Memories of a vice-principal

LIKE many associated with Ebrington Primary, Ruby Millar has enjoyed a life-long relationship with the school.

She attended the Primary School as a pupil from 1943 until 1950 and after finishing her teacher training at Stranmillis, returned to the church-based school in 1959 and remained there until 2000 without ever feeling the need to fly the coup to another school.

The eldest of six, Ruby acknowledges the "great sacrifice" her parents made to ensure she got away to teacher training, but also acknowledges her good fortune in securing a post at her former school immediately on leaving training.

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"I think the main reason I got it was I was a member of the church and it was a church school. I started as a teacher in P4 in 1959 and it was a shock to the system. When I was a pupil you did a lot of knitting and sewing and I can remember the teacher teaching me to sew something you would never make in school now - a nightdress. Things were beginning to become more modernised when I went back .

"We didn't get TV sets until we moved to the new school, it was a church school and we had to clear the desks every afternoon to allow church organisations in at night. In my first classrooms it was forms the children sat on and did your work there. They were like long benches with nothing to lean on to write. Another teacher and I swapped so I got the other room with the desks with tops on them."

Despite the drawbacks of the furniture and the need for a rota for schoolwork as well as the rooms, Ruby soon settled into a routine of instruction that maximised on what was available to her in the various teaching areas.

Luxuries

It was about 15 or 20 years later that Ruby took the step up to vice-principal and by that stage she was enjoying the luxuries on offer in 'the new school'.

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"I was teaching a year and four months or a year and a half when we went to the new school. Going to the new school was unbelievable. We moved from a situation where I was sharing rooms to a classroom of my own with all the facilities I could want. Your own cupboards, your own desks, you know? All the things you could want, although when we moved at the beginning we didn't have our own desks as they hadn't arrived, so we still had to use the desks from the church. The other desks just didn't come in time for the opening of the school," she said.

"It was an unbelievable day," Mrs Millar said of the last day in the old school and the move to the new one.

"We had a service in the old building, a church service conducted by the Rev Robert Dickinson and the principal was Mr Robert Ramsay, and they conducted a service and the last hymn was 'Lord Dismiss us with Thy Blessing'. Then we lined up in classes and we marched to the new building," she said.

Recalling the facilities in the old premises as 'primitive' with toilets outside, and one playground, Mrs Millar said the new school felt like falling into the lap of luxury.

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"I think I actually said something like that in an article I wrote. I remember we had great teachers and 275 pupils at the time of the move, and at the new school we had long corridors with individual classrooms off that and we had all these inside toilets and we had a stage and a proper assembly hall, one corner of which was a dining area. Before that we had to walk to a canteen facility on the Glendermott Road, with the children who wanted school meals accompanied by two adults. With the move we had our own kitchen and canteen area, which at that stage were a part of the hall," Ruby recalls.

However, numbers attending the school mushroomed over the years and eventually the school was renovated, which included a stand alone canteen and kitchen facility on the grounds.

Music room

"The old kitchen was converted into a music room and the renovation gave us a bigger hall," she said, adding that it contrasted greatly compared to what she remembered from being a pupil.

Ruby admits that she had looked forward to going to school; "My mother said that from I could learn to talk I had always wanted to be a teacher. She always said that about me. I remember that the caretaker had to go in early to stoke the boiler in the old school. The classroom I had, the one with the forms, was very warm because it was over the boiler house, and the other room with the desks, we heated it with a stove. We lit the gas cooker and heated it up with it. You would not get away with that today, but we did it," she said, adding: "We didn't put it on all the time, but we did put it on when it was necessary."

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"You accepted things like that then. Nowadays we are household plants. We didn't have oil-fired central heating in homes in those days, so we didn't think a thing about it. And I remember there were ink wells and they had to be filled. I think people forget all these things, but it was 50 years ago and things have moved on. They have so much now, toys, computers, everything.

"When I was a child it was all formal teaching, tables, spellings, and if you introduced something different you were really popular, even something new in PE. When I went there I brought in netball with the girls. The boys had always had football, but the girls got netball and that was wonderful. I was popular then because I took netball for the P7," she said, noting that in those days you had to be an all-rounder in terms of your teaching ability, and that included being able to play the piano.

Indeed, at one stage all new teachers had to have music.

"I didn't have too much, but I had enough to do what I had to. I did the piano as a child and I have the piano there and play an odd time, but it's only an odd time. Now you have specialist teachers and some schools now have a music teacher on their staff. Ebrington had a full-time music teacher for years. I remember when we moved to the new school we had a radio then, so we took music programmes from there. We had 'Time and Tune' and I remember 'Singing Together'. 'Time and Tune' was for the younger children, and I remember thinking how we had progressed, and children made instruments out of junk material, if that's the word to use, and for a drum you just had to improvise and use whatever you could get," she said.

The recorder

One of the near-compulsory things that all children seemed to have to do, and teachers endure, was the learning of the recorder, and later the violin for those who wanted to take it up.

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In reflective mood, Ruby reveals that the old school started in April 1901 with 100 pupils on the roll and, by that September, there were 170.

"It was started by Ebrington Presbyterian Church and being a church school the church would have been in charge and run by the church committee and that's why I got the job there, because I was a member of the church. I was a lifetime member of the church, and still am," she said.

In fact, Ruby is currently Clerk of Session of Ebrington Presbyterian Church.

"I would do it all over again if I had to. I really enjoyed it. Oh yes, I had my ups and downs, but you were responsible for the whole class, and one term I remember I had 49 children. At one stage they brought children into the school every term, nowadays they only bring them in once a year. Then they did an intake in September in January and after Easter, so that's how I ended up with 49," she said.

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Asked how she kept a class that large 'entertained' she said: "You just had to do solid work the whole time, there was very little of this practical or creative activity,, you couldn't with that class. Most of it was practical work that just had to do the three hours."

There was learning by repetition, with spellings, mathematics and times tables...

"Nowadays there is no skills in spellings or tables. I object strongly to the mobile phone language. Anyone who gets a text from me gets everything spelled properly. I think that is what is ruining the spelling, and I get frustrated when I hand the shop assistant a certain amount and she had to put it into the till to find out how much I am owed in change. I get frustrated about that. Standards have slipped, well, I feel they have," Ruby says.

One great love was the Pushkin Scheme, which included a visit by the Duchess of Abercorn when she was teaching P7, and there was also a visit to Baronscourt, which included a sumptuous lunch with 'posh jelly'.

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