AOSA CENTENARY HISTORY 1841 - 1941
page forty-nine
Contents
Chapter I
Chapter II
Chapter III
Chapter IV
Chapter V
Chapter VI
Chapter VII
Chapter VIII
Chapter IX
Chapter X
Chapter XI
Chapter XII
Chapter XIII
Appendix
The School had hardly settled to the change before war began. Yet for the School the war seemed an affair afar off. The Committee immediately took what they considered to be wise precautions. Should the Germans invade Yorkshire, Ayton School would be prepared. The headmaster was instructed to keep £100 in gold in the safe; various farms in Fryup were willing to accommodate the girls’ side; the boys could look after themselves. As to food, the School was on the priority list; farm and garden supplied the usual milk and vegetables; Granny Nicholls, cook for fifty years, continued to bake her admirable bread. A hint of trouble came from the Middlesbrough food supervisor when he found that the school got 50 pounds of margarine a week. But just in time the food control rearranged the areas and transferred Ayton from town to Cleveland. Cleveland farmers neither wanted nor needed margarine so the school got ample supplies.
Isolated incidents abounded. Henry Kitching, the secretary to the Committee, was chairman of the local tribunal; his brother, Alfred Edward, was the military representative. Several members of the staff were called up. When Zeppelins came, the headmaster and his wife paraded the green often till after midnight to wait for the safety signal; from a corner one night they saw the glare of the one shot down at Hartlepool. Part of the lower field was planted with potatoes and squads of children and staff helped farmers to gather theirs at 2d per hour per head. Indeed one squad was actually at work when the armistice stopped the fighting. J. R. Clayton, the electrician, was drafted into the army, so for two years the headmaster and the senior assistant, James L. Baker, ran the turbine and dynamo and, inexperienced as they were, kept at any rate a glimmer of light even at the worst. The village sergeant of police came along one morning and ordered lights to be obscured that day. So Herbert Dennis took him round the whole range of buildings and the lights were screened within a month. Many of the same screens were, twenty-five years later, to be pulled out of their dusty retreats for quick and urgent use, and the Old Scholars’ memorial of the fallen in the war to end war, awaited the names of those killed in the next.
During the war an increase in numbers, rather more emphasised on the girls’ side, had compelled building there. In 1912, the school had 107 pupils, in 1916 it had 151. These children needed extra room as did the ones from Rawdon in 1921 who brought the numbers to 187.
A convenient legacy from William Harding, an old scholar, helped the Committee to decide to extend the girls’ block and in 1915 they began to build. The west end of the Boarding House which had been bought and rebuilt in F. R. Arundel’s time was taken down; a new section was added which brought the school buildings right up to the roadway cutting across the green. This new building provided classrooms, music rooms, dormitories for girls and maids, mistresses’ bedrooms and bathrooms at a cost of over £1,800. The division between the dining room and the classroom looking on to the green was pulled down and thus the dining-room overflowed into its annexe.
The disturbance caused by four years of war had hardly ceased before an invasion of thirty-four Rawdon scholars upset the tranquillity of routine. The Committee of Rawdon school had decided by the end of 1920 that they could not carry on the School. Negotiations for a general transfer of children and equipment started between the Committees of Rawdon and Ayton and after protracted, annoying, but inevitable delay, resulted in the coming of six girls, one mistress, Joyce Thorne, twenty-eight boys and the ex-headmaster, A. L. Stapleton, who thus returned to Ayton which he had left only a year before.
The delayed decision had also delayed preparations. The original building plan provided for a couple of storeys over the boys’ schoolroom, the museum, and the laboratory. The steep rise in prices prevented the completion of this programme and ultimately the new laboratory and boys’ bedroom rose over the shed and changing-room block alone. ‘Chestnut House', now to become ‘Rawdon House', and the home of A. L. and Marjorie Stapleton, was ready, but nothing else.
Thus, when in September 1921 the Rawdon people arrived, the boys slept in the gymnasium and lecture room. In the latter, the master in charge slept in a cubicle improvised from the boys’ boxes. The changing-room lay open to the sky; a clutter of girders and hot water pipes lay about in the boys’ schoolroom; desks, chairs, tables, boxes, apparatus of all kinds, littered that part of the playground that was not occupied by heaps of builders’ materials; for most of the term neither schoolroom nor museum could be used for classes; the daily assembly took place in the girls’ hut; football clothes were retrieved from a heap in the playground.
But difficulties existed only to be overcome, and gradually the chaos gave place to order. The buildings slowly approached completion; strange boys learnt strange landmarks and customary observances. The staff bore the strain; tempers might fray for a moment, physical strength might fail, but in the end energy and good will conquered. Proper accommodation superseded makeshifts, and the new year saw a settled order.
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