Bessy Ruben
I remember Miss Green. She had snaggle teeth. I was very fond of her. Then we had Miss Poole, who was a dear, and we had Mrs Cameron, who was a fiery Scot. And we had a Miss Jackson – she was so patriotic that she wore a Union Jack apron. After the Kishenev pogrom, there was an influx of Jews from Kishenev. A lot of the children came to our school and I remember distinctly this Miss Jackson saying, ‘Now, all you foreigners who come from Russia, you should all go back to your own country.’ And a girl sitting in the front – her name was Yetta Solomons – she was so incensed about it that she took out her inkwell and flung it at Miss Jackson, and smashed her glasses. Of course she was chastised for treating one of the staff in that fashion, but our headmistress was a very nice and a very clever woman. I met her many years later and I asked if she remembered the incident. ‘Very well,’ she said. ‘We had that teacher dismissed, because she was in a Jewish area and she just didn't like foreigners.’
Richard Common
We had this one teacher, old Ramsay, and he was a tyrant. He used to have a stick. It wasn't a cane, it was like a very thin rolling pin, and if you did anything wrong he used to rap you with it. You held your hands out, palms upwards, but if you pulled your hands back, instead of bringing it down on you, he brought it up and hit you on the knuckles. One day old Ramsay went out, and one of the lads hid his stick behind the central heating pipes. He came back and he couldn't find it and he told us that when he did find it, we were all going to get it. He marked our names down on the blackboard with the number of smacks we were going to get. And my goodness, when he found it, we got it. He stood us all in line and he looked on the blackboard and walked up, saying, ‘Ten for you! Six for you!’ right up the line. The girls got the same. He hammered us all.
Nicholas Swarbrick
The Jesuits ran Stoneyhurst College in Preston and the Catholic College for Boys in Winkley Square was staffed by the same Jesuits as the College. These Jesuits were very much inclined to use the leather strap they called a ferula like the devil.
In my first two or three forms at the college I did very well academically. Each week we had a card which we took to our parents, which had four designations on it – the first was excellent, the next good, the next fair, and poor. In the first three forms I always had excellent – excellent on conduct and application. And I always got sixpence from my father for that. When I moved into the senior college there was one particular Jesuit priest, Father Ellison, and he was a devil with the ferula. On one particular occasion I had a lot of homework, I was given a lot of irregular verbs to parse – horrible things. I did my best, but Father Ellison hit me so hard and hurt me so badly that I refused to go back to school. My father more or less acquiesced, and my education was ruined. Although I was instinctively a studious person, that ruined my education. Nowadays, Father Ellison would have been jailed for what he did to us. If I'd had my way, I would have gone to the local Church of England grammar school where there was no ferula, but religious intolerance was fairly rampant, and I wouldn't have been allowed. After that incident I stayed at home and no one came in to teach me. I was fourteen when I left school.
Thomas Eustace Russell
When I was at Hatfield Road School in St Albans, we had a master named Cowley who was a brute of a man. A sadist. He broke a boy's wrist with the stick on one occasion. There was a great how-de-do about it.
John William Dorgan
In Choppington, there were two schools. One was the Church School with a grant from the County Council and the other was the Colliery School. My mother couldn't fit me out with decent clothes, so I couldn't go to the Church School. I went to the Colliery School. On Monday morning, every child in the school had to pay fourpence. That was an enormous amount of money in those days. Usually, I didn't have it, so I had to walk to the front of the class and put my hand out. I received four good straps on the hand. Girls who couldn't afford the fourpence got the same. About half the class used to get the strap every Monday morning because they couldn't pay.
Bessy Ruben
A lot of the children at our school didn't have birth certificates, so when they reached the age of fourteen, their parents would have to go and swear an affidavit at the solicitor's to say the child was fourteen, and the child would have to swear too. At school one day, one of the girls said, ‘I haven't got a birth certificate, and I've got to go and swear that I'm fourteen.’ So Dinah, this friend of mine, said, ‘Oh, you don't have to worry – all you have to do is, if you're a Christian, you stand up and say, “I swear by the Lord Jesus Christ”, and if you're Jewish, you have to swear another way.’ That's all she said, and she never meant anything derogatory against Jesus Christ. The teacher was out of the room when this happened, but there were two Christian girls there. When we went out to play in the playground, I could see these two girls walking up and down talking, and pointing at Dinah and our little crowd. When we came back, the teacher of the class called Dinah out to the front of the class. ‘How dare you stand up and make fun of Our Lord? We don't make fun of your Rabbis or your Gods!’ and so on. And Dinah was weeping. ‘I didn't mean anything,’ she kept saying, and she didn't, but the teacher wouldn't even let her speak. She was sent out to the headmistress, and then she was sent to apologise to all the English staff of the whole school. She was sent to Coventry. The only one who used to speak to her was myself, and I used to meet her outside school. Sent to Coventry with a year's marks taken away from her.
Albert ‘Smiler’ Marshall
My headmaster was a wonderful man who took a great interest in me and all the pupils. He taught everything, including football and cricket, gardening – and he was also the scout master. The staff were a bit ‘fishy’ – a Miss Herring, a Miss Salmon, and the headmaster was Mr Whiting. They were all much loved by the pupils. Twice a week the rector visited for the first hour. We started with a hymn and were told about all the historical events which had taken place on that day. Any trouble, and you got the stick. None of the boys mentioned this to his parents, as he might well have been belted at home had he done so. Most boys had an orange-box on wheels, and when we were released from school, there was a rush down the hill to collect horse manure for the gardens.
Andrew Ruddick
My first school was run by a middle-aged woman called Minnie Turnbull. We used to pay thruppence a week, and the big school at Hallbankgate cost tuppence. Minnie Turnbull had ten pupils, five girls and five boys, so that was half a crown a week, and that was all she had to live on and she had a daughter and a father to support. When free education came into operation, after the summer term Minnie Turnbull had to close down, and we went to the big school.
Bessy Ruben
Commercial Street School was a lovely place. What attracted us very much at the time was the unseen heating. In the winter we had the warm air blown in and in the summer it was cool air blown in. We were told how lucky we were that this was our new school, and we were breathing clean, fresh air every day. The school had about 304 children, out of which about 300 were Jews and four were Christians. In consequence, we had all the holidays, both Jewish and Christian.
Harry Patch
I went to a Church of England school where the headmaster was a disciplinarian – so much so that he lost two teachers in three months. They couldn't stick him. But he was a good man. He gave up two nights a week, Tuesday and Thursday, for evening classes.