Open-air schools were cold comfort for pupils

IT was announced last week that three Darlington schools are going to be demolished and a £21m educational village built in Haughton to replace them.

One of the schools which is due to be bulldozed in 2005 is Beaumont Hill Special School, to the north of Darlington.

This school, with its distinctive bug-eyed classrooms, is special for more than one reason.

It is the last remnant of the early 20th Century fad of providing open-air schools for children with "anaemia, adenoids, enlargements of glands and discharges from ears".

The idea was conceived in Germany for educating TB sufferers at the beginning of the last century. When it arrived in Darlington, in 1910, the town congratulated itself on its pioneering approach, because only London and Sheffield were trying similar ventures.

It was planned to build the school near Harrowgate Hill golf course. Because of its lofty position, the area was considered to be the healthiest place in town.

Instead, the first open-air school ended up in North Lodge Park. A local carpenter constructed a wooden frame with two canvas walls. The canvas could be moved depending on the direction of the wind to shield the children - all girls - inside.

There were 20 of them, and they were taught botany, clay and cardboard modelling, and arithmetic, in which measuring the trunks of park trees played a major part.

For many of the pupils, these were the first lessons they had ever had.

Some of the girls had been prescribed rest by their doctors, so hammocks were slung between trees for them to take a nap. Parents, though, had to provide an extra coat or blanket to keep the children snug.

It was arranged for the pupils to visit Kendrew Street baths every day to have a spray bath.

But the summer of 1910 was typically English. The school opened on May 25 and closed on July 29 because of bad weather.

In 1911, the movable wooden schoolroom was wheeled over to Dodmire School, where an old stable block was converted into a lavatory.

The school was initially only open in the summer, but as the sickly girls piled on weight in 1923 it was decided to open it all year round, and boys were admitted, too.

The open-air fad swept the country, and by 1929 there were 60 such schools, with Darlington boasting a new permanent one.

It opened on July 18, 1929, off Salters Lane, on the site of today's Beaumont Hill Special School.

Costing £4,800, it was the "most far-reaching development of education for physical defectives" and there were 41 pupils "on whom health had not smiled".

There were four open-air classrooms which looked like bandstands, because in the original German experiment the classes had been held in converted bandstands. There were wooden shutters on the sides and under-floor heating.

"At least the snow will not have to be swept from the floor," noted the headmistress approvingly, which suggests the Dodmire school was very chilly.

The school day began with cocoa and brown bread. There was a midday meal followed by hot and cold showers. Then came the afternoon nap, taken whenever possible outside, with the children lying on their sides facing the teacher.

With such a crowded curriculum, it was a wonder there was time for formal teaching.

Although it was a well-intentioned concept, the selection of pupils became haphazard. One was there because she had a slight eye problem; another had a broken arm; and yet another because his brother had once suffered from tuberculosis.

In 1952 it was time for a rethink. The school was remodelled, the open classrooms being replaced with the rounded glass windows which today give Beaumont Hill its distinctive bug-eyed appearance.

These windows were still easily removable to let in the fresh air, but they were designed to catch the sun's healing rays for as long as possible every day.

There were now more than 80 pupils, with a school nurse in her own clinic and a physiotherapist on site. This holistic approach is today being expanded into an "education village" where schools will share their site with a health practice and other social services.

At break times, children were given cod liver oil, orange juice "and other health-giving foods".

In 1960, the Northern Despatch (The Northern Echo's now defunct evening sister paper) said: "The most valuable lesson pupils learn at the school for delicate children is that they do not have to look far to find someone who seems worse off than themselves. A cripple knows he can breathe freely; an asthma case knows he can walk."

In recent decades, as schooling policy has changed so that disabled pupils are, wherever possible, not excluded from mainstream education, the Salters Lane school has amalgamated with Mayfair and Glebe Road schools to form Beaumont Hill Special School for children with "special needs".

Now the policy is moving on again, and by 2005 the bug-eyed link with the rudimentary beginnings of education for children with health problems will be no more than a memory.

Ignominious end to a novel industrial experiment

TODAY, behind the skips in the tip off Darlington's Drinkfield Road, a few bumps in the wasteland hint at what was a remarkable industrial experiment.

