OPENING DAY – The School in 1956

The school was officially opened by Sir John Wolfenden nearly three years after it enlisted its first pupils. The Evening Post reported on the occasion: Sir John’s comments about the future of education and Grammar Schools seem contemporary today: with a tweak or two to muddy the language they could have been part of the present Government’s manifesto. What have we been up to in the meantime?
A programme was produced to accompany the opening ceremony, and it says a lot about the early School. If you click on the cover, the (simulated) programme will open in a separate window, and you can turn its pages. Switch between the windows while you read this commentary. The links below take you to different parts of this page itself.
The Building The School and its Community The Governors and Staff of the School The Programme Life and Work at the School A Plan of the Grounds Back to top
Page 1: The Building
The building was designed by E.W.Roberts, who was the County Architect when the school was planned, though he had retired by the time of this official opening. Initially it had, along with laboratories, a library and craft rooms, ten classrooms – the rightmost on the ground floor served as a Music room, in that it had a piano. The practice rooms pupils enjoyed for some of the Grammar School’s history came much later. The programme describes Mr. Roberts’ design in some detail. Gedling was a mining community, and amongst other things, he had to cope with the risk of mining subsidence. It worked: a few years later the county suffered a sufficiently significant earthquake to make the stage proscenium shiver as if it were in a Warner Brothers cartoon, but there was little damage to the school.
				Page 1 shows the layout. There was accommodation for 540 pupils, which was later much increased. But there’d been changes even before the official opening – the dining room, for instance, had had to be enlarged. Le Willows, the county’s new reserve of places for pupils with aptitude, drew them from a much wider area than usual and the planners hadn’t allowed for the high proportion who couldn’t go home for lunch.
The Assembly hall and stage extended across both floors, and a balcony on the first floor had seating for 60 – mostly prefects and other privileged people. The science labs each had preparation rooms a nd smaller store rooms. These latter were made to serve a variety of other functions. The Biology store, for instance, was converted into a photographic darkroom by the Maths. teacher, who with the Woodwork master constructed an auto-focus enlarger based on the pantograph principle.
The Building The School and its Community The Governors and Staff of the School The Programme Life and Work at the School A Plan of the Grounds Back to top
				Page 2: The School and its Community
				This page set out the School’s mission, which differed from a modern Mission Statement in that it was specific. It could be understood, and compared with the eventual outcome. It echoed the sentiments of Lord Wolfenden’s address very well. Better, it delivered very convincingly over the succeeding years. The School sought to maintain ‘the values traditionally associated with the grammar school, while meeting the challenge of change presented by this second half of the 20th. Century’. That certainly seems like a Mission Statement, but it meant something real. The School was new. No ancient ivy or battered desks more heavily tattooed with inmates initials than Bradbury’s Illustrated Man, no pantheon of benefactors to be honoured, and no architectural glories to attract the sightseers. Yet, without these props, it aimed to deliver a genuine academic education, and it did. Still, we’re not quite sure what happened to the ‘special rooms for a large sixth form’.
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Page 3: The Governors and Staff of the School
Pages 3 and 4 are the centre-spread of the programme, open on the knee of each of the lucky people invited to attend the opening ceremony in the assembly hall itself. Everyone else, and most of the pupils, had to listen to a relay outside the hall.
				Here on page 3 are listed some of the Great and Good of Le Willows in 1956. Not all, though. Who, for instance, was the Caretaker? If you’ve Googled your way to this site because you’re on that list, perhaps you might tell us. The list of degrees among the staff is very interesting. Only one (Mr. Shearer, the Sports master) had an Oxbridge degree, but several had Masters degrees they’d had to work for (a Masters at Oxbridge was a Bachelor’s degree with an extra payment). The Headmaster, Mr. Marshall, had an M.A. and an M.Sc., and an L.R.A.M. to boot. The Senior Master, Mr. Todd, had both L.R.A.M. and A.R.C.O. to add to his degree: the last points up a serious omission from the School’s resources: no organ in the Assembly hall. The grand piano had its work cut out trying to make up for that.
Two members of the original staff had already left before the official opening, and four more, identified by asterisks, were soon to leave. Just as the two original Le WIllows staff, and their pupils, spent their first year guesting at two other Nottingham schools while Le WIllows was being built, these four were waiting to begin another new school: the Beeston Secondary Technical. And Le Willows was now taking classesful of ‘late developers’: pupils who had ‘failed’ the 11+ but succeeded in a second test at 13+. Nottinghamshire was doing its best to deliver the Education Act.
		The picture below shows most of the original staff at the school. It was taken (we think) during 1954, in front of the extended dining room. ‘Printed by Kodak’, the colours have survived astonishingly well, but the shot was a little out of focus.
