Mr. Mitchard remembers his schooldays at Camerton School. His account is reproduced from Look! This was Timsbury by kind permission of the Cheshire Home.
I spent most of my schooldays at Camerton School. The headmaster was Alfred Matthews and he was one of the old fashioned sort who was very strict and I can assure you that on many occasions I couldn’t sit down after I got home because of the treatment that I’d had because I’d done something wrong and I’m afraid that if I went home and told my father that I’d had the cane at school, it was repeated because he always said that the headmaster would never give punishment unless it was due. I could say that with regard to the Camerton Schoolmaster, he was very fair, and in his fairness, if he wanted a cane to correct the children with, he used to send them out to catch a nut hazel out of the hedge, and if you were caught by the farmer cutting that nut hazel, Lord help you. He used to give us a few cuts and in fact always we held our hand as high as possible, so that it reduced the power on the cut and also be used to always have a look at our hand first because we had a habit of putting horsehair tight across our hands which split the cane. My earliest memories are of schooldays which were very happy. Whatever punishment we put up with, schooldays were the happiest days of our lives.