Explore Your Archives

After the Library’s centenary Lauren, Helen & I have been very busy working to put together our exhibition for the Explore Your Archives campaign. I have posted before about the research I have been doing for this campaign, and the workshop we attended.

Explore Your Archives is a nationwide scheme led by the National Archives to make archives more accessible to people, and aiming to get people interested in the wealth of information which can be found when exploring archives. We chose to focus on schools in Stockport – a natural choice as we have excellent collections about schools, most notably the Stockport Sunday School collection. The exhibition we created focuses on schools from 1796 through to 1950.

To protect the originals, we reconstructed copies of the archives with selected excerpts for people to read at their leisure, in the hope that people will read them and if interested will request to view the originals.

The items I focused on were school log books, housecraft lessons, cookery lessons, school dinners, and an exam paper. We also put together an exhibition guide so people can easily identify the items.

School Log Books

The school log books we hold are from a variety of times, the selected excerpts I chose to include were from

• Cheadle Heath St John British School (excerpt dated August – September 1884)
• Great Moor Church of England School (excerpt dated March – September 1923)
• Lancashire Hill Council School (excerpt dated May – July 1909)
• Brentnall Street Infants School (excerpt dated August – October 1897)

Log books were written by head teachers, and recorded important events in school life such as the visit of inspectors, closure of the school or a new member of staff. Attendance information, and information about recorded epidemics are included. They are wonderful sources of information, which allow us to find out more about the history of schools in Stockport, what lessons were taught, how school life was different, and how national events such as the outbreak of WWI and WWII affected children at school.

Domestic Science Lessons

The equivalent of domestic science lessons taught to the girls pre-1950’s was ‘Housecraft’. It was taught to girls to prepare them for managing a household – this included instruction in household account keeping, compilation of budgets of expenses, cost of furnishing, and of household upkeep. It also taught instruction and practice in the various cleaning processes necessary in the household, the care of linen, furniture, and other articles of household use, needle repairs and adaptations, and so on.

In the archives we hold an exercise book which shows lessons in Housecraft. It was donated with some other exercise books, and curriculums relating to the Manchester Exam Board. One of the other books is dated 1918, so perhaps this exercise book is from a similar time period. We don’t know who the exercise book belonged to, as there is no name, but the book shows us what girls were being taught in Housecraft classes. There are sections devoted to housework – the girls were taught how to organise what housework to do when, and how to do each job most efficiently and effectively. Cookery shows what they were taught to make, how to choose a cut of meat and how to identify whether meat is old or ‘from beasts fed on oil cake mixtures’. There is also a separate section for a ‘Laundry Book’ which details how best to wash different items, how to starch and how to iron.

There is also some information in the school log books regarding housecraft lessons. The log books indicate that girls from Lancashire Hill Council School & St Peter’s Church of England School were sent to the Bridgefield Centre, girls from Woodford School were sent to the Poynton Centre. They would learn laundry, cookery, and sometimes needlecraft.

 Cookery Lessons

To show what girls were taught to cook in school, I made some recipe cards using recipes from school cookery books, which people visiting the exhibition can take away.

Two of the recipes come from Mrs Goodison’s Cookery Book, a notebook of carefully written recipes, recipes cut from newspapers and magazines & receipts from various food suppliers. The newspaper clippings date from the 1920’s to the 1950’s and the book has a vast array of recipes everything from rabbit several ways, to mock cream and a variety of baked treats.

The third recipe comes from a cookery book dated 1889, by the Manchester School Board.

You can read more about them here.

School Dinners

I was interested in school dinners, because everybody seems to have a memory of them.

The best source of information was minute books from the schools – I mainly used The Stockport Education Committee: School Canteen Sub-Committee Minutes and The Stockport Industrial and Ragged School Reports. The ragged school gives an example of school dinners in the 1870’s. The Education Committee minutes doesn’t give specific menus like the one below, but does generally refer to the types of food given. I also used information about the Education Acts through the years and the impact these have had upon school dinners.

Sample Ragged School Dinners, Stockport, 1870’s
Australian meat 4 oz. ¾ lb potatoes, 4 oz. bread	Rice & Milk, with 4 oz. bread	Soup (with meat) with 4oz. bread	Pea soup (made with ham bones) with 4 oz. bread	Vegetable soup (bullock’s head) and 4oz. bread

Exam Paper

In St Peter’s Church of England School log book, a history examination has been fully written down, with some results of what the children answered.

The paper was set in 1933 for children aged 13 and over in 12 schools throughout Stockport, as part of a ‘Report on Teaching of History in Public Elementary Schools’.

Questions include:

1. Arrange the following names in the right order of time – Shakespeare, St Paul, Wolfe, Wolsey, Isaac Newton (1 mark)
2. In what century after the 10^th were good roads first made in England? (1 mark)
3. What happened at Waterloo, Runnymede, Versailles, Blenheim, Copenhagen, Gibraltar, Tower of London? Choose any four of these and give dates if you can. (8 marks)

The paper has been transcribed, and is available in the library for people to test themselves and measure themselves against the standards of the 1930’s. Unfortunately the answers were not written down, so Heritage Library staff had fun debating the answers.

The average score over all the schools was 27.5%. The best score for the paper was 40%. Comments from the report include:

“…The teaching often seemed lifeless and mechanical; many of the teachers gave the impression that they would have preferred to be teaching something else…”

“…The children rarely seemed to remember anything but what they had been taught quite recently: still more rarely did they seem able to think about the past intelligently…”

“…It can hardly be regarded as a brilliant result for the time expended…”