We have been given a set of photographs which we believe to be in Pentland Primary School, Billingham c1950s. Maybe someone can help us identify the classroom of children…
The photograph album donated to us is from an unknown source.
Picture Stockton Archive
A Pictorial History of Stockton-on-Tees
Yes the lower is indeed Pentland School infants class, it was taken in about 1947-8. I know this because I have an original copy of the photo. I am the little boy on the left with dark hair and check jumper playing with building bricks. I lived at 157 Pentland Ave. and attended Pentland School up to the time I went to Grangefield Grammar School in 1954-5
The two photos are taken in two different rooms. The lower one with the “bus” is the entry-level classroom, at the end of the infants’ school facing the entryway and first-level classrooms of the junior school. In my time (Sept. 1949) this classroom was supervised by Mrs. Berry. A couple of faces ring a bell, here, but I can’t put names to them. (After all, what’s 65 years, between friends?) The upper photo was taken in the classroom at the opposite end of the building, housing second-year youngsters. This progress is visible in the “individual” activities of drawing and painting, plus the more sophisticated writing on the wall exhibits, as opposed to the “communal” play-based activities of the lower shot. I seem to remember a Mrs. Stewart running this class. In the top picture, the camera is directed towards the corridor that ran the length of the building, facing Pentland Ave. The photographer is facing away from that wall in the lower one, out of the windows that looked out onto the macadam play area and fields.
An additional memory of Mrs. Berry’s class in 1949-50 was the arrival of a pallet full of parcels one day, one of which was given to each child in the school to take home. These turned out to be tinned foods from America, creating a preference for tinned peaches, over the real thing, that has lasted to this day. It also gave rise to the question in my five-year-old mind, of where this “America” was, where they had so much, that they could give these delicacies away, to families in a country still using ration-books. Oddly as things turn out, it’s now home.
I love the single-decker bus, complete with conductress. It looks as if the bus was held up by some roadworks, nice to see that some things dont change.
It’s one of the curved, end windows so that must be the back of Cheviot Crescent as they were the only houses that close. That must be the class at the far end of the infants school, at the opposite end to where reception was. When I was there in the early 70s that was the room they used for painting. There were easels set up and they used to dress us in little plastic tabards
Yes it is Pentland, I went to Pentland from 1977-87, I live on Pentland now but was also lived on Pentland when I was a baby at number 81.
I am lead to believe that this is indeed Pentland primary by my wife who say’s that the houses in the bottom photo through the window are to the rear of Mendip Cresent/Road.
Those houses are too close to be Mendip, it looks like they are in Pentland Avenue, due to their back gardens being close to the school path, if you entered via front gate off Grampian/Pentland and turned either sharp left or right in front of school building, either way I love the pics and would like to see more of `billy north` as I knew it. I am lead to believe that a load of school albums going back to the forties/fifties were lost when asbestos was found in attic rooms in the 1980`s.