An affectionate memoir of my Spinney Primary School: 1955-1960

By John G.R. Proctor

I JOINED, seventy years ago this year, in March 1955, aged six, along with my brothers and our sister, “The Spinney County Primary School” in the then new town of Harlow, Essex, from Chingford’s “Longshaw Primary School”.

The school is now “Cooks Spinney Primary Academy and Nursery” – rather ironically, as I recall our Headmaster, Mr Angwin, a Cornishman, regularly reminding us that the school was “The Spinney!” and the surrounding residential area was “Cooks Spinney!”

I was placed in the second year of the Infants Department for the last term of the school year. Unfortunately, the Infants Department, unlike my parallel class in Longshaw, believed in “learning by discovery”, a policy, which, in my class at least, invariably led to chaos and confusion. I recall being asked on my first day to ascertain how many pints of water make a gallon, which, without any prior knowledge of what a gallon is, did not lead me to the conclusion that eight pints are required. Hence, this experiment, rather than encourage me to explore mathematics further, left me hesitant to take up any similar challenge in the future in case I should be demoralized by another failure to attain the young woman teacher’s high esteem and beaming smile.

The pencil points to the location of the then yet to be constructed “The Spinney County Primary School” in this undated early map of Harlow published in “History of Harlow”, (1969) by the Harlow Development Corporation. To the right of the site is the residential area “Ladyshot” with the playing field and forest further to the right. Across the road on the edge of the map, was New Hall Farm, an employer of prisoners of war in the war years, and an area where we regularly took long walks. It is now a residential area.

During the next four years, our teachers’ methods were more formal and therefore quite congenial compared to that to which I was introduced in this school. In the Junior school, at that time we, being of the post-war baby boom generation, had four classes in each year graded A, B, C, and D. Each class had forty or less pupils and one teacher. Possibly due to my obtuseness in not learning sufficiently by discovery, I found myself in Class 1-C, a class of 39 boys and girls under the tutelage of Mr Ingram.

By dint of rising up the rank order of pupils following the mid-year and summer examinations, at mid-year in Class 3-C in December 1957, I and two other pupils were transferred to Class 3-B. Three pupils in 3-B were similarly transferred to 3-C. That must have been as demoralizing an experience for the unfortunate three, as it was an uplifting one for my two peers and me. We were praised at home with such encouragement as, “And next year, I expect, you will go into Class 4-A . . .” However, that did not happen – to me at least – and in my final year, in Class 4-B, the teacher of which was Mr Bowen, we took the examination, in English and Mathematics, known as the “Eleven Plus”. At this exam, as the examination was held in January, half of us were still ten years of age including me who was not eleven until four months later.

However, I passed, perhaps due to my fondness for English and especially, “Reading” as, when required to write a paragraph, in the exam, about a famous person, I wrote about, not the missionary David Livingstone as one may expect, but H.M. Stanley, the man who found him when Dr Livingstone was lost to the Western world in the vastness of East Africa. Incidentally, one brother – compared to me an intellectual giant in mathematics – instead of writing about “An escaped budgerigar” for his 11+, “Write a paragraph” question wrote, instead, about “An escaped burglar”. It did not occur to us until later why anyone would expect ten year olds to write about escaped burglars.

However, to return to the Junior school, although female primary school teachers usually dominate primary education, in my four years in the primary school, we had a succession of male teachers only. This was probably due to the post-war shortage of teachers (due in part to the raising of the school-leaving age to fifteen years in 1947) when men on being demobilized from the armed forces, were encouraged to take up the role following an intensive one-year ‘emergency’ training programme.

Not all the accepted applicants for training had strong academic qualifications but all were subject to a rigorous selection process. That programme ended in 1951 when, according to the educational historian, H.C. Dent, “. . . one in six teachers in maintained schools was emergency trained. Many of them proved above average teachers and more than a few first class. On the other hand, there was possibly a higher proportion of weak teachers than among those produced by permanent training colleges.”*

It was likely that some of The Spinney’s teachers, during my years at the school, were ‘emergency trained’ but most, by then, would have attended the permanent colleges’ two-year training programmes (increased to three years in 1960). Some of our teachers were ex-national servicemen. Their anecdotes often referred to the 1950s’ rebellions against colonial rule. They were never reluctant to illustrate their discourse with illustrations gained from experience.

