The School Buildings

The School's Buildings

The original school consisted of 12 wooden prefabricated classrooms. Only the main hall and administration part of the school was brick built. Though the buildings were never meant to be anything but a temporary they served as a school for thirty years - longer, I believe than the purpose built Keresley Newlands High School.

There was no metal work classes in the early days of the school and the woodwork classes would seem to have taken place in room 11 which later became a domestic science room and the art classes took place in one of the other wooden classrooms.

In a description of Copthorne published in February 1953 in the Coventry Evening Telegraph there is a suggestion that only around four hundred pupils were ever expected to attend Copthorne which the purpose built section of the school could have catered for, but I have little doubt the adjacent hostel buildings were always intended to be an integral part of the school. When the purpose part of Copthorne was being built the post-war baby boom had already occurred - the city planners must have been aware that secondary school numbers were going to burgeon in the late fifties.

The school received the keys to the hostel block in June 1953 within two years of it opening and no doubt the block was meant to become part of the school the following autumn but this did not transpire as the building of Coundon Court had not been completed and some of the intake of that school were in occupation of the block until April 1954. In the meantime the school had to use classrooms at Keresley Grange School instead.

In the city records office there is a conversion plan dated February 1956 for the hostel block showing how part of the building was to be converted in to metal and woodwork “shops” and art rooms. These plans would have freed up the former art room in the purpose built section and allowed two domestic science rooms to be provided ready for the first year of the “baby boomer intake.”

Other rooms in the hostel block became classrooms some time in the fifties as well, but even this proved not to be enough. A portable classroom (known as "the terrapin" after the name of the company which manufactured it) was erected outside the hostel block. I’m fairly sure this was in 1958 as this was the year I entered Copthorne and I recall the “terrapin” being brand new.

The inspector’s report of 1962 notes that two of the classrooms had been taken out of use on the grounds of safety. These were in the hostel block. That same report recommended that the school should have two science laboratories not just one. Sometime after 1963 classrooms 8 and 9 were indeed made in to one laboratory when numbers had obviously fallen and the school could afford to loose a conventional classroom. (Or possibly this may have been done just prior to the school becoming an annexe of President Kennedy when numbers were certainly lower.)

Before the school closed the "terrapin" disappeared (it was actually given to Coundon Road Rugby Club and served as an old players club room.) The old nissen hut adjacent to the girl's playground which had been used for "domestic science" purposes disappeared too. Whether these removals happened whilst Copthorne was still a secondary school I have not discovered.

Paul Buttle

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