Boys will be boys '“ but the girls could tell a few stories, too

Little Ivy and her brush with Mr Oxley the baker has been mentioned before in this column '“ how he told on her to her father, after she queued up with 'the poor children' when leftover buns were given away at the end of the day. Miss Amy Chambers, head teacher of the Infants' School in Church Street, instituted an annual ceremony combining Empire Day and the crowning of the May Queen where the lads for once took a back seat, but in street scene photographs of the time, boys greatly outnumber girls, who were, perhaps, kept at home by their mothers, to help with housework or minding the younger ones.

Some years before the First World War, an Act was passed allowing children to leave full-time schooling at the age of 12, on condition they could pass 'the Labour Exam' and undertake to continue studies at 'night school'. My own mother (born 1904) sat and passed the exam at 11, after the schoolmaster said he had 'taught her all he could', but she was obliged to go on schooling till her twelfth birthday. She then, as the oldest child in the family, became her mother's daytime assistant, while attending classes for business studies each evening. At the age of 90, she could still recite her timetable, and recalled how, during an enemy air-raid, her class took shelter in a nearby church hall, only to find themselves below a glass roof, through which they saw the Zeppelin go over!

An all-male audience, please note, when Sutton Mill (pictured) was dismantled with the help of Mr Funnell's steam engine in 1907, after 138 years on the site.

The memory of one elderly lady was stirred at a talk on Tide Mills by mention of Mr Dale 'the horse doctor'. As a girl, she had been watching from a distance as his patients went for their daily gallop through the shallows of the sea. One fell and broke a leg and had to be destroyed by the humane killer, there and then. 'The sea turned red with its blood' she told us. A talk about the Danish barque Peruvian, stranded close to the sea wall in 1899, struck a chord with one of the partially-sighted listeners. When a small girl, she and her mother had joined many others to look at the great vessel. Mention of the ship's iron side smashing repeatedly against the wall at high tide called up a vivid memory of sparks flying and spectators crying out in alarm.

More on shipwrecks: in living memory the Russian cargo ship Ussuri and its unscheduled arrival in the bay one foggy June morning in 1936 remain clear to many. As usual, crowds gathered, including one girl for whom the Ussuri would always be 'the monkey ship': for a long time it was thought she was confused by the number of cats seen to jump ship but it transpired that some crew members were actually seen on deck carrying a pet monkey. A little farther west along the beach and 28 years earlier, battle was joined between the Tide Mills boys and a group from town, intent on scrumping the village's apples (as they did each autumn). On the shore that year lay the trawler Gamecock, stranded some days earlier with its hold still full of fish. The raiders were bombarded with the stinking cargo, and 'them boys never came again'.

Date and name unknown, another vessel on our shores was vividly recalled: 'We heard in class that a wreck had left a load of sweeties all over the beach, and when we was let go we ran as fast as we could and ate all we could find. Oh dear, there wasn't many boys in school next day, and them that was spent most of the time being ill'.

The cargo was untreated liquorice!

PAT BERRY