Friday 13th September 2019

Friday 13th September 2019 - Number 5909

Welcome to the Laws Family Register

We reach out to all, regardless of Race, Colour, Creed, Gender, Orientation, or National Origin, offering support for researching family history and documenting cultural inheritance.

Robert Henry Laws

1828-1881

Captain of the Barque 'Woolhampton'

my paternal Great Grandfather

This is Robert Henry's Wife

Sarah Ann Laws, formerly Fuller

My paternal Great Grandmother

1846-1924

R I P

Gone but not forgotten, this blog is dedicated

to all those who have borne our illustrious

surnames LAWS and LAWES Worldwide

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Our Database

(Updated daily)

01:00 Wednesday 11th September 2019

50,096 Folks - 4

16,622 Families -1

120,291 Events + 6

All in 10,493 Places +4

Are your LAWS family amongst them?

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Mail us today with your inquiries. we'd be glad to help you.

Enquires are still very welcome

so please e-mail me, now

registrar@lawsfamilyregister.org.uk

John P Laws

'The Registrar'

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A Child of the Twenties

A suburban childhood of the Twenties

seen from the Nineteen Nineties

by my late father

John Robert Laws 1921-2008

EDUCATION

In those days one paid fees for attendance at grammar schools though these could be
waived if a family income was a bit tight. At fifteen guineas a term, or was it a year,
it seems chicken feed now but for many, the amount was a big lump to find. The
school uniform was obligatory of course and included caps for boys and hats for girls
– to hide their pretty curls.

Minchenden was, like the elementary school, one of the schools which were
co-educational probably about half and half, and one soon found out that boys and girls
were pretty equal at academic subjects and that some of the girls tended to work harder,
There was a theory that boys worked harder in separate schools without the girls to
distract them, but I doubt the truth of it, indeed it seems possible that the boys in the
boys-only schools had to put more time and effort into finding and meeting girls instead
of working.

We were in general, fortunate with the school staff, a mix of types and personalities like
any group, but as competent as any and better than a lot. They too must have been
influenced by the pleasant working conditions and relaxed but disciplined mood of the
unit. It was small by present-day standards, some four hundred pupils, quite enough to
my mind even if it can be done more cheaply with twice as many. George Bernard
Shaws’s comments about doing and teaching are very true so often, but we had both,
Art and Music teachers about whom the reverse was true. - They could do but not teach.
It must have been frustrating in the extreme for them.

The rest of the staff must have had their frustrations too with the need to produce exam
results from pupils with their normal share of laziness and only interested in only a few
subjects. However produce results they did, by dint of much note scribbling and even
the unorthodox use of a French text of the New Testament for religious instruction.

Not all the education was in the classroom, there were occasional outside visits, two
very contrasting ones spring to mind. The first to the Roman remains of Verulamium at
St.Albans and the other to the Ford Car factory a Dagenham. I think I was more
impressed with the factory where it seemed to me that they made everything except
the tyres, perhaps there was not a lot of sub-contracting then. The molten metal being
poured into sand moulds for the cylinder blocks was a wonderful bit of knowhow even
if its roots went back as far as Verulamium.

Although education was fairly broad it became exam orientated as the time went by.
The General Schools Certificate with Matriculation exemption was the objective for
most of us and there was plenty of homework to be done in the evenings and holidays.
I fear we skimped on a lot of it. Only a few went to University in those days but the
Matric served as an exemption from the preliminary exams of a number of professional
bodies as well as being needed before doing the Inter for University entrance.

There were other activities outside school hours and one of my interests was the
Astronomical Society. Under the guidance apparently of the woodwork master a good
observatory with a revolving dome was built by the boys and was equipped with an
excellent five-inch refracting telescope which had at one time belonged to King George
the Fifth.

How it came to us I have no idea, there must have been some sort of tie-up between
one of the science masters and the powers that be who arranged it well in advance as the
observatory was built to fit it. Apart from the idle curiosity of looking at the moon and
planets, a good deal of useful work was keeping records of sunspots movements and the
timings of the occultation of stars by the moon.

We visited the Greenwich Observatory which was still one of the great observatories
of the world although beginning to be out-classed by the hundred-inch reflector at
Mount Wilson in the United States. The big two hundred reflectors and the radio
telescopes were not even on the drawing board. There was at that time, already
speculation about the possibility of space travel and my friend Stan Law and I gave
a lecture to our group about it, all carefully mugged up from a book of course.
I doubt whether at that time we believed a word of it.

We were kindred spirits with common interests in mathematics and woodwork.
The maths did not get that far as the ‘mathematics’ – more advanced, which a few
of us did as an extra subject for Matric, was only on the fringes. The woodwork turned
out more useful and the final exams we spent all our time in the woodwork room
making equipment for the physics lab.

to be continued tomorrow

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