Wombwell High School

The Great Fire of Wombwell

(A tribute to the staff of the time)

by Irene Dalton - Headteacher 1987 - 2002

I first heard of the fire at 9 o’clock on a Sunday night. I had spent the weekend with friends in Harrogate, and on my return there was an urgent message from Mick Savage, a senior teacher at the time and a great servant of the school who, alas, died at the age of 39.

When I arrived in Roebuck Street, it was filled with pupils and their parents, all milling around in shock, looking at the still burning school. Many came up to me, saying, ‘What is going to happen to us?’ There was a sense of great community loss, some pupils were openly crying.

As I went down the drive, the extent of the fire was frightening; the whole administration block was still in flames, sparks spitting from electric cables, and firemen worked inside the smouldering ground floor attempting to put it out. Water had been sprayed into the adjoining hall and offices, causing a lot of damage. The next hours passed in a state of shock, my dominant thought was that we were finished as I tried to concentrate on the Police, Fire Services and Local Authority personnel who wanted answers to questions.

But already the spirit that makes Wombwell the community it is was at work. Pearl, our redoubtable dinner lady and tea maker, had been round her neighbours, begging tea bags and milk to provide hot drinks for the firemen and the staff present. The night passed in nightmare fashion; foolishly, and almost incapable of thought, I drove home when the fire was under control, refusing offers of a bed for the night, set my alarm clock for 5 a.m. and woke when it rang about ten minutes later and I had to get up.

Again, support was immediate, When I joined Mick on the drive at 6 a.m. to meet staff coming in, the dinner ladies came out with tea and bacon sandwiches to sustain us. As the staff arrived, some completely ignorant of the disaster, I sent them home for the day and sat down to plan with the senior management team how we were going to manage the next few days: indeed, how the school was to survive.

We had lost the staffroom and the school hall, 19 classrooms were either destroyed or uninhabitable because of smoke damage, the administration rooms were severely fire and water damaged; our paper store, in which the fire had started was gone - we did not even have any order forms with which to order replacements for the equipment we had lost. We had no access to the school records.

Decisions were taken rapidly. The children would not come in until the following Monday, giving us a week to prepare. The Deputy Head responsible would re-jig the timetable, allocating new rooms and whatever else needed to be done to accommodate the full timetable. Dining would be crammed into one of our two dining rooms. We would hold a planning meeting with Heads of Department on the next day (Tuesday), they then made assessments of what was needed and all staff would be in to salvage what they could and move into their new rooms and prepare from Wednesday onwards. Some pupil volunteers helped with the salvage. Admin staff, led by the Bursar, would set about ordering the stock and equipment we needed. Sue Fenna, later the champion of Operation Campus, set about creating a new staffroom in our old sixth form common room, despite having her own PE Department to manage. We intended to open for pupils on the following Monday.

I did receive offers from other Heads to take in some of our pupils. These I politely refused, believing that if children went elsewhere for a short time, they might never return, our numbers would decline accordingly, and the school itself would be under threat.

In fact, we did open on the Monday, with a full timetable. As the children arrived, they were directed to an ancient blackboard, which showed them where to go. Quietly, and with the good sense I have always expected from our pupils, they went. And so we began the long road to recovery.

For days, I went about the school in jeans, wellies and waterproofs, inspecting the damage, talking to people from the Local Authority, loss adjusters, well-wishers and the police and fire services. I lived, more or less, on Mars bars and coffee, I was even interviewed by a television crew with a Mars bar in my hand, looking as if I had just come home from a hike. The most important message I had to get across to the media was what a wonderful community Wombwell was, the very positive aspects of the work the staff were doing in desperately difficult circumstances and the excellent behaviour and good sense of the pupils and parents. The media, of course, were looking for something more sensational. It wasn’t easy.

My office became a cupboard (literally) off a big room we commandeered as the administration centre in C block, the old 1928 building. (We had to remove the shelves as two of our taller staff kept banging their heads on these.) I was still in that room six months later when an official from the NAS/UWT came to visit and wryly expressed his amazement at meeting a Head who had so little regard for status that she occupied such a small, scruffy space. The secretaries had an awful job. Based in the smoke and water damaged hall, with no heating, they spent weeks photocopying school records and correspondence, all of which was damp from the water sprayed on it, and smelt dreadful. Even now, anyone looking at papers before 1991 will see a black border round them - the heat damage from the fire photocopied as well.

