Memories of Judith Hinton [1961 - 1965]
My parents chose Queen’s College over the local village school in Belbroughton because of number of pupils in each form. At Queens College, the classes were much smaller, but there were slightly different age groups in one classroom and pupils of mixed ability.
I have a black-and-white photograph of Queen’s College. I can see myself and the other boys and girls from the school on the lawn in front of the house. I see myself from the outside, from the eye of the photographer, a third-party expression of a moment captured nearly fifty years ago, but I can’t recall how we were all organised in to being positioned or posing with all those “big boys” behind me with James Dean hairstyles and winkle-pickered feet.
Prescott House must have been a beautiful building in its heyday, a sort of Mansfield House or somewhere else out of Jane Austen. To us it was just our school, a purely functional edifice where we had to go every day to learn our lessons, but there was some air of mystery behind the closed doors beyond the magnificent marble staircase; we were never privy to this inner sanctuary. These were the Principal’s own private apartments. We pupils never used this staircase; we used the back stairs, which, in the original house, must have been where the servants went up and down.
There were long rectangular lawns on three different levels with a pond on the bottom one. This was full of lilies, plants and newts. It wasn’t particularly large, but it was big enough to lend interest to this part of the grounds. Beyond the pond was a hedge and beyond that, a wood or the Dell, which was out of bounds to all pupils, possibly because of the danger of falling branches. If you ever went through you had to brush off the telltale dry leaves from your socks before going back to class. It ran along to the boundary with the secondary modern school further down the road.
Down onto the second-level lawn there was a bank at the side which we used to roll down. It was quite steep and very scary; I think this is where my glasses got broken. Up beyond this bank was the Temple Folly, an imitation of a Greek temple, a non-functional building erected to suit a fanciful taste. I can’t remember much about it except that we used it as a stage when we performed the Pageant – a re-enactment of scenes from Tudor times. One of the older girls rode in on her own grey horse as Elizabeth the First. And I was a little Elizabethan waif. I had to take my glasses off for this.
Children are cruel to other kids the world over and especially to those who wear glasses, who are ugly or who are fat. I was unfortunate enough to wear glasses: pink-rimmed National Health glasses and I was made fun of. They broke once and were taped together with Elastoplast, more or less the same colour as the glasses.
There was no such thing as central heating, but the classrooms were warmed with stoves and coke-fires. I don’t remember shivering in class, but we were more resilient on those days. There was a stationery cupboard at the top of the stairs where we could purchase pencils, rubbers and new notebooks from Miss Oakley, the school secretary.
Mr Chance, the caretaker, wore a brown felt hat and had a limp; I’m not so sure that he didn’t have a wooden leg. Almost a sixties’ Freddy Kruger, but not half as sinister, in fact he was very kind. At heart, we felt sorry for one another. He for me, because I wore glasses and I for him because he was so shabby and seemingly backward. When it was the season, he gave us raw rhubarb from the walled garden, a kind of Secret Garden which was shut away and hidden to us all. We dipped the rhubarb in sugar contained in a screw of blue paper.
The whole school inspired a sedate, serene air, exuding discipline and decorum. The boys at Queen’s College lived in fear of the cane. Everything seemed old-fashioned. Even the way we were taught to write. We had classes just in penmanship with pen nibs and ink. Ink-stained fingers and blotting paper were very much part of school life. Such a shame that they should have laid so much importance on the art of calligraphy and that I should have taken the upstroke-downstroke thing so seriously, because as soon as I got to my next school, Wychbury Hill, I was told that that sort of handwriting was too refined, with so many loops and flourishes and was no longer in fashion, so I had to re-train my script once again. I was now taught a much quicker, easier and more modern form of writing which is the basis of my present hand.
For four years I went to Queen’s College every day on two buses each way. If you do a calculation this would mount up to months of my life spent on public transport to and from Stourbridge. I had to wear a uniform for the first time in my life: a royal blue blazer, grey skirt and even a stiff straw boater for summer. I kept the boater until April 2011, when I had to turn my mother’s house out after she died. My son used it to dress up in one summer when we were over visiting. Goodness knows what happened to the blazer. There are a lot of grey areas. I can’t remember a dining room, but I can remember having lunch in our classroom when we were with Miss Taylor. I can remember where the kitchen was and the ubiquitous smell of boiled cabbage. I can vaguely remember learning country dancing in a big room on the other side of the courtyard. Our school life at Queens College was truncated when Dr Johnson Ball decided to close it at the end of the summer term in 1965.
Webmaster Comments : Mr Reginald Chance (Caretaker) did indeed have a wooden leg which he lost during the 1st World War The majority of classrooms were heated by open fires [when required]. There was central heating within the principal rooms of the house and one or two of the Seniors' classrooms - plus a huge old fashioned radiator outside of the 'Green Doors' leading into the Assembly Hall from the 'servants corridor' - we used to place fruit gums on it to soften them before eating them - keeping a sharp ear out for any approaching Staff.
