The following article is reproduced from Pembury Village News (Winter 2000 edition)

One of the projects that Mary Adams, a former school teacher at Pembury School, set her classes many years ago was to compare working in the present day school with conditions in the Victorian School, which we know today as The Old School. She used to take the children on a tour of the old school looking for clues and below I set out her notes in an article she sent to me sometime ago, on the things that they discovered:

Victorian School 1873
Outside

The front of the building shows the use of old bricks, which had weathered well, buttresses and vent grids. The roof is steeply pitched and the classroom on the south side still retains the original decorative ridge tiles. The rear of the building has some Kent tile hanging on the walls. They also noticed the chimneys and the lead sheeting, some of which, Mary recounted, was once stolen whilst she was working in the south classroom!

The children noticed the Church-like windows with their pointed shapes and some stained glass. These were found in Church Schools and also Board Schools.

The Headmaster’s house was attached to the school. It had a recessed porch-way and an outside toilet and coalhouse at the back. An old low wall retained the school garden in the front and the schoolhouse had a garden to the rear. The children of those days were summoned to school by a bell on the roof that has since disappeared. This bell is quite clearly shown in old photographs of the school. At the back of the school was a large sloping playground surrounded by railings where the boys were separated from the girls. A stout post against the school wall shows the demarcation line. There were two separate porched entrances with steps leading in from the separate playgrounds and these can still be used.

Inside

The School Hall has a very high ceiling with rafters and a trap door into the roof space. The high ceiling made the room difficult to heat in winter but a cool place to work in summer. There are fireplaces in each of the four classrooms and one in the Hall, which show that the rooms were heated by either coal or wood. There are vents in the outer walls of each room which could be opened or shut by hand to let out the smoke from the open fires.

The Head Master’s room had a trap door and ladder to a loft above with a wooden door overlooking the hall. In some old schools this wooden door would have a pane of glass in so that the Head Master could watch the teachers and children working below. Certainly the classrooms had a panel of glass above the door. The cloakrooms and small kitchen were situated between the head master’s house (now a Nursery School) and the hall. School dinners were served throughout World War II from this small kitchen (which is now part of a classroom).

When it was fitted out as an old kitchen with its butler sink, draining boards and huge wooden plate racks, Mary told me that she used to use it for pottery and painting. It is also believed that the original hall floor has been replaced because the wooden blocks were very uneven. The children originally used wooden box-lid desks with inkwells and dip-pens. When she first went to the School in 1967, Mary recounted that the trays of inkwells were kept in the stock-cupboard, as were some of the old slates the children wrote on. The desks may have been set on galleries because the classrooms windows are set high up. However this may not be the correct assumption, as the more likely reason for the high windows was, perhaps, to prevent the children’s attention straying from their lessons if they looked out of the window.

In her research regarding the old school, Mary drew up a picture of life at the time. Many of the pupils were from the homes of poor tenant farmers and were often absent from school to help on the farms, hop picking and fruit picking. The summer term, she remembered, finished at the end of August when the hop picking began. In winter many children’s books were in poor condition and had to be placed around the open fire in wet weather to dry

Henry Plant
Editor of Pembury Village News

(With kind acknowledgement to Mary Adams)