SCHOOL DAYS ARE HAPPY DAYS.....

…..or are they? We went into the town centre today and walked a different way to the bank - passing Sanford Street Boys School, which was built in about 1873 and named after Charlotte Sanford, the wife of the Lord of the Manor, Ambrose Goddard, a fact that neither Mr. HCB nor I knew.

At one time, Sanford Street had 23 houses and a Congregational Chapel built in 1877, but this was demolished during the 1970s when the town centre was regenerated and sadly so many of Swindon's historic buildings were destroyed. The school was opened in 1881 and Mr. HCB was a pupil there from 1953 to 1957. It has been boarded up now for a couple of years - its future is uncertain and interestingly, there is one terraced house left right next to the school, which is thought to have been the caretaker's house.

As we wandered by, Mr. HCB was telling me what each classroom was used for and was reminiscing about the various teachers, who had their own way of dealing with minor misdemeanours. Mr. "Ike" Gradwell apparently used to throw wood at the boys and being a woodwork teacher, there was always plenty of that around. Mr. Hemingway used to walk to the back of the class and if anyone was misbehaving, he would throw the blackboard rubber and apparently, was a very good shot - well I guess that depended on whether you were on the receiving end or not! Things were very different in those days - can you imagine the furore if teachers did the same thing today? They would be suspended and taken to Court for infringing a pupil's human rights!

So here is Mr. HCB - standing outside his old school - and who knows the next time we are in the town centre, it may have been razed to the ground - so I thought I should get a shot of him, although he was a little reluctant to be my blip for today! I asked if he had been happy at school and his response was "Well, I think so - we just accepted what happened to us at school - if we went home and told our parents we had been chastised, we were likely to get a clip round the ear, so we just took our punishment and got on with it."

“The difference between school and life?
In school, you're taught a lesson and then given a test.
In life, you're given a test that teaches you a lesson.”
Tom Bodett