Kingsthorne School

On 16 October 1931 the Architect and Building News printed the plan of a new school in Kingstanding. Cranbourne Road Junior and Infant School, designed by J. H. Hawkes and Son, laid its classrooms round a large rectangular courtyard, with verandahs along the front facing a wide playground.

A school round a courtyard

In November 1929 Birmingham’s Education Committee announced it would buy sites for council schools in Cranbourne Road and Twickenham Road on the Warren Farm estate. The Victoria County History records that Cranbourne Road Council School opened in 1931, first in temporary buildings and then, the same year, in permanent ones for 816 juniors and infants. A classroom photograph of 1932 is among the earliest pictures of the school. In 1954 it was renamed Kingsthorne.

Richard Wall, a pupil from 1941 or 1942, remembered a dog lying outside Mr Jones’s classroom “in the quadrangle”, the courtyard the architects had drawn.

Shelters at home time

Ray Malvern started at Cranbourne Road in about 1940. Children could start before they were five, he remembered, so that mothers could go to work. For the first few months they went in the mornings only, and once afternoons began, “we seemed to get air raids on a regular basis just about finishing time so was stuck in the shelters instead of going home.” Richard Wall’s father was serving in the Far East, and he did not see him until he came home at the end of the war, when Richard was eight.

Some children were sent away. Voices of Kingstanding shows a photograph, lent by the school, of Cranbourne Road evacuees at Ripley station in Derbyshire, and a Cranbourne Road girl was among the Kingstanding evacuees photographed with the children of Swanwick school in 1941. The shelters stayed behind the wooden classrooms long after the war; Ian McLean remembered them there when he left in 1971.

Heads and teachers

Chris Hillcox’s timeline names Miss Pool as head of the infants in 1940–42 and Mrs Fairhead as head of the juniors in 1943. Ray Malvern and Richard Wall both remember Miss Pugh as junior head in the war years, with Mr Giles, Miss Acton, Mrs Warwick and Mr Taylor, who had been “demobbed from the RAF”. Ray Griffiths remembered Miss Fairhead as “strict, very pre-war dressed”, and singing a sea shanty at Birmingham Town Hall dressed as Jack Tars. Later heads remembered by pupils were Mr Hawkins and Mr Worrall in the 1950s, Mr Bullus up to about 1971, Mr Evans in the mid-1970s, and, in the timeline, Mrs Raven for the infants in 1976 and Mr Foster for the juniors in 1979. Dorothy Ryan, there from 1952 to 1958, remembered that the future musician Steve Winwood was in her class.

The wooden classrooms

What children remember most are the wooden blocks on the raised part of the back playground. Martin Brookes remembered the ghost stories told about them, of a Second World War airman said to haunt the old classrooms, and the rumour that they had once housed RAF men. Louise Andrews remembered playing “days of the week” on the steps of the wooden huts, jumping from Sunday at the top to Saturday at the bottom. There were four houses, Emerald, Topaz, Ruby and Sapphire, white rabbits on the central green, and trips to Burford Road playing fields.

Still on Cranbourne Road

Kingsthorne celebrated its golden jubilee with a printed history, and it is still open on Cranbourne Road as Kingsthorne Primary School, a two-form-entry community school. The plan of 1931 was drawn for the first children of a brand-new estate. Ninety-five years on, the school on Cranbourne Road is still filling up with their successors every morning.