Tom Hepburn School Days (Hutchesons)

When I was ten years old (1885) we moved from Biggar to Crosshill in Glasgow and stayed there till I was twelve. We rented a flat at 20 Dixon Avenue, a suburb on the south side of the city. This was not far from the entrance to the Queen’s Park just a block from our previous house on Allison Street. In fact, we could see our old house from the windows of our top story flat on Dixon Ave. across a vacant lot. It was not long after that, however, that the vacant lot held a new tenement that blocked the view. My mother used to point out the door of the Allison St. house where I had bawled so loudly in my babyhood days that the neighbours always knew when I was coming home in my perambulator and was feeling hungry.

Our new house was a top flat, three steps up. It also had two large rooms in the attic which made a bedroom each for Addie and I. There were three rooms and a bathroom below and a large hall. The bathroom was quite a new thing to me. There were very few bathrooms in the country districts then. To lie full length in a long bath and splash about was quite good fun until my mother popped in to see if I had washed behind my ears. The small cistern for the noisy descent of water to the corner utensil was also interesting. I was caught one day climbing up to see how the chain worked the valve so nicely. I was interested in mechanical appliances even then.

We did not know any of the other tenants of the flats, except to speak to occasionally on the stairs. I can remember they were stone stairs of an especial hardness. As is usual with boys of that age I was often in a hurry galloping down three flights of steps two at a time. Sometimes I missed my footing and the hard steps made themselves felt.

Grandma Crawford came to visit us occasionally but did not stay for long. I can remember taking her out, my sister and I for a walk in the Queen’s Park which was just two blocks south along Victoria Road. One of these times she was in very good luck. She found a sixpence on the pavement at the corner of Dixon Avenue and Victoria Road and then another at the Queen’s Park gate. Grandma was amused and said she would have to come more often when she brought us such good luck. I felt doleful because Addie had all the good fortune but Grandma made it up by putting a shilling in my piggie bank when we got home.

The move from Biggar to Glasgow was made to help Addie and I to get a better education in the city. My father thought he could carry on his agencies just as well from Glasgow and be closer to the center of things by

doing so. She attended the Hutchison’s Girl’s School and I went to the Hutchison’s Boy’s School. I had twice as far to walk as she had as the boy’s school was on Crown Street. It was a tremendous challenge going from a country school to a large installation with a head master and twenty teachers, a drill instructor who was a veteran of the Crimean War, and a janitor in uniform whose principal occupation to my mind was the sounding of a big gong at the school door. Unknown to me, at the same school but in a different class was John Buchan from Peebleshire, later a brilliant writer and Governor General of Canada as Lord Tweedsmuir.

I had a mile and a half to walk to school from Crosshill suburb down Victoria Road to Eglinton Toll and then along a long, diagonal side street to Crown Street. Victoria Road was bounded then with brickyards and clay pits. I wasted many minutes in watching the making of bricks when I had a little extra time on hand. The street cars drawn by a pair of horses were another great item of interest. We school boys took many a short ride on their back steps when the conductor was busy lifting fares in the interior or even better when he was on the top. He couldn’t slide down the crooked back stairway as quickly as darting from the inside. We usually managed to hop off in good time but I remember once tripping as my feet struck the ground and going head over heels into the mud, The conductor’s laugh reached me as I scuttled upright gathering school books. The Pollokshaws Street cars that joined the main route at Eglinton Toll were an oddity. They were drawn then by three mules hitched abreast. The mules did not trust one another and kept wide apart.

The walk to school had to be done no matter what the weather was.  I can remember one severe winter when the snow lay on Glasgow streets until it was black with soot and the frost was keen. I often travelled with another boy from an adjoining street whose name was John Wood. He was a cheery fellow. As we were toiling along the slippery pavements I complained about the cold. “You should do like me, Tommy, wear two pairs of trousers and two woolen vests. Then the cold doesn’t matter,” he said. I hinted at that plan to my mother but only got an extra thick suit of woolen underwear which prickled like a hair shirt.

