Peckham Road School

In 1941 a party of children from Peckham Road Junior School set off for Derbyshire with very little: the clothes they wore, their gas masks, a change of underwear and a luggage label with their name, age and school. Brian Scott, who lived in Hartley Road, remembered on Voices of Kingstanding that a bus took them to Castle Bromwich station, a train to Alfreton and another bus to the iron-making village of Ironville. There, in a school hall, local people came in and chose which child to take home.

A school built with the estate

Peckham Road Council School opened in 1931, while the new council estate was still going up around it. The Victoria County History records that it started in temporary buildings, then moved into new ones for 776 juniors and infants. For a while the older pupils borrowed the junior block while the juniors made do with huts, and the old King’s Vale Council School on Kingstanding Road was run as an annexe. Separate blocks for senior boys and senior girls followed in 1932 (the city archives’ catalogue says 1933), and when even those filled up, classes spilled into the Kingstanding Methodist Hall.

The pictures that survive show a school full from the start. A class of about forty sits at double desks in 1932, arms folded, a boy at the front holding a slate chalked “VIII”. The senior girls staged a festival in 1934. In 1938 the infants put on a play for parents’ day.

Miss Boot’s piano and Mr Bullivant’s furnace

Michael Arblaster, a pupil from 1943 to 1954, remembered that on his first day in the hall the headmistress Miss Boot played the piano and told the children to skip. She stopped, walked over and asked why he was skipping on one leg. “I dunno, Miss Boot, I’ve never learned how to skip with both legs.” An older girl was sent to teach him, and to show him how to tie his laces too.

He remembered Miss Bracey’s infant class reading about Old Lob the farmer, Miss Allen in Prep A, and Miss Woodford, who made him a cardboard egg to wear as Humpty Dumpty. In winter he stood over the gratings outside the woodwork shop, in short trousers and “Daily Mail” boots, to catch the warm air from the underground furnaces stoked by Mr Bullivant, the caretaker. And he remembered the boys’ open-topped toilet block, with a swastika painted on one wall and an RAF roundel on the other.

Evacuees and the school board man

Brian Scott was told the reason for going: a stray bomb had hit the pipeline bringing Birmingham’s water from the Elan Valley, and children were to be sent somewhere the water was safe. His group went with Miss Aslin and, he thought, Miss Stimson. He stayed about three years, and heard by letter from home that he had passed his 11-plus. Chris Hillcox’s timeline for the school records that in 1941 Miss Bloxham and some children were evacuated to Swanwick, also in Derbyshire.

Not every child went. Pauline Latimer, born in 1936, started at Peckham Road in 1941 and remembered her first teacher as Miss Bloxham, “so how come it is said that she was evacuated?” She also remembered her older brother leading her off truant, ducking along the railings, and the school board man calling on her mother while her father was away in the army.

The heads they remember

The timeline names Mrs Bloxham as head of the infants in the early 1940s, with Mr Phillips as headmaster of the juniors, and Miss Boot in charge of the infants by 1943. Richard Wall, in the senior school around 1948–50, remembered Mr Winsor as headmaster, and that he died one summer holiday “in his fifties”. In the seniors there were Mr Martin in art, whose call to order was “pipe down”, and “Pop” Mason, who taught generations after.

Two new names

In 1945 the senior boys and girls became schools of their own. In 1954 all three were renamed: the infants and juniors became King’s Rise County Primary School, and the seniors the King’s Rise secondary schools, whose story runs on from here. The secondary school has gone. The primary has not. It became Kings Rise Academy in 2012, with its gates on Hornsey Road. Ninety-five years after the huts, the school that opened with the estate is still teaching its children to read.