Elmwood High School

A Memory of Hackbridge.

I went to a brand new primary school called Park Farm, so then going to Elmwwod was like going back in time. I just caught the end of Stacey walking around like something out of Harry Potter. My brother had told me about the morning assembly where Reg Evans played the violin & I think it was Nellie Perman played the piano. It was horrible as they never seemed to be playing the same tune. They still had the old dip in the ink pens in some classrooms, it was like something out of a Dickens novel. The leather footballs would almost knock you out if you were stupid enough to head one, and I saw the biggest rats I ever saw running out from underneath the old canteen down the road (eventually condemed by a visit from environmental health). Reg Evans was quite an interesting bloke. He was actually a trained theatre make up artist and made up one of the girls in our class to look like a film star one day. Chippy Wood was a good honest bloke. Nellie Peman though, was a bit of a battle axe. She bumped into a wall surrounding Carew Manor once and a sword fell out of the wall. We used to play football across the road in Beddington Park and it was freezing some days. When Stacey left we had a head master called Atherton I think it was, and he as soft as Stacey was hard. He gave me the cane once and he was looking the other way as he couldn't bear to look. Some famous people went to Elmwood, notibly Roy Budd the pianist (he hated it), actor Edward Woodward, and my favourite, guitarist Jeff Beck. Great reading people's memories of the old dump. Sad it's gone really, but if you look at the facilities of most modern schools now it's no wonder they closed Elmwood. I've included memories of Elmwood in a book I'm writing at the moment as there were so many funny things going on there.