Denbigh Road Schools Luton

A Memory of Luton.

I attended Denbigh Road school in 1944 at the age of five and had advanced to both junior and senior schools by the age of twelve.
My sister Margaret took me in on my first day but I was not too keen on staying as I remember.
My oldest recollection is collecting an oblong piece of cardboard from the classroom cupboard. The card had holes pierced down each long side threaded with a cord. We sat cross legged on the classroom floor when we were taught to ties knots and bows to simulate tying up our shoes correctly.
In the first year of juniors I escorted a girl classmate to her home in Buckingham Road after school when she dragged me into a high privet hedge and planted a kiss on my lips, wow!
In the juniors I excelled at playground games, the most popular being "Milkies". The game was played with cardboard milk bottle tops that each player would place on edge against a wall. We would all retreat about ten feet and skim-flick our tops in order to knock down those on edge. The player who knocked down the last standing "milkie" claimed the whole game play of milk tops.
The older "mikies" were usually quite soft and dirty as many still had the remains of the cream on the top of the milk but the new ones were hard and flat and usually claimed the win. Each morning the boys would arrive at school with their pockets stuffed with dirty smelling "milkies" ready for the lunchtime contests but if we arrived early enough we would sneak a game or two before assembly.
Another activity was to burn holes in film negatives using the power of a magnifying glass, I can remember the smell of burning film to this day. Family's in those days would keep their negatives in order to have processed additional pictures to give to friends and family, needless to say we had none! Another game was to see who had the fastest "Dinky Toy" when we would oil up the axles and wheels and shoot them down a slope in the playground.The cars the traveled furthest were usually heavily scratched and chipped but carried the highest exchange value when swopped, the best swop of the day being a red double decker London bus.
Academically, each year end in the juniors I was placed in the low thirties in an average class size of thirty three, but I owned the fastest silver Mercedes Benz dinky toy!
Things changed for the better when having failed the eleven plus I moved up to the seniors and was then always in the top three and excelled at maths due to the help of Mr Fern who everyone in the school feared. Having then passed my very first examination I qualified for a place at the Luton Technical School much to the annoyance of the the head teacher Mr Trip who was against anyone leaving his school and tried to persuade me to stay on. No luck there "Trippy"

John Russell
11th June 2016