Tag: Mr Thompson

St Peter’s School, Horbury, 1958-1962

teachers
plan of school

My form teachers at St Peter’s, Church of England controlled, Junior School, Horbury, 1958-1962.

  1. Miss Andrassy, a relative of the Andrassy family who ran a butcher’s shop on Queen Street. I remember her being keen on art.
  2. Mr Harker had his classroom in the prefabricated block in the school yard. Organised a class walking group, The Travel Club. Walking must be good for you, because it’s only last autumn, a few weeks before he died, that he managed the two-mile walk around Newmillerdam.
  3. Mr Thompson, who I’ve written about before in this blog, had his classroom in the Ebenezer Hall, a few hundred yards away from the rest of the school in Ring O’Bells Yard. He was a great storyteller.
  4. Mr Lindley, back at the lower corner of the main school, encouraged us with drama and making little booklets. I still have my booklets on Bible stories, birds of prey and, from the last weeks of our time at junior school, a short summary of the history and myths of Ancient Rome. I was a bit over ambitious with that one!
  5. Mr Douglas, our pipe-smoking headmaster, worked from a small office in the main school which he shared with his secretary. Mr Douglas, like Mr Harker, was a keen fellwalker.

Art, walking, storytelling and writing and illustrating booklets: St Peter’s gave me all the basics I needed for my subsequent career!

Mr Thompson

Continuing my experiments with drawing with a brush, here’s my third-year teacher from St Peter’s Junior School, Mr Thompson. In those days of the post-war baby boom our class, 3T, was a short walk from the school itself, in the Ebenezer Hall. I’ve got an image of him in my mind leading us from school to overflow classroom and vice-versa. As to whether he wore a trilby hat and a scarf, I’m not certain, but I’ve tried to keep to my impression of his character.

There’s a gap between the picture in my mind and the drawing that appears on paper, so why should I add further to my difficulties by not going for the more familiar medium of pen and ink? I scan my initial pencil before inking over it (right), just in case that turns out to be the version that I prefer.

I couldn’t resist adding colour this time. The brush pen drawing works well with the flat colour produced by the paint bucket tool in Photoshop, so I’m definitely going to keep on experimenting.

I’ve got one more class teacher to draw, Mr Lindley from the fourth year, then there’s the headmaster, the caretaker and about half a dozen other teachers who made an impression on me, so hopefully I’ll get better with practice.

Mr Thompson has ended up looking a bit like J B Priestley in my pencil drawing and like Priestley’s main character in his play An Inspector Calls. That’s appropriate because Mr Thompson was a great storyteller.