Ludlow Grammar School

I was appointed to Ludlow Grammar School to introduce Geology at 'O' and 'A' level, and given a 'lab' on the top floor of what had been the old girls' grammar school - the lovely Georgian house at left in this picture (courtesy Wikipedia because, as always, I have no pictures of what I did at work). The Headmaster, a Mr Robert Burns, gave me a good budget and I had support from the County inspector, so I was able to equip the room. But the real joy of the job came from my first 'A' level class, many of whom were keen to come out with me at weekends to roam the countryside in search of minerals and fossils.

Shropshire is a geologist's paradise, with rocks in age from PreCambrian to Old Red Sandstone. The old lead mines in the Shelve district yielded some superb mineral specimens, like these crystals of chalcopyrite on calcite, but we tended to concentrate on the fossils, particularly those in the quarries at the back of Wenlock Edge - quarries to which, these days, we would never have access. So....

....we found creatures like the trilobite Dalmanites myops in the Wenlock Shales.

In the Wenlock limestones we found corals like Heliolites (pictured) which, when sectioned, showed a distinct banding. We concluded that the banding might have been caused by a nearby river which, in the rainy season, had brought muddy water down onto the reef where the corals lived. We applied to enter our findings for the BBC's 'Young Scientist of the Year' programme, and were accepted.

On a trip to a quarry at Buildwas on the River Severn one of the students, David Webster, found a fossil which I couldn't identify so he sent it to the Natural History Museum. A few days later a professor of palaeontology at Southampton University asked if he could drive up and be shown the site. The fossil, Osculocystis monobrachiolata, was only the second of the species ever found, the first having migrated from Shropshire to a museum in New York.

I became involved in a teacher trade union while at the school, soon becoming the 'school rep' for the NAS. When during the coalminers' strike of January and February 1972 Calor Gas cylinders with open fires were placed in all the classrooms because the boiler had run out of coal I had the 'pleasure' of telling the Head that, either the fires were removed, or my members would walk out. A delivery of coal arrived the next day.

The geology and the trade unionism might have been exciting but the school was stuck in the past, very traditional, with a concentration on exam results rather than on educating the students. Some of the staff had, since they were eleven, only been away from the school to go to university and fight in the war. I always thought that I should have had this job, not in my mid-twenties but in my last few years of teaching, so I could have retired in Ludlow.