In the course of reflecting on their childhood cinemagoing, Cinema Culture in 1930s Britain (CCINTB<\/a>) participants would often fall into talking about their schooldays, sometimes recalling playground chit-chat about films seen and stars venerated:<\/p>\n And erm and then we’d talk with girls in\u00a0the\u00a0school yard. We used to sit, sit down <\/em>in the\u00a0school yard, in a group, talk.\u00a0They were all as bad as me, you know. All as bad as me. Wanting to know. Who. If\u00a0I didn’t go [to the pictures] the night before, somebody did. Talked about it\u00a0all the time.\u00a0<\/em>(Ellen Casey)<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n Or the temptation to bunk off school to go to the pictures:<\/p>\n Interviewer:<\/em><\/strong>\u00a0Yeah. ‘Cause I was interested when you’d been telling me on the phone about\u00a0<\/em>eh, all the kids sort of\u00a0<\/em>skipping<\/em>\u00a0off school\u2014<\/em><\/p>\n Interviewee:<\/em><\/strong> Oh yes. [\u2026] But you see, I didn’t. I wasn’t that gone. [bursts out laughing] I was a <\/em>good little girl. <\/em>(Kath Browne)<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n Or leisure-time trips to the cinema in the company of friends from school:<\/p>\n [Going to the cinema] was usually with my\u00a0<\/em>school<\/em>\u00a0friends. [\u2026] And eh, yes. Ooh, we used to chatter a lot about the films we’d seen<\/em>\u00a0<\/em>at\u00a0<\/em>school<\/em>. We were all collecting film star photographs. <\/em>(Beatrice Cooper)<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n As well as the occasional cinema visit organised by their school:<\/p>\n I seen [Gracie Fields] in a few films. You know\u00a0they took us once\u00a0from\u00a0school to see one of her films and it was called <\/em>Queen of Hearts. I remember\u00a0that. Well. Taken to the pictures. We loved it. You know. And she had these\u00a0marvellous dresses on and all this. <\/em>(Ellen Casey)<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n Now, of course, the school took us once a year to the pictures. [\u2026] Mhm. What did I see in the school pictures? Well, the first one I saw was <\/em>Little Women. <\/em>(Nancie Miller)<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n *<\/p>\n All the interviewees were asked how old they were when their full-time education came to an end (for most of their generation the minimum school-leaving age was fourteen). To some participants, this question offered an occasion for comment on the educational opportunities that had been available to them. Their reflections, frequently alluding to constraints on their schooling, are expressed as a distinctive set of themes and modes of telling, and these are typically conveyed in a variant of memory talk that melds the personal with the collective or frames the personal within a collective experience.[i]<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n A number of participants recall that their home circumstances simply put them out of contention for anything beyond the most basic schooling. Nat Frieling, for example, never even sat the exam for a scholarship to secondary school:<\/p>\n I left school at thirteen. The answer to that is–such is poverty. I\u00a0never went in for\u00a0nowt.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n Going on to a secondary school was out of the question, others recall, because for most schoolchildren fees would have to be paid:<\/p>\n We weren’t in the position to go on to, er, [post-elementary] education in those days as they are now. Because in those days, you had to pay for it. [\u2026] You had to pay for it in those days. <\/em>(Sam Flamholtz; left school at fourteen)<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n I would have loved to have gone\u00a0on to continue my education, but it wasn’t possible financially. At that time [\u2026] you used to pay\u00a0for everything, well, you know I was an only one an<\/em>d [they] still couldn’t afford to\u00a0educate\u00a0me<\/em>. (Mary McCusker; left school at fourteen)<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n And a free secondary-school place might not be taken up because a uniform and other necessities still had to be paid for:<\/p>\n You sat an examination and normally you’d go to a high school or something. I got, eh, I was getting free to this convent school. [\u2026]. But it would have meant books, and it would have meant uniform and my mother couldn’t see her way to do it. <\/em>(Sheila McWhinnie; left school at fourteen)<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n I had to be taken away from grammar school because my mum couldn’t<\/em>\u00a0afford a replacement\u00a0uniform. <\/em>(Mickie Rivers; left school at fourteen)<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n For some, staying on at school beyond the minimum leaving age is recalled as having been out of the question because the earnings from a job were an essential addition to the family\u2019s income.