This page contains details of the schools and education I received whilst living in the Railway Village from 1943 until 1952. It also contains details of my "do-it-yourself" education from my earliest days until I left the Railway Village to get married in 1958. The schools I attended as a child were College Street Infants School, Sanford Street School, College Street Primary Mixed School, Chelworth House at Cricklade (a convalescent home) and Westcott Secondary Modern School in Westcott Place.
The most important area of my education was probably of the "do-it-yourself" variety. Perhaps that is not really fair on the majority of my teachers who did their best with very unpromising and sometimes troublesome material. Nevertheless, finding things out has always been a passion with me. In finding things out, one usually runs into an expert sooner or later, only to find that what you thought you knew wasn't quite what you thought it to be!
My schooling at College Street started in 1943 when I was 6 years old. I remember a rather dangerous and cramped iron spiral staircase which gave access to the upper floor. This worried me each time we used it throughout the day to change lessons. Sometimes I even had nightmares about it. Many of my memories of that time are only vague impressions, things like chanting our times-tables, learning the alphabet (first the letters and then the sounds of each letter), an Empire Day parade in the playground, and learning to spell "beautiful." There was also that school smell of pencils and furniture polish, and the singing at morning assembly of "All things bright and beautiful" which I thoroughly enjoyed.
A traumatic lifetime memory of that time crops up whenever I run my tongue around my remaining lower front teeth. We were having a practice air-raid evacuation and, as I got up quickly from my desk, I tripped and smashed my mouth on the iron frame of the desk in front. Bleeding and in pain, I was hustled off home and from there to the GWR Hospital rear entrance in the "backs" at the rear of 6 Emlyn Square. I don't remember much about what happened next except that it was painful and that I didn't return to school for quite some time.
Another never-to-be-forgotten memory is of having to use every scrap of paper to the utmost because there was a war on. Our teacher handed out paper which had already been written on by past pupils. We then had to turn the sheet upside-down and write between the lines of the existing writing. This got worse as time went on because we had the same sheets and had to fit further lines in between the others. Eventually we had to write around the edges until there was simply no space left in which to write. We were also encouraged to write smaller and smaller and to keep the letters as close together as possible. Years later, I found this cramped writing very difficult to change but I eventually did it with the aid of a Calligraphy book from the GWR Library. In 1944 I was transferred across the road to Sanford Street School.
F. Smith, Headmaster; E. Smith, Class Master; L. Gadd, Class Mistress.
It may be hard to believe but I still have some of my School Reports from this era! For Sanford Street they are for the four terms ending Christmas 1944, Summer 1945, December 1945 and July 1946. It seems that I wasn't very good at anything much, especially "Arithmetic" or "Sums."
Mr. Smith was the name of our Arithmetic teacher. He was partly bald and very strict, as all teachers were at that time. At the start, I had no trouble with figures and I would often finish first and then look around at the other pupils. One day when I had finished early as usual, the boy sitting at a desk across the aisle from me took his work out to Mr. Smith, muttered something to him and pointed to me. Mr. Smith ordered me to bring my work out to him, which I did, and he compared it with the other boys' work. Then he turned to me and angrily accused me of copying, showing me that the other boys answers were identical with mine, which I could not deny. I was warned that if I did not stop copying, I would be caned.
I was astonished that anyone could be so sneaky because, of course, the other boy was actually copying my work. At the next lesson, the same thing happened again and I was caned. And again, and again, each time with more strokes of the cane on each hand. Why didn't I explain? It seems daft now but I never thought of doing so. To me at that time, authority was authority, and if authority said or did something, then that was it and all about it. Unfortunately, it had the long-term effect of making me useless at anything to do with figures. I hated Maths from that time on until long after I had left school.
Another teacher I remember with fear and trembling was Mr. Hodges, a large, strong man with large strong hands. His favourite trick was to quietly come up behind you when you were doing something you shouldn't, such as talking in class. The first you knew about it was when all the breath was knocked out of your body and you were incapable of taking another breath. He had belted you hard in the middle of the back with the flat of his hand. It was frighteningly effective though.
