I wanted to try and piece together snippets of information and understand more about my Dad's school days in Swansea. Originally I thought he must have gone to the elite Swansea Grammar but then I came upon this photo and a reference on his CV to two years spent at Glanmore Grammar. According to the internet this had been a girls school. I had to read through the school log book to fully understand what a unique and character building experience it must have been to have been a pupil here. The headmaster's entry captured the excitement and above all the weather: snow on the opening day in January 1920 and thereafter much torrential rain. The school buildings were not the grand institution on the hill but the WW1 army huts that had been transported from Salisbury Plain as temporary accommodation for an experimental school for "bright children" set up on the site of a farm. Admission was dependent on passing an entrance exam and even then fees were payable unless a scholarship could be won.. One of the main preoccupations for the head master was trying to improve facilities for drying out the soaking wet clothes of the boys as there was only a small boiler room. The other was the battle to stop the boys' daredevil bike rides down the steep hills, sometimes with pillion passengers aboard. The log book refers to a stream of visiting educationalists coming to observe art, science and maths. Pupils had the opportunity to stay until they applied for university although many left to take up a place at technical college or to go to sea. After the second world war it became a girls school and amazingly the army huts were still in use after the school closed fifty years years later. My Dad left after just two years when the family moved back to Lambeth. What memories of that city by the sparkling sea he must have taken with him.
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