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For
the majority of pupils at Park Place, schooldays were a time of hard
work in a disciplined environment but many former pupils have
nevertheless recalled their time at the school as days filled with
excitement and enjoyment. For one generation, however, memories of the
school are tinged with more than a little sadness for their childhood
was overshadowed by the tragic slaughter of the First World War. For
the younger pupils, the gravity of events on the continent was far from
clear and the war merely meant a few changes in their normal routine. Industrial
work, for example, now had a practical objective: It was then that we had to spend many hours laboriously knitting khaki scarfs and grey woollen socks for the soldiers at the battle front. Whenever I think of those hours of knitting, I have a wave of genuine sympathy for whoever it was whose lot it became to receive the socks I knitted, for it was an absolute impossibility for me to make the second sock the same size as the first. But there was always the opportunity to write a little note of apology and good wishes and tuck it in the toe of a sock. The
need for economies during the war even had some advantages for the less
industrious. Jotters had fewer pages and required less effort to fill,
while the three-times-yearly demand for contributions to the magazine
also ceased, as the school magazine suspended publication after the
outbreak of hostilities. The
most direct impact of war on school life for many of the children was
the necessity to become accustomed to new teachers. Many of the male
staff left to serve with the armed forces, normally to be replaced by
women. One absentee, however, was not at his post for even more dramatic
reasons. Mr Munro, head of the French Department, had been spending his
summer holiday in Berlin in August, 1914 when war broke out. As a
result, he was interned for the duration of the war but, happily,
returned safely in 1919, to be greeted by crowds of delighted pupils as
they exited from the annual closing exhibition. There
were also new faces among the pupils. At the end of 1915, the Serbian
army had to retreat before the Austro-German forces. A large number of
the civil population refused to remain under the German occupation and
joined their army in the retreat through the pathless Albanian
mountains. Amongst the civilians, there were about ten thousand
schoolchildren. It was a terrible retreat and almost one-third died of
hunger and cold but those that managed to get through found a refuge in
France and Great Britain. A small group of fourteen children ended their
long journey in Dundee where they joined classes at the Harris. Despite
the language difficulties involved, they made remarkable progress in
their new surroundings - some even gaining passes in the leaving
certificate examinations. The
school staff tried to maintain an atmosphere of normality but,
occasionally, a dramatic incident would focus the attention of all the
pupils on the harsh realities of those desperate times. While such
incidents were distressing for some, they nevertheless served to remind
the pupils of the importance of supporting the war effort through the
War Savings Association: I
remember well the shock in the school at the news of the loss of Lord
Kitchener, the excitement in the class the morning after the Zeppelins
had been sighted crossing the Tay, and the interest in joining the
queues of pupils making their first contributions to War Savings where
the money was paid to specially erected booths attached to army tanks
drawn up in the Albert Square just beside the statue of Queen Victoria. The
older pupils, and all who had relatives involved in the conflict, needed
The
silent khaki-coloured ambulance trains which came silently into the West
Station and the dark blue ambulances conveying the patients to the
hospital were familiar sights in those dark days. Tragically,
many did not return and, at the end of the war, the pupils and staff of
the Harris, in common with so many others, had to count the cost. The
school was closed for a day in 1919 when Sir Douglas Haig attended a
memorial service in Dundee Parish Church for former pupils of the school
who had lost their lives in the conflict. Further tribute was paid in
1921 when a memorial to the fallen was unveiled in the school in a
ceremony which pupils of the time still remember as a deeply moving
experience. The memorial, which now stands in the entrance hall of the
present school, is a permanent reminder of the tragic loss suffered in
those dark days: The
memorial, with its 167 names, shows the great sacrifice made by the boys
of Harris Academy - names which cover the whole history of the school
from James Tosh, one of its earliest pupils, to lads who had scarcely
entered the Higher Grade department when the war began. Five out of six
successive dux medallists appear in the lists and many of the brightest
spirits in the school made the supreme sacrifice. For
many years afterwards, a Remembrance Day service was held in the school
in memory of the fallen. Two minutes silence was observed, poppy wreaths
were laid on the memorial, and the whole school filed past the
remembrance board. The solemnity of the occasion made a profound
impression on many of the pupils: At
eleven o'clock the bugle was blown. This was the signal for silence and,
for two minutes, all was still. A great hush fell over the whole school
and one and all, during that short time, were filled with a mixture of
joy and sorrow - sorrow for those who had been so brave and unselfish
during those four horrible years of struggle, and gladness at the
thought that these dark days were in the past, and that the children of
today will not live to be the soldiers of tomorrow. The writer of this description was thirteen years old. Sadly, his naive optimism was not to be realised for another generation of pupils was to undergo the same terrible ordeal.
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