I thought you might like to see the bargain of the century, which I’m taking to Bantock House fair and selling for less than the price of the cheapest 12th scale house kit.
The bargain is actually a school, based on the board school at Carlton Miniott in North Yorkshire. Having been a school teacher myself and having attended a Church High School for Girls, I had more than enough nightmares to lay to rest. I tackled them all a quarter of a century ago in this building, which was entirely scratch built by me and true twelfth scale. Everything is there in the wood except the roof of the school hall.
The working windows and doors, all scratch built, using the Black Country Miniatures stained glass windows that the original miniaturists made at the time, are only lacking a hinge on the front door.
Inside I designed the school hall to have steps, although the balsa wood for the lower ones is missing. It’s not fastened down, you could remove it if you wanted to copy one of those television programmes where desperate people buy old churches, turn them into family homes through their own blood, sweat and tears and then have the divorce immediately afterwards. In reality in Victorian schools, the students were in shared long desks on steps, with the older children at the back and the little ones and the teacher and the blackboard at the front and several different lessons going on at once, with pupil teachers, who were the students who had got to the back of the class really quickly. The windows are copied from a school I taught in and are the kind that cannot distract children, because no one can see out of them and which need a window pole to open.
To the right of the hall are the rooms, as you can see these have a ceiling and also a roof, neither fixed because I didn’t have the dexterity back then that I have since acquired in quarter of a century of miniaturising, so you can get your hand in everywhere. Would you like a closer look?
Here is the study of the headmistress, a place of fear and terror and also
very Victorian fixtures and fittings and her own toilet and cloakroom.
When I was a child you were allowed to be sick in the very splendid toilet belonging to the headmistress, which was right across the hall from her office. It had beautiful blue flowered porcelain which I got to see quite a lot as I had a grumbling appendix for a few years and was sick down the beautiful toilet often. The fish tiles above the sink were made by a Miniatura artist, of course, though don’t ask me which, it was quarter of a century ago.
The building is electrified, the copper tape runs around the rooms at adult waist height to power these self-made lamps which are on stands fastened to the top of the wainscoting. I think a buyer would be well advised to junk the lamps and find the position of the tape with a current tester.
In the centre of the building is the caretaker’s cubby hole and the toilets and washbasins for the children. Caretakers in schools are an interesting breed, inclined, in my experience to sudden and unpredictable invisibility, as for example when a child has been spectacularly sick all over the floor. Spot on four o’clock, however, they manifest, with an urgent need to lock the building immediately so that the poor teacher never gets to do the marking at her desk and go home unencumbered but always ends up taking 42, exercise books, 42 stick the snow on the snowman models and 42 potentially pin-on-the-wall best writing on a bit of paper efforts home with her. (42, my first class had 42 children in it, half illiterate, several from criminal families and they all ended the year reading and sitting up straight and listening. In those days, thirty years ago, you were meant to teach them something and you jolly well did.)
Next to the cubby hole are the children’s toilets, all scratch built because no one was doing toilet kits then.
Above the washbasins I have made the tiles spell out: CLEANLINESS IS NEXT TO GODLINESS because for the Victorians it was. The plumbing doesn’t work but it looks as if it should, which again in my experience of schools is highly authentic.
So what do you think? Would you like to give my school house room?
It needs the roof for the main hall cutting out of plywood and the floor with or without steps deciding and finishing. The chimney stack outside the fireplace needs finishing with balsa wood and then it needs cladding on the outside, either brick slips, brick paper or something artistic and then the roof needs cladding and then it needs playing with. So, quite a lot of stick-on outside stuff and then you have a school to furnish and fill for a knock-down make an offer price.
Why did I never finish it?
I started to collect the dolls, because a hall full of dolls is ideal for a doll collector. I collected kits, which were hard to find, antique dolls, which were less so and I was always on the lookout for a glass-eyed doll to be the teacher. I searched a couple of continents and dozens of antique shops for glass-eyed miniature dolls and was told everywhere that it couldn’t be done. So eventually, I saved up, and took the one day class on how to make a porcelain doll, to see if I could do it myself.
And that, as we used to say when we went to the cinema to watch a news reel, is where I came in. This is the building that made me make dolls all those years ago. It started my second career and that’s why it never got finished, even though it’s within a whisker of being done.
I do really mean I want less than the price of a cheap house kit for it, I’d like someone else to lay their ghosts with it and enjoy collecting all the children. I can’t sell it by Internet because it might cost more in postage than I’m asking for it. I have some architrave to go with it and I think another angel corbel and some school bits. Come and make me an offer. Here are the details for the fair on Sunday
www.wolverhamptonart.org.uk/visit/bantock
click on What’s On and then Sunday 20th October. As you will see the fair is on from 11-4 and entrance only costs 50p, which is utterly ludicrous, although it’s small, it’s select, these are Miniatura exhibitors, it would normally cost you at least a tenner anywhere to see them. Plus you’ve got the whole rest of the museum and grounds to lose the family in; as an introduction to miniatures it’s a bargain.
Come and get a cut-price education!
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JaneLaverick.com – more enthusiasm than six monkeys and one banana.