Tales of school days in wilds of the valley
THE little primary school at Crowden was long closed when I moved into Bleak House in 1980, but I often wondered about the pupils there and their day to day lives and I kind of hoped that all the children just loved their little microvalley community – in the wilds and self contained – what a great place to grow up.
It makes me smile to hear my own three children, twins Oisin and Culain, now 31 and my daughter Niamh, 19, talk to their friends about growing up in Crowden: they loved it, although some of the stories make me shudder retrospectively when I hear what they got up to in our 10 square mile back garden. Riding cows for example...don’t ask!
As for the kids attending Crowden School at the turn of the 20th Century, one of them, Railwayman John Davies, who lived in the red-brick cottages on the opposite side of the Woodhead Dam to Bleak House when we were there, often told me tales of his days at the school.
The games they played and the adventures they got up to: to be fair, it seems John’s friends did much the same as my own children – Crowden has always been the ultimate adventure playground.
Down the years I have forgotten some of John’s stories, so imagine my delight when my good friend Robert Farmer shared some of the correspondence he exchanged with John.
My eyes lit up when I saw the count of pupils and although John was hard pushed to remember names, he knew for certain the occupation of their fathers and it produced a first-rate snapshot of life in the Valley just before the first World War.
Nine gamekeepers children, 10 railwaymen, seven water workers, six quarrymen, 12 farmers and, from the pubs, three from the Quiet Shepherd, two from the Commercial, one from the George and Dragon, three from The Angel and a further three from the Crown at Woodhead. You just cannot buy information like that and I’m so grateful to Robert for sharing.
The school was built by public subscription in 1856 and was a Church School.
All the scholars were expected to attend classes during the week and on Sunday as well.
John says: “I started school there in 1913 and at that time there were around 40 pupils.
“The headteacher was called Mrs THT Wood and she stayed at the school until it closed at Easter, March 1921, when she went to Wincle near Macclesfield. While she was at Crowden she lived with her daughter in a house across the road from the Commercial Inn, , a hundred yards from the school.
“We also had a teacher called Miss Clarke who stayed in the vicarage with Mrs Moorhouse, who lived there at the time as we did not have a Vicar in residence until 1916.
“Miss Wain, the infant teacher, arrived from Hollingworth each day by horse and trap.
“The scholars walked to school every day, some three miles from Woodhead, others two miles from Torside and my sister and myself lived at High Stones on the hill opposite Torside and we walked one and half miles every day with three girls from the farm nearby.
“In the school there was a large stove in the middle of the room with iron railings on which you could hang your coats if they got wet.
“We took sandwiches as there were no school meals in those days.
“After school finished on Friday, we all helped getting the school ready for the whist drives and concerts which were held most Saturdays, especially in winter.”
John was very succinct in his letters to Robert and he managed to squeeze so much information in a couple of typed pages.
Oh for a glimpse of those letters, stuck in the bottom of drawer somewhere.
In his letters to Robert, John gives many more insights to valley life and indeed the country as a whole in those dark days of the so called Great War.
“In 1917 and 1918 the food situation got very bad.
“The war was not going very well for us at the time and we had what we called ‘profiteers. We also had a flu epidemic and a few people died and were buried at St James.
“The school was closed a time or two while I was going there for scarlet fever and the measles.
“People started moving away when the farms shut down. At the time four of the inns and the quarries were doing very badly and by 1920 there was only a dozen children attending the school.”