Margaret Rose Howell

Margaret attended All Saints Primary Schools in All Saints Road, Wolverhampton WV2 1EL.

The Church of England church of All Saints was designed by London architects T. Taylor Smith & G. F. Roper in 1876, in the early gothic style, to replace the earlier Mission Church and School. The 88 feet long by 25 feet wide by 54 feet high nave of the present building was built in 1877-79 by Highams of Wolverhampton and was consecrated on All Saints' Day 1st November 1879 (and became a parish church in its own right in July 1881).

Margaret attended the Church of England School that was situated to the west of All Saints' Church. It was a typical Victorian-style CofE School, opened by Lord Barnard in 1894.

It closed in the 1990s with its remaining pupils being transferred to Grove Primary School. The school has been restored/modernised and extended by 'The All Saints Action Network' and re-opened in October 2008 as 'The Workspace', a state of the art community facility offering a wide range of facilities. This preserves the shell of the building that Margaret would have known, and serves today's local inhabitants very well.

Margaret recounted that on the first day of school she was sat next to a boy by the class teacher. This pretrified her! Her mother had warned her to 'keep away from boys - they are all nasty, rude and dirty'. Perhaps fearing that Margaret might develop a liking for lads and land up 'getting into trouble' (as getting pregnant was called in those days) if she befriended boys, Elizabeth had laid on the warnings too thickly for sensitive Margaret. The five year old burst into tears and ran out of the classroom - and all of the way home. Elizabeth had to take Margaret back and explain things to the teacher on the afternoon. Margaret always felt very sorry for the lad she had been sat next to - he was a lovely chap as she remembered and she recalled he turned bright red and avoided her after that..

At the age of 11 Margaret started secondary School. She attended St. Peter's School in Wolverhampton. The school she attended opened on 25th August 1902. It was situated on the eastern side of St Peter's Square with the girls downstairs and the boys upstairs. In 1932 the infants school was closed and in 1934 another wing was added giving a hall, science, woodwork and metalwork rooms.

She did not like school. It seemed to be full of rules, which, if you broke, landed you with demerits that culminated in detention. She recounted how she left her pen in a classroom at the end of a session, and realising her mistake when she arrived in the next class was asking a friend if she could borrow a pencil when she was spotted by the teacher. She got a demerit for talking in class. She explained to the teacher that she had been asking to borrow a pencil as she needed to return to the previous room to collect the forgotten pen. So she was given another demerit for forgetfulness and told to go and fetch it. She returned to the previous classroom and knocked on the door - then got another demerit for disturbing the lesson in the previous classroom. So, forgetting the pen earned her a detention.... it seems that school was a source of anxiety to Margaret from that moment on.