	The picture shows,  standing, from top left: D. Mortimer (Latin); Anne Wood (Sports); Bob Shearer (Sports); Cyril Swabey (Maths); Fred Lee (Geography: an Honorary Life Member of CLeWS); Fred Pennel (Biology); Isaac Stamper (English: an Honorary Life Member of CLeWS and the mentor responsible for whatever literary skill your Webmaster shows in these pages); Haydn Ryley (Woodwork); Harry Makins (History: the form teacher for the first boys at Henry Mellish and, until his recent death an Honorary Life Member of CLeWS); Peter Fish (Physics); Marguerite Squire (Languages: she was the form teacher for the first girls at West Bridgeford); Ned Bates (Languages); Vincent Todd (Music and Senior Master). Seated from the left are: Mrs. J. Reaville (who left before the Opening); Miss G. Gatley (Domestic Science); Eileen Storey (Deputy Secretary); Mrs. Symmonds (Secretary); Anne Robinson (Sports); and Muriel Kent (Art: she has a sketch pad in her lap, and is an Honorary Life Member of CLeWS. Your Webmaster’s artistic skills, such as they are, are mainly due to her.) Missing from the picture are Stephen Marshall, the Headmaster, and Agnes Denne (Chemistry and Senior Mistress). We believe she took the photograph.
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Page 4: The Programme
This page seems to bear the stamp of Vincent Todd, the Senior Master, who, along with his mantle of musical skills and qualifications, wore the armour of Tradition for the School. It was rumoured that he was the model for the cartoonist Giles’s ‘Chalky’, or vice versa. ‘Guests’ – that is, those in the Hall itself – ‘are requested to remain seated ….’ and to conform to a number of other instructions including ‘keeping to the right in corridors and on stairs’. The people outside the hall, though, are cordially ‘invited’ to go to the dining room for refreshment before touring the rest of the school, and they were free to crash about the corridors in any way they fancied. It’s as if anyone in the Hall was, ipso facto, a pupil and therefore open to be ordered about.
				Pages 5 and 6: Aspects of Life and Work at the School
				Here are set out descriptions of various displays proudly arranged around the building. The School had clearly already made astonishing progress, considering it was only now being officially opened. In the General Science Laboratory the Mathematics master, Mr. Swabey, had arranged an exhibition showing how School Mathematics can be related to everyday life – in the news as this article is being written, there are reported proposals to allow State pupils to opt out of Mathematics once they have learned to master arithmetic, since ‘algebra and geometry’ will have little relevance to modern daily life. But this display included the photographic enlarger referred to above, with the underlying geometry set out for all to understand. And to prove that it worked, another part of the lab. displayed photographs of school life, including school holidays already undertaken and the development of the school buildings and the site.
The School seemed especially proud of its tape recorder. That seems surprising today, when almost every portable radio has a recording device and CDs are given away with corn flakes. But before the war there had been no tape recorders in Britain – the principle of ‘bias’, which tamed the magnetic behaviour of iron oxide to allow distortion-free recording, was developed in Germany and captured by the Allies as one of the spoils of war. In the early sixties, owning a tape recorder had more cachet even than owning a television set.
				Ours – from memory, by Ferranti – was a splendid machine: ruggedised, barely portable and finished in military green. The tape movement was controlled by a mysterious joystick arrangement and sound levels were monitored by a circular ‘magic eye’: two lips of neon light beat against each other in silent sonic ecstasy. Masters & Johnson would have been proud.
It came with an equally splendid magnetic ribbon microphone, of a similar quality to the then standard studio mike used by the BBC. But a ribbon mike is not for amateurs: it is strongly directional both to the front and the rear, so it picks up many unwanted reflections when used in normal rooms. BBC Studio Managers had access to special devices to adjust the response – empty cigarette packets – which were not generally available in School.
				So the results were disappointing except to the Physics master Peter Fish, who used the machine to illustrate the principles of magnetic hysteresis and acoustics in his Physics Lab display. It certainly wasn’t much used in language lessons, though it nearly came into its own when used to record a ‘Goon Show’ scripted by pupils. Not quite – razor blades for tape editing were also missing from the School’s kit.
The school’s two most successful recordists were not tekkies. They were the ones with the best ears: the Music master, Mr. Todd, achieved some remarkable balances of the Nottinghamshire County Youth Orchestra in its earliest years, and the first peripatetic violin teacher, Miss Ward, could record and reproduce the efforts of her pupils with clinical, and painful, precision. She could also carry the thing around.
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			Back Cover: a Plan of the Grounds
			This is the school plan in 1956. If you came by public transport you could choose to arrive by train from Nottingham Victoria station (now the Victoria Centre shopping complex) to Gedling & Carlton, the station just past the bridge at the top of the map. This was part of the Daybrook Loop, on which one could, if one were ‘into’ trains, ride from Victoria and back to Victoria for the price of a platform ticket. Cheap Day return tickets to Gedling and Carlton were cheaper than singles, but British Rail’s contract price to the County for school travel was dearer than the bus. The Loop was closed for safety reasons (a few months after being entirely redecorated) and a group of music pupils from the School rode the Loop with their instruments to mark its passing.
School buses delivered pupils to the junction of Shering Hill and Wood Lane (top left corner of the map). Entry to the School grounds was either via Wood Lane’s leafy hill or from Burton Road at the bottom of the map, which led to Burton Joyce and the river.
			The public, staff and prefects (there were no sixth-formers then) entered the school itself by the glassy front doors just beyond the little island in the drive, but the hoi polloi had to enter on the left, between the changing rooms and the science labs. Despite the lack of ivy Le Willows was a very pleasant place to work, though there never were enough bike racks or tennis courts. But look – no pokey little offices built in corridors, no portakabins, and, trust us, absolutely no graffiti on the walls!
The Building The School and its Community The Governors and Staff of the School The Programme Life and Work at the School A Plan of the Grounds Back to top www.carltonlewillowsgs.org.uk