We were recently sent some wonderful photographs by Isobel Pilkington, the daughter of Thomas Brown who was headmaster at Yetholm School from 1952 to 1958. Thomas Brown was a keen gardener and a bee-keeper. One of Mrs Pilkington’s photographs shows the extensive school garden belonging to the schoolhouse and another shows Mr Brown collecting a swarm of bees from a tree on the green in front of Bowmont Terrace. In the 1950s, when Thomas Brown was headmaster, school children were not expected to help either with the garden or with bee-keeping. However, this was not the case in the 1920s and 1930s. The headteachers at Yetholm School in that period, first Mr Alexander Bell and then Mr George Jenkins, were keen to develop a Rural Sciences curriculum for the older children. A report by an HMI (School Inspector) in 1928 praised this aspect of the School’s teaching: Thus, between the wars, bee-keeping and gardening were a regular part of the curriculum for the boys at least. The same report says that the boys spent the best art of one day on Rural Science, while the girls spent more than a day on their rural skills. However, not everything went smoothly all the time . During a busy period in 1935 collecting bee swarms for the school, the Rural Sciences teacher, Miss Bain, got badly stung: A well known resident of Yetholm, Mrs Elma Goodfellow, recalled keeping hens and bees when she was a pupil at the School before the Second World War. There is a recording and transcript of her interview HERE
Here is the bit about the garden: ‘We kept hens . . and you also kept bees, I remember being told once about this story about the bee-keeping and there were two very special bees being brought all the way from Italy. And Mr Jenkins, who was the headmaster, finally got word that the bees were at Berwick Station. He was allowed to go down there and collect them. One was for Yetholm School and the other was for Denholm, and Miss Finn . . was going to take the one bee up to Denholm. But unfortunately she got into her little car, she sat on it and that poor bee that had survived all the way from Italy, succumbed in Miss Finn’s car at Yetholm.’
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