It was early September 1961 and along with twenty or so others from Edmund Waller Junior School I was in the Annexe of Samuel Pepys Secondary Modern on Old James Street in Nunhead.
Now I can’t be sure but I don’t think I was shot through with anxiety as we stood in the playground on that September morning.
After all I walked up from Lausanne Road with my friends, Jimmy O’Donnel and John Cox and were surrounded by lads who just six weeks earlier I had been with at Edmund Waller.
And that was pretty much it. True we now had a uniform and the name of the school was different but otherwise that great shift to a secondary school didn’t amount to much.
We had exchanged one school for another, most of the people I had known had joined me along with about another 130 or so boys from neighbouring schools and the building looked just the same.
The only significant difference was that the girls had gone off to other single sex establishments and we were missing that small handful of hopefuls who had qualified for a grammar school.
We stood in the playground, our names were read out and we were allotted a class, a teacher and timetable.
None of which is at all remarkable and is the lot of thousands of young people every year. Except we were the secondary modern boys marked out for an education which would be less well funded and would concentrate on technical not academic subjects.
As it was in the fullness of time we were given the chance to do “O” levels and made to feel that we were not second class.
Not that any of these things even entered my head all those years ago.
Back then it as just what you did.
And that first year has ranked low on my list of significant personal events.
If I am honest there were even times when I wondered just how much of it I remembered or how relevant it was to me later in my life.
But of course it was and was so in many different ways.
I suppose the first is that it points yet again to the baby boomer generation which put great pressure on the system as we passed through it.
Samuel Pepys had expanded to cope with the increase in pupil numbers, building a new building beside the old LCC school and farming out the year 7s to Nunhead which was some distance away from Telegraph Hill and the rest of the school.
Equally it is how with the passage of time you begin to question bits of that younger life, and so it was with the school annexe. Did we really walk a good 20 minutes in the opposite direction to the main school to Nunhead? Was the building still standing and what of the surrounding area?
Well, the building is still there although now it is Rye Oak Primary School but some of the places I knew have gone, like the little sweet shop at the opposite side of Old James Street, run by a little old lady called Kay.
Here from memory was a place which hadn’t changed in three decades.
With an eye to her potential profits she sold all sorts of cheap sweets including paper cones of lemon ice for a penny.
Before and after school for a brief twenty minutes the place would be full after which I guess it settled down with just the occasional customer.
It was the sort of place we all felt quite at home in and was replicated by scores of similar tiny shops closer to home.
And in the same way the Annexe was very little different from my Junior school which is not surprising. It was built in 1887 and the Annexe three years earlier.
These were the Board Schools, built of brick with high windows and were warm in winter and cool in summer unlike their 1950s successors which with those walls of glass were the very reverse.
I took them for granted but looking back they were a high point in school architecture.
These were solid and sound, meant not only to last but announced to everyone that inside the serious and exciting business of education was offered up.
How different from their modern counterparts, which with a change of name and purpose could be a set of offices, or even a supermarket.
All perhaps a long way from that playground in the September of 1961, but perhaps not so for.
I started off thinking about a school I attended and remarkably I find it still there as I left it and still doing the business.
Pictures; from the collection of Andrew Simpson, Rye Oak Primary School Tim Wardle, Victorian Schools in London, 1870-1914, http://www.victorianschoolslondon.org.uk/Schools.htmx?schoolid=402 & Edmund Waller, courtesy of Colin Fitzpatrick
After all I walked up from Lausanne Road with my friends, Jimmy O’Donnel and John Cox and were surrounded by lads who just six weeks earlier I had been with at Edmund Waller.
And that was pretty much it. True we now had a uniform and the name of the school was different but otherwise that great shift to a secondary school didn’t amount to much.
We had exchanged one school for another, most of the people I had known had joined me along with about another 130 or so boys from neighbouring schools and the building looked just the same.
The only significant difference was that the girls had gone off to other single sex establishments and we were missing that small handful of hopefuls who had qualified for a grammar school.
We stood in the playground, our names were read out and we were allotted a class, a teacher and timetable.
None of which is at all remarkable and is the lot of thousands of young people every year. Except we were the secondary modern boys marked out for an education which would be less well funded and would concentrate on technical not academic subjects.
As it was in the fullness of time we were given the chance to do “O” levels and made to feel that we were not second class.
Back then it as just what you did.
And that first year has ranked low on my list of significant personal events.
If I am honest there were even times when I wondered just how much of it I remembered or how relevant it was to me later in my life.
But of course it was and was so in many different ways.
I suppose the first is that it points yet again to the baby boomer generation which put great pressure on the system as we passed through it.
Samuel Pepys had expanded to cope with the increase in pupil numbers, building a new building beside the old LCC school and farming out the year 7s to Nunhead which was some distance away from Telegraph Hill and the rest of the school.
Equally it is how with the passage of time you begin to question bits of that younger life, and so it was with the school annexe. Did we really walk a good 20 minutes in the opposite direction to the main school to Nunhead? Was the building still standing and what of the surrounding area?
 |
| Rye Oak School, 2006, © Tim Wardle |
Here from memory was a place which hadn’t changed in three decades.
With an eye to her potential profits she sold all sorts of cheap sweets including paper cones of lemon ice for a penny.
Before and after school for a brief twenty minutes the place would be full after which I guess it settled down with just the occasional customer.
It was the sort of place we all felt quite at home in and was replicated by scores of similar tiny shops closer to home.
And in the same way the Annexe was very little different from my Junior school which is not surprising. It was built in 1887 and the Annexe three years earlier.
 |
| Edmund Waller School, 2009, © Colin Fitzpatrick |
I took them for granted but looking back they were a high point in school architecture.
These were solid and sound, meant not only to last but announced to everyone that inside the serious and exciting business of education was offered up.
How different from their modern counterparts, which with a change of name and purpose could be a set of offices, or even a supermarket.
All perhaps a long way from that playground in the September of 1961, but perhaps not so for.
I started off thinking about a school I attended and remarkably I find it still there as I left it and still doing the business.
Pictures; from the collection of Andrew Simpson, Rye Oak Primary School Tim Wardle, Victorian Schools in London, 1870-1914, http://www.victorianschoolslondon.org.uk/Schools.htmx?schoolid=402 & Edmund Waller, courtesy of Colin Fitzpatrick
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