Anatomy Lectures

Timetables from the 1955-56 academic year show Anatomy lectures for first-year students started in the spring term with four one-hour lectures timetabled across the week.  In this letter of 28 January 1956 Alice describes some of the teaching techniques which included marking bones and muscles on fellow students with special pencils and using human skeletons for the study of bones. 

The study of Anatomy had formed part of the curriculum right from the very early days of Bedford Physical Training College and, as in the 1950s, a human skeleton (given the nickname ‘Mr Perkins’) was used as a teaching aid.

Mr Perkins in Small Lecture Room, 1903

Warwick Gymnasium

It’s the start of the Spring Term and Alice has returned to an annoyed house mistress in the shape of Miss Nowell-Smith, the lacrosse and cricket coach, and a more intensive timetable which included lectures on Friday evening until 6.45pm and on Saturday morning until 10.30am.

The new term also sees students using the Warwick Gymnasium for the first time.  As well as housing what was later described in the Bedfordshire Times and Standard (6 July 1956) as “the most up-to-date gymnasium in Britain”, the new building also had a biology laboratory and art room, the latter staffed by a new Art Mistress from the renowned Slade School of Fine Art.  Alice is not alone in being impressed by the construction of the gymnasium floor, several architectural and construction journals published at the time also commented on its special features.

A communal dining room sufficiently large to accommodate all students and staff won’t be built until 1957 and so Alice has to make her way (in all weathers) from her student room at 29 Lansdowne Road to the dining room at 3 Lansdowne Road.

Warwick Gymnasium, 1956

Lacrosse: Bedford v. Dartford

In the 1955-56 Season, Bedford College of Physical Education fielded no less than four lacrosse teams.  Alice usually turned out for the 1^st or 2^nd XII.  On the 26 November 1955 all four teams played against Dartford College of Physical Education and swept the board with wins for all four teams.  In her letter of 27 November Alice describes something of the journey to Dartford and the elation of winning.

Alice also gives an account of a visit to the College by one of the participants of the successful 1953 British Mount Everest expedition - the ninth mountaineering expedition to attempt the first ascent of Mount Everest and the first team confirmed to have succeeded when Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay reached the summit on Friday, 29 May 1953 – but rather frustratingly does not mention who!

November 1955

In November 1955 Bedford College of Physical Education featured in ‘I want to be....’ – a series of features about careers for boys and girls broadcast as part of Children’s Hour on BBC Radio Home Service.  The programme contained interviews with tutors and groups of students and was first broadcast on 12 November 1955.  In her letter of 10 November, Alice reminds her parents to listen to the programme.  We know from a subsequent letter that Alice and her fellow students “thought the broadcast very bitty especially compared with the tape we bought from the BBC of all the recordings they took here”.

We learn of some of the extra-curricular activities undertaken by Alice: playing lacrosse for the College, visiting a probation officer for a biology project, and attending a weekly evening lecture delivered by an outside speaker. 

Alice makes reference to rehearsals for an end-of-term play.  She is following a long tradition going back to the early years of the College of students putting on an entertainment at the end of the autumn term.  These were often pantomimes or revues containing topical references to the College and its ways.