Robins Lane School Appeal
Now it's changing again and it will become an Academy School in September 2010 in partnership with St.Helens College and Edge Hill University. There will also be a big investment in new facilities and, I understand, a partial re-build. Hopefully, this will be a boost for the school which has had its problems over the last few years and successfully raise student aspirations.
As another chapter in the life of the old Robins Lane school closes, so the school will be commemorating its heritage with celebrations planned for this July. Brenda Williams of the school is appealing for any ex-Robins Lane and Sutton High pupils with memories of school days, photographs, school books or other memorabilia to get in touch. It sounds like an exhibition is being planned. Contact Brenda at brenda.williams@sthelens.org.uk SRW
UPDATE July 2nd 2010
A centenary exhibition detailing the history of Robins Lane and Sutton High will take place in the Drama Studio of the school on Tuesday July 6th and Wednesday July 7th at 6pm. Anyone with a past link to the school is very welcome to attend.
Robins Lane Secondary Modern Girls School c.1956 - contributed by Ivy Swift
Relevant links: Robin Lane School in Education Page; Memories of Sutton;
Partners aim to turn Sutton High into 'visionary' academy (St.Helens Star article);
School had so much success (St.Helens Star letter);
Sutton Manor Primary's Own Dream Heritage Project
If you’ve walked through the beautiful woodland at Sutton Manor over the last couple of weeks, you may have noticed the addition of three new seats that aesthetically capture the essence of the former colliery's heritage. Designed by the Forest Road schoolchildren, they display a great mix of art, social history and poetry plus functionality too, as a place of repose for weary walkers like me!
One of three benches in Sutton Manor woodland that commemorate Sutton Manor Colliery
It has been often been suggested that the Dream statue does not reflect the mining history of the site. Actually it does - not every representation has to be literal, of course. However it's a fair point that there should be more at Sutton Manor to remind folk more overtly of the old colliery site’s illustrious past. The NCB gates and hidden-away remnants of the former mine shafts plus the smart new signage at the base of Dream are fine but somewhat insufficient memorials to the colliery that dominated life in the district throughout the twentieth century. So the appearance of these three superb structures, courtesy of the Sutton Manor Primary kids and the Shining Lights Heritage Group, are a very welcome addition to the site's landscape but only tell part of the story of their commemorative efforts.
It all dates back to 2006 when the primary school successfully applied for a £34,000 Heritage Lottery Grant to produce a project about the former colliery. They immediately involved a small group of ex-miners and borrowed a wide variety of artefacts which were exhibited at the school in June 2007. Two DVDs were produced that featured ex-Manor miners being interviewed by the schoolchildren about their lives in the pit, as well as 'home videos' that two men had made whilst working at the colliery.
Benches designed by Sutton Manor Primary school kids who worked with Bernadette Hughes
Teacher Les Dunning tells me that Sutton Manor Primary have also produced a book on the colliery and various pieces of art work, including the aforementioned seats:
There is one bench in the school playground and three others on the site which have all been designed by the children. Over the next two months a poetry trail will be placed on the site with posts that display lines of poetry that have been written by the children. 
However, I doubt that any the children who've worked on the project will damage the benches or the yet-to-be-installed art trail in the future. I suspect that involvement in the project will have instilled in them a greater respect for the site and for its heritage. Now why didn't we do this sort of thing when I was at school, instead of studying books of irrelevant battles in France from hundreds of years ago that were impossible to engage with?
A fourth bench sits in Sutton Manor Primary School's playground (contributed by Les Dunning)
I'm really looking forward to seeing the poetry trail on the Sutton Manor site, which does sound like another great idea. The book and DVDs, incidentally, are available from Sutton Manor Primary School subject to a donation to school funds. Make it a big 'un! SRW
Sutton Manor Primary contact details: Tel. 01744 678700 suttonmanor@sthelens.gov.uk
Christmastime in Sutton of 1899
It's been a very cold December so far this year in St.Helens and it was particularly cold 109 years ago with the reservoir off Gerards Lane frozen and so Sutton kids had fun skating and sliding on the ice. Just whether snow fell on Christmas Day in 1899, is not recorded but it was certainly a time of charity, tragedy and heroism.
It was a far less commercial time than today, with the church playing a much greater role in Sutton community life. The St.Helens Reporter's Boxing Day edition reported that a large congregation attended St.Nicholas Church in New Street on Christmas morning which was:
...most beautifully and artistically decorated for the Christmas festival by Mrs. Hughes, assisted by the Misses Parr and Mr. Thomas Burns, gardener at Sherdley Hall....the Rev. M. F. Binney, vicar, reading the lessons and taking the Communion Service. 
