Off to School

My father, Norman Albert Harry Maitland, was 15 years old when he won a coveted place at the Royal Naval Dockyard School in Portsmouth. The Dockyard Schools were established in 1843 to bolster the quality of Royal Navy ship design and construction, and provided high quality technical training for academically gifted apprentices. They offered an outstanding free education for working class boys, many of whom were the sons of dockyard workers, as my father was. 

The School operated a ruthlessly competitive process in which the class was halved each year based on exam results until only the top fifteen pupils remained in the fourth and final year – my father was one of them and eventually graduated third in his year. He is pictured, 5^th from the left, in the back row of the photograph below.

His time at the school was interrupted by WWII and in 1939 his class was evacuated to the New Forest. As an older boy who could be relied upon to behave well, he was billeted at two surprisingly grand places – Rhinefield House, which is now a luxury hotel, and Beachern Wood House, which was owned by a member of the Barings Bank family.

The 1939 register reveals that my father was one of 9 schoolboys living at Beachern House where there was a housekeeper, cook, parlourmaid and two housemaids – what an experience it must have been for a working class boy used to living in a modest terraced house in the back streets of Portsmouth. My father clearly relished his time there, and we spent many happy hours together exploring the parts of the Forest that he had first discovered on long wartime bicycle rides.

My father completed his apprenticeship as an electrical fitter and remained working in Portsmouth Dockyard until 1946 when he left to join the Customs and Excise, thus fulfilling the prophesy of his apprentice master who had joked that his tools were clearly destined to end up in the dock !

Dad always remembered his days at the dockyard school fondly and kept in touch with many of his classmates. In 2004 he joined them on a reunion tour of Portsmouth Dockyard to celebrate reaching their 80^th birthdays – remarkably all fifteen of the boys from his 4^th year class attended and they were even joined by one of their schoolmasters.