"At the beginning of September, 1939, the Staff was recalled from holidays, as the Government’s plans for evacuation were put into operation. Blackpool was a reception area, and into it poured thousands of evacuee children. Teachers became billetting officers, first of all collecting information about available accommodation in the streets assigned to each of us, and then leading strings of children to occupy it. My ‘beat’ was Adelaide Street, and I still remember the warmth of sympathy from many of the householders there, though there were understandable tears from one of them when twenty little boys of seven and eight years old filed into the house she was running single-handed.

Once billetting was complete though the return home began as a trickle almost overnight we returned to our own scholastic problems. The Central High School for Girls, from Manchester, had been allocated to the Collegiate School, and it took many Staff Meetings to work out the details. On one basic principle Miss Dunn was adamant that the incoming school must have an exact half of all we had to offer. So each school spent four hours daily in the school building, 8.45 to 12.45 or 1.0 to 5.0, morning or afternoon in alternate weeks. We spent the out-of-school time in a variety of accommodation, including the cricket pavilion in the Park, and rooms provided by the Co-operative Society near their central premises. Here we did what we could lessons as far as possible for the Senior School, and some for the Juniors, with various other ploys like darning socks for a nearby anti-aircraft battery, knitting, speech-training and mime. However, this two-into-one scheme had a limited life, for many Manchester girls, with their attendant staff, drifted back home as the threat of air-raids appeared to recede, until we were able to incorporate such as remained into our own classes. In 1943, when severe bombing attacks on Manchester became a reality, we housed a part of Stretford High School, but this time with little disruption of our own regular activities.

Blackout regulations made other changes necessary, as it was not possible to black-out the whole building. The Hall was done, and most of the main floor. The Staff-Room became the headquarters of the Staff fire-watchers, for, like other citizens, the able-bodied among us had to undertake fire-watching duties. After instruction at the Fire Station in such alien branches of knowledge as the use of stirrup pumps and How to Deal with Incendiary Bombs, we arranged a rota of three fire-watchers per night, to spend the blacked-out hours in School. Duties began by a routine inspection of the top corridor with dimmed torches, and a hazardous ascent of two ladders, one at each end, to make sure that no incendiary bomb had somehow got unnoticed into the loft. Then three camp beds were put in the Staff Room, though we were not allowed to undress, and the watchers lay uneasily listening to the sounds of darkness swing doors creaking without cause, pipes muttering, the occasional foot-step outside the windows, which we always hoped belonged to a warden or policeman. As the months went by without incident, sleep came more easily, until the night when a patrolling policeman, loudly pealing the front-door bell, failed to wake the ‘watchers’. After that, one of the three spent the night in isolation in Room 24, theoretically more likely to respond to any future summons. There was no hot water in School taps then, so after a chilly wash in the morning, we greeted the new day bleary-eyed and sticky, grateful if it was the weekend, when we could go home to bath and sleep, instead of staying to teach.

Black-out affected, too, the hours of teaching. We could not begin School until it was light, nor continue after it was dark, so in winter we were often having Morning Assembly in the light of dawn, and seeing girls out of th2 cloakrooms in a deepening dusk, where they moved quietly like dwellers in some mythical land of shades. It was difficult to run the school societies, but some new activities came into being, as some girls and staff were prepared to come back in the evenings to make camouflage nets, or, like the Knit-Wits, to combine knitting for the Forces with discussion. The Savings Group, too, made gigantic efforts, and raised thousands of pounds in the special Savings Weeks organised by the Government. As the need for labour in the Fylde became more acute, girls from the Middle School were sent out in the Autumn terms to help lift the potato crop on local farms. They would return to School at the end of the day, muddy, tired, but usually happy, eager to compare notes on their employers and rural amenities. Some girls also helped on local farms in the summer holidays, one going on to qualify as a veterinary surgeon from this start.

To Fire Drill was now added Air Raid Practice, in the humped shelters excavated at the ends of the hockey pitches, a feature of the School landscape for six years almost a school generation. Into them filed the School, packed tight on slatted wooden benches in semi-darkness, though fortunately actual siren-warnings in school hours were few.

The Government’s wise policy of ensuring that sufficient food was available for school children led to a rapid extension of the School Meals Service too rapid for the very limited accommodation available. The select little group of County and other girls from a distance suddenly exploded into two crowded sittings in the small dining room (now the Library), where space was so restricted that plates of food in one direction and piles of ‘empties’ in the other were passed over the heads of the diners by a chain gang wedged tightly between the tables. Dinners were no longer cooked on the premises, but imported from a central kitchen in the town, and the erection of the present Kitchen-Dining-Room Unit after the war was a most welcome relief from conditions which had become almost intolerable even if part of the cost was the loss of the best tennis court

In 1941, Miss Dunn retired, having stayed beyond her original intention, to see the School through the initial disruption caused by the war. The coming of Miss Allan speeded up a trend which the war had made inevitable a closer link between School and the world outside its waifs. Our activities became more outward-looking, and as Miss Allan herself became more closely involved with public activities, so did the School. The Staff itself was changing, as those who had known the School before 1926 came to retiring age, and had often to be replaced by part-time, temporary, or married teachers. Miss Allan herself married, a step then considered so heterodox that her continuance as Head Mistress was seriously debated! It seems a far cry now from this situation to the present Staff, with its high proportion of both married staff and men.

Another development that began in the war years, and which has grown to be of doubtful advantage to school girls, was that of weekend and holiday jobs, which, in a town like Blackpool, are often so demanding that girls are in danger of returning to School drained of energy. Blackpool’s capacity to absorb vast numbers was used for another cause in 1940. After the fall of France, all the Polish Air Force which could make its way here was brought to Blackpool, where they stayed for varying lengths of time, till they could be posted to other areas, and re-formed as a fighting unit. The officers and men were given a course in English as part of their training, and some of the Collegiate Staff volunteered to give lessons to their wives and families, using French, which many of them spoke, as a common tongue till they were sufficiently fluent in English. Some of them h3d fled the length and breadth of Europe to find means of reaching England; most of them were gnawed by anxiety for relatives still in Poland; all of them were home-sick for their own country and eager to talk about it. Some of the younger men, billeted in the town, found good friends and new homes; some married local girls, and in the 1950’s, their children were beginning to enter the Collegiate School.

Throughout these years, academic work went on. In a bold gesture of defiant confidence, the coalition government passed, in 1944, a new Education Act. It provided for secondary education for all according to the gifts and potential of each child and, as Mrs. Forgan writes, "it changed the climate of parental choice. It allowed married women to teach a revolutionary measure, and girls ceased to feel that the choice must be either teaching or matrimony. The Ministry of Labour emerged as a useful ally in career planning, Careers Conventions became established.

Innovation was not lacking in other ways in school. Constant requests for help and money drove us to start the Charities Fund, with an evening event, later to be replaced by a Garden Party. We held our first Sports Day. Hitherto there had been a feeling that Sport was not for the Collegiate School girl! It began at 6 p.m. and finished before 10 when dusk drove us home. We went on a school journey to the Lakes and stayed at the Elterwater Youth Hostel. Most travelled by bicycle, and from the third years up to the sixth, only twelve faced the outing. Food coupons and food for packed lunches had to be taken with us.

Those of us who entered the sixth form in 1939 still debated and discussed and played games and prepared for our examinations. Current Events were of pressing relevance and our perspectives were understandably different from what they would have been had there been no war. Yet the running of the school had to go on, and, before Hiroshima changed our concept of permanence, we could still feel that Goodness, Truth and Beauty would somehow persist. We could write,