Sidney James Hampshire 1982

It is well we cannot see into the future otherwise I think a lot of us might opt out of this existence very quickly.

Born before the first World War little did I realise the trials and tribulations that were to follow.

I do not remember much, if anything, of the 1914-1918 war except what my parents told me later in life. One thing was starting school-life in 1917 at Rawlinson Street Infants and progressing at normal speed to Standard IV in the “big boys”. The headmaster then was a person known as "Snobber" Brooks who, I found out later, resided in Fairfield Lane.

He it was who started a special examination class in preparation to take the Scholarship Examination for entrance into the Higher Grade School and be gave us homework to do - a thing unknown in a primary school. His ambition was to have the most scholars passing this examination and he succeeded by frightening us all to death with threats of what would happen if we failed.

I understand he took his own life some two or three years later.

In September 1924 I therefore became a scholar at the Higher Grade School or, as it became known, the Barrow-in-Furness Municipal Secondary School.

The headmaster then was “Gaff” Barnes who was a very strict disciplinarian and had very fixed ideas about boys speaking to girls. The boys had to wear their caps, which bore a yellow circle, at all times out of doors, giving rise to taunts of “ringworm" from those who went to other schools. If one was caught talking to a girl detention followed - and whipping one's cap off and stowing it up your jersey to avoid recognition had the same effect.

In this period, in Great Britain, a serious depression was operating, also a general strike which led to my father emigrating to the U.S.A. Fortunately he found good employment there and stayed about 3-4 years, when Vickers sent for him and guaranteed him work for life.

I was looking forward to taking up electrical engineering when I left school. In those days one could not buy a ready-made wireless set, only parts could be bought from which to make them, and this I learned to do partly with the help of Hugh Sawtell our Geography Master. I made pocket money by making sets for those people who could afford them.

As was still very difficult to obtain, my father, who had returned to Barrow-in-Furness late in 1927, found work for me through the good offices of a neighbour, as office boy at the general offices of the Barrow Haematite Steel Company in Walney Road.