Swindon in the Past Lane

A 19 th century programme reveals an energetic array of activities enjoyed by Swindon High School pupils at their annual Sports Day in 1898. The earliest record of a school in Swindon was the Free School founded in 1764 to educate 20 boys and 5 girls.  Pupil numbers soon outstripped the accommodation in a cottage in Newport Street and the National School was built on the same site in 1835. The school in The Sands began life as the Classical and Commercial School for Young Gentleman.  Swindon Advertiser founder William Morris, one of the schools' early pupils, was enrolled for about eighteen months to complete his education where schoolmaster George Nourse, according to Morris, was a nice, kind, old gentleman but lacking firmness and ability to teach. By 1869 Cornish born Samuel Snell was in charge.  One of five sons of a lead miner, Samuel was a pupil teacher by the age of sixteen and the only one of his brothers to escape the Cornish lead mines. ...

Swindon has enjoyed a long history of educational excellence and was quick to establish a Local School Board following the 1876 Education Act. With the old GWR School bursting at the seams, the School Board rapidly set about building new ones. Queenstown Infants' and Girls' and Gilbert's Hill Girls' and Infants opened in 1880 with Westcott Infants' and Primary Mixed the following year. However the Westcott Street Infants School log book reveals that the school actually opened at the Drill Hall in March 1878. 'I, Jane Harrison, Certificated, took charge of this school on Monday last,' wrote the newly appointed schoolmistress in her first entry. Miss Harrison admitted 24 new children in the morning with a further 21 in the afternoon. Meanwhile eight school board officers trooped through the schoolroom to see how things were going. With her assistant mistress Miss Robson and two monitresses, Alice Turner and Albinia Dowling, Jane Harrison was pl...