Kathryn and Paul Black talk about school involvement in Wakes Week during the early 1980s.

“Did the school ever do anything towards Wakes?

Just before our time, the children had the whole of Wakes Week off, so that they could enjoy Wakes and stay up late at night and do things, which in a way was quite sensible really, because they got very tired during Wakes Week. And then when we first came, they had Thursday and Friday off and that went to Friday and they went in on a Friday but the Wakes Committee paid for entertainment for them on the Friday. We used to get performers coming in to the school hall and doing little plays for them or puppet shows and things like that on Wakes Friday. Tideswell Community Players used to do the Wakes sports up on the school field on a Wednesday night and they always used to have me writing down the names of the winners, because I knew all the names, I was the only one who knew all their names and we used to get all the prizes from Chapman’s sweet shop.

P – there was a lot more during the week for them to get involved with really. There was a Lego competition, which I took over and also we had other things like

K – You did the go-cart race, that was good, that was brilliant

P – That was like a time trial. Kids used to make like soap box things and then we used to start up the school drive and then on the corner I used to get a lot of straw bales and when they came out and the Police closed the road, well the road was closed anyway. So they came out of the school drive, round the corner, down into that little dip and that gave them a chance to stop at the bottom and somebody would ring a bell. We couldn’t have had a race because people would have been killed I think on that corner? No, we didn’t have any accidents as far as I can remember.

When was this late 70s, early 80s?

P- Probably early 80s.”