The demolition crew dismantling our former chapel building are a friendly bunch and very graciously allow me on site pretty much whenever I want to in order to photograph the process.  Although due to my holiday I missed the "window" to get inside the shell and take pictures, there is still plenty to see despite the larger machinery having arrived on site to demolish what 134 years ago was a brand new Baptist day school backing onto a brand new church.  In the photo the school part is now almost gone leaving a big hole into the former sanctuary.  The vestry, complete with its evil 1950's wall paper is still (at the time of the photo) extant and just behind the arm of the digger.

This afternoon I was visiting one of my ninety-somethings who has recently been in hospital and she was recalling how her grandfather had remembered the 'old' (wooden) chapel that stood on our grave yard and had attended the Baptist school when it was a shiny new - presumably state of the art - place.

This picture - downloaded from the web where it had been uploaded from some archives held my my folk - shows what school looked like in 1913 - hard to imagine how they fitted so many children in such a small space as it was, but they clearly did.  Hard, too, to imagine that in this photo are parents of some of my older people.  Seemingly, before free education exisited,  people paid 1d a week for reading and 1d a week for writing (no record of what they were charged for arithmetic!) so it was hardly a cheap option for miners with large families.  Running costs were subsidised by an annual 'Sermons' Sunday.

The advent of free state education meant the Baptist school closed fairly soon after the opening of this shiny new building... and the rest, as the saying goes, is history.