Dancers step out in Dales with lessons in school life
Community dance studio The Nash find echoes of past in modern life with stories of village education
THERE WAS a time in the Dales when lessons were for the wellheeled, as children skipped school for household chores or to watch railwaymen build a new future.
These echoes of memory, so easy to fade, have been captured for eternity in a project encompassing the Story of Schools in the Dales.
Now, as a near-forgotten age is brought to life by those with lived experience, a vivid picture begins to emerge of a lost era for one of Britain’s remotest communities.
Yet even in a century of societal change there are trends that turn full circle, said Emily Rowe Rawlence, of community dance studio The Nash in Hawes, which instigated the project.
All too familiar tales have emerged of gardening lessons for lunch, she said, school closures to fumigate, and a now reversing exodus of young people in search of a better life.
“These stories bring the last century to life in a new way,” she said. “It shows the effort that went into these schools, and in a way that we wouldn’t be able to appreciate.”
The Story of Schools, from The Nash with Dales Countryside Museum, delves into people’s memories of education in Upper Wensleydale, Arkengarthdale and Swaledale.
An oral history has been collected in interviews with people who attended from the 1930s to the 1960s, uncovering riveting tales of war years, discipline and truancy.
For Ms Rowe Rawlence, the catalyst had been in her own family home, a former Victorian National School founded in 1845 but which closed when Hawes Primary opened.
Dilapidated and run down, it has since been renovated to become a community dance studio known as The Nash, but throughout the Dales, she said, there are these ‘invisible’ buildings.
“We would look around these little villages, and see the ghosts of all these old schools, and the stories they have to tell,” said Ms Rowe Rawlence.
“It’s amazing to think how much our thinking has changed about education in a century.”
With support from the National Lottery Heritage Fund and Sustainable Development Fund, work on the Story of Schools has been underway since last year.
While planned study sessions with local schools and immersive Victorian classroom experiences were postponed due to lockdown, interviews have been possible at times.
Among the recollections that emerged are tales of summer nights playing cricket or rounders, the peal of a school bell, and of students being sent for cigarettes by a schoolmaster. Then there are stories of school closures, as outbreaks of illness and epidemics such as whooping cough or scarlet fever swept through the classrooms.
One log from Reeth Friends’ School in 1892 reports that the school was closed for two weeks for measles, which allowed for the rooms to be disinfected with sulphur.
Such stories, said Ms Rowe Rawlence, signal a familiar echo which resonates today.
Not only in school closures or a recent return to favour for gardening lessons, but in a well-documented cycle of young people leaving the Dales, now beginning to return.
“This isn’t about how life was better in the past,” she said. “That tide is turning. We can see these echoes of a time past beginning to come full circle.”
We can see echoes of a time past coming full circle.
Emily Rowe Rawlence, of community dance studio The Nash.