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First school prize giving (Brisbane Courier 9 Dec 1932)
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Location of the school shown on a 1938 aerial photograph, only part of Dennis Street formed at the time (QImagery)
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Current day aerial view (Google Earth Pro)
I started school at the age of three and a half in 1941 by attending a small kindergarten in a private house about 300m from where I lived. I walked there most days. The kindergarten was owned and run by a Miss Shire and her sister who was called ‘Ladybird’.
I can still see Miss Shire in my mind, a thin grey haired lady sitting in the middle of the class room directing us in our lessons. Even then she seemed ancient but she survived to be still playing the organ for at least 20 years later at the St Andrews Anglican Church Indooroopilly. I attended this church when I was in my late teens and early twenties so she may not have been so old after all. She must have been an enterprising lady to have conducted the school and carried on her life during the war time.
Her kindergarten was my first taste of ‘formal’ education. I can see in the photograph below that I was wearing shoes but during my primary school days I went barefoot. In consequence my feet became very hard. This was to my advantage because some of the road I had to walk over was gravel and there was some natural bush to walk through.
I have recently been in contact with Lorna Lightowler nee Barrett who helped with a few memories of Miss Shire’s. Lorna lived diagonally across the road from our home in Hunter Street and attended at the same time I did. Her Mother was a good friend of mum’s. She had five siblings and one of her brothers Arnold became a good friend of mine. He attended the kindergarten though not until 1942.
The 1941 class at Miss Shire’s. The pupils I remember are Janice and Margo Feather (back row left) and Lorna Barrett ( 2nd from left mid row). Aged three and a half I am seated far left on the front row. Taken in the front yard of Miss Shire’s Kindergarten in Dennis Street (Rod Foster)
The photo of the 1941 class shows 17 children attended. Lorna said Arnold didn’t start until 1942 when he was aged 3. This to an extent puzzles me because my sister Roslyn turned 3 in June 1942 and she never attended this kindergarten. However it’s possible this would have been too young for kindergarten and with the war then raging it’s more than likely Miss Shire declined to take any more pupils and perhaps she intended closing down some of the school.
There was a spread of ages of the students as Janice and Margo Feather shown in the photo (their father was Dad’s solicitor) were about 9 or 10 years of age. This was not just a kindergarten as Miss Shire taught preparatory classes, taking the Feather girls through their primary school years to the final Scholarship year of Grade 7. These two girls went to St Aidan’s a private church school later.
Lorna went on to Taringa Primary School though the war interfered with this slightly as it closed for a while and she was evacuated to Banoon to live for several months and attended Runcorn Primary School. Lorna said her sister Margaret and an elder brother Raymond attended Sherwood Primary but as Margaret was some years older than me I don’t remember this. Lorna remembers the music at kindergarten and how she enjoyed it. She remembers an English hunting song ‘Do Ye Ken John Peel’. Strangely I don’t have any recollection of this though many years later I sang it to Mum’s accompaniment at our musical evenings. What I do remember is Arnold and me playing the wag in the bush where we travelled every day to the school.
We would enter the school through the front gate then along a short gravel path to stairs at the side of the house and then into the main classroom, a large room which would probably have been the lounge. It had bare floor boards and forms against the walls to sit on. I remember that we sat facing the centre of the room. We didn’t have desks so must have done most of our work on our knees or on the floor as the only benches I can immediately recall were under the house where we had our lunch.
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Cover Queensland Copy Book (Rod Foster)
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Example of letters from Rod’s copybook signed off by Miss Shire (Rod Foster)
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Example of numbers from Rod’s copybook, signed off by Miss Shire (Rod Foster)
I remember little of what our lessons were but we had copy books in which we copied letters in a cursive style. We were doing cursive writing in 1942 before I was five. Nowadays some children at six or more can’t read this. My grandchildren have difficulty deciphering what I write though that of course may be the quality of my writing, however, my writing skills were passable so I always managed.
Two pages from the copy book are shown above. Note the initials M E S 24 June 1942 and 14 September 1942 on the bottom of the page. Actually when I look at these copies I reckon the writing is pretty good for a young fellow. I say there is nothing to be admired in the modern writing. This tends to be a sort of printing. Some of the old cursive writing by people with a good hand is beautiful and to be admired.
At lunch we would go under the house and again sit on forms around bare wooden tables. This provided an area for the pupils to sit and eat. Mum had a terrible habit of giving me cheese sandwiches for lunch and I hated cheese but perhaps it was just the war time cheese because I’m very fond of it now. Apparently it was one of the foods we could get reasonably easily and perhaps ration coupons were not required. We would play in the back yard of the house but there wasn’t much space. The house was surrounded by bougainvillea and had a huge Poinciana tree in the front yard. Miss Shire must not have required much living space for herself.
In class we must have done our recitation of our tables and spelling, played games, and learned poetry and music sitting on the forms. Arnold could recite Hiawatha and Lorna other poetry. I remember only snippets of this time and whilst Lorna agrees we had no desks, we think there may have been one or two small tables with chairs where we wrote in our copy books. I am not sure what the older children did, they may have been in a separate room. Lorna recalls that when the school was all together the older children would sit at the ‘far end’ of the room.
I recall the black board hanging on one of the walls. In addition a large roll up chart hung on the wall with pictures representing the letters of the alphabet. We learned our alphabet from a picture book with ‘a for an apple on a twig’ and I learned to read and could read very well and so could those other children who attended the school. With the higher level type lessons going on as well some probably rubbed off on us as what we learned ensured that I by-passed preparatory at the Sherwood Primary School going straight into Grade 1 and this applied to Lorna and others who went to Taringa.
I conclude by digressing slightly about my primary school years, and why my Mum sent me to Sherwood. It was likely due to the war. Our parents considered the Indooroopilly Primary School was inconveniently located for we children in Hunter Street, well over a mile. To get there we would have had to cross Coonan Street, the main road leading to the Walter Taylor Bridge, where there were continuous military convoys, and past Witton Barracks, the Military and POW establishments at Tighnabruaich, and then the infamous Indooroopilly Hotel. Too much to contend with for little children. Taringa was a similar distance but the main road and military establishments/hotel could be avoided. Lorna says she walked to Taringa at first and when the school re-opened they rode bikes. Thinking of that time now I have to question why I did not attend Taringa. I think Mum was impressed with a teacher at Sherwood School who lived close by, and who would be able to accompany me from Indooroopilly to Sherwood on the train, then just a short walk from the station. Perhaps Mum also wanted to get as far away as possible from the ‘Taringa influence’.
As it was I didn’t attend school during 1943 because of illness and other factors such as the war, and the time away at Caloundra and we had billets, but I think the kindergarten closed sometime during that year. I was hospitalised with Meningitis and as medical records have been destroyed confirmation of the admission and discharge is not possible. I can only remember lying in a hospital bed and a bare building. After my discharge and while I was convalescing our billet Mrs Scorer read books to me and I absorbed them like a sponge. This disease and the term in hospital probably held me back physically for quite a while.
[ Rod Foster October 2020 – extract from a more comprehensive memoir ]
