More readers recall happy times at Fishergate School summer camp

The article, headlined “Memories of Fishergate Campers”, focused on a camp logbook kept by Mr Francis William Laycock between 1921 and 1934.

But sisters Barbara Woodley and Brenda Allison have been in touch to say the camp continued well into the 1940s – although by this time the teacher who led them, Mr HB Wrigley, had moved to become head teacher of Haxby Road Primary School, so it was known as the Haxby Road camp.

Mrs Woodley and her sister went to the camp several times in the 1940s, when they were aged between eight and 12.

The campsite was on the hillside overlooking the bay. “We had the most amazing views,” said Mrs Allison, who now lives in Aldwark.

It was a “long, long walk” from the campsite down into the bay each day to enjoy the beach. But enjoy it they did – taking donkey rides, rock pooling and simply enjoying the freedom and the fresh air.

“We used to go down each day in a little group and come back in a little group,” said Mrs Woodley, who lives in Fulford.

Under the supervision of Mr Wrigley and his fellow school staff – they included Harry Skinner, John Huscroft, Miss Julie Fisher and Dorothy Garnett – the children took part in camp concerts and once gave a concert near the beach. Mrs Woodley said: “We were both beginning to enjoy singing. Our grandma had just taught us We'll Gather Lilacs.”

The Huntington area of York where the sisters lived with their parents was fairly poor in those days and wartime ration-tioning was in full flow. Simply getting away to the countryside for a holiday was an amazing experience, they recall.

Even the food at camp was a treat. Mrs Woodley said: “We had a wonderful cook, Reg Whitehead, who was an old boy of Fishergate. He made the most wonderful custard. I’d never had it before. And we had fresh milk from the farm.

“It was a magical, magical time. We’ve never forgotten it.”

As to Mr Wrigley, the schoolteacher who made it all possible… “He was such a kind man,” Mrs Woodley recalled. “One of a kind.”

Her sister agreed. Brenda said: “He gave children from low-income families – and we were on low incomes in those days – the chance of a happy holiday we wouldn’t otherwise have been able to have.”

Colin Duggleby – a school classmate of the Calpin sisters as they then were – emigrated to Australia in 1962 and now lives near Melbourne. But he also remembers going on the Haxby Road summer camps just after the war.

“Conditions in England were still chaotic, with severe rationing and many families living in near poverty,” he said in an email.

“A school camp at Robin Hood’s Bay was a new adventure for ten and 11-year-old children, especially when the beaches on the east coast had been out of bounds during the war,” he wrote.

The children travelled to the bay by train, carrying their belongings in army kit-bags.

The first camp Mr Duggleby remembers was in a field on top of the northern headland – though it later moved.

He said: “We were accommodated in ex-army bell tents. We slept ten to a tent on straw-filled palliasses with our feet towards the central pole.”

They washed each day with cold water in bowls on a trestle table, and food was cooked in an open-air camp kitchen.

During the day, the children were generally free to explore the village of Robin Hood’s Bay and the beach and rock pools.

“One memorable character who had a stall on the slipway near the lifeboat station was (to us) an elderly gentleman who collected sea urchins and scrubbed the thorny spikes off them, thus converting them into colourful containers which he filled with scented herbs and flower petals, to be sold to visitors as pot-pourris,”

Mr Duggleby wrote. “His sales spiel included the fascinating life-story of sea-urchins and where they could be found.”

Jane Turner, of the Robin Hood's Bay horse and donkey family, with two of the boys from the camp

Teachers, from left, Betty Scott, Julie Fisher and Dorothy Garnett

Reg Whitehouse, right, who Mrs Woodley recalls as a wonderful cook

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