Twickenham Road School

Some time around 1934 or 1935, on his first day at Twickenham Road infants, a boy who signs himself DeeBee and his best mate heard the bell for playtime and decided school was over. They went home. “Soon sent back though,” he remembered on Voices of Kingstanding. His first teacher was Miss Edwards; on your birthday you got two sweets and a badge to wear, and a third of a pint of milk cost a halfpenny.

Huts first, then a school for 816

In November 1929 the Evening Despatch reported that Birmingham’s Education Committee meant to buy sites for council schools in Twickenham Road and Cranbourne Road on the new Warren Farm estate. The Victoria County History records what followed: Twickenham Road Council School opened in 1930 in temporary buildings for 384 juniors and infants, and permanent buildings for 816 opened in 1931. The old huts were used for senior pupils until Dulwich Road school was ready. Chris Hillcox’s timeline for Dulwich Road begins on 1 June 1931 with the “Twickenham Road senior school”, which moved to huts on Dulwich Road that September. More huts were added in 1936 and 1937, and by 1938 average attendance was 920. Barrie Cross, who started in 1932, remembered the same teachers as DeeBee, and Miss Baldwin besides.

Miss McGowan’s Austin Seven

Pupils remember Mrs Wilson as headmistress of the infants in 1937–38, with a large picture of the Madonna above her desk, and Miss McGowan at the head of the juniors, who drove to school in a grey Austin Seven. Miss McGillicuddy taught infants for a very long time: June Bradley was in her class around 1955, and her father had been taught by her before that. Mr Wayne played the violin in lessons. Mr Hill was the teacher many boys feared; Clement Watts remembered moving to Warren Farm Road school at nine because he was frightened of “poppa Hill”. The caretaker, Pauline Ravenscroft remembered, was her father, who played a dulcimer at assemblies, with plectrums rather than hammers.

Gas masks in the playground

DeeBee remembered that as war drew near “we all had to carry our gas masks and were at times made to put them on”. Shirley Thain, who started in 1937 or 1938, “moved with my gas mask to the juniors”, and remembered air-raid shelters and wartime, and loving the school anyway. Frances Fletcher’s older brother and sister were there during the war, when there was a shelter “they used to have to run to if the bombs were coming”. Some children were sent away. One Twickenham Road boy, his daughter wrote, was evacuated to Ripley in Derbyshire, taken in by a family with a butcher’s shop, and later worked in it. The school opened a nursery class in its building around 1943.

Dancers, coaches and cups

After the war the school was known for performing. Valerie Roberts shared a photograph of children dressed to dance on 14 June 1953, and Glenice Clarke remembered plays, singing at Birmingham Town Hall, and dancing all over the city. Around 1955 children from the new Shard End estate, where no school had yet been built, came to Twickenham Road by coach. Frances Fletcher remembered a garden patch where children grew radishes and nasturtiums, and a long buffet for the 1953 Coronation.

In the 1950s and 1960s the headmaster was Mr Blades. “You heard him before you saw him,” Barbara Newton wrote: “he had metal toe caps on his shoes.” Mr Lane and Mr Trevor Smith ran football and cricket teams that won “lots of cups”, and more than one former pupil calls T. W. Smith the best teacher they ever had.

Still on Twickenham Road

The school was renamed Twickenham County Primary School in 1954, and in 2014 it became an academy. It still stands on Twickenham Road. Glenice Clarke remembered presenting Miss McGowan with a sundial when she retired. In 2013 she wrote that it was still on the outside wall of the school.