LOOKING BACK

The story of the School is clearly divided into two parts, which can conveniently, and properly, be described as the Oldroyd years and the Farish years. The two eras were quite different in nature.

Mr Oldroyd fought for the school on several fronts. He tried to enlist more students, and when that failed, he fought the threatened closure until the growth in pupil numbers came to the rescue, all the while ensuring a standard of education that gave the school its widespread and deserved reputation.

Those battles were won before Mr Farish took over. His tasks were to guide the school through the fundamental changes in education of the post-war period, and to ensure that standards were maintained while admitting students in ever-increasing numbers. The reason for the Farish years occupying fewer pages than the Oldroyd years in this book is that Mr Farish did not have to undergo the public drama of threatened closure and rows in the town Council Chamber. His problems were as great, if not greater, but were not the kind that made headlines. His achievements in the first few years were formidable. The old and new systems of School Certificate and GCE had to be catered for simultaneously despite shortages of staff and materials. In later years he managed to oversee the education of six hundred pupils in a building which was not adequate as a place of learning at all, and could only sensibly accommodate half that number. It was fortunate that he was a man who performed so well under pressure.

Indeed, the School and the town could not have hoped for two better men to hold the reins. Would they have been interchangeable? Would either of them have coped with the problems of the other any better or any worse? It is intriguing but pointless to conjecture. Suffice to say that in both cases the adage "cometh the hour, cometh the man" has never seemed more appropriate.

Simultaneous with the handover was a change in the nature of the school's population. Although by the 1940s there were many scholarships available, it was still a fee-paying school. The abolition of fees and the introduction of the 11-plus selection system meant more children of working class, blue-collar parents were able to attend, although in the eyes of many the school was still considered elitist.

The School's perennial problem of accommodation, persisting for over forty years, was put into perspective when the building became the Heywood Junior High School in 1968. The number of pupils to attend the new school was set at 360. Making allowances for the increase in accommodation, that was very close to the figure that Mr Farish had given in 1948 as the most that the school should be asked to take.

Was Heywood Grammar School a good school? It is obviously a matter of definition. It was certainly successful in academic terms, and by and large most former pupils and teachers have happy memories of their time there. That should suffice.

SOURCES

This story should have been recorded thirty years ago, and by someone else, but as it wasn't I have done my best to set down a brief history of Heywood Grammar School. It is already far too late to write the complete story. Documentation is scarce. There is evidence to suggest that when the building ceased to be a school in 1971 all records were taken to the town rubbish tip and dumped or destroyed. If this is true, the full story can never be told. In any event, I have been able to trace only a few scraps of original documentation.

My main sources of information have therefore been archive copies of the Heywood Advertiser and the recorded minutes of the various Education Authorities responsible for the school over the years. Copies of the School magazines the Flyer and the Phoenix have also proved invaluable I have reluctantly omitted many details which depended on personal memories. Thirty years on, and in some cases sixty or more years on, so many of them contradicted both contemporary reports, and other peoples' recollections of the same events, that I decided to trust no-one's memory, not even my own.

Consequently, these pages contain only the bare bones of the story that should have been told. It is too little and too late, but I hope better than nothing. There are many omissions, due either to the lack of information or to my own lack of diligence. There are errors too, I'm sure, but I hope not so many.

Maybe the publication of this book will bring to light some of the missing school records, and the story can be written anew. I shall leave that to someone else.