Tag: Ossett Grammar School

Ossett Cross Country, 1965

Ossett grammar School playing field

My Letts School-Boys Diary, Monday, 5th April, 1965: ‘Cross country – Stef and Fred running on intermediate. Got photos of them (3 in all).’

Other than rather poor contract prints, I haven’t been able to get any images from my 127 negatives until now, using my scanner. Once again, I’ve coloured them in Photoshop.

runner

Lucky me, I’d got out of running, perhaps because I’d been off with tonsillitis a week earlier or, more likely, because the school houses, Marsden, Pickard, Haig and Bentley were entering more energetic runners, such as my friends ‘Stef’ (above) and ‘Fred’ (below).

runner

With the start of the Easter Holidays, this was a busy week for me, finishing off an astronomical telescope kit and planning our next home movie, a science fiction epic:

diary

Bill and I also had our club magazine to print, featuring an article on a ‘whirlwind’ at Painthorpe, reported by ‘Stef’ and a fire at school:

our homemade magazine

FIRE AT OSSETT GRAMMAR SCHOOL

Smoke poured out of a workman’s hut at O.G.S.

Workmen fled in terror. 5 yds away stood a tank of petrol. It took 2 fire engines 10 minutes to get the blaze under control. Thanks to Ossett Fire Brigade no one was hurt.

R.A.B., HJNC News, no.4, April, 1965

Hostile Aliens

alien logo

The big news though was our alien invaders movie going into production:

All sorts of special effects, tricks and camera angles were used. In filming one scene in which a soldier, R. Ryan, was burnt I, the camera man , was engulfed in flames. The most effective scene was one in which a model vehicle moved towards the alien’s rocket.

The best angle short showed soldiers running off the top of the picture.

As yet the film is not complete the second half will be filmed soon.

R.A.B., HJNC News, no. 5
rocket

Rather like the young Steven Spielberg character in The Fabelmans, I persuaded my sister to guest star as the ‘Hostile Alien’, complete with papier-mâché head which I shaped around an old bucket that my dad used to force rhubarb. My brother Bill meanwhile drafted in friends to play the ill-fated World Security Patrol, joined, as in most of our films, by my friend John as an action hero.

tank

At that time there were always a few wartime helmets still kicking around. For the final scene involving an ‘Atomic Cannon’, we had to wait until autumn, when fireworks became available.

Ancient History

Ancient history school exercise book

In my grammar school days, Ancient History, with it’s epic battles and larger than life characters, always had more appeal for me than the serious, grown-up Social and Economic History from 1750-1865 that we were obliged to study for our O-level with its sober politicians and reformers and its Corn Laws, Factory Acts and Reform Bills.

Hannibal

I couldn’t remember the litany of dates, I still couldn’t tell you when the Metropolitan Commissioner for Sewers was appointed and despite my enthusiasm for history in general, it turned out to be the one subject that I failed.

Battle of Salamis

In Ossett we were surrounded by the tail end of the Industrial Revolution with plenty of textile mills, steam railways and coal mines with five miles of the school but there was no hands-on element to the course it was all classroom based and all taking place elsewhere than on our local patch, which actually had its own local luddites, reformers and innovators.

Horatio and the bridge

Unfortunately, to judge from the length of my school exercise book, we got just one term of Ancient History with our class teacher Miss Eaves. I’m still enthusiastic enough about the subject to have taken the University of Reading’s FutureLearn course on Ancient Rome twice, once before our visit there three years ago and, again, to recap after.

Battle of Marathon

Figure of Three

Figure of Three locks stonework

I think that you can see that John Smeaton, engineer on this stretch of the Calder & Hebble Navigation, had previously worked on lighthouses. This 250 year-old stonework withstood the ravages of the Storm Ciara floods in February last year, but the spillway and the island were scoured away. A £3 million repair project took a year to complete, delayed by the coronavirus outbreak.

High security compound at the Figure of Three locks.
underpass

On our school cross country, my friend John and I used to jog – or more probably saunter – through this echoey underpass beneath the railway. As we were wearing our football kit we could imagine that it would be something like this in the tunnel at Wembley on Cup Final day. Not that we were keen on football: for me 90 minutes wandering along the school cross country route was preferable to running up and down the pitch. We knew all the short cuts, so we didn’t have to run all the way.

Healey Mills footbridge over the Calder

We cross the Calder here, at Healey Mills, but at that time there was a riveted steel footbridge, now replaced by this box girder bridge.

Healey Mills

Our cross country route took us down the hill behind the gasworks and through the hamlet of Healey Mills. At that time people lived in this small terrace at the entrance to the mill yard.

Former end-terrace house at Healey Mills.

We sometimes had a bit extra to our route because the school playing fields were another quarter of a mile from the school in South Ossett.

playing fields

Mr Moore, General Science, Ossett Grammar School

Mr and Mrs Moore

“Carbon dioxide turns limewater milky, excess turns it clear again.”

“I put my teeth in my back pocket one day and they bit me!”