Another teacher I remember was Mr. Blunt. I think he was nicknamed Dicky Blunt. Again, a very severe disciplinarian but when he told us stories at the Friday afternoon assembly you could hear a pin drop. One such was a serial about a Ventriloquist and I eagerly looked forward to that every week. How disappointed I was to have to go back to College Street and miss the other episodes.
I was off school for many weeks during my stay at Sanford Street when a fellow pupil fractured my thigh in the playground. I remember being in plaster and that my leg itched unbearably. The authorities decided to change the school system about this time and I was sent back over the road to College Street again.
G. Solven, Headmistress; E. Haydon, Class Teacher.
My school reports for this period are for the terms ending December 1946, July 1947, Easter 1948 and July 1948. Once again I don't seem to have done very well at anything and once again it was illness - chicken-pox, measles, Ricketts and TB amongst other things.
Actually, I didn't have TB but my younger brother did. It was thought that I would necessarily come down with it too, so we were both isolated from school. After a series of horrendous operations, my brother was required to go to a convalescent home in the country for a month or so. This he point-blank refused to do unless I was allowed to go with him. After having already spent so much time in hospitals (Savernake Hospital in Marlborough being one) this was not at all surprising. The doctor cautiously approached me and asked if I would mind missing school and going with my brother. Would I mind missing school? The doctor must be mad. This seemed like a great adventure to me and I readily agreed.
Chelworth House, situated in the countryside around the village of Cricklade, has nothing but happy memories for me. We had the run of this very impressive house, its grounds and the surrounding fields. It was wonderful to get up, have breakfast and then go exploring wherever we chose in this idylic place. My brother wasn't too happy about it though and he pined for "home." To him, still recovering from the latest of his numerous TB operations, it was just another absence from home to be endured like all the others. He was often in tears because he wanted to go home and I could not understand him crying about such things. Until, that is, our stay was over and we were back to the Swindon grime and 6 Emlyn Square. It was then that I quietly cried myself to sleep every night for many weeks. The dream was over.
Back at school things seemed to be settling down nicely until something called "the Eleven-Plus" examination suddenly appeared on the scene. We were to take the exam across the road in Sanford Street and we were encouraged to do our best. The trouble was, I had obviously missed doing the types of questions we were required to answer because I had no idea whatsoever when I took the exam. To me, the questions were about as sensible as asking, "If apples are ninepence a pound on Shrove Tuesday, how much are bananas on Fridays, given that pears are three for a penny-farthing during Lent? Give your answer to the nearest half-penny."
And so I failed the Eleven-Plus exam and it looked as though I would be going to Sanford Street School. The authorities, however, changed the boundaries about this time and decided that I would be in the wrong school. I was therefore transferred to Westcott Secondary Modern School, which was supposed to be nearer to 6 Emlyn Square but actually wasn't.
C. Thompson, Headmaster; R. Tabb, Form Mistress; M. Hallard, Form Master; J. Hunt, Form Master; E. Hayward, Form Mistress.
My school reports for this period are for the terms ending Christmas 1948, Summer 1949, Autumn 1949, Summer 1950, Autumn 1950, Summer 1951 and Christmas 1951. I also have a Final Report and a Certificate of Character, both dated 9th April 1952. Apart from that, I left school with no qualifications whatsoever. However, I could read and write and I have always been grateful for those blessings.
Once again I don't seem to have been much good at anything, except, perhaps, Art and English. The teachers were sympathetic for the most part and they did their best with all of us but it must have been very discouraging for them.
A typical "Art" lesson would go something like this, as the teacher distributed paper and materials for the lesson: "Well, it was Bonfire Night last night and that's your theme for this lesson. Draw anything you like about the subject and keep quiet. I'll be back in about an hour." Sometimes, however, the teacher would ask if we had seen the sunset last night and noted the colours. When we said we had, he would ask if we had noticed the green colour of the sky towards the horizon. Everyone laughed at him for saying this, insisting that it was a sunset and that there was no green in the sky. But he was right, as we found out when we really looked at the next sunset! Such things fascinated me.
Shortly before leaving Westcott Place School, Mr. Hunt, one of our teachers, said that as we would be leaving school soon, we should have some idea of what work we would like. He then proceded to ask each of us in turn what we wanted to do. Nobody had much idea. When he asked me the question, I said that I wanted to be a Commercial Artist. He swiftly replied, "Think again, Williams, where do you think your parents would get the money from for that sort of thing?"
