I I started at Cyprus Terrace infant school in April 1958, when I was 4¾. I think it was probably half-days to start, and I vaguely remember having a peg with an animal on it.
I found these entries in the School Register when I visited the North Devon Record Office in 2025, and I found them very moving. I remained good friends with Peter Salter for years, and hadn’t realised that I was at infant school with Anne Goad, whom I knew later as a teenager. I was usually the youngest in any school year, but I see that Chris Symons was even younger than me.
The school was built in 1896, and closed in 1969.
This is the building in 2024, and now appears to be shared accommodation but without any sign, so possibly a women’s refuge.
The headmistress was Miss Olive M Pemberton, and I do remember that she was very kind and respected. There were three teachers and three classes covering the two years, with about 20 children in each. The picture was from an open day in June 1955.
Here is Miss Pemberton reading to children. Sadly I don’t remember many details of being at infant school; occasionally there was music, and I never managed to get a drum, just a triangle or a tambourine. There was an orchard behind where we could play in in the summer.
It was as good as it looks, and we learned things too!
Some of my diary entries. January 16th and 19th 1959 were a Friday and Monday, so my guess is that we had to do a diary on those days. I must have said what I wanted to write, and then copied the letters – while the writing eventually did get a bit better, the pictures showed little improvement.
The school was a 500yd walk from home in Trafalgar Lawn, and at first Mum took me and picked me up, but after a few weeks I was walking home on my own aged 5. I stayed on the northern side of Newport Road, passing my grandparents’ homes, and then shouted across the road for Mum to tell me when I could cross safely.
I think I remember the teacher asking me ‘would you like to learn to read?’, and starting me off on Janet and John books. These used the ‘look and say’ method, rather than phonics, so I learned to just recognise words rather than spelling them out – maybe better for absurd English pronunciation. When my children learned with phonics, we all got used to ‘Uppy Umbrella’ and so on. I progressed quickly after that, and started devouring books.
Comics were very important to me, and I think a good incentive for reading. This diary entry for March 29th 1960 shows that I took Harold Hare and Playhour, which used to be delivered to the house each week. Harold Hare’s Own Paper was a spin-off character from Jack and Jill, which I took before. I later sent off 6d (?) and became a member of Harold Hare’s Pets Club, and got a certificate and a badge.
And of course at Christmas I got an Annual.
MONEY
Pre-decimal currency provided a great training for mental arithmetic. For those born after 1971, when decimalisation started, there were 12 pennies in a shilling, and 20 shillings in a pound. There were also half-pennies (pronounced ha’penny), and ¼ pennies called farthings, which made 960 farthings to a pound. They stopped being legal tender in 1961, by which time I had already started collecting them.
The ’thruppenny’ bit was twelve-sided – silver thruppenny bits were smaller and were withdrawn in the 1940s, but were still kept as the traditional addition in Christmas puddings, as a prize for whoever was served one (I was supposed to have swallowed one once, but I am not convinced that is true).
Images of money, my farthing collection etc
The ‘half-crown’ was 2/6, and I remember Mum testing me as we walked along with ‘What’s five half-crowns?’. ‘Twelve and six’ I would dutifully reply.
Although the exercises write, for example, one shilling and sixpence as ‘1s 6d’, in shops and price lists it was always written ‘1/6’ and said as ‘one and six’.
Being able to add, say, the duck (10d) and the bag (1s 6d) required adding the 10d to the 6d to get 16d, which is 1s 4d. Then add the shillings to get a total of 2s 4d.
To multiply 2s 11d by 2, as in the exercise sheet, required multiplying the pennies to get 22d, converting that to 1s 10d, multiplying the shillings to get 4s, then adding it all up to get 5s 10d. [Alternatively you could convert 2s 11d to 35 pennies, multiply by 2 to get 70, and convert back to 5s 10d. But we weren’t taught to do that.]. I was six (nearly seven) when I could do this. This may seem quite hard, as it now such a pointless skill. But with practice it was not particularly remarkable, and clearly others were expected to do it too.
Sums
We had a good grounding in arithmetic.
It’s interesting that when I was 6 I could add ‘17+17’ correctly, before I could write a seven the right way round.
We obviously practiced dividing numbers with remainders, which I assume was to get us ready for long-division in primary school.
