Attendance Poor, Circus in Town: Holiday Given

Yardley Gobion School in Northamptonshire had worked this out years earlier. Its 1887 log is a calendar of surrender. 9 February: holiday in the afternoon, so the children could attend a conjuring entertainment at Potterspury. 7 September: a flower show at Wakefield, only forty children present, “a holiday was accordingly given”. 10 October: numbers very low, partly owing to the weather, so the register was marked at 9.30 to let the children leave earlier for a circus procession in Stratford, and the afternoon was a holiday.

Register first, procession second. The paperwork is done, and then everybody can go and look at the elephants.

At some point in the next century the circus stopped being a reason to close the school and became a subject. A Historic England case study describes St George’s Infant School in Great Yarmouth taking the whole school to the Hippodrome for workshops in juggling, plate-spinning, trapeze and tightrope. The circus ran through every subject for a term and ended in a public exhibition and performance, and the whole school went to see the summer-season show. Yardley Gobion would have closed for a fortnight.

I have adopted the 1887 policy for Saturday jobs. The register is taken at 9.30 in the kitchen. Hoovering, bins, the dishwasher. If attendance is poor, owing to weather or a circus, a holiday may be given, at the discretion of the head, who is me.

It held for one weekend. The second Saturday, at 9.28, the youngest announced that there was a circus procession in the garden. There was not. There was the cat, walking along the fence. But attendance became very poor very quickly, because all three of them had gone to the window, and my husband had gone with them.

My log for that day reads: attendance poor, owing to a circus procession (cat). Holiday given in the afternoon. Hoovering not done.