I didn't dream of questioning authority in those days so I simply accepted what he said and gave up that idea. This of course left me at a complete loss and I simply went where I was put on leaving school.
So it was that I gained an apprenticeship with the grand-sounding title of "Journeyman Electrician." I eventually attended, very reluctantly, the newly-introduced "day release and night school" system at Swindon College, Victoria Hill.
For reasons unknown to me, when I was born, my parents were convinced that I would be a Parson. To help with what they thought was going to be my career they bought a set of Arthur Mee's Childrens' Encyclopedias to get me started! It was sad really because we never had much money at any time and it must have been a real sacrifice. Nevertheless, I really loved those books and I am told that I even used to take them to bed with me when I was little. I certainly did this as far back as I can remember.
I did not do well at any of my schooling because I could find very few links between the contents of my beloved encyclopedias and what went on at school. The trouble was with my experience and concept of so-called education. Added to this were my frequent absences from school because of a variety of illnesses suffered by me, my younger brother or my Father.
Dad had been kicked in the stomach by a horse whilst serving a career in the Army and he was often at death's door with perforated ulcers and such-like ailments. He was invalided out of the Army and then worked for some years as a Storeman in the GWR. Many times he would collapse in the night with blood gushing from his mouth. Quite often he would attempt to get to the outside toilet and just as often he would fall backwards across my bed, and up the blood would come all over the place. This became so frequent that I bought a torch to keep by the side of my bed so I could see what was going on. On such occasions, the next stop was the GWR Hospital, Victoria Hospital or Stratton-St-Margarets' Hospital. Many times we were called to the hospital to see him for the last time and to say "Goodbye," but he always seemed to recover. He managed to out-live some of the doctors who had treated him and operated on him. A frequent cause of embarrassment to me was his habit of pulling up his shirt to reveal his operation scars to any visitors who called, with the remark, "There you are! Have you ever seen anything like that before?" I must admit though, it was very impressive. Anyway, back to the account of my education!
The things I wanted to learn about seemed to have nothing to do with schools so I gathered a lot of information and experience in other ways.
The Old Professor, whose actual name was Thomas Richards, lived in London Street and I think I met him one day when I was playing with an ex War-Department bombsight in the street. These were very cheap (about two shillings) at the end of the War and the lenses were of superb quality but I didn't know that until The Old Professor appeared on the scene.
The Old Professor was unable to resist anything to do with optics and he showed me how to turn the bombsight into a high quality microscope. This was right up my street because for years I had been wanting a good microscope to look at things like plant bits and blood cells. This desire came from my Arthur Mee's encyclopedias which had pages of circular pictures showing all sorts of objects as seen through a microscope.
The mention of blood cells and microscopes reminds me of an episode which took place at Westcott Place School. Some kind person had donated a wonderful-looking "glass and brass" microscope to the school which was kept locked up in a glass case in the corridor. I asked if I could look through it and the teacher asked me what did I want to see. When I said that I wanted to see what blood looked like under the microscope he said, "Oh no you don't, Williams! Trust you to want to see blood. You've had it!" So I never got a look in and the microscope was never used as far as I know.
The Old Professor also introduced me and some friends to Astronomy. He would invite us into his house periodically and set up a large "glass-and-brass" (his terminology) astronomical telescope out in the back yard. Us kids would then take it in turns to view the craters on the Moon or the rings around Saturn.
We always called at his front door and he would conduct us through the house to the telescope which he had already set up for us in his back yard. On the way, I noted the framed pictures hanging in the passage. One was of his degree in Mathematics and others were a variety of astronomical photograhs. My favourite was a photographic enlargement of the craters of the Moon showing where something had hit the moon and skidded across at some time in the past.
None of my friends were interested in microscopes, so when I arrived at his front door with some question or other about, for instance, pond life, we would go to his upstairs sitting-room. His wife was always there comfortably and quietly knitting away while we discussed lenses and microscopic life. The stunning thing about this room was the number of shiny brass microscopes under glass domes which practically took over the place. It was a joy and a privilege to be allowed to operate such optical marvels.
