Away from school
We often start our learning at our mother’s knee, or at least it is our mother’s who start our education. Leslie Brame shared some of his early learning. Or read about his time at Stowupland Elementery School
Traditionally it was mothers who taught us household routines, whilst fathers introduced their offspring to the outside world of work, gardening and D-I-Y.
In the 1920s moving on from elementery school to senior school was less straight forward then today. In his manuscript ‘As I Remember It’ Leslie Brame explained his gratitude to his teacher Mr Dewing for considering him ‘capable of obtaining a place in the secondary schoool’ as recommendation of the elementery school was important but the young Leslie also had to sit a scholarship examination and pass with high marks. Mr Dewing gave up his free time to tutor Leslie in English, arimetic,, general knowledge, grammar, syntax. synonyms and antonyms. He added ‘being in Suffolk meant that I must be able to use capacity measures such as quarters, bushels, and pecks as well as imperial pints, quarts and gallons.’
The headmaster of the Stowmarket Secondary school ‘worked hard to convince the forward-looking education committee of the East Suffolk County Council that the idea of getting a university degree intheology was not the obsession of some ‘crank’, but would be a real credit to the council and its education committee. In a time of increased secualisation of education, Mr Eldridge had to use all his powers of persuasion, but he persisted and in the end earned a scholarship for me to go to Cambridge and attempt the tripos in theology’ later gaining a further extension to the scholarship for a further 2 years of post-graduate study.
Despite the headmaster’s efforts the scholarship was insufficient to cover Leslie’s university expenses so the Congregational minister arrnged the setting up of ‘a fund to which wealthy people in the Church were privately invited to contribute’.
