School/Poverty

School mistress and pupils at school in Blaby c1883. Courtesy of the Records Office for Leicestershire, Leicester & Rutland.

Mrs Everitt: From this house you can see the church, and the school was a church school. It had been opened in 1875, or round about then, and I started to school in 1919, and I’m sure the books that I first had to look at for infants were the same books that they’d started the school with. Also of course, it was a little stone building that got very cold in the winter, so we had a fire, a little fire. If the first class before you went out to play would be able to sit at the front of the class, near the fire, but when you’d been out at play you had to sit at the back, and those poor souls who’d sat at the back came and sat at the front to get warm. It was.. very hardy, you know. And, also, quite a lot of the children, their fathers had been in the First World War, they’d returned, and quite a few of them were damaged, so to speak. There were people with fathers who’d got one leg, or blind, that kind of thing. It’s forgotten now, but I can remember really how poor the children were on account of the parents not being able to make a living, the fathers couldn’t get jobs, you know. Sometimes a family, of children in this village, perhaps they couldn’t all attend school because there weren’t enough pairs of shoes to go round and they’d say Mabel’ll be coming in tomorrow, she’ll get the shoes. The headmaster and teachers thought nothing of it, I think they despised the poor children, but nevertheless they accepted that it could well be.

©EMOHA