When I married and left Emlyn Square for Dean Street I would sometimes go back to see him with my wife and he was always glad to see us. Sadly, he became ill a couple of years later and began to lose his reason. He would sometimes continue to visit my Father but Dad said that he couldn't make sense of anything he said.
I still have some microscope books and slides which he generously gave me as a child. I also have a copy of an article he wrote for the magazine English Mechanics describing how to make an achromatic microscope from an ex-WD officer's periscope for five shillings and ninepence. I didn't actually make one because I never seemed to have the vital five shillings and ninepence in those days.
The Old Professor was a kindly gentleman of the Old School with a great enthusiasm for microscopes and telescopes. Consequently, we never played "knock-door-run-away" at his house nor did we put fireworks through his letter-box!
Books always have been, and continue to be, a life-long passion with me. I realised very early that books could inform me about things that people either couldn't or wouldn't tell me. From nursery rhymes I soon graduated to Enid Blyton (I still like Enid Blyton books) and then joined the Junior Library when I was old enough. This became a problem because the books I really wanted were in the grown-ups' library. When I turned up at the desk to take them away, I was told that I couldn't because I wasn't old enough to join. Such is life.
I also belonged to the GWR Library which was very convenient, situated as it was, just around the corner in the Mechanics Institute. I discovered Charles Dickens' works at the age of 14 or so because Dad was always reading and re-reading The Pickwick Papers. The book had become very battered and it reeked of tobacco smoke. However, I could make neither head nor tail of the words and I didn't know what most of them meant. I therefore decided to attempt to read The Pickwick Papers with a dictionary alongside, having made the resolution that, when I came to a word that I didn't understand, I would look it up before going any further. Imagine my dismay to find that I couldn't even get past the title page without using the dictionary, because the actual title is, The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club and I had no idea what "posthumous" meant! I persisted and that lengthy exercise increased my understanding of the English language dramatically.
I found Dickens to be very amusing and interesting if you read him slowly and paid particular attention to the punctuation. Reading Dickens in this way I found that the characters came to life and were utterly believable. It followed that it would be a good thing to have the whole collection of his works which I could read at my leisure. But where to get them? I could not afford a new set so I approached the GWR Chief Librarian and asked if it would be possible for him to get me a second-hand set through the library, for which I would pay, if the price was affordable.
He regarded me with great suspicion and insisted on having my name and address and a talk with my Father. This duly happened and the books eventually arrived, to my delight. When I asked Dad what the problem was, he told me that the Librarian thought I wanted the set cheap so that I could sell it on at a profit and spend the money on drink or something!
Learning to swim may not seem to be a thing which could be learned from a book but I did just that. Westcott Place was allocated time and tuition in the GWR Swimming Baths and when we were asked, "Who wants to learn to swim?" every hand in my class went up. Sadly, our teacher said that only two could be taken from each class, so that was the end of that. For me, this meant going off to the library to get a book on how to swim. After months of study and practice over the GWR Swimming Baths I still could not swim. Then one day, Westcott Place arranged a day-trip to the Isle of Wight and I started to put into practice in the salt water at Ryde the actions that didn't work in the Swimming Baths. And it worked! I could swim! This, of course, reinforced my view that books are very desirable things to have about.
Museums have also been a life-long passion with me, I suppose because they had real fossils and minerals in them in those days, not just pictures or drawings. I am not so keen on museums now because they seem to have packed most of the real stuff away and replaced it with colourful display boards with pre-conceived ideas presented as fact printed boldly on them, and full of flashing lights with wretched buttons to press, which don't work half the time.
I was a frequent visitor to the Swindon Museum in Bath Road and I have many happy memories of the place. It was a long and weary trek from Emlyn Square when I was little but well worth it every time. Later, when my younger brother was in Savernake Hospital, we (Mum, Dad and I) visited him most weekends by taking the train from Old Town Station to Savernake Station. From there, we walked up the chalk escarpment into the forest and through it to the hospital. On the way, of course, I had my eyes on the flints which are there in great abundance. One particular flint which I picked up contained what looked to me like a piece of very ornate Roman pottery (I was interested in Roman Villas too at that time) so I pocketed that specimen with interest.
