Shirley was up in our attic on Monday. She pulled down some of the detritus of my teaching career and asked if I could sort through it - perhaps throw some of it away. After all, fifteen years has now passed since I opted for early retirement. Why on earth have I hung on to so much of it for so long?
If I died tomorrow that stuff would not mean a thing to anybody else. Even my grown up children would not give it any more than a cursory glance before binning it. Amongst the memorabilia debris I found the two school magazines shown in this blogpost.
The first one was from the summer of 1964. I know who designed the front cover. It was a young art teacher called Barry McKenzie. He was still there when I arrived in January 1986, following a promotion from my previous school.
Barry also designed the following cover from the glorious summer of 1966:-
The two designs suggest a simpler, more innocent time when school magazines were printed in-house and costs needed to be limited. Within each magazine there were forty eight pages and they all needed to be stapled by hand in the middle before every pupil's family received a copy.
The magazines were meant to champion achievement and endorse a sense of community and well-being in the school which was built just a few years earlier on the northern edge of this northern city. To this day, it continues to serve an area with plenty of social and educational challenges.
Below you can see some of the text from the 1964 magazine. No word-processing back then. The typists would have used Gestetner stencil skins each placed in a rather basic printing machine before black ink was applied from a tube and the hand wheel was turned to churn out multiple pages. Later these had to be turned over and printed on the reverse. It would have been a very arduous task.
Anyway, I freed our house of these two magazines by posting them to the current headteacher of the school. I hope he finds a way to save and cherish them but that is now out of my control. At least he is someone with a History degree so there's a chance that history matters to him.
from Yorkshire Pudding https://ift.tt/o8g7Dqj