In a class of our own

I was in this class at the Old Park Institute in 1955. Can you spot me? The only person I can remember is the girl sitting next to me. Her name was Drusilla Plant, a girl with ambitious parents.
Why was I educated at an Institute? Old Park was a tiny village in Shropshire. It has now been covered by Telford Town Centre. The house where I was born is under Sainsbury's car park - you would think they could put a plaque on one of the bins or maybe on a parking ticket machine.

Old Park had only about 50 households, A Post Office, A bakers, no pub, no butcher's, no church or chapel. for fun you had to go to the big cities of Dawley or Oakengates.It was many years after this photo that I got interested in local history and read that in the early 18th century Old Park had the second biggest Iron Foundry in the whole world. The biggest being the Abraham Darby works near Ironbridge. So Old Park was there at the start of the Industrial Revolution. It had lots of mechanics and it had a mechanics Institute to train them. By 1955 the Industrial revolution had long gone and the Institute became a tiny Primary School with one class and one teacher.

The Institute closed in about 1957 and we moved to Malins Lea Junior school. This meant a 2 mile walk across the fields. We crossed a field called the Red Ashes by the locals. I did not understand this as the field was not red nor had it any ash. I found out the story much later. There had been a strike in the late 18th century. Workers were asking for higher wages. The foundry was owned by the Botfield family and was facing severe competition from latecomers to the Industrial revolution (Europe again!). The Botfields were well connected and the militia were called out. Some of the strikers were shot and killed in the area that became known as the red ashes. Old Park's own Peterloo.