MGS in the News: “Goodbye to the Old Grammar School”

Just prior to the Old Hall Lane buildings opening in September 1931, The Guardian published a piece describing the Long Millgate site as it was closed. The Receiver, Owen Cox, and the Head Porter, Maurice Jepson were interviewed as they locked up for the last time.

“The Manchester Grammar School officially deserted Long Millgate yesterday. Mr. Owen W. Cox closed his office and removed to the new buildings at Birch-in-Rusholme. The well-known Mr. Maurice Jepson, familiarly called ‘The Sergeant,’ for the last time locked up the school as he has done every night for nearly fifty years. Each of these officials has seen ten generations of school-boys come and go. The leave-taking was painful to both.

Before he left, Mr. Cox walked through the empty building with a representative of the ‘Manchester Guardian’ taking a last look at the old classrooms. The steps of only two people echoed coldly along the corridors. It was the silence upon which he intruded that moved Mr. Cox. He did not like working in a building lacking the happy vigorous atmosphere which comes from having every room above, below, and all around packed with schoolboys. An old school during the holidays is no place in which to be. A closed school is worse.

Most of the walls have been stripped bare. But here and there are old boards bearing the names of boys, written in gold. Some are scholars, some athletes. Many are dead. Where the boards will go no one knows. The new school is concerned with the present and the future. Meanwhile Mr. Cox and Mr. Jepson can recreate the stories of scores. Their memories, fed on affection, flourish prodigiously. They know more of the lives of boys and men than they could tell in a month. Theirs is strange wisdom. The material emptiness of classrooms yesterday contrasted oddly with the spiritual fullness which they gave to them. In Mr. Cox’s room was a pile of photographs. During the upheaval he and his colleague have spent many an hour picking out schoolboys of the last century, naming them, recalling them, wondering about them. Celebrities in embryo have gazed at them from faded prints – Lord Bradbury, Professors E.T. Whittaker, R.G. Lempfert, E.D. Telford, and many others.

Now there are packing cases in the gymnasium. Schoolmasters’ desks sacred and terrible, have been uprooted with ignominy, leaving piles of pedagogic behind. Two hundred old desks, unfit for an efficient generation, are being left to stir queer thoughts in the mind of the buyer of building sites. Their tops, carved and notched in idle hours, look well enough. Mr. Cox will save one or two for talismans or charms which will awake memories. Their fronts are astonishing. Worm-eaten at first glance, on closer examination they are seen to have been devoured much more by penknives, penholders, and nails plied by fidgeting fingers while empty eyes stared at blackboards. Generations of the schoolboy ability, despite the copybooks, to do two things at once have here left their mark.

Notices remain: ‘For traffic, only during intervals,’ ‘— will leave by this door.” One blackboard bears algebraic symbols. Another has the verse, heavily underlined, beginning, ‘Hugh of the Owl was a scholar bold.’ Once enforced with pain, now they are meaningless. Yet one fancies that Mr. Cox will not wipe them into nothingness. The swimming-bath has been drained. Mr. Cox, standing at its edge, saw some of the hundreds who learnt to swim in it. He saw also the baptism which he himself gave it, for he was the first to plunge in at its filling. The bath at the new school is twice as big. He is going to be the first in that, too. Today he will descend into the strange waters. But not so Mr. Jepson. He can tell a harrowing tale of a seaside adventure close to seventy years ago. Fathers were stern in those days. Tremulous little boys were apt to find themselves hurled into the midst of the ocean. Mr. Jepson does not care for swimming.

These two friends of the school are naturally going to see that the new era opens in a manner proper to the occasion. Too many old boys – and young as well – have impressed upon them the necessity of their active presence if the school is to have the same soul in its changed body. So they will go to Birch-in-Rusholme, perhaps to suffer homesickness for those to whom their faces will be reassuring. They made their farewells characteristically. Mr. Cox walked round with his eyes on phantoms. Mr. Jepson worked with his hands on packing cases.“