Cardiff Schools & the Age of the Second
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CARDIFF SCHOOLS & THE AGE OF THE SECOND WORLD WAR THE LOG BOOKS: A DOCUMENTARY HISTORY Keith Strange 1 For Alexander 2 Acknowledgements First and foremost I must thank the headteachers who allowed me access to their school records (though I would, ever so politely, draw their attention to my postscript). The staffs of the Local Studies Department of Cardiff County Library and of the Glamorgan Record Office deserve my particular gratitude for their expertise, patience and support. I would also like to place on record my thanks to Dan Chidgey, archivist for the Catholic Archdiocese, for tracking down the Heathfield House, St. David’s and St. Illtyd’s records, and to Sister Mary Bernardine of the Sisters of Providence of the Institute of Charity and Brother Damien of the De La Salle Brothers for allowing me to work on this material. The debt I owe Dennis Morgan will become apparent as the reader turns the pages. Finally, my thanks are also due to the staff of Keymaster Locksmiths, Penylan Road, Cardiff who managed in several cases to open Log Books which had been locked for years and to cut the keys which opened even more. To one and all, sincere thanks. 3 Introduction Masquerading as a senior lecturer in the Cardiff School of Education I have been privileged to be allowed access to the Log Books and, where they still exist, the Admissions Registers and Punishment Books of 95 City of Cardiff schools and 23 Glamorgan ones. I have also drawn on the Education Committee Minutes of both authorities, especially Cardiff, and various other primary sources, but the great bulk of the material presented here has been culled from the Log Books. Since the advent of State education in 1870 all publicly funded schools had been required to keep a Log, normally stoutly-bound and with its own lock and key, in which ‘The Principal Teacher must make at least once a week an entry which will specify ordinary progress, and other facts concerning the School or its Teachers - such as the dates of withdrawls, commencements of duty, cautions, illness etc. - which may be require to be referred to at a future time, or may otherwise deserve to be recorded’.1 The keeping of these logs varied enormously from head to head and from school to school. So whilst some logs contained some detail others devoted page after page, year after year (and in some cases decade after decade) to minimalistic entries along the lines of ‘Miss So and So was absent today’ or ‘Mr. So and So resumed duties today’ and common to all was a preoccupation with pupil attendances which, in an age when salaries and capitation were at stake, is understandable even though it didn’t subsequently lend itself to exciting reading. Nor did the practice of recording the title of each and every Circular sent out by the Education Office which was another common phenomenon. Heads have told me that it was a demand of the Authority but I have read enough Logs to know that by no means all schools did this even though a great many did.2 I have waded through literally hundreds of years of ‘Miss So and So was absent today’ and ‘Received Circular…’ and, believe me, the experience is hardly an edifying one; but in this wading I have also come across much which is of interest and this book is a product of such encounters. If, individually, many logs were laconic and mundane, collectively – as I hope what follows will show - they can provide a unique and fascinating insight into schooling and the wider world. The reader will need to appreciate that the school system in place in Cardiff and elsewhere during the war years was quite different to our present one. Basically there were two types of state schools, Elementary and High. The great majority of children only attended elementary schools, which consisted of mixed infant departments and single sex upper schools, in which they remained until their fourteenth birthday. A minority of pupils, having passed an 1 From the printed frontispiece of the first volume of the Log of Roath Park Boys’, 1895. 2 Whilst I have yet to track down, if it exists, the Circular which informed Heads that they no longer needed to keep their Logs, from the nine Cardiff schools whose records I have looked at through to the 1990s it would seem that the end came by the middle of that decade and I only know of one instance where the Log is still being maintained. 