PRIMARY REFLECTIONS

About two years before my school days started, I was told that some day I would enter Harris Academy‑but alas pronunciation at age three is difficult ‑ and the name became Harris Macabemy.

In 1913 we entered from Park Place over a playground cobbled with 5 or 6 inch long cobbles and entered by a door into a short corridor. The First Infant room door was on the left side almost opposite the Rector's Room. Barry Robb came into our room occasionally and to me he was the most important man in the world. Our fee was five shillings per quarter and the name at the foot was J. Barry Robb MA BSc. He had good looks and a fine carriage and the ambition of my childhood was to emulate him.

Our infant teacher was Miss Duff and we all liked her and loved to follow her instructions. Some of us‑mostly boys‑wept off and on during that first week, for we had never been away from our mothers in those days before nursery schools were thought of.

I came home complaining after a fortnight that I had not been taught to read yet but I must have been expecting instant results. When a student came to teach us a special lesson we felt we were an important class. I still remember the lesson about a tree when a fine picture of an oak tree was displayed and remember yet how disappointed I was when no‑one knew that small branches were called twigs. It is strange what we remember after sixty or more years.

I recall our happiness at the first summer holidays with its long seven weeks of freedom ahead, the trips to Barnhill sands, or to St. Andrews and in August to Glenisla. But alas came the crisis that was to upset Europe in a way that even few adults had expected. My mother accompanied by brother and me boarded the train at Lochee to go to Alyth on 5th August and on the way to the station we saw three letters WAR on the news bill. We were held up at Alyth Junction as three trains from Aberdeen rolled South with hundreds of Gordon Highlanders going to France. Some had time to come out on to the platform and they looked marvellous in their kilts.

The war did not seem to make the immediate impact of the Second War but perhaps I was too young to feel it. School went on as usual and I remember one lesson in particular. In our reader was a story about a teacher and her class baking a loaf of bread. After we had read it Miss Duff did what the teacher had done, and we copied the pupils of the story by bringing the ingredients and helping (or hindering) in the preparation of the dough. Then some girls took the dough to the cookers where it was to be warmed to make the dough rise and later to bbaked. On its return in the form of a cottage loaf we each received a small piece of bread and strawberry jam and even the Rector and Miss Sutherland the Lady Superintendent came in to taste the bread and join us in our meal.

I have never forgotten this lesson and have often recalled it when educationists were advocating the so‑called new methods of class participation. Miss Duff was indeed a most successful teacher.

These two years as an infant pupil still seem a long and happy time, in retrospect.

The war had more effect on the country and the school in the next three years, with shortage of food and many other things. The school exercise books gradually had the number of pages reduced whilst the price rose to threepence. I found a small newsagent and book shop at the foot of Blackness Road which had old exercise books sold at the old price. My first success in the world of finance.

I was never good at gymnastics but when we went to the school hall with our class teacher in the primary school I took the opportunity to read the War Memorial Boards, fixed up to the railing of the first half landing above. 'Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori' was the first Latin I ever learned and I still remember some of the long list of names steadily lengthening especially after the battles of Loos and of the Somme.

The war ended at the time in November 1918 when all the schools in Dundee were closed to try to arrest the spread of the dreadful influenza epidemic. The death rate was devastating and when the school resumed, two of our class were missing. Willie Reid had died and a boy Henderson lost both his father and mother and was adopted by an uncle in Glasgow. The tragedies of war and epidemic were soon over now and in another year I passed into the secondary school with my class mates and we were divided into three new classes along with many new friends from other primary schools.

From secondary school days I remember the names of some of our great teachers `Johnny Munro', `Dolly Taylor', `Uncle John' (John McHardy), John Doig and Mr Pitkeathly who contracted lead poisoning whilst making Galena crystals which were used in the old crystal wireless sets in 1925. His purpose was to raise money to pay for the Sports Field and Pavilion in which we all took part at a Great Sale of Work. These were the days of independence before we learned to hold out a begging bowl to the Local Authorities and the Government.

Hard working, happy days of long ago.

Robert Allan (1913‑26) Dux of the school 1926. Formerly Headmaster of Rockwell.