One teacher, for example, who experienced them in an army troopship, related a colourful description of the notoriously choppy seas in the Bay of Biscay (or ‘Bag of Biscuits’, as we pupils called it). Another anecdote I recall was a description of the tropical climate in Malaya, as the country was then known, when, in the jungle during the “Malayan Emergency” (1948-1960) soldiers removed leeches from the skin with the tip of a glowing cigarette. Another anecdote referred to the fear that tank servicemen felt when, as a tank’s observer, their head was always necessarily higher than the steel plates of the tank.

In retrospect, that is from an adult’s perspective rather than a child’s, our teachers were probably in H.C. Dent’s “above average” category with perhaps one “first class”. On the other hand, an example of a “good” teacher from a schoolboy’s point of view, it was generally agreed, was Mr Brown as “He is always cracking jokes . . .” Mr Brown was ready on some Friday afternoons to set off after school with his portmanteau packed to attend Territorial Army training weekends.

There were, of course, women teachers in the Junior school. The redoubtable though warm-hearted, grey-haired, Miss Harrison, for example, always taught Class 4-A. Miss Harrison was the old-fashioned sort in language and dress and much respected by pupils and parents alike. Mrs Angwin, the Headmaster’s wife, with a firm, motherly nature, taught Class 3-A, and Miss (or Mrs) Hammond, the teacher of Class 2-B had a penchant for modern fashions including the sack dress, popular in the 1950s. Most other teachers were, for me, the anonymous ‘extras’ quietly passing back and forth in the background.

The Queen and Prince Philip visited Harlow in 1957. We pupils at “The Spinney” were taken to the Stow (the local shopping centre) to watch the royal convoy pass by and to wave with our miniature union flags at the Queen and Prince Philip. They graciously smiled and waved back at us. (The photo is from “History of Harlow”.)

Reading, writing and arithmetic (“the three Rs”) as in the 1880s, were the principal subjects with at least one, legally required, scripture lesson every week. ‘Reading’ was practiced daily in pairs, in groups, or independently with the teacher in the first two years trying hard to hear each child read. “Reading with expression” was encouraged and “recitation” by individuals was occasionally introduced, both of which in a class of forty pupils must have severely tried the teacher’s patience. Some of us escaped sometimes-unchallenging lessons by taking refuge in our Royal Crown Readers. The content of these “readers” was robust. They described aspects of travel, adventure and wars. They provided models of excellence in writing.

They were mines of information and they contained uplifting and moral tales. In Class 4, I recall particularly the summaries of Juliana Horatia Ewing’s ‘Jackanapes’ (1884) – a tale of courage and sacrifice appropriate to the Victorian era in which the reader feels deeply immersed – and her ‘Daddy Darwin’s Dovecot’ (1884).

The latter is about a poor orphan boy who, through his honesty and perseverance, rises in his master’s esteem to the extent that his master, in his will, leaves his property to this employee. Poems and passages for recitation were also included.
The Royal Crown Reader, Book 4 (1948)
The Royal Crown Reader, Book 3 (1948)
The illustration, left, by the title page is of King Midas and his daughter. The King, who loved gold, found he could turn everything he touched into gold but never expected his family would turn into gold also.

I am not sure whether William Blake’s poem, “Tyger, tyger burning bright . . .” was included in a Royal Reader but, even so, on hearing the poem read by the teacher in Class 3 (either Mr Rand, the teacher of 3-C or Mr Buck, the teacher of 3-B) the reading and writing of poetry became for me thereafter a lifelong pleasure.

This illustration is from Blake’s first publication of ‘The Tyger’ in 1794

Blackie’s Model Readers, Book V
This was a popular series published from the beginning of the twentieth century onwards. It was full of adventure and action and was often read by the boys and girls in Class 4.

