By late July the MMU will have moved out of that college on Wilmslow Road and that will be the end of just over 200 years of educational provision stretching back to a boarding school set up around 1812.
Once everything has been packed, the last students seen out of the door and the staff checked the routes to Hulme in preparation for September the place will pretty much become a quiet and empty place.
The admin block and the library will survive given their history but the modern buildings will go and be replaced by I know not what.
There is talk of a housing development and some new school build but at present I don’t think there are firm plans.
So in the absence of a blue print for the future I thought I will fall back on thoughts of what it was like to there in the college.
I was there for just one year between 1972 and 73 and my memories of the place are a little vague.
The admin block was somewhere I went for tutorials perhaps once a week and the library even less. But at least they made an impression unlike the tall teaching block and the prefabs which sadly I cannot bring to mind.
So this is an appeal for anyone who does have memories of the College to share them with me.
Mine I have to confess are not over lofty and run to a few lunch times in the Old Cock, one tutorial and an embarrassing session where I Mike and John had to prove me knew all about AV aids.
This was a compulsory part of passing and involved proving that we could wire a plug, thread a film projector and master a banda machine.
Needless to say for graduates who had burrowed deep in to the Metaphysical poets, had risen to the challenge of Gladstone’s Midlothian speech and charted the complexities of the Russian Revolution the AV test was daunting.
With one simple tug the supervising technician ruined my attempt at the plug rewiring, smiled as the film I had so carefully put on the projector whipped back at me and didn’t even check the banda.
At the time I couldn’t quite see the relevance but of course six months later those skills were very much in demand, for this was the age before the computer, before desk top publishing and power point and an age when the cutting edge of technology was the old reel to reel film.
The television and video tapes were yet to make their appearance in schools and if you wanted to break from chalk and talk the alternative to the film was the slide projector.
And if you wanted to be innovative and move away from the text book there was only the banda, which was a machine which reproduced teaching material made by writing or drawing on spirit masters.
These were fitted to a drum over which ran the spirit and you hand wound the drum producing as many copies as you could before the master faded before your eyes.
Not that I suspect that the last of the students who will leave Didsbury in the summer will have faced such old fashioned hardware, indeed even the title A V short for audio visual is as much a part of the past as the slide projector the reel of film and the banda.
And I bet none of them will appear in the new state of the art premise in Birley in Hulme.
Pictures; from the collection of Pierre Grace.
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| The Staff common Room in the admin block |
The admin block and the library will survive given their history but the modern buildings will go and be replaced by I know not what.
There is talk of a housing development and some new school build but at present I don’t think there are firm plans.
So in the absence of a blue print for the future I thought I will fall back on thoughts of what it was like to there in the college.
 |
| The admin block |
The admin block was somewhere I went for tutorials perhaps once a week and the library even less. But at least they made an impression unlike the tall teaching block and the prefabs which sadly I cannot bring to mind.
So this is an appeal for anyone who does have memories of the College to share them with me.
Mine I have to confess are not over lofty and run to a few lunch times in the Old Cock, one tutorial and an embarrassing session where I Mike and John had to prove me knew all about AV aids.
This was a compulsory part of passing and involved proving that we could wire a plug, thread a film projector and master a banda machine.
Needless to say for graduates who had burrowed deep in to the Metaphysical poets, had risen to the challenge of Gladstone’s Midlothian speech and charted the complexities of the Russian Revolution the AV test was daunting.
With one simple tug the supervising technician ruined my attempt at the plug rewiring, smiled as the film I had so carefully put on the projector whipped back at me and didn’t even check the banda.
At the time I couldn’t quite see the relevance but of course six months later those skills were very much in demand, for this was the age before the computer, before desk top publishing and power point and an age when the cutting edge of technology was the old reel to reel film.
And if you wanted to be innovative and move away from the text book there was only the banda, which was a machine which reproduced teaching material made by writing or drawing on spirit masters.
These were fitted to a drum over which ran the spirit and you hand wound the drum producing as many copies as you could before the master faded before your eyes.
Not that I suspect that the last of the students who will leave Didsbury in the summer will have faced such old fashioned hardware, indeed even the title A V short for audio visual is as much a part of the past as the slide projector the reel of film and the banda.
And I bet none of them will appear in the new state of the art premise in Birley in Hulme.
Pictures; from the collection of Pierre Grace.
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