The Liverpool Times

Plenty of memories of Kirkby here!

As promised here is a gallery of 57 of the teachers from the old St Kevins School in Kirkby.

The gallery of individual teachers is taken from a photo of the staff, taken in July of 1985.

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Some classics!

By the grace of God, and the wonders of a scanner, we have been forwarded some good photos of St Kevin’s with perhaps more to come.

Several photos are now in our possession, and as a special treat for the many former pupils of St Kevin’s Catholic Boys Comprehensive, we’ve got a special gallery lined up with the faces of some 57 faces from the common room – all the staff as it were!

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More news on the Kirkby connection with the good people of Malaysia.

As reported on The Kirkby Times (here) there was a teacher training college in Kirkby which a number of Malaysian students headed to back in the 1950s. Many of these young students, went on to take up important positions in the post British colonial Malaysia, and the country today is, by many standards, a true success story.

A Mr Zainal Arshad, Kirkby 1954-56, wrote an article which can be read at the link above. The article is interesting and worth a read if you’ve not already done so. Thankfully more news of the Kirkby Malaysia connection is out there on a blog kept by one of he former students of the college, now an active pensioner, righting wrongs and writing online.

The article on the Kotastar blog refers to Kirkby in the way we like to see people refer to us - in a positive light! But below is a reminder of the previous published article from Mr Arshad.

“The name Kirkby is still very well-known in Malaysia. In fact the former students still meet from time to time although many of us have passed on. As one Kirkbyite wrote, “Kirkby is an emotional landmark that will not fade. It will remain forever in our memory and our heart. It will be remembered fondly for as long as we live”. Zainal Arshad

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Lads with penknives, shock horror, and so on.

More memories of Kirkby, with penknives and knives, splits, tree knife, swings, Mill Pond rafts, Geronimo ! and the Swiss Army Knife, coolest knife a lad could own!

These enlightened times we live in are not the best times for children. Things have changed beyond recognition as far as the average childhood goes.

Take knives for instance.

Today, most of us see knives in a negative sense and few boys own penknives, or would be able to own or collect several little knives.

As I recall, nobody really felt uneasy due to the fact that almost every lad in Kirkby would have owned a penknife at some point in their lives and carried it. Many lads would never be without the penknife, and nobody panicked if one of the lads got a knife out and started whittling a bit of wood, shaping it into a point or picked the dirt from the fingernails.

Many men also carried a little penknife or knife.

Knives were handy to have and boys generally expressed an interest in a well made penknife, tools and weapons in general. Nobody thought it odd and the nanny state was not there to wag a finger at us as if any interest in weapons per se tagged us up as the next serial killer.

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Memories of Kirkby

The recent posts from Hacyon Daze are a remarkable flashback to a Kirkby now buried forever beneath concrete.

The area now known as old rough wood was, in the 1950s thick woodland that stretched all the way to St Chad’s church relived only by a narrow road, now the five lane County road. The Water tower stood above this huge area of woodland.

It was demolished in 1965. And in 2000 the cobbled road that led to the tower was dug up and removed – without the permission of the owners United Utilities - during the pillage of Kirkby when developers where given a free hand by the man (Cllr J Keight )) who put Kirkby up for sale and gave land away for next to nothing.

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More memories of Kirkby for your reading pleasure.

The recent post about the beginnings of St Marks Church in Northwood was a delightful insight of Kirkby from an age long forgotten.

The comments by Roland Meredith are a reminder of the decent people who helped to build Kirkby and respect its past through affection, rather than antipathy.

The Kirkby of the 1960s was the major re-housing of tens of thousands of Liverpool people to an area that provided new housing, top class sporting facilities, and some of the finest schools in Britain. Kirkby was also renowned for its air quality and green open space’s. Liverpool retained the management of the Housing stock until 1974.

Anyone under the age of 40 in unlikely to recall the Kirkby Town Centre of the 1960s which boasted major household names, like Woolworth’s, Boots, and Littlewood’s; as well as an outdoor market. This latter prize was always resented by the Huyton group as Liverpool Council refused to give them an outside market having legally held market rights 10 miles from their Town Hall since the days of King John.

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The Building of St Marks Church.

I lived in Northwood in Kirkby from 1960 until the end of 1963. For the first 18 months we lived in Jarrett Road, until we had built Saint Mark’s house in Brook Hey Drive. Soon we had built the hall at Saint Mark’s which we used as a church until the new church was built.

For the first year we used a converted chicken hut on the site of the present Vicarage garden.

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