Dulwich Road schools

On 20 November 1940 Dulwich Road Girls’ School sent a letter home to parents. If the sirens went during school hours, what should happen to their daughter? They were to cross out two of three choices: they would call for her themselves; she could be sent home quickly in any lull; or she would stay in the school shelters until the “All Clear”. The school warned that the wait “may be hours”, and that the “Black-out” came early. Lee Lewis kept a copy, and it is on Voices of Kingstanding today.

Huts, then a school for the Warren Farm estate

When Christine Mullard’s family moved to Norbiton Road in March 1930, she remembered, there was no school yet, and children walked to Hastings Road School and back four times a day. The Victoria County History records that Dulwich Road Council School opened in 1930 in temporary buildings, with permanent blocks for juniors and infants in 1931 and for senior boys and senior girls in 1932. Chris Hillcox’s timeline adds that the senior school began on 1 June 1931 at Twickenham Road, moved to huts on Dulwich Road that September, and entered its permanent building in 1932. The infants and juniors went in from Aylesbury Crescent; the seniors from Dulwich Road.

It was soon overcrowded. Infants were taught in the Congregational church on Brackenbury Road from 1936, and seniors in St Luke’s Church Hall from 1938. In 1940 the timeline counts 641 girls and 592 boys.

Miss Wallace’s murals

On 24 April 1936, the timeline records, murals were presented to the school. Christine Mullard, a pupil until December 1937, remembered that “it was lovely to watch the mural being painted in the hall – Miss Wallace, our headmistress with girls from different years and classes.” At Christmas the woodwork boys built a stage in the girls’ hall for a show that ran three nights, and the hall was always full.

War on Dulwich Road

The timeline follows the war closely. Shortly before the war the school closed “for possible evacuation”, and reopened voluntarily five days later. On 17 May 1940 it was decided that more air-raid shelters were needed before full-time schooling could begin, and attendance became compulsory again on 30 September. In December 1940, 170 boys, 204 girls and 214 juniors were evacuated to Kirkby, Ashfield. Those who stayed raised money for Wings for Victory and Salute the Soldier weeks, and in 1945 boys went potato picking for ten days. Maurice Sellars remembered the iron railings round the school being cut off with oxy torches in about 1943–44, for the war effort.

Shirley Bartram, a pupil from 1944 to 1948, looked back on an education given “despite gas-masks, air-raid shelters, rationing and lack of calculators”. The shelters outlived the war: Ray Griffiths remembered a greenhouse built on top of one, and Clement Watts an iced slide running down from it across the boys’ playground.

Heads, and a school song

Christine Mullard had two junior headmasters, “Mr Lock and the other was Mr Locker!” Miss Ward became head of the girls in 1942; girls of the late 1950s and 1960s remember Miss Green. On the boys’ side Mr Dolphin retired in July 1959, Mr Eynon took over, and Mr A. A. Simkins became headmaster in November 1968. In the juniors Mr Dugard wrote the school song, and former pupils were still piecing it together sixty years on: “Bold, brave and true, in all we seek to do … Black and gold!”

Warren Farm

In 1954 the schools took the name Warren Farm. The city archives record that the boys’ and girls’ secondary schools were joined in 1973 and closed in 1983. In October 1986 the Sandwell Evening Mail reported the first sod being cut for a Warren Farm Leisure Centre on Dulwich Road, cheered on by children from Warren Farm Junior School. Warren Farm Primary School is still open on Aylesbury Crescent. And when Voices of Kingstanding photographed the sports hall of the old school around 2011, Miss Wallace’s three painted panels of 1936 were still on its walls.