4 entrance examination, went to single sex High Schools at the age of eleven where they studied for five years for their Central Welsh Board School Certificate Examinations and only a very few went on to the sixth form and sat Higher Certificate Exams.3 Thus in January 1943 there was somewhere in the region of 125 elementary schools in the City of Cardiff with a total of 30,070 pupils and ten High Schools with just 3,816 pupils.4 Within the elementary sector there were some variations, with mixed sex junior and senior departments in some schools for example and, in June 1939, Glamorgan County opened a brand new non-selective Senior Mixed School, what would later become known as a Secondary Modern, in Whitchurch. [At this time the schools at Whitchurch together with those at Llanederyn, Llysfaen, Radyr, St. Fagan’s and Tongwynlais did not come under the aegis of Cardiff but as they are all now a part, or recognised as suburbs of the City I have included material from them.] In an attempt to enable the reader to identify individual schools and at the same time reduce the verbiage, I have shortened the names of some of them, used their present day titles in other instances or even renamed them completely – this latter course of action being inevitable when confronted by the logs of no fewer than six schools named St. Mary’s. Thus Roath Park is reduced to Roath, to distinguish between Llandaff Church in Wales and Llandaff Council, Highfields, the one becomes Llandaff City and the other Highfields, and St. Mary’s Church in Wales Mixed, Clarence Road, is rechristened ‘Clarence Mixed’. Should this strategy cause any offence, I apologise profusely. Finally, I have drawn on the work of a predecessor of mine at UWIC, Dennis Morgan, in an attempt to provide a Cardiff perspective and incorporated a sparse commentary about the war so as to help place events in the City into the wider, global perspective. 3 For example, in June 1945 there were 353 girls on the register of Heathfield House and yet only two pupils sat the Higher Certificate Examinations. CCL, City of Cardiff, Reports of Education Committee, November 1944 – October 1945, Secondary Schools Committee, 4th July 1945, p.252, for pupil numbers, and CCL, Cardiff, Education, 1945-46, Minutes of the Governing Body of Heathfield House, 29th November 1945, tabled at the Secondary Schools Committee of 5th December 1945, p.252, for the exam details. 4 The figures for the elementary schools, based on statistics from January 1943, were presented in April 1945 to a sub-committee considering the reorganisation of the City’s schools following the 1944 Education Act. The secondary figures are based on returns for January 1943. CCL, Cardiff, Education, 1944-45, (Re-organisation of Schools) Sub-Committee, 18th April 1945, pp.164-170 & CCL, Cardiff, Education, 1942-43, Higher Education Committee, 12th February 1943, p.87. The exact number of elementary schools cannot be given with certainty as my research has revealed that the numbers given in the report of April 1945 are in some cases inaccurate. For example, all eight Roman Catholic elementary schools are listed as having Boys’, Girls’ and Infant Departments and yet six of them only had Mixed and Infant schools, the exceptions being St. David’s and St. Peter’s. 5 The Log Books City of Cardiff Albany Road Boys’ * Albany Road Girls’ * Albany Road Infants’ * Allensbank Boys’ Allensbank Girls’ Allensbank Infants’ Baden Powell Infants’ Birchgrove Infants’ Birchgrove Mixed Canton C W Girls’ * Canton C W Infants’ * Cathays High for Boys Court Road Boys’ 5 Court Road Girls’ Court Road Infants’ Crofts Street C W Infants’ 6 Crwys Road Infants’ * Crwys Road Mixed * Dulwich House Hospital School * Eleanor Street Mixed & Infants’ 7 Ely Infants’ 8 Gladstone Boys’ Gladstone Girls’ 9 Gladstone Infants’ Grangetown Boys’ Grangetown Girls’ Grangetown Continuation School Grangetown C W Infants’ 10 Grangetown C W Mixed Greenhill Open Air School Hawthorn Infants’ Hawthorn Mixed Heathfield House RC High 11 Herbert Thompson Boys’ Herbert Thompson Girls’ Herbert Thompson Infants’ 5 The Logs of the schools at Court Road are held at Ninian Park Primary. 6 Now renamed St. Anne’s. 7 This and other Eleanor Street Logs are held at Mount Stuart Primary. 8 Now renamed Millbank Primary. 9 Two Logs, covering the period 1915–1970, are held at Cathays High School. 10 Now renamed St. Paul’s Primary. 11 Held by the Sisters of Providence of the Institute of Charity, Loughborough. 6 Hywel Dda Infants’ Hywel Dda Junior Mixed Jackson Hall Oral School for the Deaf * Kitchener Road Mixed & Infants’ * Lansdowne Road Boys’ Lansdowne Road Girls’ * Lansdowne Road Infants’ Llandaff City C W Mixed Llandaff, Highfields, Mixed & Infants’ * Llanishen C W Mixed & Infants’ * Maindy Infants’ * Maindy Junior Mixed 12 Marlborough Road Girls’ * Marlborough Road Infants’ Metal Street C W Boys’ * Metal Street C W Girls’ * Metal Street C W Infants’ * Moorland Road Boys’ Moorland Road Girls’ Moorland Road Infants’ Ninian Park Infants’ Radnor Road Boys’ * Radnor Road Girls’ * Radnor Road Infants’ * Roath Park Boys’ Roath Park Girls’ Roath Park Infants’ St.