Recent articles about St James’ Church School, Derby, have prompted more ex-pupils to contribute their recollections. Here Phil Jerram, of Kilburn, recalls starting there in 1942, in the middle of the war, when trolleybuses were still running and sherbert dips could be bought for farthings.

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St James’ School was in Dairyhouse Road but, because I came from Chellaston, we always said it was at the top of Douglas Street, off Ivy Square.

I was born in 1938, in Snelsmoor Lane, Chellaston, and my earliest memories are of my father carrying me into the air raid shelter, which he had built in the back garden, when the Germans came over to bomb Rolls-Royce.

I can remember the decoys in Aston Lane lighting up the sky. I was also, sometimes, taken down the cellars at Marsh Flats Farm, which was just over the fields.

We had two evacuees, whom I can only just remember but I vividly recall Chellaston when it was a village, before St Peter’s Road was built and well before the housing estates.

I used to deliver milk in a pony and trap from Marsh Flats Farm. The milk was ladled out of a churn in half pint and pint measures, straight into the housewives’ milk jugs. We still used farthings then.

I remember the street parties in School Lane to celebrate the end of the war and, later, the party for the Queen’s Coronation. They were held between the school and the Coronation Tree.

We used to watch silent films at the corrugated iron institute which we called the Tin Tabernacle, at the corner of Back Lane.

The institute was well used for all sorts of village activities. My parents used to play badminton there in the winter and we played tennis at Chellaston Tennis Club, behind the Methodist Church, in the summer.

I was four years old when I started my school days at Chellaston School, in School Lane, opposite the church, so it must have been in 1942.

When I was seven or eight, I went to St James’ School. I have never been able to understand why my parents sent me there. Perhaps it was because the pupils were evacuated to Chellaston during the war.

I have never heard about that and would appreciate more information about it. I can’t think where they could have been put.

When I first started at St James, trams were running along Douglas Street. I remember, many years later, seeing cobblestones and the old tram rails when they were doing some work on the road.

When I got off the bus, which was twopence (old money), I would buy arrowroot and sherbet dip or locust beans from either the shop on Osmaston Road or the one opposite the music teacher on Douglas Street.

I used to walk a mile to get the Trent bus to Ivy Square or walk to Shelton Lock to get a trolleybus. Later, when I was about 10, I would cycle to school, which was the soft option because it saved the walk.

We used to go to Reginald Street baths, where I learnt to swim and do life-saving. I also used to swim for the school. We had four houses – Balmoral, Buckingham, Sandringham and Windsor, who competed against each other. The sports trophies were kept in a cabinet in the main corridor.

I have two friends, Fred Whitehurst and Bryan Lane, who went to St James at the same time as me and supplied the photographs.

It seems strange that Chellaston people were going to St James when the usual school they would go to was Shelton Lock. Could this be the evacuation connection again?

And was the evacuation due to the school being in a built-up area close to Rolls-Royce and the Derby foundries who were making armaments for the war?

I also recall that, after getting our parents’ signed permission, we were sent to Abbey Street School for sex lectures. We came out as confused as when we went in, after an embarrassed teacher mumbled his way through the life cycle of rabbits and that was it!

I left St James in 1949 and went to Allenton Secondary Modern School until 1953, when I started work at George Fletcher and Co Ltd, in Litchurch Lane, later to become Fletcher and Stewart, as an apprentice patternmaker.

When I had completed my apprenticeship, I worked at International Combustion, Rolls-Royce, Derwent Pattern Company and finally retired from Patterns Derby in 2003.

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