FIRE AT
DARLEY ABBEY SCHOOL
All the boys had long gone home when a walker in the
Park saw flames through a window. The fire-fighters
managed to confine the blaze to one wing -- but this
contained our four best classrooms. All that was left was
an empty shell and it was two years before it was made
habitable again.
The older part of the house had a third storey unused
for many years. It was in a dreadful state but we managed
to find two rooms just large enough to hold desks for
twenty boys with teacher and blackboard poked into a corner.
Across the courtyard was an old coach-house with big double
doors and a cobbled floor, and nearby a long, narrow room
used as a potato store. None of the four had any heating,
and all the other features that made them quite unsuitable
– but in 1948 conditions were such that one had to make
the best of things and simply ‘soldier on’.
I taught in all of them at one time or another and
found the old potato store, known to the boys as ‘the
spud hole’, to be the one everybody detested – and with
good reason. It was a dark, miserable place and never
completely lost its sickly, earth smell!
The air seemed full of snowballs when the photo was
taken early in 1950, and some of these can be seen
silhouetted against the dark shape of the house. Restoration
work was at last under way, but there was to be one noticeable
change. A large clock was being fitted and the roof parapet
had been made higher to accommodate it.
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