Yesterdays
Pronounced locally as "Bee-chiff", Beauchief is a prosperous, quite green part of the city of Sheffield in its south-western extremity, close to the boundary of South Yorkshire with Derbyshire. It's the kind of district that's well set-up with golf courses. The name derives from the French for "beautiful headland", so it's clearly a post-Norman-Invasion appellation. It might just as appropriately have been called "Venteuxchief" since at the top of the hill there seems to be a constant, strongly blowing wind.
My acquaintance with Beauchief began in my first year of secondary education. The school I attended was the Catholic Grammar School for boys in Sheffield, De La Salle College. For aspiring Catholic families in South Yorkshire, it was the school to which they would want to send their sons (the equivalent for girls in Sheffield was Notre Dame High School, now co-ed). I gained a place by passing the much-hated 11+ examination that elevated some students to grammar schools and condemned most to the Secondary Modern Schools of the time. The third component of the tripartite system that then existed was the Technical School. Grammars were, as suggested above, academically selective and, generally speaking, prepared their students for higher education at universities; Technical Schools prepared their students for skilled trades, engineering, and industry; and Secondary Moderns, provided a broad-based, general education. There were problems with the model. While Grammar Schools largely fulfilled their purpose and were effective in facilitating social mobility through getting more working-class kids (like me) to higher education, there were nowhere near enough Technical Schools to achieve their purpose nationwide, and Secondary Moderns eventually became perceived as the waste bin into which failures were decanted, even though that was the majority of children in the country. The solution was the scrapping of Grammar Schools to create a one-size-fits-all system of so-called Comprehensive education. While this has merits, it has unfortunately reduced the chances of advancement for working-class children in society, less social mobility being the consequence. In the 1970s and 1980s, Grammars generally either became Comprehensives—as did the school I attended, merging with a Secondary Modern in the city centre—or became independent, fee-paying schools. Somehow or other, I'm not sure how, some Grammars remained both state-funded and selective—there are always exceptions to every rule. Now, competition for entry to the few remaining Grammar Schools of whichever kind is vicious.
My school's main campus was in central Sheffield, in a district known as Pitsmoor. The late 19th and early 20th Century housing thereabouts suggested a moderately prosperous area: while most were terraced houses, there were semi-detached and detached houses of sufficient size to require a domestic staff, such as a housemaid. The terraces were brick built, the larger properties were of stone, or some of brick but stone fronted. Since the time of my acquaintance, the area has become increasingly poor, with larger properties being subdivided into rented apartments. There has been an increase in the incidence of crime, especially drug related crime, with a taxi driver notoriously murdered near the former location of my school some years ago (that's still rare enough in Britain to merit note). However, at the time I frequented the locality, it was a safe neighbourhood of reasonably good reputation. Downhill to the north, in Fir Vale, is one of the best and biggest NHS teaching hospitals in the country, The Northern General, where I was born.
The school owned other property in the form of a Jacobean hall at Beauchief. While the Pitsmoor campus had a modern gymnasium and an adjacent football (soccer) pitch, the school additionally used the ample grounds surrounding Beauchief Hall for sporting activity. The building itself had been leased to another school, but the cellars were used by ourselves as changing facilities, and each weekday afternoon was set aside for an entire year's cohort to participate in pointless physical activity. During winter the grounds were marked out with several pitches for football and rugby and a route through the surrounding woods was used as a course for cross-country running. During summer the grounds would be marked out with cricket pitches, tennis courts, volleyball courts and an athletics track.
Something of a change occurred in my second year at De La Salle. The school began to take additional entrants by selection at 13+, much expanding the number of students in that and succeeding years. To find room for the new, regular influx, Beauchief Hall itself was brought entirely back into the school's use, providing space for two years' worth of students (requiring four classrooms).
The hall is approached from Abbey Lane, a slight misnomer in that the road in its modern form is actually a main road. A left turn onto Beauchief Drive takes one away from the sense of being in a city, as the narrow lane passes the remains of the part-Medieval Beauchief Abbey church, two halves of Beauchief Golf Club's course laying to either side of the drive, which then rises up the moderate incline, past an old farmstead to the headland itself, through stone gateposts and into the hall's grounds. Two ponds lay to the left, the hall to the right, together with its ancillary buildings. Even during my educational tenure, the latter were private residential properties, and very handsome too, with examples of Dutch gables, if my memory serves.
Logistically, with Beauchief Hall being off the beaten track for so many, students had to congregate early in the morning at the Pitsmoor campus, hop on the school's coach and drive through town picking up others at a couple of main public transport hubs along the way. The additional travel time of the said coach rides, morning and afternoon, would have seriously shortened the school day, so we were denied an afternoon break and lunch hours were halved. In that way some of the lost educational time was clawed back. Working out timetables must have been quite a task as each of the four relocated classes also still had to spend time on the main campus at some point, to use laboratories and other facilities.
Leaving aside the to-be-expected frictions of intra-student life, it was a memorably happy year at Beauchief, with a great sense of liberty, some of it officially sanctioned in one sense of the word and some of it officially sanctioned in the other. We were not permitted to go out of bounds (Ha!), the tolerated areas for student activity being the car park for playing football (the teachers' vehicles being in constant danger of damage) and the green space to the north of the hall, bounded by (forbidden) woods (Pshaw!), for more general recreation. We were not permitted to use the main entrance of the building nor its main staircase, and instead relied on a dark, narrow, creaking, and uneven wooden staircase to the rear of the building. The overall effect of being there was not dissimilar to being plunged into the semblance of an old-fashioned minor Public (ie private) School environment, like something from Tom Brown's Schooldays.