I did fairly well as a pupil at Hutchison’s Boy’s School. At least, that is, I managed to stay out of trouble. Our worst tempered teacher was a Mr. Cameron who taught English and Grammar. The classes were large with about fifty pupils per class. Old Cameron was a man one needed to watch carefully for he reacted to the mood of the moment. He had a nasty habit when he saw a new student inattentive or talking to his neighbour of throwing his leather strap with unerring accuracy to hit the guilty one on the head. I was never caught that way. I must have watched my chances carefully. I do remember the boy next to me receiving the strap full force on the side of his head and ear while he was speaking to me about something. Cameron then shouted, “Bring that here, fellow.” Then the sinner escaped with two hearty smacks, one on the palm of each hand. He then came back to his seat with the sore hands tucked under his armpits. On the other hand, when Cameron was in a good mood, usually on a Friday afternoon, he let the class do some elocution. Each seat had to put up a voluntary item and the teacher laughed as much as the rest of us at any especially humorous bits.

We had a Mr. Brown as our teacher for the first year and then Bonar and Cameron the second year I was there. Bonar was a very efficient mathematics teacher and it was from him that I got my first look at Euclidian Trigonometry and other branches of mathematics.

The times we enjoyed the best, however, were the gymnastics on the hard, tiled school playground. It was surrounded by high brick walls with the tops of tenement houses looking over us. The drill master, named Dixon, was an old veteran of the Crimean War. He had a dictatorial way of calling out his boys for their gymnastic exercises. He usually waited until a class of English or Mathematics had got into full swing. Then he would open the door just far enough to put his head in and nod to the teacher. That was the signal for pandemonium to start. The students threw their books aside and raced for the class room door. Once out on the playground an order barked by old Dickson soon got us back in line. The exercises started with bending and flexing the muscles in all the usual ways of the drill masters. After a week or two we were initiated into the use of basket-hilted sticks for sword exercises. Sometime later old carbines of light weight were given out and we were put through all the military maneuvers possible in our confined space. Now and then, to keep the class in a good humour, usually towards the end of a strenuous half-hour, old Dickson lined us up across one end of the playground. “Now!” he roared, “The enemy are faltering and they can’t stand much more. Prepare to charge. Fix bayonets!” We hadn’t any bayonets fortunately. Then with a roar, “Charge!” We all roared our loudest and galloped across the playground prodding our carbines with their imaginary bayonets at the enemies’ line. We usually were stopped in time but sometimes the noise was so bad and we were too excited to hear the: “Halt!” Then we prodded the muzzles of our guns into the backs of the seats that lined the far wall of the playground. The round marks in the paint got too numerous and the headmasters discovered them. After this the “Charge of the Light Brigade” had to be taken out of the program.

The only thing I led the rest of the class in was map drawing. I was a surprised and elated boy when I discovered the best map work done in the class all pinned up the last day of the session on the wall, my map of Scotland was at the end of the row with “First Prize for Map Drawing” posted below it.

On the final day of school when the prizes were distributed in the great hall with many of the boy’s parents present, I received a copy of Dicken’s Bleak House given as a prize. It was the first novel I got to read but it took me a long time to finish it. In fact, I don’t think I read it through until I was many years older. Speaking of novel reading I remember around that time discovering a copy of Robinson Crusoe on a shelf in Grandma Crawford’s house at Lochwinnoch while Addie and I were staying with her. She saw that I was very interested in the book and so asked me, “What book is that you have got, Tommy?” I gave the name and she straightened up with a severe look. “That’s not a good book for reading on the Sabbath Day. That’s all lies. Give me that book.” It was returned to the back of the shelf where I had found it and so I did not get too far with Robinson Crusoe until much later.

The only local visiting that I remember my folks doing during our two years stay at Dixon Ave., Crosshill was over to Pollockshields to visit Uncle John, Aunt Jane and their young family. Cousins Jamie, George and Jean were all that was there then and they were several years younger than Addie and I. Therefore, we did not mix much until they got older. Grandma Crawford at Lochwinnoch was our standby in the summer holidays.