Author: jbark1ed
Company: Staffordshire LEA

Children interviewing Berys Whittingham

Q1. Did you play checkers in the playground?

A1. No, all we could play with in the playground would be hopscotch, which you would draw yourself.  Just getting a stone that would mark white on the playground.  Or we had a very long skipping rope and in the skipping rope we would have had perhaps eight girls skipping together.  It must have been very long.  

I can’t remember if we had anything else in the playground.  We had to just make up our games really, except I used to tie my coat around my neck and fasten the top button and leave the coat hanging down my back and play witches.  That is all I can remember.

Q2. Were lessons hard when you were at the school?

A2. Do you mean by comparison to today?  They were very, very different indeed.  We were told what we had to do, we got our work from the textbook and we kept on doing sums and sums.  Not problems like you do now, or written questions.  

Just sums and every morning before we started our maths, we had to have a test on tables.  We were asked our tables really quickly for about a quarter of an hour and in the top class if you didn’t answer quick enough the teacher would throw the blackboard rubber at you - really hard.  And you just hoped you didn’t get hit, but you still had to keep working out your maths tables anyway.

And we didn’t have a ruler.  We weren’t given compasses.  The first time we were trusted with a ruler was when we were about eleven.  But it was alright because the classes were big.

[Berys asks the children: how big do they think the classes were?  The children thought they weren’t very big.]

We had forty-eight in a class.  [Berys asked how many they had in their class.  The children said twenty-seven].

Well if you have forty-eight in your classroom, the teacher is very much in charge of things because he needs to know where everybody is.  You didn’t get up from your desk and wander round, or fetch things.  You sat at your desk, did your work and were good because there was no choice.  But it doesn’t mean that we weren’t happy.  We were happy at school it is just that was what we were used too.  We had a great time.  But in the classroom we did what we were told and we got on with everything.

Q3. In the celebration [photo], why are some children dressed in sacks?

A3. In sacks?  I think that must have been a sports day, would it have been?  I think they were probably in a sack race.  I don’t think we wore them for anything else.

Classroom toys
Berys explains that in the classroom.  In one of the corners there was a shelf with a dolls’ house on, and I was five and I never saw it lifted down.  There was also a little rocking horse thing on top of the cupboard.  And bless me, I sat there looking and wanting to have a go, but it never came down.

The children explain that they have some toys now, which we are allowed when it is raining. 

Berys tells the children that just after the war they didn’t have many toys.

Q4. How long did the celebration go on for?

A4.  What the Rose Queen?  It was only the afternoon.  It wasn’t a school afternoon, it was a Saturday afternoon, so that parents could come as they would normally be at work.  The vicar would come because it was all to do with the church, across the road.

Q5. In 1958 [photo] what was the job of the boys?

A5.  In 1958, well I would be gone then, so I couldn’t say.

[The children commented that the boys wore long socks].

Oh gosh, the boys were wearing short shorts when they were here.  They were still wearing them when they went to the High School, aged fifteen or sixteen.  It was only then that they wore long trousers.  Nobody had long trousers on at Christ Church School.