A film about the Green School is now available to watch on the online archive cornishmemory.com. Since 2014 CAST has been gathering memories from former teachers and pupils of Helston County Secondary School, the school that once occupied the CAST building at 3 Penrose Road. In March last year CAST received a grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund and commissioned the Redruth-based oral history organisation Azook to embark on a project entitled ‘Green School Revisited’. The project focused in particular on the years 1960 to 1972, when the school served children from the Lizard peninsula. During this period it was known as the ‘Green School’ because of the green and grey uniforms worn by its pupils.
Azook organised a memory event at the CAST building in Helston in July last year and, with the support of Feast, took their memory trailer to the annual Ox Roast in St Keverne in August. They recorded interviews and scanned images brought in by former teachers and pupils and have made a film from the material gathered. The 50-minute compilation is edited from the series of oral history interviews undertaken for the project by broadcaster David George, with photographs, school reports and other documents relating to school life. It explores life in the classroom, school dinners, school punishments, uniforms, home life – and of course memories of Flora Day – through the eyes of both teachers and pupils.
With the help of Betty Pascoe, who was both a pupil and a teacher at 3 Penrose Road, CAST was also able to put together an account of the building’s earlier history, dating back to the origins of the building as a School of Science and Art, given to the town by the philanthropist John Passmore Edwards in 1897.
The ‘Memories of Helston County Secondary School’ film was first shown at CAST in December last year to an enthusiastic audience of former teachers and pupils. Since then the film has been uploaded to the online archive cornishmemory.com where it is now available for all to view, together with the scanned images and documents generously lent by former pupils and teachers and the nineteen interviews recorded by David George.