Tulse Hill School was a large comprehensive school for boys in Upper Tulse Hill, in the London Borough of Lambeth, England. The school building had eight floors and served almost two thousand pupils. It opened in 1956 and closed in 1990. Notable alumni include Ken Livingstone, the former London Mayor, and poet Linton Kwesi Johnson.
History The school was opened on 11 September 1956 under the headmastership of Clifford Thomas. Student management was originally based on public school lines employing a house system, and having prefects (both school and house). Originally, there were upper and lower schools, and within the sixth forms upper and lower sixth, with the lower sixth being called the remove, similar to its close neighbour Dulwich College.
In 1972, students of the school had multiple conflicts with a local gay commune on Althone Road, occupied by members of the Gay Liberation Front. The conflicts culminated in the residents leafletting the school with the slogan "We are here and we're staying. We are not taking no more shit."
Later, the school moved away from a house system, replacing it with pastoral group units. The school operated this system until its closure in 1990. Changing population figures for the area have been given as the reason for closure. In 1988, an ILEA (Inner London Education Authority) quadrant review proposed a merger between this school and one in the neighbouring borough of Southwark, William Penn Boys. However the two boroughs failed to agree on a combined school, and the demise of ILEA as a supervisory body in 1990 made this no longer enforceable.
Education
Originally, the school had a broad curriculum providing for the normal grammar school academic courses, including Latin, Greek, French, physics, chemistry, biology and other general subjects.London County Council, Secondary Schools: Division 8, April 1962, page 24 These subjects were taken to the advanced level (A-level) of the General Certificate of Education examination.
Tulse Hill School was the first secondary school in the 1980s to offer an examinable CSE course in Black History. It was a Mode 2 CSE course examined by the Middlesex Board, and which later became the London Regional Examining Board. Boys in the fifth form could opt to do Black History after taking either a standard History CSE or GCE early in the autumn and spend the rest of the year following this specialist course and examination. The initiative was partly funded by a donation by Muhammad Ali who had visited the school and inspired Nigel File as Head of History to initiate a Black History Month and with his team to create a cutting edge curriculum. This was done using a book jointly authored by Nigel File and Chris Power, "Black Settlers in Britain 1555-1958" and which became a Heinemann publication. There is a dedication to Tulse Hill by Nigel and Chris who were both on the school's staff on its fly-leaf first page. The early student copies (from 1981) even offered teachers a methodology for teaching Black History! These early copies are much sought after on the second-hand book market and fetch prices today in excess of £60!
Ali sparred with one of the students during his visit. The last Lonsdale belt was awarded in 1986. The curriculum was also shared later with some local Lambeth secondary schools with whom it had formed a sixth form consortium.
In 1988, Tulse Hill School became one of the first London Boys' Schools to acquire a Domestic Science classroom and teacher. A workshop was converted at a cost of £50,000 to support equality of opportunity. Boys did a carousel of textile studies, cookery and parenthood skills. It also installed a second computer room to support better ICT skills.
Another initiative was to fund an "up and coming" South London athlete called Linford Christie to act as a part-time occasional mentor to its senior sports students. The sixth form tertiary board voted positively to give him a £500 grant with ILEA approval. Linford went on to be a highly distinguished UK Olympian.
In 1989 it created an Australian style "mini-school" where staff taught several subjects to first form pupils having moved from a house system to a year system. In a two-year period the roll of the school shrank from 1,100 boys to 337 who then transferred to adjacent Dick Sheppard School under a planned closure. Technically it had become an annex of Dick Sheppard School in its last year.
After Tulse Hill school closed, for five years a committee of former staff and governors administered a £20,000 Charifund investment with the Stock Exchange belonging to the schools' trustees. The trust tracked former students into further or higher education. It offered them sizable grants of several hundred pounds towards books, travel, or study fees until the trust funds had been depleted.
Throughout the school's three decades, specialist facilities in the school prepared students in engineering, building, art, music, and commercial subjects to prepare them for a variety of professions. Pupils were also prepared for student and craft apprenticeships.
Catchment
The school attendance drew from South London suburbs, including Streatham, Brixton, Herne Hill, Clapham and Brockwell Park.
School badge and motto
The school badge depicts a paschal lamb supporting a cross, set above a strip (wreath) of alternating blue and white. Below that is a shield Argent two bars wavy azure. The top half of the emblem is borrowed from the crest of the London Borough of Lambeth in which the school was situated. The only difference being that the Lambeth crest has a Pennon flowing from the cross, whereas Tulse Hill School's emblem has no pennon. The shield is the bottom half of London County Council's arms.
The blue and white waves lines represent the River Thames; the paschal lamb with cross in heraldic terms is a "canting" or punning reference to the name Lambeth.
