Archived newsletter
This newsletter is archived. The information contained within the newsletter was correct at the time of publication.
Are school days best days of our lives?
The new school year is now well under way and, students and teachers are getting to know each other and, hopefully, settling into new routines, opening the doors to new knowledge and experience and creating memories that will last a lifetime.
For this issue’s peek into North Yorkshire’s extensive records archive, we form a crocodile and walk through the school gates once more. Were these the best days of our lives, or do some of the more recent images – by which we mean the 1950s and 1960s – bring back sounds, sights and smells that we’re happy to have left behind?
The archive images on this page are among more than 6,500 available at the County Record Office. Browse the collection or buy photos.
If you have any further information about any of the images on this page, our archivists would be keen to hear about it. Please email yny@northyorks.gov.uk
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Home time at Harrogate High School in the 1960s, by photographer Bertram Unné.
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Pages from Bentham Parochial School logbook, showing a list of school songs for September, and mentioning pupil absences due to haymaking.
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A duplicate timetable for Great Ayton Council School for 1945.
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A classroom in Richmond National School in the 1950s, from the Richmond District Council collection.
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The cover of an exercise book used in 1868 by John William Morrell, a pupil at Mr Potts Academy, a small private school once at Gracious St, Knaresborough. It’s a long way from writing band names on your jotter.
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Children enthusiastically cross the road with a lollipop man at Mill Hill Junior School in 1956.
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The schoolmaster and pupils of the Dunsforths School in 1915.
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Pupils set for a performance at Applegarth School, Northallerton, in the early 20th century.