10:20am Saturday 14th August 2010
Reporter Lesley Tate has been looking back through the newsletters of Skipton’s Ermysted’s Grammar School to see how life has changed over the years. Here is the first instalment of what she found.
Ermysted’s Grammar School’s Chronicles - its termly newsletter - has changed slightly over the years.
Today, it is full of sporting and academic achievements - both inside and out of the school.
But back before the outbreak of the Second World War, the world was a very different place.
The language of the Chronicles was very different. There was a lot of poetry and articles written in Latin, as well as features on “rugger”, cricket, football and lots of cross-country - a sport not always written about with enthusiasm by the boys.
With the outbreak of war in 1939, for the next few years the Chronicles often included stories about former boys who had died abroad - either in active service or as prisoners of war.
But it still included articles on nature, sports, poems and puzzles and items on all manner of subjects from Hollywood to the auctioning of valuable antiques.
In the summer term of 1938, a small party of bird lovers had a “most enjoyable visit to Coniston Hall and lake”.
The boys had been invited along by owner Richard Tottie and enjoyed a “beautiful, fine, warm day, with bright sunshine”.
The visit included sightings of many rare birds and fowl.
“One member of the party was fortunate enough to gather a nice stew of mushrooms,” said the report. “A visit to this paradise is not easily forgotten.”
The summer term also saw the arrival of a number of hedgehogs.
A first-former, ‘Swinglehurst’, came across a hedgehog with four week-old babies - all were turned loose in the school garden.
Unfortunately, the mother abandoned the babies, so the boys put them in the greenhouse and gave them saucers of milk.
“The hedgehog is a very interesting animal, and one of the most useful in the garden,” said the author. “It is often kept in the kitchen, as a pet, in order to devour blackclocks, beetles and crickets.”
Nature Notes were a regular feature in the Chronicles of the time, but 1938 was to be the last time they were written by one particular master, who signed himself FJND.
After 54 years as a teacher and 18 years as a master at Ermysted’s, he was retiring.
But included in his last-ever nature notes was an interesting point that the hedgehog was a delicacy among gypsies.
“When they have killed the animal, they take out its entrails, wash it well, then cover it all over with a thick layer of clay and put it on the embers of a bright fire. When cooked, the thick layers of baked clay and spines come off together, and the animal is eaten with gusto.”
The spring term of 1940 Chronicles included an item from a third year boy who signed himself “an evacuee”.
He concluded that evacuation on the whole was a success.
“It is mainly the people who have had children away and brought them back who think it is a failure,” he wrote. “These people are judging all evacuation cases by their own.”
Spring 1940 also saw Craven’s heaviest snowfall for many years and the coldest weather since 1896.
All sport at the school was cancelled for the duration, including cross-country.
In 1934, the Christmas Chronicles included a discussion on Hollywood and the rise of the “talkies”.
“One could imagine Aristotle looking down his nose at the modern talkie,” wrote NL. “So formless an art form would surely have upset his dignity, so fruity a stimulus would surely have been objectionable to one who took his pleasures so simply.”
The fact that art could in any way be connected with commerce would seem “particularly strange”, he added.
“Film poses as disinterested criticism and portrayal of life and convinces some of its more simple-minded adherents that it is this, when actually it is a very skilled advertisement; a result of careful research of what the public wants.”
The author went on to criticise how talkies concentrated on the baser instincts of the audience.
“When the film financier discovers that the public likes custard pies and half-wits gallivanting, he readily gives it to them,” he wrote.
“So the tired businessman has his relief, the middle classes their ready-made attitudes and the proletariat their momentary and seven penny glimpse of heaven, to them an endless procession of incredibly opulent and repulsive women, with brassy voices and the latest Paris creations – a conception almost as revolting as the Victorian one of angels sitting on damp clouds singing hymns.”
And the experience of going to the cinema in Skipton was no better, where the silence was broken by the “incessant chattering of one’s female neighbours”.
NL was particularly damning of the new film stars who he described as having faces like “a slightly surprised cow, a smile like a tooth paste advertisement, and no particular intelligence.”
Ermysted’s has always sent its boys abroad and has established relations with overseas schools, and in 1938 it “adopted” four refugees from the Basque region of Spain.
The boys were just some of hundreds of children who had been evacuated from the Basque region of Spain following the bombing of Guernica. Most returned home, but a few made their homes in England.
Weekly contributions were collected from each house and contributions sent on a regular basis.
In 1938, a year before the outbreak of the Second World War, there was a report of a rare sighting of a golden eagle in Craven.
The bird had been spotted at Arncliffe, being attacked by a couple of jackdaws.
The same edition included a report by a language student who had decided he needed to go to Germany, to improve his language skills.
The sixth former, who signed himself GLH, experienced plenty of kindness, but wondered about the Germans’ apparent love of uniform and long speeches.
“The two aspects of Germany that struck me most were the all-pervading propaganda and the remarkable prevalence of uniform,” he wrote.
“The Germans seem to get into uniform on every possible occasion and on the flimsiest excuse – it seemed to me that half the men were in uniform, while swords and arms of all descriptions are proudly carried by even the most harmless.”
And he said the hand of Dr Goebels - Hitler’s propaganda minister - was to be seen everywhere.
“Pictures of Hitler were everywhere and sometimes in the funniest connection, if only one dared to laugh outright - I am sure a sense of humour does not find much of a place in the make-up of most Germans.”
He said politics were everywhere - but he was clear that the German people liked the English very much. They did, however, despise France and everything French.
He also found a hatred of Russia and a gullibility of his German friends to believe everything they read in the papers.
“It came as a shock to most Germans to find that there was a chance of war with England,” he said.
Despite that, he made many friends in Germany and liked what he saw - particularly the cleanliness of the towns and the punctuality.
He even went to a meeting of the Hitler Youth where the young folk put up a “really fine show”.
“I have never seen such finer physique, but for me it was spoilt by the long speeches and long marches and counter-marches,” he wrote.
We had to stand with our arm outstretched for so long that my arm ached.”
At the end of his holiday, he was almost sorry to leave Germany.
“I can recommend a German holiday to any student of the language, the Germans are kindly folk and although they laugh at one’s errors, they will help to put them right, and one can be sure of a real welcome.”
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