At Market Lavington Museum, we have a number of old school registers. We have seen this 1936-7 one before, on our Calling the Register blog post.
Visitors delight in finding their own names and those of their classmates on our registers. However, this one is rather different.
The lower half of a Market Lavington C of E School register
It has been cut in half and covered with sugar paper, with the word Records written on the front. Inside, we can see the names and attendances of all the girls in the class, but not the boys.
The girls’ attendances in the weeks leading up to Christmas
The register was obviously reused for storing 78 rpm gramophone records. The pages would have protected the records from being scratched, whilst the triangular notch at the top of each page would have allowed a record to be pulled out easily.
Maybe the record collection was used with a gramophone at Market Lavington School. We do know that West Lavington School had one, which was played by a Market Lavington lady who taught there and used it for country dance music. We have that gramophone in the museum.
March 5, 2020 at 4:43 pm |
Paper shortage during war years? …
March 7, 2020 at 8:27 am |
Quite possibly. We do not know when the register was converted for record storage.
March 5, 2020 at 5:48 pm |
We did indeed have a wind-up gramophone at West Lavington Elementary School when I was a pupil there from 1954 to 1959 so I presume this is the one now in the museum. Mrs Holman was the teacher who lived at Market Lavington but it was also used by Mrs Sims and Miss Florence Ross for us to do country and maypole dancing. I don’t recall Mrs Perry or Mr Chaloner being let loose with it though…Mrs Holman’s son Roger was in my year. Nice to know that the gramophone still exists and is in good hands.
March 5, 2020 at 10:33 pm |
Thank you for your memories.