Whilst we were visiting Blackwell, near Windermere, on Saturday, I explored one of the exhibitions which covered the time in the 1940s, when Blackwell was home to an evacuated girls school. In 1941, the junior girls of Huyton College, near Liverpool, were evacuated to Blackwell to escape the bombing of Liverpool.
The exhibition was fascinating with lots of photographs of the girls, teachers and their activities which included skating on a flooded and frozen courtyard, rooms turned into dormitories and classrooms, and recollections of some of the girls from their time near Windermere. With their lively and creative headmistress Miss Murphy at the helm, the pupils’ time at Blackwell seems idyllic. Summers were spent helping local farmers, walking on the fells and swimming in the lake, and winters skating on the flooding courtyard created by Miss Murphy with buckets of water. Huyton College re-opened after the war, but continued to use Blackwell as a preparatory school until 1962. When they left, Blackwell School was formed and lessons continued until 1976.
The Mystery of the Moated Grange
Five Jolly Schoolgirls
The School in the Forest
Three Terms at Uplands
The School on the Loch
As I wandered round the Blackwell exhibition I was thinking particularly about The School in the Forest where the school is evacuated to the Lake District. "This house 'Wildeswood Hall' by name, was situated in a clearing of a large forest...on the border of Cumberland....It had been built in the nineteenth century by Mr Amos Shaw, a wealthy cotton manufacturer, during the great boom of the Lancashire trade in Victorian times." The description of the Lancashire industrialist mirrors the life of Joseph Holt, the wealthy Mancunian who built Blackwell.
Today it seems hard to imagine such a beautiful Arts and Crafts house was once a school and full of children learning and playing!
