School Trips Memories

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Re: School Trips Memories

Post by NewcastleFalcon »

Peter.N. wrote: 27 May 2020, 12:08 The 'Festival of Britain' comes top of my list.

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Tell us more Peter was it a train trip/coach trip and other recollections I for one would be interested to hear more ....my recollection of the "Festival of Britain" was from my stamp collecting days

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Re: School Trips Memories

Post by mickthemaverick »

Apart from my trip to St Mary's Bay, already recounted in the Pennine Cycle Thread, (link in Neil's opening post on this thread), the only other School trips from primary school were day trips to London Zoo, Whipsnade Zoo and the Tower of London and Cutty Sark.

The zoo trips hardly warrant detailing as I am sure everyone has been to the Zoo at some point and nothing significant happened on either of my trips. However the trip to London sites was a little more entertaining and I wrote a booklet about it afterwards. I have just been hunting through my accessible archives to find the booklet but no luck. I do have it somewhere and eventually I will be able to find it and tell the tale in full.

In the meantime I did discover two photos from the trip which I did not use in the book so they are still in an album upstairs. From memory the trip was eventful throughout including a coach breakdown and transfer to a London Bus, followed by the Tower Pier to Greenwich launch breaking down and us getting a tow into Greenwich from a River Police launch. Photos of that are in the booklet. Our bus ride did afford the opportunity to take some pictures in Trafalgar Square but the only one available at the moment is a poor shot of Nelson's column which you can see below.
Own work Brownie 127
Own work Brownie 127
My mate Bob is becoming a bit of an ever present in my posts at the moment but when you have known someone for 66 years that does tend to happen!! So here is a picture of him standing in front of The Cutty Sark (you'll have to take my word for that!) which I took while we were waiting to go aboard.
Own work Brownie 127
Own work Brownie 127
When I do manage to find the booklet I will post it up for general amusement but don't hold your breath! :-D
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Re: School Trips Memories

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mickthemaverick wrote: 27 May 2020, 13:20 .....The zoo trips hardly warrant detailing as I am sure everyone has been to the Zoo at some point and nothing significant happened on either of my trips.
Let no-one be in any doubt there is no threshold of interestingness on this thread as most of my own posts will testify :-D

I think there is plenty of potential left in this thread. After talking to myself for the first few posts, and wondering if any participation was going to happen, Gibbo raises the game with an absolute gem!

So Mick if the thread begins to flag, dredge up something about your zoo visits :-D Did you not go to Primrose Hill and have egg and spoon and sack races! Was it your first journey into the "big City" on the underground, on a London Bus?

For us here up in the North as a child London was a very exciting place, or potentially exciting place. It was about 1968 before we first went all the way to London, prior to that "London 100" on a signpost was about as close as we got. Stayed for a fortnight's holiday with Auntie Ada in Orpington and went in and out of London seeing all the sights as well as a decent mooch around Kent. She had a peach tree with peaches on it at the side of her house :-D

Yes so join in if you can. I suspect some on the forum may have gone on many school trips on the other side as a teacher, a terrifying nightmare in my book but if there are tales to be told please tell them :-D

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Re: School Trips Memories

Post by Gibbo2286 »

School trips in my primary school days were only to the air raid shelter. :(

In the secondary we had, besides the factory trips, just one day trip to Blackpool, the school hired six coaches for that so there were quite a lot of us.
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Re: School Trips Memories

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NewcastleFalcon wrote: 27 May 2020, 14:00
Was it your first journey into the "big City" on the underground, on a London Bus?

REgards Neil
Sad to say No on both counts. My two grandmothers both lived in London, one in Leytonstone and one in Walthamstow. I had been visiting them on a monthly basis with my mother since I was old enough to use a pushchair. Around 18 months old I would say, so the trip into London was really just a routine for me by the time I went with the school. We used to take the train to Euston, then trolley bus, if I was lucky, or No 30 bus to Angel and then the 38 bus out to the Baker's Arms at the top of Leigh Bridge Road. From there we walked either to the right to my Mum's Mum (nan) or to the left for my Dad's Mum.(grandma). Nan's was always preferable as it was in William Street just round the corner whereas we had quite a walk to Grandma's in Walthamstow but I cannot remember the name of her road.
By the time the school trip came around I was a seasoned traveller as far as going to London was concerned. My Dad also used to take us up to the West End for a dinner in the Berni Inn at The Hole in the Wall in Oxford Street a few times a year and those trips would usually be preceded by a sight seeing (or should that be "site" seeing I wonder :-k ) stroll around the Oxford Street, Piccadilly Circus, Trafalgar Square, Leicester Square areas in order to develop our worldly education!!
So the only novel part of the school day for me was the river boat ride and that broke down :-D Nevertheless a thoroughly enjoyable day and we didn't get home until 7.00pm. (That was good as 7pm was usually my bedtime on schooldays).
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Re: Schooldays:Educational Trips Memories

Post by myglaren »

NewcastleFalcon wrote: 27 May 2020, 08:55 The title of this film should be "How to Have Fun on a Trip"

Have a look at this film from the 1960's.

I thought it had gone a bit AWOL when the bus pulls up to a random field with cows in it. But no that was the best bit. See the joy of simple things like egg and spoon races/sack races/three legged races/tug of war/kicking a ball around/running.
and here's a poser which if Steve watches the film he will get straight away
Where did they go to?



