View of Hope brings back memories for Wilf
This view of the village of Hope which we used in Pictures From The Past the other day was very familiar to 86-year-old Wilf Overton, as he went to the village school on the right.
"I started at that school when I was six years old in 1936," he said.
"There's not many of us left now. The headmaster was Mr Thompson, who was there until he retired. He was an excellent headmaster. He would give us the cane many times."
Mr Overton, of Plox Green, Minsterley, got the cane himself for being late.
"I left there in 1942 and went to Bishop's Castle High School until 1948."
Afterwards he had an apprenticeship at the Sentinel Works in Shrewsbury.
Mr Overton says his father went to the school before him, at the age of five in 1906.
"The picture is very familiar. There's a road on the right going past the school, and then there's a road on the left which was a lane going from the church, and they met up at the top."
Hidden behind the trees in the upper part, he said, was Leigh Manor, the then home of Lord Bridgeman.
In the centre, he says, is the church. Mr Overton recalls there were some changes in this scene just before he went to the school, and as they are not present on the picture he reckons it was taken around 1931.
The old school building, he added, was now a house.
