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What were your school dinners like?


BILL ELLIS

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I hate talking about food really, I'd sooner eat it, but the period I'm mentioning here was in the 1940's. To be honest the descriptions of the dinners dished up to us at Burngreave Secondary Modern, dont sound any different to what they dished up at Nether Green. Even the color of the delivery van.

I'll never turned my nose up at anything and the least popular dinner back then, were the fish cakes with white sauce, peas and mash. I got to admit it didn't look good. But I found out, that, because it wasn't popular, I could easily get seconds and even thirds sometime. Pretty good for a growing lad in those days. The potatos were always lumpy I might add.

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Hi, I went to High Storrs early 60s could never stomach the dinners as they obviously were cooked by the same person from the boy's school.

always took sandwiches - meant that we could go on the grounds a lot quicker to talk to boys, as you remember we were not allowed to mix to any great degree. Miss Furtado was our headmistress and she had the uncanny knack of seeing you come back into school if you had tried to get up to the shops.

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Hurlefield Boys '59 to '62, mashed potatoes tasting metallic with long ginger hairs in :gag: most puds were ok and occasionally we had salad and chips which was nice. Whether school dinners were nice or not depended on what they were like at home IMO, mine beat school ones every time.

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I remember my first school dinner ever. This was at Nether Green School in the mid-fifties. We had something called 'hash' [a new word to me] followed by treacle tart. This was served on rather faded plastic plates probably in pastel pink, blue, yellow and green.

 

For school dinners we used to go to the basement of the Methodist Church next door. There were long trestle tables with benches each side and a chair at the top end. There was a kind of mini blackboard on the wall with a hand-written menu in chalk capitals. Mrs Dean was the head dinner lady, a small woman with a high voice who didn't like us coming in too noisily.

 

Dinners used to arrive in the back of a large grey van with the sign 'School Meals' painted on the side. Somebody I know said they once saw a container of stew [or perhaps I should say 'hash'] fall of the back off the van. The driver scraped it off the road and put it back in the container.

 

Different teachers had different ways of running things. The fairest one was Mr McGrady, who used to send us up in strict rotation starting with a new table each week. Some seemed only to notice only the children sitting near them - especially the ones who were sitting up straight. Mrs Korklein was a very short lady with very high heels, who was pretty assertive with the senior boys if necessary!

 

A new head followed Mr Thraves, Mr Simmonds I think. He had great vision to improve the school [including its awful outdoor loos] He wanted meals cooked on the premises. I wasn't sure what 'premises' meant but I thought it might be some kind of round shiny oven - a bit like the containers that brought in the hash I mentioned earlier!

 

Ah yes, school dinners, served in a prefabricated building ; cold in summer and freezing in winter. Sat at trestle tables on hard benches - Wackford Squeers would have felt at home! Most tasty food was 'Fry up' which basically was yesterday's vegetables mixed up, fried and re-hashed. Delia would know doubt call it by its Sunday name of ' Bubble & Squeak'.

Favourite pudding was Manchester Tart ( yes, as pubescent adolescents we had many a laugh at that!) It consisted of a pastry base with a thin layer of strawberry jam topped with thick custard. Served cold it complemented the surroundings perfectly. All in all though, not bad at a shilling a time.

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Hi, I went to High Storrs early 60s could never stomach the dinners as they obviously were cooked by the same person from the boy's school.

always took sandwiches - meant that we could go on the grounds a lot quicker to talk to boys, as you remember we were not allowed to mix to any great degree. Miss Furtado was our headmistress and she had the uncanny knack of seeing you come back into school if you had tried to get up to the shops.

 

Ms Furtado. I remember her. A perfect counterpart to George Mack, Birds of a feather. If you were caught misbehaving during school dinner, were you made to stand on your seating bench for the rest of the period so that everone could gawk at you? I remember having to do that once. :blush:

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Hi rogG, no Miss Furtado had a much better punishment. She used to have us in the office and say how disappointed she was in us. The amount of girls this reduced to tears anyone would have thought that we had received 6 of the best. No physical punishment or public humiliation could have the same effect. She was however a wonderful person and deeply respected, at least by my friends.

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  • 3 weeks later...
Ah yes, school dinners, served in a prefabricated building ; cold in summer and freezing in winter. Sat at trestle tables on hard benches - Wackford Squeers would have felt at home! Most tasty food was 'Fry up' which basically was yesterday's vegetables mixed up, fried and re-hashed. Delia would know doubt call it by its Sunday name of ' Bubble & Squeak'.

Favourite pudding was Manchester Tart ( yes, as pubescent adolescents we had many a laugh at that!) It consisted of a pastry base with a thin layer of strawberry jam topped with thick custard. Served cold it complemented the surroundings perfectly. All in all though, not bad at a shilling a time.

 

I think the prefabricated buildings that people remember appeared after the war. As far as I know school dinners came along because of the war, it wasn't considered safe for pupils to walk home for dinner as was once the common practice. So school dinners, along with free school milk and hastily erected buildings became part of the post-war deal.

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