The Romans dedicated the month of January to Janus, the god of beginnings and transitions, thence also of gates, doors, doorways, endings and time.  He is usually depicted as a two-faced god since he looks to the future and the past.  In my last chronological posts, you may remember I’d hit a ‘brick wall’ with regard to getting on-site and had become reliant on Giuseppe and ‘undercover’ help.  But, as so often happens, what had seemed ‘the end’ was only the beginning of another phase of my story.  For as Randy Pausch said: ‘The brick walls are there for a reason.  They’re not there to keep us out. The brick walls are there to give us a chance to show how badly we want something.’

I returned to the site after work on June 2nd, unable to keep away.  Once again, there was no need to break my word because others knew how much it meant to me.  Doorways.  Gateways.  Much the same thing.  And the doorway to the site is the Gateman, of course.  At the end of the day when the site was finally quiet, Peter, Wates’ Gateman, volunteered to act as my ‘undercover’ man number two.

Doors, walls and floors were very much the theme that day on site.  The first photo Peter took was to show how the work was advancing on a new side door for the Main Building.  As you know, the original Newcastle High building had an entrance door in its north elevation.  However, it was blocked up when the 1933 extension was added.

Now that easy access to the new build will be needed, a north door is being reinstated again by Wates.  The only way to do this was to create an opening somewhere in the side wall of the bin store.  As EWA architect’s aim was to ensure optimum circulation around the building, the obvious place for the door was at the north end of the bottom corridor.  The result of this?  A direct hit on one of the ‘holes.’

Giuseppe’s photographs from that same day show us the work that was going on inside the new doorway too.  As seemed to be happening everywhere else in both buildings, flooring was in progress.

New entrance doors had also been installed in the re-styled LRC too.

New interior doors had clearly been recently delivered and were now positioned all over the building ready for joiners to hang.  Some of these doors were a pale wood such as the one waiting to be hung on what at the time was destined to be Michael Tippett’s Deputy Head’s Office at the north end of the first floor corridor.  The room next to it would soon become Room 18 where I’m timetabled for all my lessons this year.  Both rooms have been formed from the north end of the social and working staffrooms.  A good place for me to be.

On the top corridor, which will now be the Sixth Form Library and study area, the doors propped up against the walls were teal green.

The area of the building which remains virtually unchanged is the first floor main corridor with its wonderful original woodwork.  Even though nearly two years have now passed since we said goodbye to the building as Church High, those familiar doors are still dark green.

As I’ve said before, the main changes on this corridor are the lack of Room 5, my old teaching classroom, and also the old north staircase.  The stairs are now just off the north end of the main corridor to the left in the new infill extension.  As Peter’s photos show, there is still clearly some work to be done there.  It still looks like a building site!

But it did all get finished in time, of course.  And since I am writing this post in January and its god Janus looks both backwards and forwards, I thought I would include a picture of the same view now.

And what was I doing all the time Peter wandered the building with my camera on June 2nd?  Well, I didn’t exactly build a willow-cabin at the gate, but, like Patience on a monument, I did spend the time happily enjoying all the greenery outside of Peter Wilson’s cabin.

 

“For last year’s words belong to last year’s language/And next year’s words await another voice./And to make an end is to make a beginning.”(T.S.Eliot: Little Gidding) When the merger was announced in January 2013, a return to Tankerville seemed a mile away.  A lot of water has passed under the bridge since then (some of it in storm torrents, it’s true), but here we are and, to quote the end of Canon Henry Scott Holland’s poem ‘Death is Nothing At All’, “All is well.”

These profoundly healing  words, which have brought solace to many suffering bereavement, were originally written as part of a sermon.  Their great power comes from the light they shed on altered physical circumstance and the spiritual life, where ends just don’t exist – or at least are just the beginning of something else.  And there’s no escaping that the end of Church High affected many like a bereavement – and still does.  I am one of those people.  ‘Life goes on,’ but it’s more complex than that.  The new beginning we shared in September 2016 has been helpful.  Looking at things from the slant of a co-existing past and present might be pushing it for some, I know, but it has helped me.  I still see the old faces and hear the old voices within those walls.  Odder again, even older voices from the deeper past are now surfacing as I read more and more widely for this blog.  Sometimes I have taken ‘wrong turns,’ but usually that has led me to a book or name I’d not have found otherwise.

