Couple met in the Air Force

Lessons in huts when the leaving age rose to 15

Meanwhile Alexander Grant, from Penenden Heath, also remembers the class of ‘47, but isn’t in the photo.

He said: “My family moved down to Maidstone from Scotland that year and I joined the class in January just before they sat the 11-plus. I remember Audrey, Jack and all the others, but I’m not in the picture. I think it must have been taken before I got there.”

He recalls going on with most of the rest of the crew to East Borough School. He said: “We went first to a Nissen hut at Vinters Park and after that to the HORSA huts.”

HORSA was the acronym for the Hutting Operation for the Raising of the School-Leaving Age. When the government decided to raise the school leaving age from 14 to 15, a lot more classrooms were needed. The solution was to build prefabricated huts made of concrete and timber, with corrugated iron, asbestos-filled roofs. Many were put up by prisoners of war.

Between 1945 and 1950, 7,000 new classrooms were created. Seen as a temporary measure, they lasted decades, with Maidstone Grammar School, for example, not doing away with its huts until 2004. On leaving school, Christopher Moore went first to work for his father.

He ran a long-established Maidstone firm, called Young and Coopers, which was a retail and printing business in Bank Street, later moving to the High Street.

The business was partly owned by Edward Sharp, the sweet manufacturers, and did a lot of printing work for the sweet factory.

The firm closed in 1997, but Mr Moore had already left a long time before. He said: “After about 11 years with the family firm, I got a job as a sales rep with a Yorkshirebased stationery firm called Sinclairs.” He spent the next 33 years travelling the south of England from Kent to Cornwall representing the firm. Mr Moore, who now lives in Ashford Road, Bearsted, also did his National Service in the RAF and while there he met his future wife Ruth Rhodes, who was serving with the WAAF. Ruth died in November. The couple had three sons Nicholas, Guy and Clark.