Now I know that somewhere in a dusty set of filing cabinets or in some long forgotten book on the history of Manchester’s education service there will be a record of the different colleges which over the last century and a bit have offered training to those who wanted to become teachers.
But there is a short cut and here it is in the form of a poster in the common room of MMU’s Faculty of Education in Didsbury.
My friend Pierre kindly sent me the image of the poster after a conversation yesterday about the imminent move of the faculty from Didsbury to Hulme.
Mindful of the rich history of teacher training at the former Methodist College there are moves to discover what priceless documents may lie at the bottom of a filing cabinet or at the back of a cupboard.
In the past institutions have been all too quick to discard their history in the interests of rationalization, saving space and just starting a new.
In some cases just because there was no one interested in collecting the material and once thrown into a skip of burnt it is lost forever.
So I am intrigued at the plaque, which was “placed for safekeeping in the former Manchester College of Higher Education and City of Manchester College of Higher Education” recording “the students of the former Manchester Municipal Day Training College (1910-24) who gave their lives in the First World War.”
All the more fitting given that soon we shall be marking the centenary of the outbreak of the Great War.
And during this time when we focus on the sacrifice made I would like to dig deep into the records of the young men who went through the Municipal Day Training College and see what can be discovered of their lives.
But for me it is also that here is a little of my history covering my years at the old College of Commerce which merged to form Manchester Polytechnic, absorbed Didsbury Training College and became the M.M.U.
So I suppose you could say a little bit of me has been preserved on the wall of the common room along with that long line of former colleges all the way back to 1857.
I just hope it makes the move safely to Birley.
Picture; courtesy of Pierre Grace, 2014
My friend Pierre kindly sent me the image of the poster after a conversation yesterday about the imminent move of the faculty from Didsbury to Hulme.
Mindful of the rich history of teacher training at the former Methodist College there are moves to discover what priceless documents may lie at the bottom of a filing cabinet or at the back of a cupboard.
In the past institutions have been all too quick to discard their history in the interests of rationalization, saving space and just starting a new.
In some cases just because there was no one interested in collecting the material and once thrown into a skip of burnt it is lost forever.
All the more fitting given that soon we shall be marking the centenary of the outbreak of the Great War.
And during this time when we focus on the sacrifice made I would like to dig deep into the records of the young men who went through the Municipal Day Training College and see what can be discovered of their lives.
But for me it is also that here is a little of my history covering my years at the old College of Commerce which merged to form Manchester Polytechnic, absorbed Didsbury Training College and became the M.M.U.
I just hope it makes the move safely to Birley.
Picture; courtesy of Pierre Grace, 2014
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