room. Dances were often held in it (country dancing). The spare back room

was the dining room with three long tables and three forms. Mrs. Thomson’s

office was the kitchen for washing the dishes. The dinners at that time came

from Tayport. The present staff room was the girls’ cloakroom which also had

rows of numbered pegs and sinks in the windows. Miss Anquitel’s room had

no porch or toilets and a black stove stood in the room; it had to be kindled

every morning early so that the room would be warm for 9 a.m. Later in the

evening it was cleaned out and reset for the next day. Where you see the

skylight at the backdoor stood the boiler house with a big boiler which had

to be kept stoked to heat the main building; some days it took the hump and

was dour, depending on which way the wind blew. If it was out of the north

it burned quickly, but if out of the south on a muggy day it just lay dormant;

at that time we used large anthracite.

‘The toilets then were at the back of the present dining room where there is

a whitewashed wall; there were six in all, and during a bad snowy winter they

froze up a lot. I remember a long time ago the Council sending along a man

with a brazier

to try to defrost them - it was soon got rid of. Every time

a child needed the toilet someone had to go with them. The school sometimes

had to close early. The floors long ago were swept with Dustmo; you put this

sort of sand at one end and then swept it to the other end. It kept the dust

down but filled the seams in the wood. Before the boiler house was built,

every room had a big open fire and the desks were doubles and went up in

rows so that the children who sat at the back were quite high up. Some people

in the village remember when it was like that. The Headmaster then was

called Mr. Mauchline, and when the old boiler house was knocked down we

found netballs and balls still in the wrapping paper with his name on them;

they hadn’t been opened. There were also lots of old maps of Lions and Tigers

and other old maps which were burned in the boiler.

‘At the Strathkinness Schools Centenary (of the Education Act of 1872)

many interesting items were displayed including silver thimbles, medals and

some very interesting old photographs, log books, etc.’

Another description of village life has been written by Mrs. Catherine

Gray, Morenish, Church Road who came to live in Strathkinness more than

fifty years ago.

‘Strathkinness in 1923 had no sanitation and all water for drinking and

cooking had to be drawn from wells. As the well water was hard due to the

lime content, water for washing was taken from rainwater from the roofs

collected in barrels outside each house door, which was soft and lathered well.

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