Metadata
WORK ID: YFA 2208 (Master Record)
| Title | Year | Date |
| ARCHBISHOP HOLGATE SCHOOL | c.1957 | 1954-01-01 |
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Details
Original Format: 9.5mm Colour: Black & White Sound: Silent Duration: 9 mins 25 secs Subject: Sport Education |
| Summary This film documents different aspects of school life at Arch Bishop Holgate School, many of which take place outside of the classroom. The film shows both the serious, and not so serious, school activities such as making models, participating in sporting events, and sliding on ice. |
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Description
This film documents different aspects of school life at Arch Bishop Holgate School, many of which take place outside of the classroom. The film shows both the serious, and not so serious, school activities such as making models, participating in sporting events, and sliding on ice.
Title – Do you lie awake and count sheep?
A man is sitting up in bed.
Title – Or do you read comics?
A boy in his pyjamas is reading a Buffalo Bill comic.
Title – Try going to sleep! Do you want to look...
This film documents different aspects of school life at Arch Bishop Holgate School, many of which take place outside of the classroom. The film shows both the serious, and not so serious, school activities such as making models, participating in sporting events, and sliding on ice.
Title – Do you lie awake and count sheep?
A man is sitting up in bed.
Title – Or do you read comics?
A boy in his pyjamas is reading a Buffalo Bill comic.
Title – Try going to sleep! Do you want to look like this?’ (Pointing to a picture of a teacher) Who does!
The boys on the athletics field practicing and competing in track and field events. Following this is a short sequence of a house Rugby match with parents watching. At the end of the game, the players pose for the camera.
Title – Winter sports
The boys, along with one of the teachers, line up in the school playground and slide one after the other on the ice. First they are timid, but then the confidence grows until they dance and spin on the ice. The boys are clearly enjoying themselves ahdn having fun sliding on the ice.
Title – Model Aeroplane contest
In a classroom, school pupils and teachers admire a display of model aeroplanes which are hung from the ceiling.
Title – The model railway
A train goes around a model railway in a model village.
Title – On the river
Some boys are out on boats on the River Ouse in York, and they make their way through the city centre. Several teams of coxed four row past, as well as a coxed eight. Some boys go out in their swimming costumes on what looks like an old bed frame acting as a raft. Finally the film ends with a hockey match.
Context
This is one of seven films deposited with the YFA by Robert Milligan made of Archbishop Holgate School. The other films were all made duing an eleven year period: 1951, 1955, 1956, 1958, 1960, 1961 and 1962. They all feature the school students at the time and cover aspects of school activities, including students performing in pantomimes, putting on a mock fashion show, school camping trips and visits to France, and making their own films. The film from 1956 has the future Secretary of...
This is one of seven films deposited with the YFA by Robert Milligan made of Archbishop Holgate School. The other films were all made duing an eleven year period: 1951, 1955, 1956, 1958, 1960, 1961 and 1962. They all feature the school students at the time and cover aspects of school activities, including students performing in pantomimes, putting on a mock fashion show, school camping trips and visits to France, and making their own films. The film from 1956 has the future Secretary of State for Health, Frank Dobson, larking about at a piano and in the mock fashion show. The school also features in a 1969 film when they perform as part of the Mystery Plays of that year. Robert Milligan was a French teacher and Housemaster who made the films and ran a small cinema at the school putting on film shows of his 9.5 mm films. He was known as being eccentric, nicknamed after his namesake ‘Spike’, and noted for his sideboards.
