Adult School

May Day in Kibworth, 1908. The car was said to have been the only one in Kibworth at the time. Photo courtesy of the Records Office for Leicestershire, Leicester & Rutland.

Mr Monk: Well, I left school when I was 12, in the village school, and of course I wasn’t old enough to be apprenticed, I worked on a farm with an uncle until I was 15. But I knew from when I could think and talk that I’d got to be a carpenter because my dad wanted to be and he couldn’t. So I knew I’d got to be a carpenter, and my uncle wanted me to stay on the farm. So I weren’t apprenticed. Well, I was fortunate because the foreman – I was born in a little village called Mowsley and I had to ride to Kibworth to work – and he was both a socialist, a trade unionist and a co-operator, and he got me thinking on these sort of things; I joined the Labour movement in 1912, and I daren’t tell my dad and mam that I had done. And, er, my foreman wanted me to come to the adult school at Kibworth, which I did. Sunday mornings it started at nine o’clock. The adult school movement really started, oh a good many years ago, and I was told it was basically to teach working men how to read and write. Then it developed into classes and we had discussions, semi-religious. To me it was wonderful, it gave you the chance to express yourself, and I remember wishing, oh I wish I dare get on my feet and say something, ‘cos I wanted to, and one Sunday morning I decided that if I feel like that I’m going to get up, and I did. Well, I feel it helped me.

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