The school archives / Family memories from the 1920s to the 1950s, retold at one table
Ink in the Teapot. The Dormouse Was Not Amused.
For most of the twentieth century a child was put in charge of the school ink. I have just been put in charge of the PTA urn, and I have been reading the history.
The most important sentence in the history of the ink monitor is on page 88 of Stoke Albany: Portrait of a Country Village, published in 1996. Neville Brooks, a pupil at the village school from 1953, remembers his class acting out the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party. At the point where the Hatter pours tea over the Dormouse, he used as a prop “a metal teapot that the previous ink monitor had not emptied.”
They then had, he reports, a “blue-necked Dormouse”, who was not amused.
I read this the week the PTA made me tea monitor for the summer fair. I have been given the urn, a key to the cupboard and a laminated sheet that says DESCALE. I have never felt so trusted, or so frightened.
The job was always half honour, half hazard. Geoff Radford, growing up in post-war Thundersley in Essex, had to repeat his final year at primary school because of when his birthday fell, and his teacher, seeing a bored boy, made him ink monitor. He wore an apron and toured the classrooms topping up the inkwells, which sat in sloping desks, so an overfilled well sent ink down the slope towards whoever was sitting there. Same desk, same year, but now with an apron. It is the only promotion I know of that was a repeated year in disguise.
Freda Hancock, at Shirley School in Southampton from 1927, describes a tighter operation. The ink went into the wells on Monday and came out again on Friday. Separately, she made the teachers’ tea and hot milk.
Note the separation of powers. The girl trusted with the ink was also the girl trusted with the tea, and at no point did the two meet. Somebody at Shirley had thought this through.
At Stoke Albany, nobody had. The inkwells there were topped up by the ink monitor from a metal teapot. Then a play needed a teapot. The previous ink monitor is never named in the book, which is the most generous thing in the whole village history.
The fair was on Saturday. I filled the urn from the big metal jug at the back of the PTA cupboard without asking what had last been in it. Blackcurrant squash, concentrated, from sports day.
The teachers’ tea came out purple. The head was not amused.
Sources
- Geoff Radford’s Recollections of Thundersley, Benfleet Community Archive,31August2020
- Freda M Hancock (née Jurd), Memories of Shirley School 1927–1936
- Neville Brooks’s school memories, Stoke Albany:Portrait of a Country Village,1996,pp87–89
Notes from the School Gates is a light-hearted column: home scenes and family characters are invented; schools and public facts are real. About the column