Lancashire Life Article 1962

Learning in Lancashire
BLACKPOOL GRAMMAR SCHOOL
"LET US SEEK FOR THE BEST"
KATE HUTCHIN
tells how a school’s old motto is being interpreted in new surroundings

Ask any old boy of Blackpool Grammar School about his school days and he will tell you, not without pride, of the old Edwardian building in Raikes Parade, where lack of space made it necessary to have classes in a nearby Jewish Synagogue and a Methodist Sunday School: and where the tramcars, passing over a pair of spring-loaded points, "daily reduced one half of the school to a deaf croak".

That’s the way it was till last July when the School year ended. Eight Hundred and forty boys crammed into a building designed in 1906 to house three hundred and fifty.

In September, the new school year opened in vastly different surroundings. The great new three-storey building which had taken three years to complete - the grounds still have to be finished - was ready. And although the official opening will not take place till next May, the headmaster, the Rev. H. M. Luft M.A, M.LITT, took the first morning assembly in a great hall, which seemed to the boys to be almost as big as the whole school in Raikes Parade had been.

from the outside the new school at Highfurlong - it is built on the site of the old Highfurlong Farm, on the Garstang Road, in country so open that you can see Bleasdale Fells on a clear day - looks so typical of the new schools which are springing up all over the country. It has the airiness, the wide windows, the lightness of new stone and fresh paint that make the modern school architecture so exciting.

But this school is more than the work of architects and builders. Every member of the staff has advised on what was best for his particular subject, and has worked with the contractors to make a school in which the lively fifty-five-year-old traditions of Raikes Parade could still flourish in a splendidly Modern Shell.

The pride of the old school was the magnificently panelled Memorial Hall with its stained glass window depicting Sir Galahad, flanked by the coats-of-arms of the school and the town. The panelling and window have been included in the new building, to give it added dignity, depth and continuity.

The school coat-of-arms is a genuine one, by the way - with Blackpool’s own crest surmounted by a Fylde windmill and the red rose of Lancashire, surmounting books and a cross (for learning and spiritual values) over three martlets. And at the bottom is the school motto: "meliora sequamur" let us seek for the best.

In building this new grammar school, Blackpool education committee have certainly striven for and achieved the best. With pride the headmaster takes you over the school, which cost a quarter of a million pounds to build and has at least £50,000-worth of apparatus in it.

From the fine assembly hall, with its magnificent stage and electronic organ, to the gymnasium where physical training covers everything from fencing to trampoline work: from the seven superbly equipped science laboratories to the pottery room with its two pottery wheels: from the geography room with it’s globe that lets down from the ceiling, to the dream kitchen where lunch is cooked for seven hundred boys and nearly fifty staff each day, everything is as nearly ideal as money and thought can make it.

But the building, however fine, is only a part of any school. What of the intangibles - the atmosphere in which the boys work, the standards they achieve, the ideals they pursue, the preparation for living in the modern world?

One quickly gets the impression that the Rev. Mr. Luft and his loyal and co-operative staff - some of them old boys of the school - are doing an admirable job.

Here is no academic sweat shop with examination-passing the only goal, though the record in this respect is high. Last July, six boys won state scholarships, and in the five sixth forms -maths, two science, modern studies and arts, including a complete classics course - there are no fewer than one hundred and fifty boys.

Games flourish - rugby football, hockey, tennis, cross-country running, basket ball, fives and swimming . For six years running they have won the Fylde district inter-grammar school swimming championships, and Mr Luft reckons that eighty-five percent of his boys are swimmers.

Clubs, which meet in the school in the lunch hour or after four o’clock, are numberless. From science to jazz appreciation, train spotting to music, classics - they produce a play in Latin or Greek every other year - to ship adoption, drama and photography; they cater for every possible type of interest.

Russian is taken as a subsidiary subject by senior boys: some of the younger ones even correspond with Russian schoolboys. Distinguished men, amongst them old boys, frequently visit the school to talk to the boys.

Mr Luft is one of those rare headmasters who believe in keeping in touch with his boys at all times. He teaches the boys at all age levels, from the time they arrive aged eleven to the time that they leave.

"This means that we really get to know each other," he explained. "there is a tendency nowadays for headmasters to be so over-whelmed by administrative work that they have no time to teach. In some cases they only see the boys when they are in trouble, and mutual confidence is lost."

The boys are disciplined with reasonable firmness - but by the prefects more than the masters. There is a head boy, with two deputies, twenty prefects - who wear a distinctive blue gown - and forty sub-prefects. They keep order and mete out detentions, and only after three detentions is a boy reported to the head.

This prefect system, like the training for public-speaking the senior boys receive, builds self-reliance and responsibility, and is excellent training for manhood.

No wonder there is such a keen Old Boys’ Association, or that distinguished old boys are serving humanity in many parts of the world never lose touch with a school of which they and Blackpool are justly proud.