What kind of wrong turns, you may ask?  Well, like reading up on the ‘wrong’ Canon Holland for a start!  For at the very beginning of our story the voice we need to tune in to is not that of Canon Henry Scott Holland (despite being connected with St Pauls and knowing one of Gladstone’s daughters, the relevance of which will become clear to you later), but that of Canon Francis Holland of Canterbury.

It would have been nice if one of our founding fathers had written those beautiful words (which is probably what beguiled me) but as I read more and more about Canon Henry’s wit and ‘puckish charm’, something wasn’t ringing true.  Dare I say it?  He didn’t sound ‘very Church High.’  Which is because, of course, he wasn’t!  Quizzically, I returned to Enid Moberly Bell’s book and the penny finally dropped.  Something else I had known all along but had forgotten that I knew.

The Jubilee Book mentions Canon Holland twice, the first reference making clear just how integral he was to the founding of Newcastle High School: ‘Early in 1884 the Company received a request from Newcastle that they should establish a school there and intimating that sufficient financial backing would be forthcoming.  In March, two representatives of the Council, Canon Holland and Canon Gregory, visited Newcastle to report on the proposal and their account was such that at a meeting on May 29th, 1884, the Council of The Church Schools Company resolved “that it is desirable to establish a High School for Girls at Newcastle”.’  We learn in the second reference that Canon Holland returned to Newcastle on Wednesday, January 21st 1885 when the school was formally opened under the name of The Newcastle High School: ‘The proceedings began with a service in Jesmond Parish Church …… 

‘…. and then after the service a meeting was held in the school.  There Canon Holland, who had come as the representative of the Company, said that he thought that the Newcastle school stood first in interest of all the Company’s schools, for it was founded on what was already a good school.  He emphasised that no rivalry with Gateshead was intended and promised on behalf of the Company that if the numbers increased the school should have new buildings.’  The meeting Canon Holland attended was, of course, held on the original site, in the building on Jesmond Road which had previously been Miss Hewison’s school.

Florence MacKenzie ends her section of the Jubilee Book with a glorious quotation, most apt for a New Year post: ‘The future comes from behind over our heads.’  Her point was that the School, ‘secure in what lies behind, can turn in equal faith and hope to the coming .. years.’  She couldn’t have dreamed at the time how true this would literally turn out to be, with the building becoming Newcastle High School for a second time in September 2016.  In the same way, the future of the new school on Tankerville must surely be assured based on the past history of the founders of the original school.  For Canon Francis Holland of Canterbury not only played a key role in the story of girls independent schools in this country,  he also served as Chaplain to none other than HM Queen Victoria herself and as Hon. Chaplain to her heir, HM King Edward VII.  Who could have imagined that?  To use a very modern phrase, in the hands of Francis James Holland we were clearly in a very ‘safe pair of hands’ indeed!

Francis Holland’s Wikipedia biography also tells us that c 1880 he ‘established a trust fund for two independent schools in London.’  To this day, these schools still survive in the vicinity of Sloane Square and Regent’s Park, London, as the Francis Holland School, boasting a highly impressive list of distinguished Alumnae.  The Church Schools Company history explains that the Committee used these two schools as one of their guiding precedents, the other being the Girls Public Day School Trust: ‘One of its members, Francis Holland, priest-in-charge of what was then known as the Quebec Chapel, … had already ventured in this field.  He had been moved to do this by his wife [Mary Sybilla Lyall], who deplored the fact that the Church, which had played so large a part in elementary education, was content to leave the higher branches to undenominational bodies [GPDST].  The Hollands had many neighbours and friends with children of school age, who encouraged Francis Holland to found a school for their children…. When the founder became Canon of Canterbury and left London, he still kept his interest in the schools, coming up to London every week to teach in them.  In 1883 he gladly joined the Committee promoting the new company, and all his experience was at its service, but he did not incorporate his schools in the new company’.  They remained as The Francis Holland Schools Trust.

So what would Canon Holland say to us now as we enter 2017?  Well, ‘Blessed are the Peacemakers’ is the final inscription on his gravestone.  If he felt this so strongly at the very end of his life, surely that might not be a bad place for us to start.  It’s strange that it often takes the end of something to lead you to want to understand its beginnings.  Ends/beginnings, as TS Eliot wrote in ‘Little Gidding’, tend to overlap.  With this in mind, as we face this brand new year together, shall we make a pact ‘To make it count’?  And when it comes to that time (hopefully still a very long way off for us all) when the End which heralds the New Beginning draws near, can I invite everyone who shares my love of this school to ‘Meet me at the clock.’

