Mackay Country Community Trust Moving Times & Museum Tales - The Project
Achlyness
This school still stands and was used as a community building in living memory. In 1940 there were 6 pupils on the school roll.
Extracts from The Log Book
1st April 1939
Reopened today but no children attended. Terribly stormy weather. Rain has been entering by windows and ceiling with result that floor and desks are ‘soaking’.
17th September 1939
School closed – ‘Sale Day’.
4th October 1939
Weekly attendance 98%. Fires have been lit this week and the stove, blackboard and windows have been repaired.
18th October 1939
Slates, pencils and rubbers have arrived from Messrs R. M. Cameron.
14th April 1941
Children were today inoculated against diphtheria by Dr Hunter.
26th November 1941
Average weekly attendance 73.3%. Cocoa and sugar supplied for all pupils from today by Education Authority.
26th February 1941:
Only three pupils present today as there is no fire, all the coal being now finished. Temp 38 degrees.
Flannelgrams and archives from Achlyness Side Side School
Well, I haven’t heard an awful lot about the school. The only memory … I remember the school was used for church services …we came down to Kinlochbervie to the church, and then at night there was always a service, and we had to go to the school, and there was a service in the school. And I remember once going to a wedding in the school. I don’t remember very much about it, but … it’s more a feeling, rather than a memory. You know, you have the feeling of the place …and I was conscious of the people round about me and everything, but I don’t have any memory of anything else, you know … it’s just a feeling, but I know I was at a wedding in the school, and also there were evangelists came round. What was he called now, the … and they came round, and they used to hold a Sunday School here.
And it was the first time that I’d seen these things called flannelgraphs. It was like, they had – there were drawings, like they were cut out of a book …and then they coloured them, and as they told the story, each character, it was kind of cotton-wool stuff on the back, and it was like … fuzzy-felt. And it stuck up. It was the first time I’d ever seen that, when I was young.
I remember, years later on, stemming from that …doing that, using the hand-painted book, … using it myself in a Sunday School class years and years on. But they came round and they were there all summer. And they would take us to the beach and things like that, because there was no transport. And that was held in the school – in that school. But I think the school closed … I think it was by the 1950s, I think Achlyness School closed. It was a side-school.
[Interviewer] One of the things I noticed from the picture is that it’s bigger than the other ones I’ve seen – far bigger, actually – ’cause, you know, the one from the Cape side and the other one from Skelpick are – it’s as though those side-schools were the early IKEA; they’re all exactly the same – corrugated iron, one door, one window at the front, one at the back, a stove-pipe …whereas the Achlyness one’s far bigger than that – three windows, a porch … it’s interesting?
I have another photo… I think there’s another room – there was another room, slightly off the porch. But this is what I started to take from the School Log…just excerpts … the first is May 1921:
‘Three boys, four girls, two girls absent in the afternoon.’ And then September the thirteenth: one girl left aged fourteen’ – now, I have a feeling that this may have been my mother because she would have been fourteen on the twelfth of August 1921. And this was, like, September, so it may have been her; I’m not positive. I just had to take little bits …but mostly, there’s no names …it’s just the teachers’ names.
So, that’s nine in the school now in 1921/2, … it just says that this pupil is not fit to attend school. And then this one is shifting residence – closed owing to illness, Henrietta MacLeod, sister of the teacher, has been appointed temporarily to carry on the work of the school. Resumed work today – Janet MacLeod. I think she was called Jessie by the family and I think you have a picture of her …out there …… standing, and that’s 1932. And then she – I think she left then to get married. And then you have Barbara Mackay …
I’m really quite interested in that school. I still have people from New Zealand and from Canada and from different places who come to the door asking if I know anything about it, and they want to take pictures of it, because their descendants , their people, went to school there. I think, before that, somebody said to me that there used to be a school away over between Rhivichie and Achlyness, but I haven’t been able to find any proof of that. But I have been told that there was one, run by a church. I think it would have been just a building, but I haven’t actually found the building.
I’m trying to think who’s the last ones would be who might have been in the school here – I’m not sure if Bobby Morrison …might have been there for a very short time? Then there was people living in it – the Corbetts. It was used as a house after it was a school. I think the school closed – it said the log-book was from 1920 to 1950… but I didn’t get past 1944. And it says the school was closed from January 14th to April 20th 1944, and then the April 25th
Miss MacKenzie transferred from Kildonan Public School to take up duty. Latterly in Achlyness there was only one pupil. These schools were used almost like a village hall as well, for each little community.
(Source: AVMC ED12 2051)