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27 Mar 2020

Schooldays gone by

Written by Lily Barnes, Morton Photography Project Documentation and Digitisation Officer
A sepia photograph of 4 rows of schoolchildren (girls and boys) with their teacher standing to the right. The children look to be aged around 7. Beside the photograph is a mount with the text: Wohlgemuth & Co, 108 Renfield St, Glasgow.
Due to current events, children, teachers and families are having to fundamentally re-examine their relationship to education. While we as a country – along with people across the world – explore new methods, embracing the opportunities and overcoming the challenges that come with them, we wanted to share photographs from our collections that show the different experiences of school between 1895–1939.
A group of around 40 schoolchildren (girls and boys aged between 5 and 10) stand on some steps outside a stone building. Their teacher stands on the top step. Deep snow lies at the base of the steps and the children all wear boots and coats. A sepia photograph of a large group of schoolchildren (over 100), standing or sitting on a set of steps outside a school building. Many of the girls wear white smocks or blouses; most boys wear a darker wool jacket. Teachers line the steps at the edge of the group. A tree branch with new buds is in the foreground. A sepia-tinged photograph of a young lady sitting for a formal head-and-shoulders portrait. She wears a dark school blazer and her bobbed hair is neatly pinned to the side. A full-length formal black and white photograph of a young boy. He stands by a banister and looks away to the left. He is wearing a white shirt, tartan tie, kilt, sporran and woollen knee-high socks. A black and white photograph of three young schoolboys standing at the edge of a road. Hills and a single cottage stand in the background. The boys all wear black jumpers with dark shorts. The boy in the middle is holding a slate with a chalk drawing on it. A black and white photograph of eight young schoolgirls standing in a row in front of a corrugated school building. They wear a mixture of styles of dresses and smocks. A black and white photograph of a group of 14 schoolboys (of mixed ages) standing in front of a corrugated schoolhouse and a white-framed window. Most of the boys are wearing a tie. A black and white photograph of a group of around 30 schoolchildren, sitting on rocks on a hillside on a sunny day. The boys in the front row all wear shorts, with no shoes or socks. A black and white photograph of a group of people sitting on some rocks on a beach. A tin mug is balanced on the rock in the foreground. A small dog sits on the sand and looks up at a young boy, who is sitting on the knee of a young woman. A sepia photograph of 4 rows of schoolchildren (girls and boys) with their teacher standing to the right. The children look to be aged around 7. Beside the photograph is a mount with the text: Wohlgemuth & Co, 108 Renfield St, Glasgow. A black and white photograph of around 30 young schoolchildren, arranged in rows in front of a stone building with ivy growing up its walls. The windows in the background have lacy curtains. The children are dressed quite formally, with the boys in jackets or kilts, and the girls in white pinafores. Their teacher stands at the back in an austere black dress with a white lace bow. A black and white photograph of 36 schoolchildren, in a neat group in the playground in front of their stone school building. Their uniform is dark, with the girls in blazers or jumpers and a kilt; the boys wear jumpers, ties and shorts. A sepia photograph of a class of 23 young children with their teacher. They stand in three rows outside the school building in a gravelly yard. The boys wear wool jackets and trousers with boots. The girls wear light pinafores over long-sleeved tops. Their young teacher wears a wonderful spotty blouse, with a lace neck and a long black skirt.

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