Last week, Echo Memories told of John Kane, the iron union leader who is buried in West Cemetery. He rose to power in the great industrial strife of the mid-1860s, when 2,700 blast furnacemen and 12,000 ironworkers in Cleveland and Darlington were locked out of their workplace by their bosses in a dispute over pay.

All of them suffered great financial hardship; many of them lost their jobs and were forced to leave the district.

This bitter dispute persuaded Kane to find a more peaceful way of conducting industrial relations and he later made great strides with his conciliation movement.

But he was also very interested in the Drinkfield co-operative experiment - until it went belly-up.

Following the bitter dispute of 1864-66, a group of ironworkers decided to rid themselves of tyrannical bosses and set themselves up in business.

In 1866, they bought ten acres of land off Whessoe Lane from John Henry Garbutt.

They chose their site because it was near the railway, had a good water supply, and was yards beyond the boundary of the Darlington Local Board of Health, so escaping "a considerable amount of local taxation and interference".

By 1867, no fewer than 3,905 shares, at £5 each, had been sold to 350 people. Some were upper class, some ironworkers, and many were from the Midlands and Wales. Even many of the shareholders who had Middlesbrough and Darlington addresses had Welsh names such as Evans, Davies and Lewis.

Only shareholders could be employed at Drinkfield works, although non-employees could own shares.

Workers were to be given a voice in management and the scheme was hailed as "a solution to the frequent labour disputes in the iron trade".

But soon it was clear that all was not well. A public meeting was called at the Central Hall in October 1867 to discuss delays and lack of money.

Another £4,000 was quickly found, and the company started production.

Yet at the first shareholders' meeting, in February 1868, an investigation was launched into its finances. Extravagance was soon identified - "the expenses of management have been on a comparatively lavish scale".

Now Echo Memories' old favourite Henry King Spark became involved, chairing a meeting of directors and principal shareholders in September 1868.

Spark was a maverick. He had made go od in the 1850s on one huge coal deal and had set himself up in Greenbank (later the maternity hospital) as a one-man opposition to the Peases who ruled Darlington.

Spark owned a few mines, a little railway and the Darlington and Stockton Times newspaper.

He fancied himself as a politician - an independent Liberal against the Peases' official Liberals - and, using his newspaper, began campaigning for Darlington to get its own council and its own MP.

In 1867, he won the battle for a council to replace the Board of Health, and the Peases found their control threatened by democracy.

In 1868, he won the battle for an MP and the Peases found their own Liberal candidate threatened by Spark himself.

The Peases were not universally popular among working men, and Spark sought their support through the Drinkfield works.

In September, he took full credit (in his own newspaper) for balancing the company's books. He declared: "The company is now entirely co-operative, and every man, however small his interest, has a voice in its affairs."

Having saved the day, he stood down as chairman and waited for the grateful shareholders to vote for him in the November General Election.

On the first vote, a show of hands in the Market Place triumphantly elected him as MP. But the Peases' candidate, Edmund Backhouse, called for a paper ballot. The Peases, Spark alleged, then used foul means to manufacture his crushing defeat by 1,789 written votes to 872.

Barely had the poll been concluded than Drinkfield was in trouble. It went into voluntary liquidation in 1869 and Spark went to great pains to distance himself from its difficulties.

He asked the investors to sell the business to the former landowner, Garbutt, whom he had previously condemned but who now, he said, had always acted "in the most creditable and handsome manner".

There were murmurings of discontent, but Garbutt got the company and the co-operative dream died. Kane was left especially bitter, because in Spark he thought he had found one of the ruling class on whom workers could rely.

Garbutt's company was not successful. It was taken over by Thomas Vaughan in 1873, but stopped work in 1878. In 1879 the site was levelled and today only a few bumps remain behind the household waste disposal site.

* With thanks to Dr Gill Cookson, county editor of the Victoria County History, for help with this article.

Published: 03/04/2002

Echo Memories, The Northern Echo, Priestgate, Darlington DL1 1NF, e-mail chris.lloyd@nne.co.uk or telephone (01325) 505062.