Monday 4 December 2017

The best days of your life...

...is what my grandmother used to say about your schooldays, and to judge from the following further extracts from the elementary school reports at TNA that I've been looking at, I may have been too dismissive; she may have been on to something:

ED 21/23419: Ballaugh Supplementary Class, 14 May 1913 (Mr J. W. Veysey)
  • 'Nature study is taken with considerable success and the children are keenly interested in this branch of their studies. Another year they might be encouraged to collect and classify the wild flowers in which the district is unusually rich.'
ED 21/23419: Ballaugh Supplementary Class, 8 June 1914 (Mr H. Ward)
  • 'They display a special interest in Nature Study of all kinds and have an intimate knowledge of both the plants and birds of the locality.'
An interesting contrast to the previous extracts I made, and it's difficult to imagine a better evocation of the last gasp of golden Edwardian nostalgia without resorting to fiction - might be time to reread Laurie Lee's Cider with Rosie, although that was slightly later of course.