School attendance became compulsory in this country in 1870. Before that, education was often in the hands of non-conformist churches. Dale seems to have been fortunate, however: there is a record that in 1846 Scargill (West Hallam) and Risley schools (the latter founded by Elizabeth Gray) took eight children from Dale free; there seems to have been also a school of some sort at Stanton. Children would almost certainly have had to walk to school.

At some point in the 19th century a dame school was established at the Moor, at the end of the ‘Ranters’ chapel’, where the livery stables is now. The fee for this was a penny or tuppence per week. The school in Dale was built in 1869; its first head was Miss Mary Ann Sears, who was related to the
Hollingworths (possibly Miss Maud Hollingworth’s aunt). It opened with 12 children, and two teachers working simultaneously in the same room (one would remain silent while the other taught). Numbers quickly rose to 30 children, with 50 in 1879 and 59 in 1889.

Until 1893 there was just the one room, with a fire in the middle and log forms down each side, one for infants, one for juniors. The building was enlarged in 1893 to two rooms, and held a maximum of 106 children, with often 90 in attendance (90 were recorded in 1899 and 100 in 1909). (This was not unusual: when I took the 11-plus examination in 1956 in Cheshire there were 52 of us in the class – and all passed bar two.) Miss Hollingworth recalled her sister Lily Fryer, mother of Lionel who used to farm at Ladywood Farm and ran a choir until his death in the 1990s, talking of those days at school at the turn of the 20th century; she was still living in Dale in 1969, aged 83, and used to play the harmonium in All Saints’ church. Lionel was a man of enormous natural musical talent, and highly eccentric, to boot.

Harvey Cross, my other huge source of Dale memories, died in 2011 at the age of 103; so he will have been at the school at around the time of the First World War. He recalled that heating (presumably he meant some sort of central heating) was added while he and Chris were at the school; the work took longer than expected, so the children had a longer summer holiday, then went back to school at the Institute! In those days they fetched water for drinking from the pump at the triangle; there was a well in the playground for
the washing of hands. In 1919, 60 children attended the school, and 69 in 1929.

On 22 Jun 1920 the school log reports taking the children to see the disbandment of Dale’s colliery and the fall of the 70 foot high chimney.

In 1935 the kitchen and porch were built on, financed by whist drives and jumble sales and the like. Three years later, on the 4th March, electricity was installed, and in 1967 water flush toilets – a few years before they were a feature of normal homes; drainage was still into a cess tank. Numbers of children declined dramatically before the Second World War, being 27 in 1939, and continued at a lower level after the war: 26 in 1949, 30 in 1959 and 27 in 1969.