School Magazine

I am indebted to CJ Smith, a “Grange 58er”and Alan Woodhead, for passing on copies of the school magazine for the years 1958 to 1964-65.

A constant theme of our years at Grange was the reference to the state of the buildings and the “promise” of a new school. A Speech Day rarely passed without some comment about our plight. The editorial to the 1959 magazine echoes some of the frustrations felt by both staff and pupils and concerns about the future and the impact of comprehensive education.

New Jerusalem.


“These things shall be;
a nobler pileShall rise in some new, verdant plot;
A Grammar-tech., the latest style -
In nineteen hundred Lord -knows-what.”

This we cautiously conclude, is as much as can safely be gathered from the Bradford Schools’ Development Plan as far as it affects our future. Much has recently been written about the plan in the press; Mr Davies, the Deputy Director (of Education) spoke about it in some detail at the Old Boys’ Dinner, and even mentioned specific dates. We suspect actual figures must be digested with more than the proverbial grain of salt. The dates of planners, whose motto must necessarily be “To travel hopefully is better than to arrive”, are usually mere enthusiastic approximations, like the dates in 2D’s history essays.

If we had been a rocket-site. or a fashion store in the Central Area, things would have already been arranged, with Sabrina present to open the Headmaster’s study with a gold-plated key. But since we are only a school, we have to wait our turn. However, our turn will come; and all in all, we think we have not done too badly in the plan. At least we are to preserve our identity as a separate boys’ school; there is no immediate threat of being swallowed up in a new comprehensive organisation. That we are to have a technical as well as a grammar school stream need not alarm or surprise. We are already in effect a bi-lateral school, with ‘M’ and ‘X’ forms already having a technical or practical as opposed to an academic bias. The new organisation will develop and extend this aspect of our work, and will place the two types of education on an equal footing. And although this will mean that a number of the more able boys will be lost to the humanitarian studies - which in the opinion of some of us is a pity - that is to be expected in an age where  the need for trained technologists is becoming daily more acute.

Meanwhile we must not let thoughts of the future distract us from present problems. We shall undoubtedly be in our present home for some years yet. We know our surroundings are a little drab and depressing, but surely there must be many little things we could do to make them less so. The Authority have already shown their willingness to help by providing us with a fine new staffroom and also agreeing to schemes to extend the art department and equip a new library room. But we must do more to help ourselves - so on with our thinking-caps, and let us devise ways and means of brightening the old place up!

 

The 1962 editorial was entitled ‘Bricks, Mortar and Morals’ and went on at some length about the architecture of the  new buildings that had been erected in the centre of Bradford. The penultimate paragraph goes on:

‘It’s a question of values, and a question of priorities. Is it right that new garages for poorly motor-cars should outnumber many times over hospitals for poorly people? That dress-shops and dance halls should flourish like  the green bay tree, with housing coming a bad second and schools practically nowhere? Are we content, in this age of private affluence and public squalor, that our youngsters should spend their leisure time in a palatial new Locarno or Ritz and their working hours in a school which may be a cross between a gaol and a nineteenth-century workhouse - or, in our case, a Dachau of tumbledown huts and sheds?’