A junior teacher at a junior school

I first started at Backworth School around about 1950 I think. I had completed my training at Wynyard College, County Durham (see Chapter 1. Getting Started) and this was my first post. At that time it was actually part of Northumberland County (and not Tyneside as it is now). They had a slightly different system having both County Inspectors and HMIs (government inspectors) so that I was inspected by both at the end of my probationary year. I was appointed after an interview with the headmaster and the head of the governors who was a very stately retired miner, a tall and distinguished looking fellow.

The village of Backworth is situated seven miles north-east of Newcastle. In ancient times Backworth was the property of the priors of Tynemouth, with whom it remained till the Dissolution of the monasteries, when it was granted to the Grey family, from whom it was purchased by the Duke of Northumberland. When I was there Backworth was still very much a village and had many eighteenth century cottage properties. The school was a very old stone building. Its erection in the 1840s was helped by a large contribution from the Duke (1). It has been pulled down now and all that is left is the front wall. A lot of people had been rehoused in one particular area just a little distance away from the village.

The school had outside lavatories, one of them was locked and the teachers had the key and that was our lavatory. Eventually (after I had been there about five years) they decided that they would build a new block of facilities - but not for us, they were for the dinner ladies! But we were allowed to used them.

We took children from the age of 5 up to 11 years when they moved on to the middle school. There were two infant classes and then three junior classes (7 to 8 year olds) one of which I took. We had up to fifty in the class and they were of mixed ability including children who would normally have been deemed educationally subnormal. We had to teach in groups so that we could separate out the different abilities. If I remember there were six of us on the staff of the school altogether. However as I could play the piano I took other classes for music. We would also swap classes for subjects like needlework. Classes were much more structured and life was much more orderly generally.

Backworth School was built with large internal spaces with moveable partitions with which you could make the room larger or smaller for the size of the class. These rooms had rows of seats with two to a desk. Here the children would sit, learning their tables and writing the alphabet - we could do little else with such large groups. Although the emphasis in school was changing and everything was becoming more child orientated, we still did some of that later on but with the inspectors coming around you weren’t supposed to mark the childrens’ work which seemed to me to be absolutely ridiculous. How did they know they had done something which wasn’t right unless you pointed it out to them? I tried to have children doing reading practice every day which meant that I had to have some of them doing an extra session in my lunch hour. I remember one incident when a child came up to me and asked me how to spell 'Fort'. From what he was asking I assumed he must have been playing with his fort. So I said "Do you want 'fort' where you fight your battles - or 'fought' when you have been fighting people?" He relied: "Oh I want the 'fort' when I have 'finked'!"

The kids are all right

Things were in very short supply after the war to the extent that every child had to hand me a pencil as they left the classroom to go home. You just couldn’t get things and you had to be very careful. There was no difficulty with discipline. We used to have two playgrounds, one for boys and one for girls. I had to take one of the children’s football teams because one of the other teachers was already taking netball, which I might have known something about. But I knew nothing about football. So we played a sort of "swarm" football where we all swarmed after the ball and then someone would shout "offside" and we would all come to a stop.

The children on the whole were very well behaved in the school. They came into class in an orderly fashion. There was a lot of back up from the parents. They wanted their children to behave. They were all village children and the head teacher had taught their mothers and fathers. As all schools had there were a few parents who would come up to complain and he would have none of this "Now Jessie so-and-so, you just sit on that form out there whilst I get ready to see you!"

The Christmas parties were always quite spectacular because there were some very good cooks. And of course it was a matter of honour that you should have something very presentable. But the teachers always had to make sure that cakes (or what ever it was that was being made) were put wherever the children could see them because otherwise they would believe that the teachers had stolen them.

Continued in column 2...

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Backworth village

Next door to the school was the head master’s house and next door to that was this very big and tall building which was the Co-op, which was one of the main centres of attraction in the village. The building is still there and used as a post office. There is St John the Baptist Church on the corner of the crossroads and the cottages were almost opposite to it. Along the road across the railway line there used to be an opening into the grounds of what used to be a small manor house. The villagers used to go in there to a clinic for orange juice and milk for babies. When Backworth school was closed the new school was built on those grounds. There has of course been a lot of building and redevelopment in the village since those days. The big pub in the village closed and so did the Working Men’s Club.

The old station which has now been demolished was quite a long way from the village, nearer to Shiremoor on what is now the Metro line. I had to walk there every day. The colliery in Backworth was still working and the railway line which was still in use ran behind the school. Beside the railway line there was an old gentleman, the watch keeper and the engine used to stop promptly every day at three o’clock. It would let off steam so loudly that nobody in the school could hear a thing. All lessons stopped at that point and then the engine would trundle off again. An interesting memory I do have was of the Saturday when there was the miner’s gala we had to turn out and march our children behind the banners up the road to the station where there was a big field where there was country dancing and all sorts of things going on in celebration. And of course we were expected to turn up. We weren’t paid for doing it.

We also had in the school the junior ballroom dancing champions. Everybody at that time in the village was just mad about ballroom dancing. There was this one family which was quite poor and the children were really quite rough, They used to wear these big heavy boots to go to school and I remember seeing the elder child on the railway station at one time when I was going home. He was in the nicest natty suit with short trousers and carrying his dancing shoes. He was going down to the Empress Ballroom, Whitley Bay for his dancing lesson.

For richer and poorer

There was an element in the village who were really very poor and they were the children who came from the cottages. These were not the cottages that stood by the side of the Working Mens Club as you entered Backworth village. They were much older than that and were across from the cross roads. It was one of the children that I found out has been sewn into brown paper underneath her dress. This was a cotton dress which had no sleeves and that’s what she wore throughout the winter. This was the first time that I had come across this problem when I was teaching but it might have been more common than you would imagined. I went to school at King Edwards Infants and Junior School in the 1930s and I was told that the poor kids were dressed similarly during the winter. So it was still going on and must have been repeated in various places. People were just getting over the depression in those days.

But of course we did have health issues. We saw nits, impetigo, scabies, ringworm. When they got that they were supposed to be excluded. I remember one of the girls had ringworm but had been told not to mention it but actually her skirt was rather short so I could see it on her leg. So I told her that she would have to go home and let her mother look after her. We did everything we could think of and used disinfectant but it just spread through the class. There was a visit from the school doctor every year. The nurse also came in at regular intervals to inspect childrens heads. Unfortunately I picked up nits on one occasion when my hair must have brushed up against one of the children. I had to treat my hair with a special comb.

The children went up to the High Schools at 11 years after the 11 plus examination. Our children would go to Shiremoor Modern School. In those days we also had to do the 7 plus exam for the County. I had a boy in my class and there was no way I could get him to read. I would say to him "I don’t know why you won’t learn to read" and he would reply "Oh I’ll do that when I get to the Modern". End of conversation!

Then in the early 1960s I left too, heading for higher things ...

On to the next episode: Getting ahead of myself

References

1. William Whellan & Co., History of Northumberland, 1855 Images of Northumberland: Earsdon Parish
2. The old Backworth Station: Sine Project (Structural Images of the North East): University of Newcastle upon Tyne
3. Interior: The Empress Ballroom Tyne Lives: North Tyneside Libraries

Added: May 8th 2008
Last updated: March 24th 2012

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