Buckden - a Huntingdonshire Village

EDUCATION IN BUCKDEN 173 by 20' and was 10' high at the walls, and accommodated 50+ boys. In the same year, the teacher described it as ‘very close and inadequate’. It must have been a relief to write in 1880: March 12th. Left the school on the 9 th for the purpose of building being pulled down; the school is held in a large loft or granary in Mr Wm Mann’s yard… May 24th . Opened new school. But as noted above, the number of children on the registers rose to unprecedented heights in the 1880s, and in 1889 the accommodation was again found to be inadequate: School Room (mixed) 40' 2'' by 20' 3'' by 12' 2'' high = at 8 ft sq per scholar, 101.6 School Room (infants) 44' 2" by 20' 4" by 13' 7" high = at 8 ft sq per scholar, 112.2. To improve the situation a new classroom was built in 1894, 25' by 20' by 16' = (at 10 sq ft) 50 scholars. Ironically the school population began to drop not long thereafter. Within these big rooms the children sat at long desks, up to 12' in length. In 1889 the headmaster rearranged them facing him to make instruction easier. The infants sat in a ‘gallery’ of seats in tiers (the little ones at the front) until it was removed in 1930. Besides their close proximity in the classrooms, the children also faced the hazards of the ‘closets’ or ‘offices’ which were a frequent cause of complaint from the Inspectors. The boys used dry-earth type of lavatories, and the girls’ drained into a cess-pit. There were many complaints about the ‘flies and stench’ and the probable link with diphtheria outbreaks. Many experiments with different chemicals and routines were carried out: a pupil at the school in the early 1940s remembers there being two small outbuildings, each containing two buckets, one large, one small, with wooden seats; if they were not regularly emptied, they overflowed into the playground. Hygiene was not helped by there being no water-supply to the school until 1949, and the problem was not satisfactorily solved until 1956, when ‘water-borne’ toilets, as the correspondence quaintly refers to them, were installed. The premises were heated, often inadequately, by a coal-burning stove in the boys’ room and by coal fires in the girls’. Later all three classrooms were heated by coke stoves, whose tops would glow red-hot in winter. To deliver the coke, the coalman simply tipped it over the wall into the playground. 1 There were lamps: a later pupil recalls two hanging from the ceiling in the boys’ room but, he says, they were lit only once during his school career. Instead, the school hours were adjusted so that there was a shorter dinner hour in winter, the afternoon beginning at 1.45 p.m. and ending at 3.45 p.m. 1 For most of their existence, the schools fronted Mill Road and had no rear or side entrances; what is now School Lane was known as Bakers Lane, a road that ran between a farm and an engineering yard and ended in open fields. 26 th July 1899 “Group II” Brian and Verna Smith