The Latin motto Ad unum omnes was employed meaning All for One; One for All.
Uniform
Thomas's of Herne Hill and Clapham South, and later Temples' of Brixton and Streatham, tailored the uniforms for students. The school badge could then be sewn onto the blazer. Mr Thomas was thought to dislike the image, as he claimed it looked more like a wolf than a lamb.Tulse Hill School Website
In the 1960s, the 6th form tie was dark blue decorated with multiple images of the school emblem and the upper school tie was royal blue with diagonal stripes, the stripes being dark blue with a white centre. One striking feature of the early years of Tulse Hill School uniform was the house colours displayed on school caps. When the school first opened, the boys had to wear a black school cap with the school badge on the front section and the house denoted by a coloured button at the apex of the cap. In later years (c.1958), the cap was redesigned with the rear section in one of eight house colours.
All students were expected to wear the school uniform with the exception of sixth formers were allowed "modest discretion". House prefects were distinguished by small oak leaves sewn under the school badge. School prefects had large oak leaves. In the late 1950s, school prefects also wore a short gilet-style gown with blue facings around the school. This gown was worn by school prefects until at least 1966.
Houses
Games and social activities were originally organized on a house system. Boys were allocated a house and being guided by a housemaster. It was the housemasters' job to get to know their individual house members, and there were often house meetings after morning assembly. Inter-house sporting fixtures were another feature of school life, together with house outings and social activities. The house system at Tulse Hill was eventually replaced by pastoral group units.
The eight school houses were named after men who had associations with the borough of Lambeth. At the time that the house system was abandoned, there were only five houses with Wren, Temple, and Faraday having been retired some years earlier. +Houses of Tulse Hill School House Founded Colours Named after Blake 1956 Light blue William Blake, poet Brunel 1956 Pink (later dark blue after Faraday was retired) Isambard Kingdom Brunel, engineer Dickens 1956 Green Charles Dickens, author Faraday 1956 Black until about 1959, then dark blue Michael Faraday, scientist Temple 1956 Yellow William Temple, Archbishop of Canterbury Turner 1956 Maroon J. M. W. Turner, landscape artist Webb 1956 Grey (later yellow after Temple was retired) Matthew Webb the first to swim the English Channel. A painting depicting this hung in the school hall. Wren 1956 Brown (1956–79) Christopher Wren, architect
Cadet forces
Unlike most comprehensive schools, Tulse Hill established detachments of the Army Cadet Force and the Air Training Corps. The Cadet Corps had regular weekend training and annual camps away from the school grounds. Initially, there was no designated site for the cadets on school grounds, but a permanent building was erected at the end of the cycle sheds in 1962 with each unit occupying half.
The Army Cadet Force unit was established as 23 (City of London) Company, affiliated to the Royal Fusiliers. After 1968, this changed to 74 Company South East London ACF and the regimental affiliation was changed to the Royal Regiment of Fusiliers. The first Officer Commanding was Captain A J "Jerry" Hall who was also a German language teacher in the school.
Buildings and grounds
The buildings were large enough to accommodate the over 2,000 students that attended. The main building was a large glass-clad building with eight floors, served by four lifts. Until the late 1970s a lift operator would press the desired floor button for the students. In an attached annex was the administration block, the kitchens, the staff room, and the Great Hall. Morning assembly was held in the hall which had a professional stage lighting system by Strand Electric. Adjacent to the hall were a number of music rooms equipped with various instruments.
The hall also housed an organ previously belonging to the Rose Hill Gaumont Cinema. It was a two-manual Compton which had drums, cymbals and whistles removed before re-installation. It played songs such as "Trumpet Voluntary" and the school song. It was believed that cracks in the building were caused by the organ.
In addition to the main educational building there was a gymnasium block, containing six gymnasia, and a workshop block where woodwork, engineering and building trades were taught.
The main building suffered from serious structural subsidence in the 1980s and wooden props were installed at the Great Hall end to stabilise the structure.
The buildings were demolished in the early 1990s. Following demolition, the site was bought by a housing association and homes for 160 people have since been built on the site. The estate is infamous as the home of Jean Charles de Menezes and part of the reason he was misidentified by police before they shot him. The empty school buildings prior to demolition can be seen in the first filming of Helen Mirren's 1990 detective series written by Linda La Plante. As the Lambeth and the London Residuary Body gave permission for it to be used as a film location.
In 1997, the school entrance and the caretaker's cottage remained on site. House builders on site said that the school building basement (plant) level remained, as it had simply been "filled" in. After the school had been demolished in the 1990s, excavations revealed an early Saxon settlement which included eight sunken-floored buildings.
Sporting facilities