Local history: Life at Creemore School, about 1920

Play hooky and crash a wedding? Surely pupils of the past did not stoop to that sort of bad behaviour. Playing hooky and crashing a wedding is exactly what one Grade 10 student did along with several of her friends.
Here is what happened in that students own words. “We had lunch at the school and then it was off to the wedding in the Methodist Church. We had to wait until 1:20 p.m. before the doors were opened and then we made a rush to the gallery. Some women played the organ the whole time. I wasn’t the only one wishing she would quit. The bride had a lovely pale blue velvet on. She carried pink roses while the flower girl was dressed in pink. The groom never kissed the bride. Isn’t that awful? We were quite a bit later for school than the last time. (It seems as if this wasn’t the first wedding they had crashed.) When the bride and groom were leaving in the car The boys pegged snowballs at them. Isn’t that shocking? Miss Noy requires us, if we can’t give a good reason for being late, to stay until 4:30.
The teenager I have just quoted was my mother’s sister Beatrice. She was writing a letter to my mother who was away at that time. When I knew Aunt Beatrice she was a stickler for proper manners and behaviour. I was shocked when I first read that letter but perhaps we are all like that. Misbehaving when young and then knowing better later on.
I asked Aunt Beatrice many questions about her youth in Creemore. Sixty-eight years later after the hooky escapade I copied her answers down. She also wrote a memoir for me from which I take these stories from school days around 1920.
She walked to school from the country as did a few others and they ate their lunch at the school, of all places, in the furnace room in winter. In the summer they ate outside. Some days they walked downtown. One friend, Dorothy Bates, had an aunt on Caroline Street whom they visited. They looked at the jail and the swinging bridge at the end of Mill Street and occasionally went to the cemetery. In warm weather the boys swam naked at the remains of the old dam west of the Caroline Street Bridge. They jumped off the abutments.
She recalled the time they saw smoke coming down over Ten Hill. Some boys drove a car up the hill to see where the fire was. It turned out that the smoke was from the Haileybury fire in Northern Ontario. She said that the farmers collected vegetables to send north to the people burned out.
From her memoir she wrote, “When I first started to school we used to drive to school, in winter anyway. We used to put our horse and cutter at Grandma’s on Caroline Street just west of the school. After she died we put our horse at Nesbitt’s stable on Elizabeth Street. When we were older we didn’t drive at all. Sometimes in winter we would get rides on logging sleighs from Jackson’s bus. (Now the Creemore Nature Preserve, formerly known as the Mingay Tract) to Jackson’s Mill in Creemore (just south of today’s Legion.)
“I started school in the spring after I was six year old. That would be the spring of 1916. The beginner class was called kindergarten then. I think I started in about class C, then moved up to B and A, then Junior First and Senior First. I spent three years in the first room. My teacher was Miss Joy Stephens from Glencairn. We all liked her.
“I was two years in the second room. Our teacher was Marda Madill. Eva Agar came in sometimes as a substitute. Mr. Mackay was in the third room. He was the principal.”
Just a few words here from this writer to explain the grading system. Pupils went through an early program of learning when they started school, probably equivalent to today’s kindergarten. The Junior First and Senior First were grades one and two. Junior and Senior Second were grades three and four; Junior and Senior Third grades five and six; Junior and Senior Fourth grades seven and eight.
The secondary classes were labelled yet another way. Indeed, even the school itself had a different label. It was referred to as a High School but the department of Education called it a Continuation School due to its size and the program it offered. When the Continuation program was first offered somewhere around 1895 it was called the Fifth Class equivalent to today’s grades nine and ten. Later the grades were called forms: First Form, Second Form, Third Form. Fourth Form was added about 1920 and Fifth Form finally in the 1930s.
Continuing my aunt’s memoirs she goes on to say, “When I first started school I used to chum around with my second cousin, Beatrice Cooksey. We were about the same age but she died in one of those epidemics that spread through the country. (The 1918 Spanish Flu). The Cookseys lost another daughter in an unfortunate accident. It was when I was in High School and it happened one fall day when we were having our annual Field Day. Mr. Jim Jackson had his car parked in front of the school. When he got in the car he hadn’t noticed Isobel Cooksey standing behind it. When he started the car he backed up so he could swing around to go home. He felt a bump not realizing what it was and kept on moving. He had knocked down Isobel and ran over her.. That ended our Field Day very suddenly. Father felt quite badly because both the Cookseys were relatives and Jim Jackson was his friend. Jim Jackson never fully recovered from the shock of that accident and he died not long after that.”