The school was founded in the reign of King Henry the Eighth, in 1546, as York's cathedral school. In the same year its founder, the then Archbishop of York Robert Holgate, also founded two other schools in Yorkshire, at his birthplace of Hemsworth in the West Riding, and in Old Malton, the forerunner of Malton Grammar School. This was a time of major upheaval, after Henry broke from Rome, declaring himself to be the Supreme Head of the Church of England in 1534. Holgate became Archbishop of York in 1545, the first Protestant Archbishop of York, and the first to be married (aged 68), to prove his conversion – only to dissolve the marriage when the Catholic Mary came to the throne in 1553. This latter did not save him from being stripped of his post for having broken the vow of celibacy, and sent to the Tower. Yet despite the Protestant context of the founding of the school (leading to the translation of the Bible into English), Holgate still maintained the old tradition of requiring his headmasters to know two of the original Biblical languages, Hebrew and Greek, and of course Latin, to which it was translated by Jerome in the fifth century AD. Coincidently, presumably, 1546 was the same year that the Catholic Church’s Council of Trent pronounced its definitive version of the Bible canon. Upon his death in 1555 Holgate was still able to leave money to endow a hospital in Hemsworth, near Wakefield. This film predates the 1936 Education Act, which finally implemented parts of the Hadow Report of 1928, creating Secondary education, and the more modern grammar school. Grammar schools themselves go back, in one form or another, to when the Romans were in England, with, as their name suggests, an over-riding emphasis on classical languages. But well before the advent of the 11 plus exam, the school itself had built up a good reputation, taking in children from all three surrounding Ridings, many of them boarders. In 1858 the then Holgate's Free School moved from Ogleforth and joined with Yeoman’s School to set up at Lord Mayors Walk, at what is now the old part of York St John University. It was set up as a Model School, under the auspices of York and Ripon Training College – see the Context for Ripon Training College (1955). The School moved from here in 1963 to its present location on the Hull Road in Heslington, next to the new University of York which was established in the same year. One of the outstanding features of the film are the marvellous images of boys sliding on ice in the school playground – see also Boys Sliding (1900). One of the common complaints of the time of writing (in the winter of 2009/2010), is what is seen by many as a 'cotton-wool culture': a far too severe view of health and safety in relation to children’s play. Recently there have been stories of schools banning games such as skipping, conkers, hopscotch, British bulldog and climbing trees. The law simply states that each school must undertake risk assessments for school activities, and that the school has a duty of care, indeed a responsibility for the health and safety of its students. It is up to each school to implement this as it sees fit, with the courts the final arbitrators. Yet one wonders if many schools today would allow this apparently unrestrained and gleeful sliding on ice, with the teachers joining in! Helene Guldberg, quoting David Yearly (from Jones, 2007), points out the importance of risk taking for children in learning how to judge risk as adults, but notes the numbers that are killed through accidents (p. 61) – the Child Accident Prevention Trust states that 139,200 children were injured in school or nursery playgrounds in 2002. Another interesting facet of the film is the boating. During the Victorian era both grammar and public schools become centres for sports. There was a developing idea of sport, especially team sports, improving moral character – with Matthew Arnold leading the way at Rugby School, and branching out into the later movement of muscular Christianity. Racing in rowing boats on rivers in England goes back to the watermen who raced on the Thames, becoming popular in the eighteenth century with, as customary, betting on the winner. The oldest annually contested event in the British sporting calendar, and oldest rowing contest in the world, dating back to 1715, is Doggett's Coat & Badge race – four and half miles long from "The Swan" at London Bridge to "The Swan" at Chelsea. But like most similar sports, this required time and money and so it was in the universities and grammar, or public, schools that these sports thrived. The Monarch Boat Club of Eton College and the Isis Club of Westminster School were both in existence in the 1790s. The elite nature of the sport was reinforced by rules such as thiose upheld by the Henley regaatta Committee which excluded anyone, ‘who is a mechanic, artisan ot labourer, or engaged in menial activity’ (Mandell, p. 153). Another school in York that took advantage of being near the River Ouse to have their own boat houses is St Peter’s School, as can be seen in another film held with the YFA by Billy Ibberson from 1959, which also shows school students rowing on the river. In 1985 the school ceased to be a grammar school, becoming plain Archbishop Holgate's School, a mixed comprehensive. It is a Voluntary Aided school, run by a Board of Governors, which until 2004 had the Archbishop of York as its chair. More recently, an Ofsted report of 2007 described Archbishop Holgate as "an outstanding school". In September 2009 the school opened a new £4m sixth form building, The Learning Centre. The school is keen to maintain its Christian tradition, with an “aim to create a school community in which pupils are known and cared for as individuals”. All the films made by Robert Millington indicate that pupils at the school were given reign to express themselves – especially on the stage. It is unclear whether this has anything to do with the school acquiring the nickname ‘the Archies’ sometime in the early 1950s. Given its encouragement of theatricality, it is perhaps not surprising that some former pupils went into acting – such as Peter Woodthorpe who was the voice of Gollum in the 1978 animated film version of the Lord of the Rings. Judging by an online noticeboard (see References) past pupils seem to hold the school in affection – which of course is not always the case! References H C Barnard, A History of English Education from 1760, 2nd edition, University of London Press, 1961. Helene Guldberg, Reclaiming Childhood: Freedom and Play in an Age of Fear, Routledge, 2009 Digby Jones, Cotton Wool Kids: releasing the potential of kids to take risks and innovate, HTI, Coventry, 2007. Richard Mandell, Sport: A Cultural History, Columbia University Press, 1984. Robert Holgate History of British Rowing Contact website for former pupils Helene Guldberg, Let the children play Archbishop Holgate School website The Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents Doggett's Coat & Badge race Health and safety in school playgrounds Child Accident Prevention Trust Factsheet AHGS Photographic Gallery |