 

‘The Twelve Days of Christmas’ is a merry song but, in reality, the dark days between Christmas and New Year always feel odd to me.  Hanging in a kind of limbo.  The time between me being banned from the site and gaining access to Giuseppe’s photos felt much the same.  Wednesdays no longer had the same sense of purpose.  However, on Wednesday 1st June the game changed.  At Briefing in the NHSG Staffroom that morning, I found an unexpected envelope in my pigeon hole bearing an intriguing message: ‘Christine: from Peter/Amy (who had no idea what these are!)’  The handwriting looked to me like Hilary’s.  I slipped the contents into my left hand: seven rusty coins!

It was clear from the names on the envelope they must have come from the site, but how and why they’d been sent on to me was a mystery.  I mentioned them to John Crosby that afternoon.  He knew nothing about it, but confirmed the ‘treasure’ wasn’t that old.  With a wry smile on his face, he hinted it was possible the purse might be about to come my way too.  After that morning’s site meeting with Wates, he had seen Amy hand over something to Hilary.  And sure enough, at Briefing the next morning, Hilary entered gingerly cradling something indeterminable and brown-looking in one hand.

I remained amused and puzzled for some while, but eventually the story behind the ‘Tankerville Treasure’ finally came to light.  For those ‘Old Girls’ old enough to remember the school play ‘Daisy Pulls It Off’, it didn’t involve any night-prowling around the building, breaking secret codes or even a mysterious stranger whistling ‘All through the Night.’  The trail led me back to Giuseppe, of course.

I first talked to Peter, who didn’t know what I was talking about.  Next I emailed Amy Lawson at the Wates Office in Westward House.  It was exactly where the coins had been found I was keen to discover, but, thanks to Amy forwarding my email on to Giuseppe, the whole story eventually became clear.  The actual work which uncovered them was done on May 23rd & 24th, but it was June 1st before I heard all the details concerning the ‘treasure’ from Giuseppe:

‘These were found when a freestanding section of brick wall was removed last week.  I believe this wall was built at some stage in the recent past to probably hold some sports signage on the 5 metal posts that it supported.

‘The coins and purse were found by the bricklayers from Buildroute last week.  I saw them on the floor where the bricklayers had left them in a dish with coca cola, so they could descale.  I asked if I could take 2 for the school and then they offered all of them for the Client to keep.

‘They think that someone must have been chased after stealing the purse and thrown the purse into the wall gap, either in the hope to retrieve it later or in the hope to hide the evidence.  It is quite a good story and a possible interpretation, I suppose.  I am glad that you have them now.’ 

I haven’t seen many of them – and there must have been hundreds – but Giuseppe’s Clerk of Works work schedules have always been fascinating to look at.  This detail from his schedule for May 14th shows the exact nature of the work going on in this area of the site.  The removal of: the existing netting and post supports on the south and west elevation perimeter walls; the free-standing brick wall and the 5 metal uprights; and the perished wooden gate on side-posts.

It’s strange the existence of the wooden gate in the perimeter wall at the back of the building seems to have passed me by too.  ‘Familiarity breeds contempt’, as the old saying goes.  As I mentioned in a previous post, this was the gateway created in the stone wall to allow access to the five tennis courts School used within the Fleming Hospital grounds thus avoiding girls having to clamber over the wall.

So, over the years, holes in walls have clearly proved useful at Newcastle High/Church High.  No doubt to access the hockey pitch girls used to use in the Orphanage Grounds too.  Holes have the propensity of allowing things to travel through them – or into them in the case of our purse and coins.  I prefer to think the brown suede leather purse once belonged to a Church High girl, perhaps a young girl throwing it carelessly up into the air while playing outside.  If that sounds unlikely to you, believe you me, I’ve seen shoes, etc. getting wedged in all sorts of strange places this way over the years.  Since the ‘Tankerville Treasure’ hoard of four silver two shilling coins, one silver shilling and two 10p pieces contained both ‘old’ and ‘new’ money, the purse must have found its way into that hole in the wall between 1968 and the early 1970s around Decimalisation Day.

In today’s money, the sum of the purse contents is just a measly 65p but the historic inflation calculator suggests this translates as a loss of £9.66 at the turn of the 1970s.  So some girl must have felt that!  But as ‘one man’s loss is another man’s gain’, I guess we have been the recipients of the good fortune on this occasion.  It makes a nice little story, I think.  For however much I love the building, it has always been the people who have made this school.  As it should be.

