Memories of an Edinburgh primary school in the 1950s

by Patsy Hodgson

Liberton School, 1959. All dressed up and ready for the trip to Burns’ Cottage

Our long term memories are of necessity patchy and selective, a medley of isolated moments in time, but nonetheless vivid for all that.

For instance, I can clearly remember one morning in the late summer of 1952 when I was three, nearly four years old. I was sitting on the linoleum underneath the kitchen table. My mother was doing the washing at the double sink at the window, putting the clothes through the wringer before carrying them down three flights of stairs to hang out in the back green. Our top floor flat in Newington had a spectacular view north towards Arthur’s Seat and Edinburgh Castle, but it also had its disadvantages. As my mother worked, I was moaning that I was bored. I had no-one to play with, my big sister having recently started school. “I wish I was old enough to go to school,” I declared longingly. And, of course, a year later I got my wish.

School was Liberton Primary, not the modern building near Cameron Toll that now bears that name, but a modest Victorian stone building at the top of Mount Vernon Road. It was essentially a wee village school, Liberton having been incorporated into the city of Edinburgh a mere 30 or so years earlier. There were two classrooms on the ground floor, along with a cloakroom and dinner room. Upstairs there were two further classrooms divided by a sliding partition, plus the staff room. On the wall halfway up the stone staircase there was a framed picture of Jesus with the quotation “Suffer little children…”, and I’m quite sure the teachers sometimes did! Toilets for the pupils were reached by going outside and round the corner of the main building, boys to the left by the coal bunkers, and girls to the right. We used to call it “goin’ doon the pans”. There were three cubicles in the girls’ toilets and a couple of washbasins. It was always freezing.

The main school building wasn’t big enough on its own to accommodate all the pupils, so additional classroom space was located in a separate hall further down Mount Vernon Road, and also in the Anderson Hall in Kirkgate. The latter was my very first classroom. It is also coincidentally where I now go to cast my vote on election days, and I never tire of seeing it again. It’s like stepping back in time.