L.C.C. TEACHERS

New Zealand Listener, Volume 4, Issue 82, 17 January 1941, Page 3

L.C.C. TEACHERS

Service In The " Blitz" "Hi young ladies, go to shelter: they’re right overhead now"... and a trio of girls with colanders on their heads in place of helmets, with mixing basins and spoons in their hands, run out from the improvised kitchen where they are working to the sandbagged entrance of a school shelter. These are L.C.C. teachers, part of whose "premises they have turned into an emergency feeding centre, and who, in rota, combine teaching with feeding the neighbourhood round them — not actually the homeless, but those whose gas and electricity services have been so reduced that home cooking is no longer practicable. And the colander helmets are there so that, should the gunfire last long, they can make a dash to take the joint out of the oven or the pudding off the fire. Let gay little Miss Morgan, who comes from Aberystwyth, tell the story of her work, for she is now O.C. cooking at one such centre in London, as well as being the domestic science teacher to the girls there. "We've got a field kitchen set up, and in theory this is only a centre where food is cooked and catried away. But in fact there are lots of men here whose wives and kiddies have been sent away and you can’t ask them to take a basin into an empty home, so we keep a few tables for them. Here’s the menu: roast beef, gteens and potatoes for sixpence, pudding twopence, tea a penny, sandwiches twopence. Who are those men with towels as aprons? Those are _ the masters carving and serving. And that friendly man looking after the children is our Assistant Education Officer." Nothing can exceed the devotion of these London teachers to their neighbourhoods. In one East End school they were bombed out, carried on in the kitchens (which survived) of a bombed hospital, drawing the food (kept hot over basins of water) on the hospital trollies to the improvised serving counters.