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Indeed, fairly familiar and have been to those places quite a bit. I would possible recognise some of those people given a bit of time.
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Re: School Trips Memories

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I've put you on 748 now Mick but did screenshot your jumbo jet moment and shoved it on POTD :!:

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Re: School Trips Memories

Post by myglaren »

mickthemaverick wrote: 27 May 2020, 10:35 Could this be an ariel view of the destination? Staithes just down the coast from Saltburn:
Image
Looks like it although I must confess to never having been there, although my mother lived there for some years, actually in Cowbar which is a single row of houses east of Staithes itself. Pain in the bum to get to, worse than Robin Hoods Bay and Runswick bay.
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Re: School Trips Memories

Post by Peter.N. »

NewcastleFalcon wrote: 27 May 2020, 12:15
Peter.N. wrote: 27 May 2020, 12:08 The 'Festival of Britain' comes top of my list.

Peter
Tell us more Peter was it a train trip/coach trip and other recollections I for one would be interested to hear more ....my recollection of the "Festival of Britain" was from my stamp collecting days

Image

REgards Neil
I think we went by train, possibly steam! Just inside the main entrance was a huge glass sphere with blue electrical discharge, if you touched the glass a blue tracer would go to your point of contact, that was in the 'Dome of Discovery' there were all sorts of technical things of interest to me including a stripped down tram chassis with a full function explanation, I liked that a lot, trams were still running in London at the time,

There was also the 'Skylon' a tall cigar shaped structure probably about 100' tall - but I was quite short at that time, in fact I looked very much like that boy in the brownie photo - I though it was me for a minute! I can't remember very much more about it without a prompt but it was very interesting.

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Re: School Trips Memories

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Peter.N. wrote: 27 May 2020, 16:06 I can't remember very much more about it without a prompt but it was very interesting.
Peter
Here's 9 minutes of 1951 in colour Peter to help..



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Re: School Trips Memories

Post by mickthemaverick »

Watching that film reminded me of The Guinness Clocks. Several were made after the success of the clock in Battersea and I remember fondly standing in front of the clock on Southend seafront waiting for the magic to happen. http://www.bigginhill-history.co.uk/gui ... istory.htm

We used to stay in a caravan at Shoeburyness every summer holiday for 6 weeks in the 50s. My father used to commute to and from Southend on Friday and Sunday nights for the first four weeks and then stay with us for his firm's holiday for the last fortnight. As such we were on our own, my mother, sister and I for the weekdays for a month and used to walk along the seafront through Thorpe Bay to Southend every day. I always insisted on seeing the clock perform before we returned home in the early evening, often with a bag of chips and a pickled onion to munch while walking back. It is about three miles if I remember rightly so plenty of time to fight over anything with my older (6 years) sister who's belief was that she had grown up and I was just a pest she had to tolerate!! I expect she used to help my mother with the chores while I rode my rented bike around the caravan site where I was perfectly safe, wonderfully simple times.

In the evenings we would play board games, initially snakes and ladders and ludo and as I grew older we progressed to Monopoly, Totopoly and Waddington's Formula 1!! Another great source of arguments as I always wanted cars over horses and vice versa for my sister so invariably we ended up with Monopoly so I could at least have the racing car and she the scotty dog!! As I got older still my Father introduced Risk into the equation and we all loved that so no more arguments.

We had no TV at home until 1961 so we didn't miss that at all and with the decca portable record player and all Mum's Frankie Vaughn and Jim Reeves records you can see why I spent so much time on my bike!! However I honestly believe that the freedom helped me build my own self confidence to stand me in good stead for later life!! :-D
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Re: School Trips Memories

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mickthemaverick wrote: 27 May 2020, 18:28 Watching that film reminded me of The Guinness Clocks.
I was going to take a screenshot of that, caught my eye too. So I might as well do it.
screenshot
screenshot
Great post Mick....enjoyed reading that. :-D

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Re: School Trips Memories

Post by Gibbo2286 »

When we returned from Egypt in January 1955 we were posted to South Benfleet so I had a couple of months there until demob.

We used to pop down to Southend when we got time off.

At that time the new towns, Basildon and Braintree I think, were just being built, some factories already open, we would go out on road tests and stop at a factory canteen for sandwiches (Sausage and tomato)

To get a weekend pass the C/O insisted that we did a five mile cross country run on Saturday morning from the camp through the local countryside and the cemetery in PT kit, imagine that in January and just back from the sunny Egyptian desert, a lot of blue knees.
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Re: School Trips Memories

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The random hand of the FCF Archive February Ferret has selected this thread as thread of the day for 7th February 2023. New posts welcomed to mark the occasion :-D



Seeing as the Power station trip was pretty much it throughout school until age 11 I opened up the discussion to the floor at chez falcon, and discover 3 times the number of school trips were "enjoyed" by those who completed their schooling north of the border.

One to Monktonhall Colliery, which would probably tick off against my power station at Blaydon trip, but two trips to Blair Drummond Safari park no less. Strange the incidents that stick in the memory through one of the trips was still associated with one of the boys throwing a tin from his picnic into the lake and the teacher going into a massive rage about it. Hope it stopped him from turning into a full grown hooligan!

Looks like Blair Drummond Safari Park is still in existence today.

Durham's closest attraction of a similar nature was the Lambton Lion Park, but no we went to the Power Station!

Never thought about Lambton Lion Park for years, the Chronicle has a bit of a reminisce about it here
https://www.chroniclelive.co.uk/news/hi ... n-17063693

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Re: School Trips Memories

Post by myglaren »

We were regulars at the Lambton Lion Park, it is only three miles away. Always enjoyed it. Wasn't Flamingo Park by any stretch but was always a decent day out for the kids.
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