“I NEARLY got excited when I saw my old infants school featured in Memories,” writes Jim Blenkhorn following last week’s article about the Doctor Who of Darlo, Richard Hurndall, who was educated at Claremont Preparatory School in Trinity Road, Darlington, in the 1920s. "In 1950, Claremont was the infants school for Arthur Pease Junior School. It was an important school to many Darlington children in its day, but alas there was no mention of it. It would be nice to see the oversight corrected.”
Richard Hurndall, who grew up in Southend Avenue in Darlington, played the first Doctor Who in the 20th anniversary special in 1983, The Five Doctors, as the real first doctor, William Hartnell, had died in 1975.
READ MORE: MEET THE DARLO DOCTOR WHO
In 1946, Claremont ceased to be a private prep school and, as Jim says, became part of the Arthur Pease Practising School which itself was attached to the teacher training college in Vane Terrace. Fledgling teachers were allowed to hone their trainee skills among experienced staff in the practising school.
The Arthur Pease school lasted until 1965, when its pupils were mainly taken by Abbey Road school which had opened in 1957.
Claremont was one of several spill-over buildings from the teacher training college in Trinity Road: it also had Blanche Pease Hall, which opened in 1936, and Stanton Hall, which opened in 1965. They were both residences for the trainee teachers. The latter was named after Miss Olive Stanton, the formidable college principal for 25 years to 1961 who increased the college roll to more than 360 pupils – it is extraordinary that Darlington had such a large college right at its heart.
READ MORE: BLANCHE PEASE AND THE WALKING STICK WITH THE MASSIVE NOSE
However, in 1968, Durham university opened a College of Education in old RAF buildings at Middleton St George and so there were two similar institutions within a few miles of one another.
Despite Darlington students mustering a 40,000-name petition, their college lost out and was closed in the summer of 1978, having trained thousands of teachers in its 103-year life.
Extraordinarily, its main building on Vane Terrace was converted into Britain’s largest arts centre, which was officially opened on April 10, 1982, by US jazz singer Marion Montgomery.
Stanton Hall is now part of a care home, Blanche Pease Hall was demolished a decade ago for housing, and the Arthur Pease Practising School was replaced by the flats and townhouses of Scholars Park in 2003.
But Claremont, now apartments, survives.
WHAT else might survive of the Arthur Pease Practising School? Well, it was famed for having a mulberry tree in its grounds – probably the only one in the town although there is an elderly mulberry in a paddock at Thornton Hall on the outskirts. It was claimed that the trainee teachers wrote a nursery rhyme about it: "Here we go round the mulberry bush..."
However, this is usually ascribed to Wakefield Prison, which opened in 1594, where the exercise yard had a mulberry tree at its centre for the female prisoners to skip around on a cold and frost morning.
But Arthur Pease’s mulberry survived the school’s demolition and was saved for the landscaping of Scholar’s Park – is it still there?
And, when the school closed in 1965, music lecturer Victor Pollard was allowed to take the clock from his classroom. It was made in Darlington by the North of England School Furnishing Company. When he died in 1994 in Barnard Castle, his widow, Pat, gave the clock to the Galgate Methodist Church where it was placed in the schoolroom – is it still there?
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