One Village, Three Schools
There is a certain pride that comes with growing up in a place with an unusual sounding name. It is a good conversation ice-breaker, it stays with you long after you have left it in the rear-view mirror. The memories formed there persist, and the ineffable tie to your home place is something that remains.
Cut Bush was a great place to grow up, great for the imagination. Some of the earliest memories are of climbing the back fence and venturing into Rowley’s field. Not going far at first, but then plucking up the courage to go one field further and finding a huge fly agaric growing in the shade of the boundary trees.
Then, a little later, exploring the ‘village’ itself. It was at that stage a tiny gathering of no more than a handful of houses, centred around Vaughan’s pub. Just past Vaughan’s, on the road to Ballysax, was the first village school. Built in 1839, it was long abandoned by this stage. Inside, there was a half-buried, rusting plough at ground level and the floorboards creaked omniously when you ventured upstairs. An obvious magnet for local children. The fact that it was rumoured that the school was haunted didn’t do any harm either.
The booklet ‘Brownstown N.S. 150th Anniversary’ was printed in 1989 to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the building of the first school in the village. The beautiful cover illustrations were done by student Sinéad McBride. In his foreword to the booklet, Bishop Laurence Ryan prefaced his remarks by saying: ‘The provision of a school in Brownstown in 1839 was the opening of an era in which the children of the area were provided with the education which generations before them could obtain only with difficulty or not at all’.
In the booklet, Eithne Partridge describes the layout of the first school: ‘There were two classrooms, one upstairs and one downstairs. Access to the upper classroom was by way of an outside cement stairs with iron banisters leading to a small landing at the top which was enclosed by an iron balustrade at the gable end, which faced eastwards towards the Wicklow Mountains’.
Although the mood expressed in the booklet was celebratory, there was no shying away from the reality of the situation. As Bishop Ryan let it be known: ‘The most obvious need, of course, is the need of a new school…I have visited the present school and have seen for myself the very unsatisfactory conditions in which the teachers and pupils are compelled to work … I sincerely hope that the hold-up at government level will soon come to an end…’
The second school:
Opened in 1916, the ‘second school’ replaced the 1839 building. It was located a little further down the Cut Bush road, just across from the village pump. It was bigger than the first school, and was no doubt a worthy successor to the earlier one and could cater for a larger number of students than the one it replaced. By 1989, however, it simply wasn’t fit for purpose. There was many a prayer said by many a student, I suspect, for inclement, cold weather. On these days there was more than an even money chance that the heating would break down again and students and staff would all be sent home for the day, until another repair was carried out. The Irish Press, on April 14th, 1992, carried a feature titled: ‘Continuing our three-part investigation into the cutbacks that hurt in the classroom’. This was three years after the 1989 booklet, but little had changed. The report carried a picture of the indomitable and now sadly deceased school Principal Michael Kelleher, in his makeshift ‘office’.
‘There is no staff room, no drinking water, no hot water, no tea-making or washing up facilities, no cloakrooms, no storage spaces and, due to dampness, paper cannot be stored in the school’, the report stated. With no drinking water inside, students were given the job of bringing in water from outside for the teachers’ tea. A flexible rubber pipe was attached to the spout on the exterior drinking fountain, and water slowly filled a bucket below. The trick was to carry the heavy black bucket from the bicycle shed into the main building, trying not to slip and making sure you showed no sign of weakness or strain in front of your schoolmates.
By 1992, it was obvious that things couldn’t go on this way, and the parents, staff and board of management were thankful of any publicity that would highlight the case. This had the effect of galvinizing the resolve of all those involved and many a meeting was held.
Leinster Leader, 7th May, 1992:
All this organisation and protest eventually paid off. In 1994, the third and present-day school in Cut Bush was opened. The Leinster Leader on 1st December 1994, was happy to report that: ‘The long wait for a new primary school to serve the needs of the Brownstown-Ballysax area came to an official end last Monday afternoon with the formal opening of Ballysax National School … Principal Michael Kelleher said the building of the school marked the end of twelve years of protest by the teachers and parents …’ The plans for the new school were included in the 1989 booklet:
Sources:
Brownstown N.S. 150th Anniversary (1839-1989)
The Irish Press
The Leinster Leader
By Kevin Dowling, Kildare County Archives and Local Studies.