<\/p>\n [I left school] the day I was fourteen because, I hadn’t even got my school\u00a0leaving certificate\u00a0but being honest, it was a new thing, and I didn’t really\u00a0care a lot. You know as long as I was sort of helping a bit, but as the babies\u00a0kept coming\u2026. <\/em>(Irene Dennerley)<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n There are some differences in the feeling tone of these memories of education curtailed. Some accounts convey, dispassionately, a sense of acceptance. The situation is recalled \u00a0as a taken-for-granted feature of the passage from childhood to adulthood, and certainly nothing to make a fuss about. \u00a0Ellen Casey\u2019s essay \u2018Out of school and into work\u2019 opens:<\/p>\n December 1934 was the time I left school in Collyhurst. Having reached the age of fourteen, it was time to move on. <\/em>I already had a job in a Raincoat and Waterproof Factory opposite Strangeways Prison, and I was to start work at 8.30am on 2nd of January 1935.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n Bringing home a wage is recollected in quite positive terms: not just as indispensable for the family but as something to be glad about and even proud of:<\/p>\n I was going to be fourteen before the… practically on the day the school returned, I was going to be fourteen. But in my mind, I wasn\u2019t going back, \u2018cause we needed the money and I thought no, if I could just get a job.<\/em> (Nancie Miller)<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n There surfaces in these recollections little or no resentment about the barriers participants faced. In memory at least, \u201cunrealistic\u201d ambitions were neither harboured nor even brought to consciousness at the time. More commonplace is a sense of acceptance\u2014resignation would be too strong a word–that, though things might be different today, at the time limitations on education and barriers to ambition were simply the rule, the way of the world for people of their generation and their class.<\/p>\n And for their gender, too. If not expressly articulated, the sense that girls faced more limited educational opportunities than boys, or that less was expected of them\u2014perhaps even that education is wasted on a girl–is often implied:<\/p>\n I was\u00a0at school with a girl, and she was one of five. And she sat next to me and when\u00a0any problems were put up on the board, eh, she would just take one glance at the\u00a0board, and the next thing she would sit back with her arms folded as we had to\u00a0do then to\u00a0let the teacher\u00a0know we were finished. And everybody else would be\u00a0sitting chewing on their pencil. Do you know that that girl went on to work in a\u00a0wee draper’s shop and sold ribbon and wee bits of lace. Oh! Terrible waste of a\u00a0brain!\u00a0 <\/em>(Mary McCusker)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n While memories of schooling and school-leaving are more\u00a0 frequently offered by female than by male participants, taken together these are too few in number to be regarded as more than indicative of a trend. But while it would certainly be rash to generalise from these cases, the shared themes and structures of feeling across all\u00a0 CCINTB informants\u2019 memory-talk are telling. These personal memories of truncated schooling and missed opportunities belong to the collective memory of a generation. Many of us will have heard similar stories from our own grandparents.<\/p>\n *<\/p>\n There is a fine line, though, between acquiescing to the inevitability of a particular state of affairs and quietly, perhaps unthinkingly, extracting the maximum benefit from what was on offer. Nancie Miller\u2019s interview is full of references to schooling and education: \u201cI enjoyed school, really truly enjoyed it. In fact, I loved it,\u201d she insists. Recalling her first day at in the classroom, she says that she was taken to school at the age of four by her older sister, and that she \u201csat there quite happy and erm I can remember, the teacher didn\u2019t seem to mind. Nobody minded.\u201d From seeing her sister putting up her hand and answering the teacher\u2019s questions correctly and \u201cbeaming as if it was me that had answered\u201d, she \u201cknew the importance of learning.