Far Cotton CPS was the primary school I attended from ages 5 to 11 (1950 to 1956).
"CPS" I remember as
standing for "County Primary School." Northampton was a "county borough," a town reporting to a
county authority. I suppose that
was the significance of the word "county" in the school's name. It doesn't seem to make a lot of sense
otherwise. That "C" may,
however, have stood for "Council," which would be more logical, as the town council supervised local schools
(cf. "council
house"). "County Primary School" is how I remember it, though.
The school was approached from the Towcester Road through Alton Street. Its premises were bounded on the north by Main Street, on the west by Letts Road, on the south by Clinton Road, and on the east by Alton Street and Alton Terrace.
Within these premises there were a lower school for infants, and an upper school for the older children. I don't remember where the exact division was made by age. So far as the buildings were concerned, though, the northern and eastern buildings were lower school, the rest upper school.
Cyril Mortimer was my teacher in my last two years at Far Cotton, 1954-56. My school reports for those two years survive here. The headmaster was Fred Adams, an unflamboyant man perfectly suited to his job, liked by everybody. (Especially, was my impression, by his teachers, as he mostly kept out of their way.) For 1953-54 my class teacher was a fellow named Elliot, I think — and that was not at the Alton Road premises, but in an overflow annex on Abbey Road next to St. Mary's church. This was the baby boom; England was bursting with kids. Mr. Elliot was strong for reading. He had a library in his class, and gave over whole periods to just letting us read. I read Coral Island there, and (though I think in a simplified children's version) Pilgrim's Progress. Before 1953 my memory is very vague; though I recall the infant school being in charge of a Miss Cracknell.
The buildings shown in the "Far Cotton School Tour 2006" here are all lower school. The little door part-visible in the third picture of the slide show led to a cloakroom smelling strongly of varnish in the fall of 1950, when I showed up for my first school experience. My coat peg was identified by a little picture of a pig. That varnish smell still, decades later, conjures up the pig picture, and the crabbed visage of irascible Miss Cracknell, whom we all disliked, and my first class teacher, a younger and sweeter lady whose name I have forgotten (love less enduring than hate), and a classmate who wore a woollen hat all day because her head had been shaven on account of ringworm …
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The group photograph shows Cyril Mortimer's class, 1955 or 1956. A key to the photograph, with as much as I can recall about my classmates, is in the "Photographs" section of the Virtual Attic, here.
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The street whose backs are visible behind us is I think Letts Road.
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[Added somewhat later: After posting the above, I had a very touching email from Cyril
Mortimer's daughter Jane, filling in
some details.
Cyril Mortimer was a Far Cotton native, born in Clinton Road. His father was a leather worker, his mother a stalwart of
St Mary's church. Dad was bright but left school at 14 and went to
a technical college to study to
be an electrician. He then volunteered for the RAF which took him to Canada for his initial training. Due to a major
crash (12 months in hospital
with broken femurs) he became a navigator and survived, by missing bombing flights.
He returned home at the end of the war, well travelled and educated. Like many of the teachers of my time, men who had
been officers in the
war, he went on an accelerated teaching programme. He was eventually headmaster of an elementary school in
Northampton.
Cyril Mortimer
died in
1989 at age 67, the day he was diagnosed with cancer. Mrs. Mortimer was still alive in late 2009, aged 81. Cyril left
three children, all of whom, I
am told, are well-educated and well-traveled and speak at least one other language well. One of his grandchildren is
currently at the university
of Cambridge. A good man; a life well lived.
Tom Elliot, who was my teacher 1953-4, was a strong Christian. He was a close friend of Cyril Mortimer's, and stood
godfather to Cyril's
daughter. Like Cyril, he was eventually a headmaster. He died of throat cancer sometime before Cyril.
Fred Adams scandalized the town in the 1960s by running off with the school secretary, having embezzled school funds
for the purpose. Cyril Mortimer
was acting head for a while following this elopement, and Mrs. Mortimer acting school secretary.]