In the circumstances of formal sports, I more happily adopted those games that were less popular. In summer I played volleyball, there being hardly enough takers in the year to make up four teams. It was a strategy taken by several people who were not die-hard sporting enthusiasts, and, without the brainless species of competitiveness that appeared to motivate many students, we found we could actually enjoy playing. That said, I always think that cricket is an attractive game, in as much as it looks charming played on the village green, so I'd be sorry to see it fade from popularity. That charm aside, I have to say that I found it a stupefyingly dull sport to play. Perhaps I might have liked it better if I'd understood its rules (but it's heresy to confess such ignorance as a Yorkshireman).
I'd do anything to avoid football. I thought it a game for brainless clods. End of story. Now I realise that's unfair: I have many friends, some of them quite intelligent and rounded of personality, that enjoy playing or watching soccer. But in those schooldays, every ignoramus to be found only fully realised his existence, apparently, in the context of football, aggressive passion leaving no tolerance for anything but winning something as important as a game consisting of kicking an inflated bladder about in the mud. Maybe I'm missing something. I'm sure I've told you how I dodged the column by opting to muck about on a driving range or a pitch-and-putt course instead, but I did also give rugby a try. A few things helped to make this enjoyable: firstly, the teacher supervising, while an enthusiast, was a good enough teacher to understand that people become involved through encouragement and not through brow-beating; secondly, though much happier in individual sporting activity (gymnastics or athletics) than team games, I found I was not entirely useless (unlike my absence of skill in soccer); thirdly, rugby players are better sports that those who play football; and lastly, by the time enough good players had been syphoned off to make up the school's competition-level teams, there again weren't many of us left, approaching proceedings as happy amateurs instead of determined professionals. I only left off playing because so many of my pals had opted for the goofing-off option of golf, so I went to join them.
During the period we spent at Beauchief, we devised our own unofficial sports, suggested by the local topography. Being a headland, immediately beyond the school's grounds the land falls steeply away to the west through woodland to the Sheaf (the river that gives Sheffield its name). Also running in the valley bottom is the main railway line from London, Leicester, and Derby. "Hill running" consisted of belting down the wooded slope, gaining momentum all the while, and hopefully coming to a halt before the river's edge. Opportunities for physical injury and drowning were clearly plentiful and being out of bounds carried a risk all of its own: the possibility of a thrashing. Corporal punishment was still order of the day, though most teachers were either reluctant or refuseniks. Some were not, though even within the mindset that tolerated such punishment at the time they were not heavy handed in the main. I can think of only one teacher who was a tried-and-true sadist and our sojourn at Beauchief largely took us away from his orbit.
We also participated in a sport that in all innocence we dubbed "bush diving". It's quite a literal description of the actions taken, leaping from a higher place into rhododendron bushes growing on lower ground. Fortunately, none of us were impaled , nor lost an eye in the process.
But there were dangers enough within the tolerated boundaries of the hall's grounds: I fell in the adjacent ponds and put an immediate stop to the concession just granted to students allowing them to fish there (I'm beholden to the kindness of the caretakers wife who washed and dried my clothes that day); another student skewered his foot on a 6" nail scaling the north face of the groundsman's bonfire heap; and my kecks (trousers/pants) were significantly less fortunate than the blood vessels in my leg when I was unexpectedly ejected from a tree branch supposedly held in tension to the ground by faithless compatriots (the former were shredded from backside to knee, the latter bled only little. The trousers were a cause of disharmony when I got home). The idea had been to ride the bough as though it was a bucking bronco, operated with fervour by over half a dozen lads. Being about the fourth to hazard this endeavour, the others had had enough time to become slightly bored with their strenuous mechanical task and think of ways of injecting mischief and additional interest into my turn. So they simply let go the catapult. I blanche at the possibility of injury that might have occurred.
With golf courses both to the north and south of Beauchief Hall, some boys had established a racket selling "lost" balls back to the clubs. The loss of the balls often had more to do with the premature action of the lads gathering them than any genuine deficit in the players' observational skills in finding them.
Below is the front of Beauchief Hall taken in the late1990s when I decided to pay a nostalgic visit. The scan is from a print so it's not best quality. The hall wasn't quite so pleasantly landscaped in the 1970s.
And below is the rear of the hall. Deer now run in this area (they didn't in my day. It was only students running wild back then). The building behind the tree at the right is, I think, the club house of the DLS Old Boys Association, which still has a presence. The hall is now owned by a private individual, so the club had to remove from the hall itself.
This is the pond I fell in, spoiling the fun of any anglers in the student body.
A few notes on history: Beauchief Abbey was founded in about 1176 as a Premonstratensian house (White Canons, not unrelated to Cistercians) and dissolved under Henry VIII in 1537. Iron working (long an industry connected with Sheffield) and associated activities had been sources of the abbey's income. The property was thence granted to a local brown-nose, and consisted of "the house and site of the abbey or monastery De Bello Capite". Beauchief Hall was subsequently built in 1671 using stone from the ruined abbey.
Nearby, on the Sheaf, just to the north-west, there remains what is now known as Abbeydale Industrial Hamlet, a preserved historical site of industrial smelting and forging dating back to the 18th Century. I'm not sure of the museum's current status: it may be closed due to Covid restrictions, or it might, alas, be a casualty of financial circumstances, with the local authority finding the preservation and maintenance of the site difficult to fund. Having been there I can vouch for its interest, being a larger site than that of Wortley Top Forge.
There we go. Three-and-a-half-thousand words to say not very much!