My School Years

I started at Eighton Banks Primary School in 1952 aged five, having been moved from the slum clearance of the Teams, Ghd. To be in open countryside after the lung-choking life of the industrial Teams was absolute heaven.

The headmistress was Miss Smith. My teacher was called Miss Forster, I believe. I loved playing on the old "camp" at the back of the school, (before it became an animal shelter) with my good friends George Harrison who lived on Longbank in a detached stone house, his mother and father were very good to me, she would give me food and clothing, Tim Shield who lived in Springfield Avenue, Eighton Banks, (his mother was a teacher at the school), someone called Michael, a girl called Violet who lived in a bungalow off Wrekenton "Long Bank", Angela Belford and many more.

The school was first established in two cottages in 1832 as a "Charitable" school, called Barrington Charitable school, then in 1867 the existing building was built, still called Barrington Charitable School, after it's founder, Bishop Barrington, of Durham. It became known as Eighton Banks school when it was taken over by the Education Board, under the Education Act.

My sister, brother and I attended daily to ensure we got fed at least one free meal daily, otherwise food was not usually forthcoming in our house. I attended St. Thomas's Church at Harvest Festivals. I well remember Carol Cook, my brother's girlfriend. Pyeburns Farm was a working farm right next to the school, the smell was awful, but the animals got used to us.

School dinners were delivered in an old Morris Estate truck. There were pigs in the field attached to the school. You could walk over fields starting at the Church, and a lane that ran between the Church and Chapel House, all the way down past a row of disused terraced houses once home to quarrymens families, passing the "Quarrymans" pub, down a steep incline and into Mrs Kit's sweet shop in Wrekenton, to buy a penny chew. What a lovely lady she was. From the back of the school we walked over the old Roman camp to my house in the new estate, built right on top of a tip!

They were halcyon days indeed.

From St. Thomas's Church walking south we would walk up the hill, passing the council houses on the right where Carol Cook lived, up to the Wagon Inn and the streets of terraced houses where Angela Belford lived, where we played under the "hangman's arch" that led to the little chapel.

Coming out of the school, turning right we would walk up past the old row of houses to the bend, then down Galloping Green to the old vicarage at Wrekenton, now long gone, but I remember it. I recall the Minors Institute next to Dr. Pothilwaites, (? spelling), surgery.

I left Eighton Banks school age 11yrs in 1958, having failed my 11+ exam, to go to secondary schooling firstly at South Street Boys School then into the new comprehensive education system introduced in 1960, by a whole school move into the brand new school called Greenweel Lane in Beacon Lough.
How I miss those great, hot long summers, the friends I played with both as a child and later as a teenager.

I return to this memorial place each year, my children and grandchildren know all about it, but have never lived there. My dead brother's ashes are scattered there as was his dying wish.

My fondest life memories are of this wonderous village and a pace and style of life now gone forever.

History is a thing of the past.