Exhibition marks grammar’s 400th anniversary

STEPPING into the past . . .the exhibition team (l-r) former pupil Alan Petford, school archivist and former teacher Ian Holt, former teacher Jean Sanders, former teacher Margaret Castleton, parent Lynne Banister and technical expert John Widdall

TOWN-CENTRE shoppers picking up a prescription are unlikely to know that they are following in the footsteps of pupils at Oldham’s first school.

Boots stands on the former site of Oldham Grammar School which opened in 1611 after half a Lancashire acre — equivalent to almost a modern acre — was endowed for its creation.

That was the beginning of Oldham Hulme Grammar School, whose Chamber Road building actually incorporates the entrance from the original school.

Now it is celebrating its 400th anniversary with a new exhibition charting the rise, fall and rebirth of the institution. A six-strong team has created around 50 panels outlining the school’s history which will be open to the public this weekend.

Hulme old boy Alan Petford is part of the team and explained that the roots of the school go back to Puritan Thomas Hunt.

“There was a good Puritan network in the North of England and he was part of it,” he said.

“People sent their sons to Oldham from Dewsbury, Todmorden, Rochdale and perhaps further afield to be schooled by Thomas Hunt because they wanted that particular kind of Puritan education he was offering.

“He was almost certainly in with Laurence Chadderton, who was a local man made good: he went up to Cambridge and became the first master of Emmanuel College. He was one of the great Puritans of the day.”

They endowed the school in 1606 and the building opened five years later with Thomas as the first schoolmaster.

“It was quite an important building. After the parish church it was the biggest building in Oldham at that time,” added Mr Petford.

“It certainly flourished to the end of the 17th century because again people from quite some distance were coming to the school.”

As late as 1690 pupils were lodging with the schoolmaster or at local inns, studying an advanced curriculum which included Greek.

Records from the 18th century are patchy, although endowments suggest that education continued. But by the beginning of the 19th century the school was in a slum, with a slaughter house next door and a less than salubrious inn behind.

At the same time opportunities were changing. Elementary education was introduced in Oldham while more people were interested in a commercial education of bookkeeping and penmanship.

The school struggled and at one point there were no pupils, although the trustees and the governors continued to meet.

Then in 1869 the building and surrounding land was sold to the town’s corporation for £1,010 — the equivalent of a modern compulsory purchase order — to make way for slum clearances.

This money and a grant from the Hulme Trust, responsible for the likes of William Hulme and Bury Grammar schools, paid for a new school in Coppice.

The building opened in 1895 as separate girls and boys schools. The foundation stone, originally on an outside wall before the school was later extended, can still be seen in the canteen.

Ironically, the town-centre school was not demolished until the 1920s, giving the opportunity for its entrance to be preserved.

The free exhibition runs at the school from 10am to 4pm on Saturday and noon to 4pm on Sunday.

It charts its history to the 1940s and includes a school from Guernsey being evacuated — masters and all — to Hulme during the Second World War.

People can bring along their own archive material which will be scanned on the day.

Mr Petford added: “I think we know most of the very early history of the school.

“What we are hoping, as more archives come in and more people research the history of the school, is that we uncover more about the 18th century.

“We know the school was there and it had some quite competent masters.”