Every year Edith distributed the Sherdley Hall Christmas 'dole', which on Saturday 23rd December, 1899 was gratefully received by 80 senior citizens of Sutton. The Reporter revealed the contents of the dole in a second article:
The old people each got a bowl of soup, and bread and cheese, and ale or coffee. Each of them also received about 8 lbs of beef, a loaf, and 1s [shilling]. In the evening the following bands and choirs visited Sherdley Hall by arrangement: Nutgrove prize band, Sutton-road prize band, Sutton Parish Church choir, Thatto Heath Free Gospel Chapel choir, Sutton Free Gospel Chapel choir. They were entertained with refreshments, and went away considerably rejoiced by Captain Hughes' liberality. 
The Rev. M. F. Binney, who was mentioned in the first article, had the grand full name of Maximilian Frederick Breffit Binney and in 1898 had married Emily, a daughter of William Blinkhorn. On 23rd September, 1900, almost nine months to the day of his Christmas service, Emily gave birth to their son, Frederick George in Great Bookham, Surrey. He grew up to become a renowned explorer and writer who lived extensively in the Canadian Arctic and wrote The Eskimo Book of Knowledge and was knighted as Sir George Binney in 1941.
At all Christmas times, of course, some families do suffer terrible tragedies and that was certainly the case in the Highcock household at 28 Church Street, 'Pudding Bag'. Two-year-old Gertrude Highcock was burnt to death on Christmas eve when her nightdress caught fire whilst her father was taking a cup of tea to her mother. Hearing his daughter's screams, he ran down the stairs and quickly extinguished the flames, but the little girl had been severely burnt and died. As I said, it was a cold December and Gertrude probably strayed too close to the open hearth. An astonishing number of small children perished in this way in Victorian times in St.Helens. Incidentally, if you hadn't heard of a Church Street in Sutton, it was renamed Woodcock Street some five years later but sadly no longer exists.
St.Helens newspapers around this time were full of stories of the Transvaal War that was taking place in South Africa with many reports of local fundraising, although these days we refer to that conflict as the Boer War. However, perusing the newspapers of December 1899 I could find no eager anticipation of the forthcoming twentieth century. There were no references for the simple reason that it was celebrated a year later on January 1st, 1901. The year 1900 was considered to be the final nineteenth century year and 1901 the first of the twentieth century. And quite right too!
So that was a brief snapshot of Christmas life in Sutton from over a century ago where there was charity and heroism to gladden the heart but tragedy to remind us of the fragility of human life.
Sutton Times Have Been A-Changin' !
A view north towards St.Helens with Sherdley Park in the background.
St.Nicholas's graveyard and the old cub hut are in the foreground.
I'm indebted to Martin Gauckwin, who describes himself as "born and raised in Sutton", who has kindly forwarded two photographs taken from St.Nicholas church tower during the 1960s. The picture above was taken in April 1964, just a few weeks after Bob Dylan had released his third album entitled 'The Times They Are A-Changin'. I expect that Mr. Zimmerman wasn't necessarily thinking of house building in St.Helens, but he could well have been as Martin's extraordinary pictures remind us of how much the area has been developed in such a short span of time.
As you can see in the photograph (above) which looks north / north-west of the New Street church - with Marshalls Cross Road and Sherdley Park in the background - there's nothing but fields past St. Nick's graveyard and the burnt out cub huts in the foreground. Sherdley Park's old entrance gates can just about be made out at the top of the picture. In the days prior to St.Helens Corporation acquiring the park in the late '40s, these were locked at night by the Hughes family.
If memory serves (I need to check this with the local history library) the land was sold in 1966 for around £250,000. Apart from Sutton Cricket Club and Sutton Park at the picture's top right, the fields have all now gone, metamorphising into Balmoral Avenue, Stathmore Grove and Sandringham Drive etc. In fact if you click on the pictures you'll see Google Earth's impression of how the area looks today.
Looking south towards Mill Lane and Sutton Manor Colliery
In the second photograph taken in July 1963, which is a southerly view towards Mill Lane, there is a similarly desolate landscape, apart from the houses on one side of Mill Lane and with Sutton Manor Colliery in the far distance.
The pit was then in its heyday, annually outputting over 300,000 tons of coal with over 1,000 miners and ancillary workers employed. Within a couple of years it would undergo a recruitment drive but despite the National Coal Board's adverts in the St.Helens Reporter in 1966 promising "permanent employment and a secure future", it would close 25 years later. I suspect that many who lost their jobs felt that another track on Dylan's seminal album from 1964, "Only a Pawn In Their Game", would also apply to them!
Edit January 2nd 2009 - James Lamb has contacted this website to inform us that he took the above photographs with vicar Revd. James Smith, while St.Nicholas church hall was being built in 1963-4 and has supplied us with higher quality versions. Thanks Jim!
