Manning Grammar School

[Jill Sparrow 10,304]

Colthorpe's degree was in intimidation, I reckon.

 

I'm trying to think of someone who fits your description of having long hair. Mrs Lowe had very long, straight fairish hair. I suppose, in comparison with most of the battleaxes, she was reasonably young. She taught geography and was very sarcastic and generally unpleasant.  Miss Anderson was newly qualified in my final year there and had long hair. She taught Latin.

 

Do you remember Dr Smaridge who taught biology? Another not terribly effervescent soul. RE was taught by Miss Fewkes and Mrs Vernon in my time.

 

The awful Mrs Clark, who taught needlework and domestic science before Mrs Darroch arrived.  Mrs Darroch was recently married and brought in her wedding gown to show us. It was a beautiful Tudor gown which she had designed and made herself. She was wasted at Manning. Should have been a costume designer.  I do remember that she gave a lecture on sex education to the fifth formers after a couple of girls were expelled for getting pregnant.  I think Mrs Darroch was chosen because she was the only one who knew what it was!

[RadFordee 68]

Ah miss anderson thats the 1, although latin was no longer taught when i started there glad to say 

 

I think she taught me history in the 1st year she married whilst i was there but i cant remember what her married name was, i do remember dr smaridge by name & mrs darroch was a lovely lady & a great teacher too although she still never managed to teach me to sew & still cant even now

[Jill Sparrow 10,304]

Miss Anderson caused a lot of problems by trying to change the latin pronunciations taught us by our previous teacher, the timid Mr Alan Langley. He was nice but saw the writing was on the wall for his subject with the coming of comprehensive status...and left...in the middle of our Latin GCE course!

 

September 1974 saw the intake of homeless Brincliffe Grammar girls. Manning proved too small to accommodate all the extra bods and, so I was informed, the quads were filled in for classroom space. The school must have looked very different without them...but was possibly much warmer!

[RadFordee 68]

Have been reading through your older posts on this thread jill, brilliant description of the manning & you seem to remember so much more than i do probably because i've spent years trying to block those memories out, lets face it who wants to remember 5 years of being to tortured by barmy colleen (just love that name you gave her) on an almost daily basis and the photo's you have put on are just as i remember the place the hall the gym & the dreaded dome.

[RadFordee 68]

Noticed you were also in st davids as was i, had to have your name embroidered in yellow on your PE shirt.

[RadFordee 68]

Well the classrooms were always freezing in winter with just 2 heating pipes running along the back wall & the french doors with the 3 inch gap in the middle & at the bottom where the wind howled through. There were 2 wooden hut type classrooms in the quad area whilst i was there.

[Jill Sparrow 10,304]

Those huts in the quad housed the sixth form in my day. Girls were not allowed to cross the quads. We had to walk all the way round! Only staff and sixth formers could set foot in the quads.

 

The warmest place on the site was the north east hut, corrugated tin and asbestos construction with a pot bellied coke stove inside.  Elf and Safety hadn't been born back then!  The north east hut lurked behind the dining room and on a bad day we could smell the rancid mess they were serving for lunch!  I was always a sandwich girl!

[RadFordee 68]

Yes me too jill those school dinners always smelled revolting & was always jealous of the girls who lived close enough to go home for lunch as a couple of friends who lived on stanley rd did.

 

1 of the huts was my form room in the 5th year but cant remember which 1 but it didn't have a stove.

[Jill Sparrow 10,304]

It amused me that you say you've blocked out your memories of Manning. I've met countless people over the years who've said exactly the same thing. Sadly, I can't do that. I have a weird kind of memory and it just won't be blocked.  I still have occasional nightmares about the place...even though it no longer exists!

[RadFordee 68]

Funny you should say that jill i have had the same nightmare on & off for the last 45 years, sometimes quite often & then wont have it for months but i'm running around all of the corridors with someone chasing me dont know who as i never see their face & i'm trying to find a way out but there are no doors anywhere, think all ex inmates of the manning should get free therapy.

[Jill Sparrow 10,304]

It's awful, isn't it?  My nightmare usually involves being told that I have to sit my GCEs before I can leave, even though I sat them in 1974!  I argue that I don't need to, I'm in my 60s and have post graduate qualifications so isn't it time they let me out?  Yet I can never get out because, like you, there's no door.

 

I'm sure a shrink would have a field day with our experiences. There is no doubt that some psychological damage has occurred somewhere!  Wonder whether we can still sue?

[RadFordee 68]

Yes the place definitely had a lasting impact on us, if the kids of today had to go to the manning as it was then they would be in the priory or calling childline .

[Jill Sparrow 10,304]

The Manning known to RadFordee and myself is long gone!  So far as I can see, the area that remains least altered is the small copse of trees on the corner of the site bounded by Gregory Boulevard and Russell Road. Even this has been thinned out to the extent that it no longer looks the same and it has been fenced off to make a discrete green area.  The original copse was officially out of bounds to girls in my day but it was not uncommon, when playing rounders on the field, for the ball to go in there. We had to ask permission of the games mistress before going to retrieve it.

 

Djanogly Academy now stands on the section of sports field nearest Gregory Boulevard with the remaining section behind it marked out for various sports.

 

What intrigues me is what happened to the section where the school once stood.  The rear entrance drive, used by staff cars and delivery vehicles, has been closed up and divided between the two properties which stood on either side in Austen Avenue. It now forms part of their driveways. The school itself stood on a raised area which was level with Austen Avenue at the rear but had to be approached by flights of steps from the Gregory Boulevard side. Three different flights of steps ran from the tennis courts up to the main admin block entrance and the quad side entrances. The rest was terraced with shrubs, etc.  At the top of the flight of steps for the lower quad entrance, one looked down over a stone wall onto the school field.

