This is exactly what I have been banging on about over all the years that I was in architecture . Keeping our heritage and yet making modern use of it without destroying anything of note. It does not have to be Westminster Abbey to be worthy of note. The mundane has been a more than worthy section of our lives, and it represents the effort and sweat of the masses, it represents the places where our lives have been enacted. Excellent.
This old school is bordered along the bottom by St. Johns Church Hall. It was here, about sixty years ago, that a rare phenomenon occurred. I stand to be corrected as the event was reported in the Cornishman at the time and the gist of it was that on a quiet Sunday morning at dawn the weather was threatening rain with a dark sky. Several witnesses reported seeing an intensely bright sphere of light suddenly appear over Mounts Bay just a couple of hundred feet above the sea. The sphere was said to behave erratically and “dance about”. It quickly moved from the sea to “float around” over Penzance up the hill from the railway station until with a tremendous explosion it struck the roof of St. Johns Church Hall doing a great deal of damage. The sphere was reported to have been ball lightning, goodness gracious.
This type of lightning is quite rare and although not seen by many locals it was certainly heard.
The large roof of this building had been replaced just twelve months before and covered using cedar wood shingles. The lightning strike left quite a lot of them in pieces all over the neighbourhood.
Does St. Johns church hall still have wooden tiles?
This was the event that my uncle saw. He said that it was a meteorite that had generated the charge, as it burst through the dense clouds, it crashed into a house in The Battlefield. He gave me a piece that he had recovered. Where it is now, I am not at all sure. That was when I was a young lad.
This was my school! By the time I attended in the late 50s, it was an infant school only, but you can see the dividing fence that must have existed between the high school and lower school when this photo was taken. My father was vicar at St John's Church and so had quite an interest in the church school. When we moved in to the vicarage in Trewartha Terrace, there were long desk-tops from the old senior section stored in the attic.
I believe the photographic firm was a partnership between Mike COURTney and Peter Watson-WOOD...thus "Courtwood"....Peter I think left in the 70's for workin the U.S.
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