The Village School
A Brief History of Swardeston School
Until early 1873 the children were taught in a subscription school organised by the village clergy. This would usually operate from the house of the teacher, frequently assisted by other village residents who could read and write.
From the mid-1830s until the late-1840s school was taught by Eleanor Mortimer in a cottage close to Tar Row on the turnpike where she lived with her agricultural labourer husband Edmund. Eleanor was born in 1780 so was relatively elderly to be teaching twenty or so village children under the age of 12.
By 1850 school was being taught by Mary Browne, the teenage daughter of Robert Browne a builder who is almost certainly the origin of Brownes Lane at the southern tip of the common. For a few years in the mid-1850s the school mistress was one Ann Wiseman of unknown address before the role passed to Mary Thrower for a few years in the late-1850s before passing once again to Mary's daughter Letitia Thrower who was still a teenager when she assumed the role. Mary, a widow, and Letitia shared a house, which Mary owned, at the south end of the common and in 1861 they had more than thirty pupils attending school there.
The Elementary Education Act of 1870 made provision for Board Schools to be set up and on 7th February 1873 the Education Authority published a notice setting out the provision of a school for Swardeston with a one-month period for submissions. This almost certainly brought the subscription school in Swardeston to an end but, despite the one-month period elapsing, nothing more seems to have happened.
After a year of canvasing the vicar and with no hope of a resumption of the school a group of villagers wrote the this letter, on the right, to the editor of The Norfolk News which was published on 21st March 1874.
Correspondence
A CRY FOR HELP
To the Editor
Swardeston, March 15th, 1874.
On June 22nd 1874 the Education Authority published a further notice stating that, as the one-month period had now expired (actually 16 months), they required a school for 60 pupils to be provided within the next 6 months or a School Board would be formed to drive the process forward. After another year had passed a School Board was established and just one week before Christmas 1875 the Board met and appointed Mr John Pearce of Norwich to prepare plans for a school and teacher's residence to be built on a piece of land on "Upper Common" that had been earmarked as long ago as December 1870.
Eventually in June 1877 an Invitation to Tender was published in the local press by the Swardeston School Board clerk, Mr George Barnabus Feltham of Common Farm, using John Pearce's plans and specifications. Things finally moved on apace as the School Board were advertising in December 1877 for a Head Mistress to take charge of their new school in February 1878. In March 1878 the position of School Mistress was still being advertised extensively in the press with a view to the school opening at Easter that year.
Whatever their preferences the School Board eventually appointed Mr Thomas Taylor to the position of Head Master, assisted by his wife Matilda, when the school finally opened in May 1878 having cost the princely sum of £900 to build.
This implies that at least some of the village children were without any formal education for several years during this period although that is unlikely to have been the case for most of them. Mr Taylor remained in post until May 12th 1908, his 30 years of service being the longest by far of any teacher at the school.
Having been built to accommodate 60 pupils in its original form the school was already badly overcrowded by 1900 when the school had an average attendance of 75 and so was enlarged to have space for 90. To cope with these increasing numbers by 1890 Thomas and Matilda had enlisted the services of their son Arthur and daughter Maud as assistant teachers. By the time Thomas Taylor retired in 1908 the school had an attendance figure of 87 so was, yet again, overcrowded.
The school progressed steadily for a number of years with a considerable turnover of teaching staff while receiving fairly good reports from the school inspectors despite the problems of overcrowding. Many intriguing reasons seem to have been presented to explain pupil absence and almost any other activity seems to have taken precedence over education.
Towards the end of 1915 a few children were missing from school suffering from diphtheria and this took on epidemic proportions during the whole of the following year with the school being closed on occasions due to lack of healthy pupils. By early 1917 the epidemic appears to have passed but not before several pupils died and many lost months of schooling.
For the next decade or so the school suffered bouts of measles, chicken pox, whooping cough, scarlet fever and other ailments, many of which led to school closures.
By 1939, with the outbreak of WW2, the school were dealing with evacuees, gas masks, air raid practices and many similar distractions. Wire netting and glued paper were applied to windows and pupils were allocated bushes to crouch behind in the various pits on the nearby common in the event of an air raid. The boys were set to work digging a trench just outside the school walls in which to shelter during a raid.
By 1966 the school was again overcrowded and a mobile classroom was installed. This was followed just three years later by a second mobile classroom and the school was organised into four separate classes.
In January 1973 there were 96 pupils on the roll but when the school re-opened in September that year the number had fallen to just 43 due to the older children being transferred to the new school in Mulbarton. One of the mobile classrooms was taken away and builders arrived to install indoor toilets.
By 1982 the local education authority had decided to close the school entirely and, despite campaigning by parents, the school closed in July of the following year.
The last headmaster of the school, Bill Jervis, produced a history of the school from reference to the school log books and a transcription of his book is available to read and/or download here.