today. We lived on Ruskin Avenue, a suburban road of then newish houses, but there was a field between our back garden and the railway embankment, so an assortment of agricultural machinery used to trundle down our road towards the field entrance a few doors on.

And talking of agricultural machinery, I remember being mystified by this snippet of conversation from my first year at the Infants school at Wrenthorpe:

The Bottle-top Tractor

Bottle-top tractor

I’m guessing that there must have been a foil-recycling charity appeal, to raise funds to buy tractors for some war-hit country but I remember puzzling over an image of my friend assembling a tractor using the milk bottle tops he’d collected.

Wrenthorpe
Mrs Clegg’s class, Wrenthorpe Infants, 1955

I drew these before reaching for the photograph album and I’m pleased to see that I wasn’t too far out with fashion trends. Tank tops are due for a comeback. I think that it was the confident-looking boy in braces, top left, standing right behind me, who told us about the tractor scheme. He’s evidently got so much confidence that you could believe him if he said that’s what he was doing.

Mrs Clegg’s classroom, the old school building, Wrenthorpe Infants, 1955.

From the indoor informal portraits, I can see that the photographer had guessed that I’d grow up to be the sort of guy who spends a lot of time in coffee shops. I like the way the focus is on the anxious-looking girl waiting in the Wendy house. Glad that I dressed for the occasion: a tie and a tank top.