‘Writing’ often included the writing of long narrative ‘compositions’. On reading recently Joseph Addison’s “The Adventures of a Shilling” (1710), I realized this was the model our teacher had in mind when he set it as a title for a composition. Otherwise, in English we were beset with ‘exercises’, which included the writing of sentences in which we corrected the spelling, punctuation and grammar, or they were of the category known as ‘comprehension’ exercises or tests which ascertained whether we understood a passage of text taken from an appropriate book.

Handwriting was an important and carefully taught skill. In Class 3, the ink pen was introduced. It consisted of a wooden nib holder coloured blue, yellow, or red, and a detachable steel nib. Ink powder was mixed with water by a class monitor and poured into the inkwell affixed to the top right-hand corner of each child’s desk. (There were no ‘left-handed’ inkwells.) The script used was, I believe, “civil service” – a simplified form of the traditional sloping copperplate. The slightly flexible nib permitted variations in pressure but also caused blots for which blotting paper was required and happily applied. As homework was not given in the Junior school, we did not have satchels to carry our books and materials to and from home and so the blotting paper was distributed in the classroom along with the writing apparatus.

My carefully written Civil Service script, 1957

Spelling was taught systematically from Schonell’s Essential Spelling Book (we did not each have a copy) with a weekly test on the words learned during the week.

The “no homework” policy was a boon to us as each evening after school we would appear at home and then dash off to play football or cricket depending on the season on the Ladyshot playing field. The generous and well-maintained provision of playing fields in Harlow both in school and out is perhaps among the reasons why my siblings and I, and many Harlow citizens, have enjoyed lifelong good health.

No homework also enabled us to participate fully in the Scout movement. In the Junior school, we were ‘Wolf Cubs’ and attended meetings with the 12th Harlow ‘Pack’ on First Avenue perhaps two evenings a week, from 5 to 6 o’clock. Mr Baker and Mrs Rowe, two professional persons, were the leaders of the popular Cubs’ packs. I became the ‘Senior Sixer’, a role with the packs humorously compared to that of a regimental sergeant major with almost unlimited power. Mrs Rowe occasionally arranged family-like picnics for her Cubs on Saturday afternoons at the then wild and undeveloped Harlow Town Park between First Avenue and Burnt Mill railway station.

The Greyhound public house, close to Burnt Mill railway station is at the foot of the then unlandscaped Harlow Town Park. The slope in the wild foreground was typical of the park in the 1950s. The Park’s slopes are appropriated for tobogganing in snowy weather. (The photo is from “History of Harlow”.)

In Mathematics or, rather, the branch known as ‘Arithmetic’, we worked systematically and by rote through all the various operations to the extent that, even though I often applied after school to a brother, already referred to, for assistance, I often prefer, today, to use the methods taught then rather than use a calculator. In Classes 1 and 2, we did not have mathematics textbooks. The teacher instead would demonstrate an operation, using white chalk on a blackboard attached to a wall (moveable green roller boards were introduced later). I recall one teacher, for example, teaching us ‘long division’ (e.g. 1179641 divided by 87), a somewhat more complex operation than ‘short division’ (e.g. 8067 divided by 16) and writing several ‘sums’ and, later, ‘problems’ for us to puzzle our way through thereafter. Weights, measures, and money were all subject to ‘compound’ operations. For example:

L9 10s 81/2d x 14 = (i.e. nine pounds, ten shillings, and eight pence ha’pny x 14 = )

A typical ‘problem’: “A girl had ten shillings in her pocket; her brother gave her four shillings and then had nine shillings left. How much had he at first more than his sister?”

Arithmetic was usually our first lesson in the morning. Thereafter the day would wind down to weaving bamboo baskets or making clay pots, or potato prints and other interesting things in ‘Art and Craft’, or Physical Education (often football) later in the afternoon. We played in leather football (or ‘togger’) boots similar to those the famous footballer, Stanley Mathews wore, with a double-leather toecap. We hammered in four cork studs to the sole and two to the heel of each boot.