\u201d But this, it seems, was as far as it went for Nancie. Her circumstances were such that she \u201chad no thought of staying on at school.”<\/p>\n Ellen Casey paints her childhood self as unusually resolute in the matter of education. She remembers a determination to make the best of her schooling, recalling that she more or less managed her own education, taking herself to school when she was only three, transcending a \u00a0sectarian divide to sample the options available locally, and then deciding on what she considered best for her:<\/p>\n I wandered into school when I was three. And that was a Protestant school because it was just near, and I went in with all the kids. And they never bothered. They just let me go in. So I started going there. [\u2026]. But the priest started coming round to see my mother saying that it’s not right to go to the Protestant school. The Catholics, they should be there. You know, you’re doing wrong. Letting them go. So my mother was a bit worried about it. She asked us did we want to go to St Patrick’s Catholic. So I knew some girls up our street went. Said, “Oh yeah! I’ll go. Yeah.” So, we went to St Patrick’s. I was only there I think about 18 month and I hated it. I absolutely hated it. I hated the nuns. They were awful. The nuns were awful. I had to go to the, well they had a convent next to it:<\/strong> And I had to go every night to learn the religion that I’d lost out on. You\u00a0know what I mean? To pick up on the religion. I didn’t like that. You know. Kids were going to\u00a0play centres, watching magic lantern, and I was going with the nuns.\u00a0And I hated it. I was broken-hearted. So eh, I said to my mother, I said,\u00a0“Oh,” I said, “Mam. Don’t like it.” And I used to cry so. I said, “Give me a\u00a0note and I’ll go back to the headmaster at St Catherine’s and ask if he’ll have\u00a0me back.” So my mum said all right. She writ me a note. And I went and I says to\u00a0him, I said eh, “[\u2026] Can I come back? Please.” I said, “I don’t like it\u00a0there,” I said, “I do hate it,” I said, “And I don’t want to go and it’s making\u00a0me ill.” So he read the note off my mother and he eh, “Yes,” he said, “You can\u00a0come back.” He said, “When you want to come back. Tomorrow or Monday?”\u00a0I said, “Tomorrow.” So I went back to the\u00a0Protestant\u00a0school. So, that was me. I was really,\u00a0nothing bothered me. I used to do anything. I wasn’t a timid child. I wasn’t,\u00a0you know. I’d just do any– I had the willpower to do anything. <\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n *<\/p>\n Several interviewees evidently felt their lack of education particularly keenly, recalling their efforts to remedy matters in their adult lives through self-education or adult education. Nat Frieling, who explains that he received no secondary education because he had to leave school as early as possible and go out to work, was left with a lifelong thirst for learning:<\/p>\n I was determined, because I left school at thirteen, to attempt [\u2026] to educate myself. Most boys of my age went dancing when they were seventeen, eighteen. Which is quite a nice sociable thing to do. I didn’t. Most boys of my age, round about seventeen or twenty, went and played billiards. Most people of my age joined organisations, clubs. And they went to the dogs, racing. Did all kinds of social activities which I didn’t. My main activity was based on one word. Education. I went to every museum and possible place of advancement in Manchester. To do one thing. Only one thing. To learn.\u00a0<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n An active trade unionist, in later life Mr Frieling studied for a diploma in economics through the labour movement. He relished his CCINTB interview, treating it as a further opportunity for self-improvement and addressing the interviewer as a colleague and fellow scholar.<\/p>\n *<\/p>\n A different, and quite distinctive, feeling tone marks some other memories of curtailed schooling and out-of-reach opportunities. Unspoken in the recollections of a number of interviewees is a suggestion that their native talents and abilities, unacknowledged or undeveloped through the formal education system, found other outlets for fulfilment of their needs, desires and \u00a0aspirations. This observation appears to be confined almost exclusively to women.<\/p>\n The next blog will explore this discovery and consider what it reveals about the meanings of cinema for some women of the 1930s generation.<\/p>\n Participants<\/strong><\/p>\n\n
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