May 1956

Alice arrives back in Bedford for the summer term in early May 1956 and finds herself in the midst of a hot and sunny spell. Writing home on 6th May she says that the area around the College has been transformed, with the leaves on the trees along Lansdowne Road now hiding the houses. She and the other students are making the most of the sun.

The College’s new gymnasium is preparing for its official opening on 29th June and Alice sent her parents a cutting from a feature story on the gym in the Bedfordshire Times and Standard. Stories about the new gym also apparently featured in the Evening Standard and the Times Educational Supplement. The students resort to subterfuge when out and about in town to ensure that the Daily Mirror does not learn anything about the new building, as they are also interested in the story.

Term started on Saturday 5th with an Anatomy class and Athletics trials. On the day after Alice writes her letter, she is scheduled to take part in swimming, tennis and Modern Dance.

The following day, Tuesday 7th, a group photograph of the College’s students is due to be taken.

 

Towards the end of her letter Alice mentions that she is on her ‘locking up week of 11pm’. The college’s rules stated that students could have evening leave until 11pm (9.30pm on Sundays) by signing in and out of the book in their house. Lock up was at 11pm unless a student received special permission for a later return.

College Plays and Performances

In her letter from 24^th March it is nearing the end of the spring term and Alice refers to end of term activities such as teaching her last lesson, receiving grades, sitting an anatomy test and fundraising for a conference trip by having a bob-a-job week. 

Among the things she mentions is a College Play ‘Christopher Columbus’ which was an adaptation of a play for radio by Louis MacNeice, first broadcast on the BBC in 1942. Alice was not in the play herself but these were clearly important occasions in the College calendar as Alice talks about inviting an external visitor along and waiting for critiques to appear in the local press. Tickets for this production were charged at 2s 6d and 1s 6d, which would be approx. £2.80 and £1.60 today. By Alice’s time at the College, posters and programmes for these performances were printed (as below) but in the earlier days they were all hand produced. The Archive holds some beautiful handwritten and illustrated programmes from earlier years, including some believed to have been illustrated by Cicely Read who was a student at the College from 1909-1911 and went on to become Principal for a short time before her sudden death in 1949.

Programme for the production 'Christopher Columbus'

Dancing and Ice skating

It is February 1956 and very cold, with snow and freezing conditions.  Alice mentions a Varsity Fives match being played between Oxford and Cambridge in Bedford.  This was a Rugby Fives* match which was won 238-228 by Cambridge.  The Varsity Fives matches were played from1925 to the present day with the matches from 1949 to 1956 being held at Bedford Modern, so Alice met players from the final contest here in Bedford.

*Rugby Fives is a handball game similar to squash played in an enclosed court between two players (singles) or between two teams of two players each (doubles), the aim being to hit the ball above a ‘bar’ across the front wall in such a way that the opposition cannot return it before a second bounce.  The ball is slightly larger than a golf ball, leather-coated and hard.  Players wear leather padded gloves on both hands, with which they hit the ball.

The cold conditions mean that Alice experiences some different sporting activities in her week at college, with ice skating taking place instead of hockey.  Alice and other students often skated on the boating lake for fun, although it is unlikely that actual lessons took place there as students described having to jump onto the safe part of the ice!  We know that in the 1920s, ice skating took place on flooded fields in Goldington village.

Alice had the excitement of a first year dance to help warm up and in her previous letters, she describes decorating the gym with enormous back cloths made of pasted together newspapers with wall paper strips on top of them.  The theme of the dance was air travel and Alice sent the following request home for items to wear to the dance:-

 

 

Skating on flooded fields in Goldington, c.1920s

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