A pair of Sir Stanley Mathews 1950s football boots

As if to instill in us a higher level of culture than we might otherwise have encountered at our age, dotted along the school corridors and in the assembly hall were reproductions of classic paintings such as Picasso’s “Child with a Dove”, and Constable’s “Flatford Mill” (a chocolate box painting also favoured by our dentist, Mr Langley, in the Stow medical centre). They were an introduction to the highest standards of painting which, in retrospect, I much appreciated.

Child with a Dove, Pablo Picasso, 1901
Time was allocated to the teaching of Geography, History, and a little Science. Science usually took the form of ‘Nature Study’ especially in Classes 1 and 2. Nature Study was the reason classrooms often contained examples of plants in pots and budding twigs in jam jars. It was a subject popular with generations of schoolchildren until the standard curriculum was introduced following the Education Reform Act, 1988 when a systematic course in primary science took over from the apparently random selection of ‘experiments’ that we enjoyed, demonstrated by a teacher. These included our watching warm water coloured with blue ink distribute itself in a glass tank of cold water and dutifully rise to the top, or watching a candle slowly flicker out when a jam jar is placed over the candle. This was all quite fascinating but did not give us the foundation we needed for our future secondary school science courses already, for eleven year-olds in their first year of secondary school, divided into Physics, Chemistry, and Biology.

Every year the class teacher would tell us, usually close to the Easter holiday or before the Whitsun holiday, that he was going to attend a ‘Teachers’ School’ (known today as INSET, an in-service training programme). The teacher would then return to school after the holiday full of enthusiasm for a new methodology. One year it was ‘Topic and Project Work’, a teaching method first used in English schools in the 1930s. We then worked as a group on a single subject – perhaps ‘Water’, ‘The Village’; ‘The Local Farm’; ‘France’; and so on. This entailed pupil teamwork and collaboration; book-based research; summarizing; discussion; making maps and drawings; a presentation to the group and class, and other activities. Another year, a different teacher returned to school with renewed enthusiasm for creative writing, one method of which was to ask us to work in a partnership in which the two pupils wrote alternate chapters of a story. This was in Class 3, I think. The idea worked well for most of us.

Mr Rand was the teacher of Class 3-C in which I spent the first Term before ‘going up’ to Mr Buck’s 3-B. Mr Rand was also the school music teacher and choirmaster and, out of school, was the organist for many years at St Mary-at-Latton, our family church. Sadly, he was a heavy smoker with highly stained fingers. He contributed much to the school as he played the piano for the morning hymn or hymns and for school events such as Christmas carol concerts and the four Christmas parties at which all classes joined in with, initially, a fancy-dress competition. Most memorably for me, however, in our fourth year he took us for a period of traditional folk songs of which he taught a good number, including, for example, the later 18th century’s ‘Early one morning’:

Early one morning
Just as the sun was rising
I heard a young maiden
Singing in the valley below . . .

Chorus
Oh! Don’t deceive me,
Oh! Never leave me,
How could you use
A poor maiden so . . . and so on for several more verses.

Other favourite songs included ‘John Barleycorn’; ‘D’ye ken John Peel’; ‘Over the Sea to Skye’; ‘The Lincolnshire Poacher’; ‘The Bonnie Banks of Loch Lomond’; ‘To be a Farmer’s Boy’, and others. Our class looked forward to this uplifting activity, short though it was. The songs as an aspect of our history and culture seemed a normal part of a school week so it was surprising to me to find that no other local school, to my knowledge, included this activity in their curriculum.