I have a black-and-white photograph of Queen’s College. I can see myself and the other boys and girls from the school on the lawn in front of the house. I see myself from the outside, from the eye of the photographer, a third-party expression of a moment captured nearly fifty years ago, but I can’t recall how we were all organised in to being positioned or posing with all those “big boys” behind me with James Dean hairstyles and winkle-pickered feet.
Prescott House must have been a beautiful building in its heyday, a sort of Mansfield House or somewhere else out of Jane Austen. To us it was just our school, a purely functional edifice where we had to go every day to learn our lessons, but there was some air of mystery behind the closed doors beyond the magnificent marble staircase; we were never privy to this inner sanctuary. These were the Principal’s own private apartments. We pupils never used this staircase; we used the back stairs, which, in the original house, must have been where the servants went up and down.
There were long rectangular lawns on three different levels with a pond on the bottom one. This was full of lilies, plants and newts. It wasn’t particularly large, but it was big enough to lend interest to this part of the grounds. Beyond the pond was a hedge and beyond that, a wood or the Dell, which was out of bounds to all pupils, possibly because of the danger of falling branches. If you ever went through you had to brush off the telltale dry leaves from your socks before going back to class. It ran along to the boundary with the secondary modern school further down the road.
Down onto the second-level lawn there was a bank at the side which we used to roll down. It was quite steep and very scary; I think this is where my glasses got broken. Up beyond this bank was the Temple Folly, an imitation of a Greek temple, a non-functional building erected to suit a fanciful taste. I can’t remember much about it except that we used it as a stage when we performed the Pageant – a re-enactment of scenes from Tudor times. One of the older girls rode in on her own grey horse as Elizabeth the First. And I was a little Elizabethan waif. I had to take my glasses off for this.
Children are cruel to other kids the world over and especially to those who wear glasses, who are ugly or who are fat. I was unfortunate enough to wear glasses: pink-rimmed National Health glasses and I was made fun of. They broke once and were taped together with Elastoplast, more or less the same colour as the glasses.
There was no such thing as central heating, but the classrooms were warmed with stoves and coke-fires. I don’t remember shivering in class, but we were more resilient on those days. There was a stationery cupboard at the top of the stairs where we could purchase pencils, rubbers and new notebooks from Miss Oakley, the school secretary.
Mr Chance, the caretaker, wore a brown felt hat and had a limp; I’m not so sure that he didn’t have a wooden leg. Almost a sixties’ Freddy Kruger, but not half as sinister, in fact he was very kind. At heart, we felt sorry for one another. He for me, because I wore glasses and I for him because he was so shabby and seemingly backward. When it was the season, he gave us raw rhubarb from the walled garden, a kind of Secret Garden which was shut away and hidden to us all. We dipped the rhubarb in sugar contained in a screw of blue paper.
The whole school inspired a sedate, serene air, exuding discipline and decorum. The boys at Queen’s College lived in fear of the cane. Everything seemed old-fashioned. Even the way we were taught to write. We had classes just in penmanship with pen nibs and ink. Ink-stained fingers and blotting paper were very much part of school life. Such a shame that they should have laid so much importance on the art of calligraphy and that I should have taken the upstroke-downstroke thing so seriously, because as soon as I got to my next school, Wychbury Hill, I was told that that sort of handwriting was too refined, with so many loops and flourishes and was no longer in fashion, so I had to re-train my script once again. I was now taught a much quicker, easier and more modern form of writing which is the basis of my present hand.
For four years I went to Queen’s College every day on two buses each way. If you do a calculation this would mount up to months of my life spent on public transport to and from Stourbridge. I had to wear a uniform for the first time in my life: a royal blue blazer, grey skirt and even a stiff straw boater for summer. I kept the boater until April 2011, when I had to turn my mother’s house out after she died. My son used it to dress up in one summer when we were over visiting. Goodness knows what happened to the blazer. There are a lot of grey areas. I can’t remember a dining room, but I can remember having lunch in our classroom when we were with Miss Taylor. I can remember where the kitchen was and the ubiquitous smell of boiled cabbage. I can vaguely remember learning country dancing in a big room on the other side of the courtyard. Our school life at Queens College was truncated when Dr Johnson Ball decided to close it at the end of the summer term in 1965.
Webmaster Comments : Mr Reginald Chance (Caretaker) did indeed have a wooden leg which he lost during the 1st World War The majority of classrooms were heated by open fires [when required]. There was central heating within the principal rooms of the house and one or two of the Seniors' classrooms - plus a huge old fashioned radiator outside of the 'Green Doors' leading into the Assembly Hall from the 'servants corridor' - we used to place fruit gums on it to soften them before eating them - keeping a sharp ear out for any approaching Staff.