In 1926 the long awaited improvements to the school, put off during the

war, were completed and Mr. Mauchline recorded in his log book, ‘The Infants

greatly appreciate their new quarters; [the] new room is much lighter and

[has] better ventilation. There should be fewer cases of sickness among the

Infants now’.

The school reports for Strathkinness remained on the whole very good,

despite Mr. Mauch line’s many absences because of serious illness, which started

in 1902. He managed to keep the standard of work high, although before he

retired in 1928, after twenty nine years as schoolmaster at Strathkinness, his

grasp was beginning to slip; but he retained his obvious care and concern for

the children at his school.

When Mr. Stobie took over as schoolmaster at Strathkinness the school

roll was 141. When Mr. Mauchline had come in 1899 it had been 147. The

attendance was good, due in large part to Mrs. Younger who continued to

give prizes for attendance and attainment up to her death in 1942. The school

regularly received good reports from the H..M.l.s.

Mr. Stobie stuck rigidly to the instruction not to put general observations

in the log book, though the need to do so was probably much less with the

new school authorities. His log book is almost completely factual, and the last

twelve years are not differentiated between one year and another, so that

dates have to be worked out. He did not write reports every week and they

are frequently very brief, sometimes no more than as in June of 1933 when he

recorded simply, ‘133 — 125 — per 94.3’. There are periods covering several

years when neither the roll nor the attendance figures are given, although he

did state that in 1938 the roll was 112 and in 1945 it was 65. But the rate

of the drop in numbers cannot be assessed from the log book. However, Mr.

Stobie, like both Mr. Mauchline and Mr. Findlay before him, did regularly

mention the disruption caused in the school every year by the potato lifting

period. The decision to close the school during this period, first proposed by

Mr. Mauchline and later adopted in other schools had been discontinued in

1920, with a policy of exemptions for children over twelve for potato-lifting

replacing it. These exemptions still caused disruption, and school work at

this time was limited almost entirely to revision. Again, in 1939 at the

outbreak of the Second World War, a ‘potato holiday’ was re-introduced. The

official period was between three and four weeks, but as happened many years

earlier some children stayed away from school before the holiday started

and continued to lift potatoes after it had ended. There can be no doubt

that potato-lifting always affected the work of rural schools, and Strathkinness

was fortunate in having had conscientious and extremely hard-working school-

masters who struggled to keep up standards by making good the disruption

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