Scripture was a subject for which the teaching methodology was carefully taught at the teachers’ training colleges. In the classroom, it was an engaging lesson delivered in Bible-story form. Christianity in the 1950s was an important facet, for many of us, of our national life and culture. On Sundays, commercial activity, indeed work of any kind, was frowned upon and for most people it was, as stipulated in the Ten Commandments, a ‘day of rest’. Our Sunday school, held every Sunday morning in the church hall close to the ninth century St. Mary-at-Latton church, had at least four large classes for children in their various age categories. At school, an assembly of the whole school was held every morning in the school hall with prayers and hymns after which Mr Angwin, the Headmaster, would sometimes deliver a homily and notices. He told us one morning, for example, that we children were fortunate in not having to walk far to school as, in his day, he and his siblings walked miles (I forget how many, probably several) to and from their rural school. Prayers in the classroom were a part of some classes’ daily routine. Mr Buck, for example, the Class 3-B teacher, recited for his class every day before the 3.45 p.m. departure, as they waited patiently for the final school bell, a prayer from the Church of England’s evening service:

“Lighten our darkness, we beseech thee O Lord; and by thy great mercy defend us from all perils and dangers of this night; for the love of your only Son, our Lord, Jesus Christ. Amen.”

“The Lord’s Prayer”, in which we joined, followed this. When we filed thoughtfully out of the classroom, we had learned, at least, some of the vocabulary of the Church of England including, possibly, the meaning of the word ‘peril’.

School dinners are a subject I will not enter into. Initially they were 2/6d a week, rising to 5s by 1959, although mostly we preferred to go home at dinner time. (‘Dinner’ did not become ‘lunch’ until we joined our secondary schools.) We enjoyed school-arranged class visits, the last of which, in Class 4, was to the Tower of London. We had annual sports days. Before the construction of the town’s swimming pool, our swimming classes were held in the cold, sometimes leaf strewn, outdoor pool in Beechwood, near Epping, although I had started swimming at age seven in Swanage Bay in Dorset, near our grandmother’s home. My siblings and I had a busy six-week summer holiday, part of which we spent in Blackpool with our other grandmother or in Dorset, as noted. We also had holidays at Christmas, Easter and Whitsun.

Another (almost final!) recollection: the Government passed in 1956, the “Clean Air Act” in response to London’s ‘peasoupers’ of which 1952 had a particularly severe season. Harlow, hardly more than 30 miles from London, suffered these afflictions also. I remember that one day we were permitted to leave school early due to smog suddenly descending. Although the distance between school and home was very short, possibly less than 300 yards, I lost my way on the journey and wandered about, to the consternation of my family, before finding home. My class was, with the exception of our first year, always accommodated in temporary classrooms known to us as ‘the prefabs’. There were two classes in each prefabricated block and a footpath between the blocks. Each classroom had a black coal (coke after 1956) stove with a black safety railing around it. The caretaker, Mr Ford, in the cold weather, would enter the classroom from time to time to stoke the fire after which it emitted much warmth. I noticed recently in a photograph of a Victorian-era classroom, a stove identical to those we had in the 1950s.

Someone put up on “Friends Reunited”, the sadly defunct social media website and a forerunner of Facebook, an account for “The Spinney County Primary School”. A good number of the 1950s ex-pupils joined the site. They were in a diverse range of occupations: some had attended one of the new universities or a teachers’ college (and became a teacher and later a head teacher, principal, or school inspector). They had joined the armed services – one a senior officer in the Royal Navy and another a chef in the Royal Air Force. One ex-pupil of the 1950s was a town planner; others were sales persons or leaders of sales teams, or computer specialists, or had trained as a nurse. One man was a senior geologist in oil exploration, later with his own company in Houston, Texas, and so on . . .

Me (on the left of photo) with two of my brothers in 1959.

I work with a major South Asian private schools’ company, previously as a principal, director of studies, and international academic director, and now as a teacher trainer in Pakistan with the same organization.

Peter, centre, is now a retired Commander, Royal Navy.

David, 1947-2023, was a university-trained chemist recruited in the 1960s into the rapidly expanding IT profession.

Of our teachers, most of whom I presume have now passed away, I would say, “You devoted your lives to the education of children and young people and you contributed to their lives a sound, practical, and happy foundation for all their future endeavours. Well done!”