The Local Authority’s Buildings Officer, Tom Storey, and his team were a tower of strength, support and humour. He even presented me with a white safety helmet, with the wish that I might never need it again, and ‘rescued’ a Mars bar from my waterlogged office. No-one else seemed much interested after the initial event of the fire and a few condolence visits. This was before the days of offers of counselling and emotional support. As a staff, we just had to get on with it, so we did. I remember the Bursar, Diane Salkeld, and myself haunting the place till late for many nights, looking over at the twisted wreck of the buildings before they were demolished, emotionally unable to leave. And I shall never forget the smell of burnt wood and plastic which permeated the place. The cold that set in was truly awful in D Block; Tom Storey described it as a dead building, and so it was, only those who have lived with the results of a fire can imagine the desolation. For years, whenever we had any work done, like putting in a new socket, the smell of smoke came back from the inside of the building, and the memories came back, too.

No cause for the fire was ever established, as the heat at the site of the fire was so intense that forensics could not determine what had set it off. Rumours abounded, but none of them pointed to any involvement by pupils from the school, a fact I continued to emphasise to the media.

We were, in effect, a building site for two years. First the Bursar and the Senior teacher worked tirelessly with architects and loss adjusters to ensure that the new buildings were what we needed and that we got all the equipment and facilities back that we had lost, then supervised and managed the rebuilding project.

Then - deep joy - the architects admitted what I had been telling the Local Authority for years, that most of the 1960s buildings were in a state of terminal decay - rotting windows and old age had made the them unsafe. I had got to such a point of exasperation with this that I used to present visiting officers and advisers with a piece of rotting wood from my office windowsills as a momento. Staff and pupils who were at Wombwell at the time will recall being able to see fresh air between the walls and the floor in D Block in a high wind, and the Science Department could not used any of the electric sockets against the outer wall as they were permanently wet. This the staff had had to put up with for years, pointing it out, but never taking their bats home.

So a further year was spent re-cladding the whole of that. Not a simple task, as the outer walls from a section of the classrooms had to be removed one at a time and the this involved moving classes out of these rooms and the adjoining ones in succession, a very complicated process, managed with considerable skill and patience by Diane Salkeld, the Bursar. It went very smoothly, and the teaching staff put up with the disruption with very good grace. At last we looked like a new school, except that the grounds had turned into a soggy, muddy mess churned up by the building works.

The time took its toll. Numbers declined to the lowest ever, at one point our entry dwindled to 100 a year from around 180. But the reputation of the school for good pastoral care, for listening to pupils and parents, for the polite way the pupils behaved towards visitors, the standards of dress and steadily increasing exam results brought the numbers back, slowly. The staff worked to achieve this like Trojans. The bottom line was that the pupils became proud of the school and themselves, and were able to compare themselves very favourably with those of other schools.

Much was due to the tremendous efforts of Sue’s Operation Campus Team, a staff and pupil effort which turned the grounds from a sea of mud into a cared for and attractive environment. Sue became an expert beggar, wangling tons of topsoil, plants and cash from local businesses who became happy to support the school. Staff and pupils provided the muscle. It was her vision that achieved this, and I have happy memories of sitting on the steps outside the hall on a Saturday morning, eating chips and drinking Coke (sorry Jamie Oliver, but what do you know about ordinary people?) with a bunch of tired and cheerful pupils after a morning’s planting, weeding and digging. Years later, pupils from that time sometimes proudly showed me a bush, still flourishing, that they had planted with Operation Campus. One said, ‘I wonder if that will still be there when my children come here.’

What other school staff could have done what we did after such a disaster as the fire? To be up and running again, on full timetable, within a week of its happening, not to whinge, complain or give up, and above all, to stay with the school and make it rise from its ashes to a new beginning.

My memories of Wombwell are of a school community which cared, where self-esteem was high and where pupils felt safe and respected. I salute those who worked to create such a community. I only wish that those who cry down the comprehensive system, who talk of failing schools and the low standards ‘tolerated’ in the state system could understand the commitment, hard work, professionalism and - yes - I will say it, love of the place, that made it possible. It was a privilege to lead the school through this time, and I shall never forget those days.

Wombwell High School staff list 1972.

Mr. W. Mayhew - April 1929 - April 1953

Mr. W. Mayhew B. Sc. was the very first Head Teacher of Wombwell Boys’ Middle School which opened its doors at 9am on the 8th of April 1929. At that time it was attended by 221 boys. During his Headship the number of pupils on roll peaked in August 1944 at 274 boys plus 47 evacuees. Throughout the war years attendance fluctuated greatly and was dependant on air raid warnings during the night. Underground air raid shelters were sited where the current Reception area and hall are. Mr Charlie Sagar, a Roebuck Street resident for the last 58 years, and former pupil, remembers them well, “bricked and covered up, we used to play in them”. Mr Mayhew spent 24 years as Head Teacher, overseeing the period when, in 1945, the school changed its name to Wombwell Secondary Modern School. He retired on 30th of April 1953.

Is this your Sports day? Did you love or hate Sports day?

Head of English, Mr Hook and Headteacher Mr Wilson celebrate pupil achievement.