‘SCHOOL burnt down, please fetch boy as soon as possible,” read a telegram sent to all parents of pupils at Aysgarth School on March 30, 1933.
The parents probably already knew about the fire as it made front page news in regional papers, with dramatic pictures of smoke wafting worryingly from between the massive chimneys on the rooftops.
The father of one boy, who was constantly in trouble, turned up promptly and saw the headmaster surveying the burnt-out skeleton. He marched straight up to him and said: “Tell me, how did he do it?”
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Below: Work begins on rebuilding the school after the fire of March 30,1933
Aysgarth School was, as its name suggests, founded in Aysgarth by the Reverend Clement Thomas Hales (above), who had been a composition master at Richmond School. However, in 1877 he had a serious disagreement with the head there and went off to form his own school in a large property opposite the Palmer Flatt Hotel in Aysgarth, taking 45 pupils and five assistant masters with him.
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The school quickly grew so that in the late 1880s, it bought 36 acres of land at Newton-le-Willows, near Bedale, and commissioned Darlington architects Clark & Moscrop to design a model school.
Clark & Moscrop are usually regarded as house-builders, but they had just completed Barnard Castle School. Two of their other notable works are the quirky brick shop on the corner of Finkle Street and Market Place in Richmond, and their bank on the corner of Post House Wynd and High Row in Darlington, which is about to become a building society.
They had the school ready for 1890, complete with its most distinctive feature: an 80ft high water tower.
“A key ambition of generations of Aysgarth boys is to throw a tennis ball on top of, or even right over, the tower,” says Mr Haslam. “This is a considerable feat, but has been achieved by the talented few.”
The tower features the school clock, made by William Potts of Leeds, and at its feet is the “concrete”, a playground that is now asphalt but is still known as the “concrete”.
On the concrete, the boys play “cow” – a cricket-related game, which may get its name because its rules encourage an agricultural approach to batting.
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“The aim of the batsman is to hit ‘a garden’, which involves belting a tennis ball over the high wall into the rose garden,” says Mr Haslam. “When old boys return to the school, a game of Cow is considered essential.”
Those old boys include Olympic gold medal rower Sir Matthew Pinsent, the Teesdale ice explorer Robert Swan, and the financier-philanthropist Jonathan Ruffer who is behind The Auckland Project in Bishop Auckland.
It was on the concrete in 1933 that relay bands managed to place nearly all of the possessions of the school and the boys before the flames did their worst.
Therefore, much of the history has survived to be included in Mr Haslam’s new book. The boys themselves only got a slightly extended Easter holiday before emergency classrooms were installed on the playing fields while rebuilding took place.
The cause of the blaze was an electrical fault in the roof above a maid’s room – “she opened the door and volumes of smoke rolled out”, reported the Times – and so the school’s naughtiest boy, whose own father was convinced he was an arsonist, was exonerated.
Aspects of Aysgarth School by Ted Haslam is available in hardback for £20, including p&p, from the school. Email enquiries@aysgarthschool.co.uk for further details
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