 

Merry Christmas, everyone!  I hope this Christmas Day is both restful and joyous for you and your families.  I have just returned from Midnight Holy Communion at my church, St John’s, Hebburn, and the focus on the importance of beginnings and words and truth prompted me to compose this little post the moment I got home.  The Christmas reading, which shares the words of St John the Evangelist, has always been one of my favourite Bible passages.  The opening words of this Gospel never fail to resonate and in the King James Bible Version they read even more beautifully, I think:

1 In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.  ² The same was in the beginning with God.  ³ All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made.  ⁴ In him was life; and the life was the light of men.  ⁵ And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not.  ⁶ There was a man sent from God, whose name was John.  ⁷ The same came for a witness, to bear witness of the Light, that all men through him might believe.  ⁸ He was not that Light, but was sent to bear witness of that Light.  ⁹ That was the true Light, which lighteth every man that cometh into the world.  ¹⁰ He was in the world, and the world was made by him, and the world knew him not.  ¹¹ He came unto his own, and his own received him not.  ¹² But as many as received him, to them gave he power to become the sons of God, even to them that believe on his name: 

We know of the dedication stone, still there to the left of the main entrance of Newcastle High School for Girls, but how many people really know about the beginnings of our school or who Archdeacon Emery actually was?  Because he was important.  To Newcastle High School, to The Church Schools Company and to the Church of England as a whole.  The opening line of his Wikipedia entry sums him up as follows: ‘The Ven William Emery,  MA (1825-1910) was an Anglican priest in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, who has been labelled the ‘father’ of Church Congress’.    Present at the first meeting of the Church Congress in 1861, he was appointed permanent Secretary in 1869 and by 1907 had been present at every one of the first 47 Congresses.  A more detailed summary of Canon Emery’s life can be found via Wikisource (Dictionary of National Biography, 1912 Supplement). It ends this way: ‘He was also instrumental in founding the Church Schools Company for the promotion of the religious secondary education of the middle classes (of which he was chairman 1883-1903)’. 

The Jubilee history records: ‘It was not until 1883 that the … Company was formed.  In that year a suggestion from the Central Committee of Diocesan Conferences led to a meeting on the 17th of April, 1883, under the chairmanship of Archdeacon Emery of Ely.’  It also tells us Canon Emery came to Newcastle on September 26th, 1900, for ‘the most notable prizegiving during this period, and indeed one of the most interesting in the history of the school.’   This occasion was special in a number of ways: ‘the Archbishop of Canterbury [Frederick Temple], who was in Newcastle for a Church Congress, addressed the school.  Mrs Temple gave away the prizes, the Chairman was Archdeacon Emery of Ely, the Chairman of the Company, who had laid the foundation stone of the school and girls from Durham, Sunderland and York High Schools were also present to represent the Company’s schools in the neighbourhood. ‘   

The Church Schools Company was created specifically with the aim of founding High Schools for Girls. Its Manifesto, drawn up in 1883, clearly states the Company’s main objective, a purpose which distinguished them from the Girls Public Day School Trust, set up ten years earlier in 1872 (both companies were London based): ‘To secure the …. co-operation of all …. who acknowledge the duty of giving definite religious instruction as an essential part of Education.’  In her ‘History of The Church Schools Company 1883 – 1958’ , Enid Moberly Bell offered these thoughts about the beginnings of the Company and its founders: ‘Canon Emery of Ely, Canon Francis Holland of Canterbury, Canon Gregory of St Paul’s, Canon Cromwell, Canon Daniel and Lord Clinton remain little more than names to us.  The records of the Company reveal to some extent the manner of men they were, but they were not, in a worldly sense, great men.  They left no mark in the annals of the Church or of the nation but they were content to work in obscurity, not sparing themselves in the service of their generation and of those who followed.  Their epitaph is written in the Book of Ecclesiasticus: “And some there be that have no memorial who have perished as though they had never been …. and their children after them; but these were merciful men, and their righteousness is not forgotten.”‘

But unlike Ms Moberly, we know William Emery did actually leave a permanent ‘mark’ on the world, the day he travelled north to Newcastle whilst still an Archdeacon to lay the dedication stone in the side door (the Girls’ Door was its original position) of Newcastle High School.  The words on this stone are the beginning of our story.