Shirley School To Mark Its Jubilee

Press, Volume CV, Issue 30961, 18 January 1966, Page 12

Shirley School To Mark Its Jubilee

Opened in 1916 under the headmastership of Mr W. Balch, the Shirley Primary School will next month celebrate its jubilee. A week-end programme will begin bn February 11, when the school will be open for inspection to old pupils in the afternoon, and a jubilee ball will be held at Cowles stadium in the evening. The main reunion ceremony —with the ringing of the school bell, the roll call, and decade photographs—will take place on February 12, a Saturday, with a cocktail party, followed by a banquet, at Cowles stadium in the evening. There will be a church service at St. Stephen’s Church, Shirley, on February 13. The Shirley school was built to cater for a rising schoolage population in the residential areas to the north of the city—“but the handsome brick school was not in the midst of a residential district as it is today,” says a souvenir booklet produced for the jubilee. “Rather it was on the perimeter, with paddocks to the north of Shirley road. Most of the first pupils came from the St. Albans part of the district.

“Now the district has changed its character. Inwardly, and by extension f grounds and buildings, the school has changed too. But teaching methods, new generations of teachers and children apart, it remains the place that thousands recall as their first school,” the booklet says. The school was opened with a roll of 729 —but today it is a decapitated school, with classes up to Standard Four only, and a- roll of 400. In a tribute to the first headmaster, Mr Balch, who

held the post from 1916 to his retirement in 1931, the jubilee booklet describes him as “a man dedicated to the teaching service.” “Not for him the remoteness of a headmaster’s office,” the booklet says. “He taught something in every class himself, and consequently knew every pupil in the school.

“Mr Balch’s special subject was English, which he developed thoroughly through the school. Later, he wrote and had published a series of textbooks on English, based on his own experience in teaching the subject. These were popular throughout schools in Canterbury, and wider afield, for many years: and even today many teachers still find value in them.”

Another name prominent in Canterbury education in the booklet is that of Mr W. J. Cartwright, chairman of the Secondary Schools’ Council, and a former headmaster of the Normal School. As a young teacher at the Shirley School in 1922, he taught 93 pupils in “the old tin shed” —this during a period of rapid expansion after World War I.

Injured In Collision.— Mrs Susan Weeks, aged 27, of 48 Bowker street, Timaru, suffered head injuries and was taken to the Timaru Hospital by ambulance when her motor scooter was involved in a collision with a truck in Timaru at 2 p.m. yesterday.— (F.0.0.R.)