At the next opportunity I took my flint into the Swindon Museum and told the Curator that I had found some Roman pottery encased in flint. Unknown to me at the time, this was quite a startling impossibility and he was duly startled. Then he rightly said, "Show me" and I produced my piece of flint. He took one look and said, "Them's not pottery, them's Urchints!" At least, that's what it sounded like to me but he was rather gruff with kids at the best of times and also had a pronounced, sinister limp, so it was best to say nothing if in doubt.
He must have seen that I was genuinely puzzled because he then said, "Come up 'ere," and led the way to the upper floor and to a glass case in which were several Sea-urchin shells. "Them's Urchints!" he said. Then, pointing at one in particular, he said, "There's yer pottery, it's an Urchint." I was stunned to realize that I had mistaken a small part of Nature for a man-made object and Sea-urchins have been one of my favourite interests ever since. This particular one was called, "Cidaris." If you look carefully at the plates of which it is made, you will have to admit that, in isolation, any single plate could easily be mistaken for a piece of ornate and delicate pottery.
As I grew up the Curator got to know me better and we talked about such things as the number of Ice Ages, of which he told me there were seven, which surprised me somewhat and I had to check that out later. That old fellow knew quite a lot but you wouldn't have thought it to look at him.
Shortly after I began my apprenticeship as a Journeyman Electrician the Day Release Scheme was introduced. This meant that for the whole of one day each week I was obliged to attend Swindon College in Victoria Hill. I also had to attend night school at the same place. This really peeved me because I thought I had done with schooling for ever. At the end of the first year we had exams and I achieved zero marks in all subjects! I wasn't at all surprised at this but everyone else seemed to be.
About this time I began courting the girl who was soon to become my wife. She had been to Headlands Grammar School, had lots of GCEs and stunned me by casually announcing that all the pupils there had access to microscopes which were actually used in the lessons! In addition, she was about to leave to train to become a school-teacher specialising in Maths, which was by far my worst subject. It began to slowly dawn on me that there might, after all, be something valuable in all this education, especially as microscopes were used. I therefore decided that I had better begin to buck my ideas up. Easy, you might think, with someone like that around? But no, she had to be away for two or three years for teacher training up in Lancashire and we could only meet infrequently.
So I did the unthinkable. I ordered the Swindon College Maths book used by my course from WH Smith, paid for it when it arrived (and that really hurt) and started in at page 1. I was determined to work my way through it as I had done with The Pickwick Papers. But life is never that simple or that easy.
First of all, I had little time available for study. I had to go to work each day so I only had the evenings in which to study and one evening each week was night school anyway. My daily study routine for many weeks was getting home from work, washing, changing, eating, and settling down in an armchair in the front room of 6 Emlyn Square to study Maths. This was far from ideal because the family radio was by my left ear and it was always on. It crackled a lot and I was often requested to give it a thump, which usually cured it for a while. My parents would often say, "Why don't you pack that up? I don't know how you can concentrate with all this racket going on." I took some sort of grim delight in persisting and, if nothing else, I learned how to concentrate regardless of my surroundings. You may wonder Why I did not go to a quieter part of the house. The reason is that the fire was in the front room and the only chair where people didn't walk all over you was the one in the corner by the radio.
In this way, starting with Addition, Subtraction, Multiplication and Long Division, I worked on through the mysteries of Fractions, Trigonometry, Algebra, Logarithms, Quadratic Equations and so on. In due course I got as far as the Calculus (with other books) but all that averaging out didn't seem right to me and I lost interest. I even bought a slide rule for the Maths part of our Electrotechnology lessons at Swindon College.
At our next end of year exams I passed easily with high marks. I did all my homework as soon as possible instead of leaving it for later. I also insisted in working out things in my own way from the basics because I did not like having to use any theory without knowing how it came to be. Consequently, the teacher would often say, as he walked around giving us back our marked homework, "Well, Williams, yours is right as usual but I don't know how. You can't have 100% because no-one gets 100%."
When it came to the final exams some years later, I was so cocky and bigheaded that I refused to revise as they approached. Consequently, I only got a Second Class Pass instead of the First Class Pass I had expected and it served me jolly well right!
Page updated 27 July 2008