Evelyn Whitfield: teacher at Juniper Green Primary School 1980-2002

Evelyn worked in the old ( 1910 ) building in the Infant Department and the Nursery when it moved there from Woodhall avenue ,and also in the new ( 1976) building 

I had two P5 classes in the new building and it was open plan. Open Plan was a wee bit disconcerting at first because you had to watch the noise levels The bays were open one side to the corridor that went round the school and in the centre of that space was the big gym hall. The teaching bays were quite small and it was quite a squash to get thirty children seated.  It got really hot in the summer and cold in the winter. 
 It was a Poulson school: that architect from Newcastle…there was a scandal about that.  The roof leaked from early on but it’s hard to believe they demolished it. It was only built in the 70s and the old school went on…
  There was a door from the corridor on either side into two open air courtyards.  You could look out of these big glass windows into the courtyards and see the plants and birds.  Those courtyards were really nice: like the lungs of the school.  At the millennium there was a time capsule buried in one of the courtyards and I wonder what happened to that.  I was in the nursery at the time and took a couple of children over to the event.

Then I went over to the old building and had two P3s and then went upstairs to the art room and had a composite class P 2/3. Only 25 children: it was a lovely wee class. You had lots of space in the art room but the noise echoed when they scraped their chairs back.  I once had a moment’s alarm when a skinny wee boy was going up the stair holding the railings. He lent on the railings and he nearly slipped through! 

When the Nursery first opened it was in Woodhall Avenue. It was a lovely little building and it had a garden. It had its own janitor ---a woman. By the time I went into the nursery for my final eight years at Juniper Green it had moved into the Infant building . There was a waiting list but we had thirty in the morning and thirty in the afternoon  with one teacher and two nursery nurses.

When I started in 1980 there were four other teachers who started at the same time.  Mrs Wilma Durham, Margaret Gould, Mrs Noreen Manson and Mrs Rae  Ritchie ( Rae Malcom then). 

Mrs Cairns was the infant mistress when I first came: she looked like a typical Infant mistrtess of the time : she was comfortably designed!!!  I think her first name was Betty but  I called her Mrs Cairns.   The Head Teacher was Mrs Ramsay and then Tom Monaghan took over as temporary head. Assistant Head was Mrs Baker. Mr Green came next as head in 1982 and then Caroline Bennett in 1991.
Miss Hannah went off to Australia and we had Kate Burden on exchange . Karen Boxer went off to New York and taught in a school with lots of celebrities’ children and in her place we had Bonnie Smith. Scott Meal came in 1982-ish.  For a while teachers didn’t move around very much, tending to stay in the same department. 

 When Baberton was new…
Juniper Green was the largest school in Edinburgh and the second largest one in Lothian and there were three classes for each year except for the bulge years P1, P3 and P7 where there were four classes.  You could have 33 in a class.  P3 was usually part of the Infants department but there were so many of them that only three of them could be accommodated in the old school and one class had to be with the Juniors across in the new building.(not the Juniors  across in the new building.) 
It was a nightmare of organisation trying to accommodate all the children but we just expected the Head to deal with it. It was a topic among the parents: will the school be able to cope? As teachers at the start of the term we were given the register and then there would always be new names to be added onto it.  
It was mostly the younger staff across in the new building and the older staff in the old building. Mr Green was traditional and thought it should be women in the infant department. 
A really large number of children from Baberton stayed for lunch at school perhaps because it was a long walk home to the estate or perhaps because their mothers chose to go back to work  to pay for the mortgage on their lovely new house. 

Tragedy
You got the feeling it was safe for the children to come through the estate but I suddenly remembered when a wee P5 boy, Alan, was knocked down on the way home .  I can remember his face. He was the only child of older parents and the story was that he was looking at football cards and stepped off the pavement behind a lorry that was reversing.  It shouldn’t have been there and of course lorries didn’t have that peeping noise then to alert you that they were  reversing. 1981 or 2 it was- on the way home.  A horrible thing to happen!  It was so strange- I met his mother by chance about thirty years later, just recently in fact, and she talked to me about him.
The children all came running into school  the next day full of it but the teacher, Fiona   O’Brien, said   “We’ll have a normal day and do our work “ And then she gathered them round at the end of the day and  they talked about it together.

Local Studies: Baberton and beyond!
I have a clear picture of having a P3 class in the old school and I walked them round to look over Baberton to the Forth and I remember this boy saying “If there’s so many houses in Wester Hailes and Baberton imagine how many houses there must be in the whole world!”  And I realised that many of them never lifted their eyes to that view though they walked up and down to school every day.

 In recent years more and more came from Wester Hailes, often because their parents aspired to give their children a better chance and they saw JG as doing that. But it was quite a commitment because they had to bring them up to school for seven years.

In the mid eighties I had a P5 and we were doing transport. I brought the class along to the bypass and one group had to record the traffic along Lanark road like delivery vans and cyclists, meanwhile the other group had the bypass to record and it was just constant.  They were really taken with that: the volume of traffic on the bypass compared to the local road.  I remember one serious  little boy saying  “ Thank you Mrs Whitfield for taking us on that quite short but most  interesting walk” You could almost see the quote marks!

Children used to talk about going swimming at the WHEC.  When I was in the nursery we used to take a small group of children to story reading at the Wester Hailes Library to go out into the community.  We’d walk down and take the 33 bus and then come back and talk about it to the others.

It used to be that when parents registered their children  they used to give the occupation of the parents. I don’t think they have to do that any more.  I remember one mum giving her occupation as phlebotomist…It was useful if there was a dad who was a fireman and we had one mum who was a district nurse.  They might come and talk to the children….

The lack of facilities in Baberton

There are no facilities in Baberton and I distinctly remember a new young teacher who had got off the bus and walked up through the estate saying how shocked she was at how big an estate it was and not a shop or a park or a wee school!
I remember children starting to talk about going to the Gyle for shopping, not so much to Wester Hailes centre.

There used to be a big muddy embankment in the school grounds where the  children liked to play but often it was too wet and they weren’t allowed on it.

As for the staff we had retiral dos and latterly they’d be held at the Baberton Golf Club.  Friday lunchtime we’d sometimes go down to the Tickled Trout.

A stable population
In the nursery I was beginning to have children of  the children I’d had a generation before.  They’d move back to Baberton when they got married: maybe to be close to their parents for babysitting. It was a very positive feeling that stability : there was a loyalty to the estate   There’s a variety of housing going  from one bedroom terraced right up to four bedroom big ones. I think it was always seen as a quite an upmarket kind of housing estate