Ex-Whitnash teacher: ‘I was in old school photo’

Margaret Elliott, of Lillington, pointed out that our caption of the staff photo at Whitnash Endowed School was incorrect.

In fact she (not Miss Wells) was pictured in the back row on the left when she was Margaret Winterburn, a student teacher at the school.

Miss Wells (later Mrs Markham) was a student teacher in the previous year.

Mrs Elliott says the photo was taken in July 1951, probably by a Courier photographer on the occasion of a fete at the school.

She remembers that Mrs Jones, the headmistress, lived in the schoolhouse with her husband, a retired policeman. Mrs Jones became the head of the new school, St Margaret’s, when it opened in 1963.

There was only one primary school in Whitnash when Mrs Elliott was there but, as the town’s population has increased, now there are four.

After her year as a student teacher, Mrs Elliott went to college and then taught at Bath Place School for four years from 1953. She moved to Telford School in Lillington when it opened in 1957 and spent most of her career there. She is now 81.

She remembers Jean Field and her books about the area and recalls going to some of her talks. They had both been pupils at Kings High School in Warwick.

Helga Bolton has also contacted us to point out that the photo of the pupils group outside Whitnash school was taken in the 1950s not the 1940s.