 

From what I can see, the entire site is now all one level.  The school site was not built upon until long after Djanogly Academy was in use and, even now, only part of the old Manning footprint has construction on it, the remainder being used as car parking.

 

I recall reading years ago in the NEP that the old school site would be difficult to build on and I pondered whether this was because of the discrepancy between ground levels. Wonder how they resolved the problem?

 

 

 

[Cliff Ton 10,458]

50 minutes ago, Jill Sparrow said:

What intrigues me is what happened to the section where the school once stood.  The rear entrance drive, used by staff cars and delivery vehicles, has been closed up and divided between the two properties which stood on either side in Austen Avenue. It now forms part of their driveways.

 

I may be talking total rubbish, but is this it ?   https://goo.gl/maps/5b6mMfqxjjCbsZy2A

 

The cobbles on Austen Avenue and Stanley Road are quite spectacular.

[Jill Sparrow 10,304]

Indeed, it is, CT!  The back entrance (now driveways of private houses) faced Stanley Road.  As to the cobbles, they're beautiful, aren't they? However, they weren't there in my day. They cover a fairly small area and appear to have been installed not all that long ago. It is exactly 48 years ago this month since I was round there...and they weren't there then!

[Brew 5,409]

27 minutes ago, Cliff Ton said:

The cobbles on Austen Avenue and Stanley Road are quite spectacular.

An ancient tradition the council invented. Cobbles were not laid in fancy patterns and as the picture shows they break up easily under modern traffic.

In frost and snow they're dangerous to drive on, not too easy to walk on either

[Cliff Ton 10,458]

That's what I was thinking. They may look good but I'll bet they're lethal for cyclists etc.

 

And I'd be interested to know the reason for doing just that short length of two roads.

[Jill Sparrow 10,304]

My thoughts, precisely.  A mystery. Maybe someone can enlighten us?

[Jill Sparrow 10,304]

Manning, during my time, was a real mixture of backgrounds. Some girls came from very affluent families who could well afford to pay the fees for NGHS but, for some reason or another, that establishment had rejected them. I suppose NGHS couldn't take everyone who applied and they could afford to be choosy, since supply exceeded demand.  Some had sisters at NGHS while they were at Manning.

 

At the other end of the scale, some girls came from very deprived backgrounds and their parents really struggled to buy all the items of uniform required.  I was aware of one girl whose mum refused to buy her tights or shoes to replace the worn out ones she had. Fortunately, a friend in the same class took the same size and supplied her with footwear and several pairs of tights, without which she either wouldn't have been able to go to school or would have been publicly pulled up for the state of her uniform.

 

Staff seemed to take delight in that sort of thing. I didn't have school dinners but was told that those with free dinner tickets (which included the girl above) were made to queue separately from those who paid. Shameful.

[RadFordee 68]

Hi jill, katyj kindly forwarded a photo to my other half on face book as i'm not on FB of a manning class with mrs davy on it, she looks just as i remember her, not that i will ever forget that face!!

Cant help noticing that a lot of the girls on there are not smiling i wonder why probably the same tortured expession we would have had when we were inmates there.

 

[Jill Sparrow 10,304]

Yes, I sent katyjay some photos as she wanted to put a face to Barmy Colleen!  Thought that would pull you up sharp! As you say, who could ever forget her?

 

The photo(s) were taken in the summer of 1974, before you arrived in the September. That was the only visit from a photographer during the whole of my time there.

[RadFordee 68]

Yes i was thinking to myself that i didn't remember ever having the school photographer at manning,

not that i need a photo to remind me of my time there!.

 

You would never guess from looking at mrs davy's face that she was stark raving bonkers would you?.

 

@Jill Sparrowhey arnold has just said that barmy colleen has sharks eyes, dead & black was his description .

[Jill Sparrow 10,304]

She had, as I remember, very pale skin and lots of freckles. Gingerish hair and grey eyes. Close up, her skin was quite wrinkled which probably made her look older than she was. I don't know whether she smoked...many staff did. Her habit of dressing in dark greens made her look washed out, as she does on that photo.

She was my form mistress in the fourth year. You can imagine how we all felt about that! However, if you could separate the maths maniac from the person, she wasn't too bad as a form mistress. One thing in her favour there was that I don't recall her pulling anyone up about uniform breaches...ever! Very different from the likes of Christie and others who would make a point of finding fault, often where there was none.

 

Colleen was the first face we saw in the morning for a year. She took registration and ushered us into assembly, thereafter gathering her small group of RCs and disappearing elsewhere whilst the Protestants sang hymns and said prayers in the hall!  Occasionally, during registration, she would even crack a joke and make a passable attempt to be affable but it was too late. After years of running the gauntlet of her mercurial temper during maths lessons, we had learned to be very wary of her. We just never knew when Jekyll would disappear and Hyde would erupt.  Had we not encountered her in maths lessons, she would probably not have seemed too bad. Eccentric , certainly, but most of the staff were guilty of that.

[Cliff Ton 10,458]

The photo in question.

 

[Jill Sparrow 10,304]

Thanks, CT. This was the year below me in 1974. Well, half of it.

 

One thing that strikes me on looking at this is the huge discrepancy in the length of ties. They weren't conventional ties, of course, those were only worn by the sixth form when in uniform. Our ties were Petersham ribbon on elastic, worn under the collar. For a school that was so bl**dy picky about correct uniform and appearance, you'd think outlets like D&P would have supplied ties to a specified length...but they didn't. Looks messy. Some girls wore lots of house badges/games badges on their ties. Not me. I didn't wish to be associated with any of that!