1950s Schooldays
The Society's most far-flung member is Clive Seymour who now lives in Tulsa, Oklahoma. In the 1950s he went to school at St. Margaret's School in Queensbury Mews, these are some of his reminiscences from those days...
I believe we moved to Sillwood Road about 1953, and I started school in Mr. Grace's third form class at St. Margaret's School in Queensbury Mews. As was noted in a recent Society newsletter the school was demolished a few years after my family emigrated to the United States in 1957. The school had a sort of basement courtyard where we could gather during playtime, but our real running about was done on the Regency Square green. This was before the underground parking lot, and the green was not terraced, so we could play football, cricket and any other games that occurred to us.
My grandparents lived in one of the houses on the north side of the square, and I would often stop in for a cup of tea and a biscuit or two on the way to and from school. There were no dining facilities in the school building, so we were turned loose from noon until two in the afternoon. Many pupils went home for lunch before returning to run about on the Square green and then to class until 4:30 p.m.
At that time, we were using nibbed pens that we dipped into inkwells on the desk. When I moved up to the fourth form, I was occasionally assigned to the ink team that gathered wooden trays of the ceramic ink wells and took them to a little room on an upper floor. We topped up the ink wells from quart-sized pottery containers. Great fun. The wooden floors of that little room were forever stained from little boy ink mishaps.
Mr. Venning was the fourth form teacher, and Mr. Mason was the headmaster. We were given regular religious instruction on one side of the room while the several Jewish children in the class would sit on the other side of the room and read or draw or colour. Classmates I remember: Robin Knight, whose father owned a butchers shop at the top of Preston Street on the east side, Eddie Starr, Paul Abrahams, Gerald Isaacs. I have very fond memories of the school, but I have sometimes wondered whether we were considered pests by the then residents of Regency Square and the surrounding area. Those thoughts were triggered during our most recent trip to Brighton when Sharron and I were trapped on a number 2A bus returning from Rottingdean to Brighton with a pack of screaming school kids. Sweet little buggers.
Of course, we were also close to the seafront, and we would frequently venture on to the West Pier to see how the rod fishermen were doing or spend spare pennies in the amusement arcade. On this last trip, we saw several people skipping stones on the water. That was a favorite pursuit of ours, too. Conkers when they were in season. We would flick cigarette cards against the wall at the north end of the east side of Regency Square. Whoever got closest to the wall won the other player's card. These were those cards with pictures of soldiers or trains or cars or planes that were greatly prized at the time.
When a group of us walked home to the Sillwood Road area, we would make our way through one of the little shops on the west side of Preston Street. There was a little post office in the back of the shop where you could buy savings stamps. I don't know whether you still have those, but the idea was for children to buy sixpenny savings stamps and stick them in a little savings book which could be redeemed for cash or converted into a real post office savings account. A back stairway in the shop led down to Little Preston Street where it intersects Sillwood Street and so home.
That's all for now.