“You’ll end up in the ‘B’ form with all the other Charlies!”

Mr Moore, General Science teacher, Ossett Grammar School, c. 1963

Mr Moore’s lessons at Ossett Grammar School in the 1960s were a mixture of science, musical hall jokes and outrageous opinions, hence his nickname ‘Loony’. He had a particular fondness for the Isle of Man, where I assume he grew up.

Most memorable incident: phosphorous igniting during one of his demonstrations . . . which then set fire to the rest of the phosphorous as he attempted to put it back in the jar.

His wife taught science at Highfield School, Horbury. I remember that she always wore her hair coming down across one side of her face and I’m told that this was because she had been badly scarred in a laboratory accident while carrying out research during World War II. I’m told that, of the two of them, she was more highly qualified. I knew her to say hello to but the little that I’ve heard about her background comes to me secondhand.

Ossett Grammar School, 1962-67

Ossett teachers

Having drawn all my form teachers from infant and junior school, how could I not continue and include my teachers from Ossett Grammar School, from 1962 to 1967.
Miss Eves had her classroom at the right-hand end of the prefabricated classrooms, opposite the school dinners kitchen. Her specialist subject was religious education.
Mr Foster’s classroom was down the slope from Park House, the oldest part of the school, in a recently-built block of single-story classrooms. He was a mathematics teacher.

Teachers

Mr McGrady, the music teacher, was based, as you might guess, as far out of earshot of the rest of the school as possible, in the music room in the other, smaller, block of ‘temporary’ prefabricated classrooms overlooking the school playing field.
Mr Mason’s classroom was in the brick-built block of the school, towards the art room end. I can’t remember what his specialisation was. English perhaps. At the end of summer term he left the school and went to teach in Africa.
Mr Beaumont was the woodwork teacher. Again his classroom was in the brick-built block, this time at the gymnasium end.

I didn’t stay on into the sixth form. I was ready and eager to start at art college.

Cross Country

Not surprisingly, my earliest attempts to keep a diary were illustrated, although not usually as elaborately as this account of the school cross country run. Cross country was a brilliant excuse for me and my friend John to get out of football, run off down towards the gasworks, then saunter along the canal towpath enjoying the Calder Valley countryside that still provides the subject matter for my sketchbooks. Obviously, in that annual race, we had to put a bit more effort in. Thirty-sixth isn’t bad!

The reference to the ‘Hostile Alien’ (top right) was to a home movie that my brother and I had made starring my sister in the title role – disguised in a papier-mâché bug-eyed monster head – zapping the soldiers of the World Security Force with a ray gun fashioned from my dad’s chromium-plated torch. Difficult to operate with the boxing gloves that she had to wear.

I’d evidently doctored a Christmas card that we’d sent to Mrs Ruby Jefferies, who had been my Latin teacher at the school – Ossett Grammar School – for a couple of years and who, along with her husband, had rented the upstairs flat in my mum and dad’s large Victorian house.

Our Hostile Aliens, Flying Machines and a secret agent were transferred to video in the 1980s and we’ve since gone back to the original Standard 8 films and had them professionally transferred to DVD and memory stick.

I was approaching my fifteenth birthday at the time and my ‘O’-levels were already looming, so it’s amazing, reading the diary, how much time I was able to spend movie-making, writing, drawing, printing magazines, making models and staging plays and exhibitions. This might account for my rather moderate success in the following year’s exams but my indulgently creative adolescence was a perfect grounding for my years at art college and for my subsequent career which has included elements of all those activities.

With my friends Derek (‘Chic’) and John watching the hockey, with my sister blowing the whistle. Mr ‘Perry’ Mason was our form teacher.
‘Silent Spring – Bill got into fix with plugs. Mum said better than Shakespeare’ (our previous production, Richard III)

In the evening of the day of the cross country my brother and I staged our Silent Spring exhibition, a series of scenes from Rachael Carson’s book, mainly homemade dioramas, illuminated in succession, with a soundtrack that we’d recorded on tape. No role for my sister in that, but she had been referee at the school v. staff hockey match in the afternoon.

Living in the Past

old diaries

I came across the diaries during a pre-Christmas clear up in the studio. Taking a box of slides back up into the attic, I found a cardboard carton which contained five fire-damaged diaries from my school and college days, dating from 1963 to 1969. I’m so glad that despite their charred edges, I kept them. Because of their condition, I haven’t taken a proper look at them for fifty years.

As I like to keep pointing out to my brother, it was his homemade amplifier, our first-ever experience of stereo, that caused the blaze on the metal shelf-unit in our shared bedroom. In return, Bill likes to remind me that when I showed the insurance assessor his partially-melted Jethro Tull albums, I should have questioned his professional opinion that they were still all perfectly playable!

Four of the diaries are National Coal Board staff issue, which my father brought home from work, and the fifth was evidently a promotional item from an engineering firm.

leaflets
My after-school job: On that day I got paid for delivering 1500 leaflets for the Lion Stores supermarket around Ossett. Glad there weren’t more to deliver!