School's out again (From Bournemouth Echo)

School's out again

12:59pm Tuesday 9th June 2009 in

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IT is a lesson itself in how times have changed for the better. Today the threat of swine flu has everyone on the alert but a century or so ago diseases were so common that a village school frequently had to close.

The closures are just one of the fascinating insights to be drawn from Shirley Percival’s study of the school, with which, for more than 40 years she was associated as a parent, secretary and governor.

Called Lytchett Matravers: A History 1874-2008, it outlines the way the school changed over the passing of decades and changing headmasters.

But it is also a study in social history in the way local people lived their lives.

The school, which opened for admissions in 1875, had cost just £1225 to build when pupils had to pay fees of 7d (under 3p) a week to attend.

And attendance, according to Shirley Percival, was the greatest problem. The fee was a lot for some families in those days and often children would be kept at home to work on the farms or go cover beating for the gentry.

Discipline, too, was harsh.

“The cane was the master,” wrote the author. “Most boys held their hands out daily for three or six strokes and sometimes there was a thrashing.”

The children may have been young but from 1880 the then head introduced military drill during recreation time.

“I’m sorry to say that this injurious practice of throwing stones is very prevalent in this parish and, in order to put a stop to it I invariably punish,” reported Mr Halladey who was head in 1880.

They were tough times with money scarce and even in the year 1900 the youngest children drew their letters with their fingers in sand trays before moving on to slates. Reception children still learnt on slates more than 40 years later.

But what of their health? As early as October 1884 the school closed after scarlet fever was rife in some families.

“The Dorset Medical Officer of Health ordered the school to be closed to prevent measles and scarlatina spreading,” the author writes.

“The school rooms were disinfected with Jeyes fluid and McDougalls powder and were cleaned and repainted.”

The closure was to be repeated many times in the coming decades.

In 1892, for example, it closed due to a flu and measles epidemic.

It was also closed in 1909 following an outbreak of measles and scarlet fever. Diphtheria was also a worry and, later in the same year, chicken pox affected the school again.

Sometimes Shirley Percival’s detailed research revealed, the school would be closed for up to five weeks because of epidemics as the decades came and went.

During the First World War, village children gathered cowslip whose blossom would be sent by post to be used for medicinal purposes, mainly for ointment for war wounds.

And when war broke out again in 1939, the Lytchett Matravers village children again performed a role.

This time, throughout the war years, they “gathered rosehips from the hedgerows and they were sent away to be made into rosehip syrup, a drink and mineral source much needed as oranges and bananas and overseas fruit became non-existent in the British Isles.”

Shirley Percival’s study centres on the lives of the school, its teachers and its children right up to the building of the new school in 1992 and on to the present day.

It’s a valuable history but more than that, it peeps behind the classroom doors to show what life was like in times that seem so different to the world we know today.