Haslingfield School has been involved in the training of teacher students since at least 1931, but there was a period after the Second World War when these students came from a teacher training establishment based in Wimpole Hall.
There is a large flat area of arable pasture on the Wimpole Estate situated just inside the Arrington Gates. From 1944 to 1960, Wimpole Park as it became named, was host in turn to an American Hospital treating army casualties of war, an experimental teacher training college, a squatters camp, a community school, emergency local authority housing, and lastly a US Air Force Hospital best remembered for being the ‘place-of-birth’ for hundreds of Americans.
In June 1947, the school logbook reports that
“Mr. Worth and Mr. Conquest, students at Wimpole Training Centre, came to gather data for school practice, which begins on June 16th.”
They started teaching on the 16th, and were observed by their supervisors on the 20th.
In January 1948, ten children from Wimpole Park started cookery lessons at the school. Hot school dinners were occasionally shipped in from the park until 1954, when the Head complained about their quality. In September 1948 two more teacher students came. Others followed in January and May of the following year, but the stream stopped abruptly in June 1950, when the college presumably closed.
The college did indeed close in 1950: it was an “emergency teacher training college” always intended to be temporary. The idea was to train men (and later women) coming out of the armed forces for teaching. My father was a tutor there and we lived in an army hut on the site from 1947-49
do you know from the records the christian name of one of the students mentioned abve – I refer to the Mr. Worth who could have been the deputy-head of the first school I taught at after qualifying in 1962?
Thankyou.