Tricia talks about her time working at Wensum Lodge as a part-time secretary from 1993 to 2000 and what changes in Adult Education brought with them.
The Warden’s secretary
I started as a part-time secretary at Wensum Lodge on October 11th 1993. I worked for the newly appointed warden, Simon, and Vanessa Bowron, the assistant warden. My job description says I was responsible for the operation and maintenance of the Apple Mac word processing system. I was the only one who had a computer. Everything else was paper based when I started which was just as Ken and Brenda Davis retired.
That regime had finished, and Wensum Lodge now came under new rules, much more controlled from County Hall. I had to do the minutes for lots of meetings – the management committee, the advisory committee, the Friends’ committee and Jurnet’s committee. Everything they did was scrutinised. I think Norfolk County Council felt they’d lost control of Wensum Lodge and they wanted it back.
It was a very busy place when I started. Many courses, mostly things like pottery, drawing, life drawing, silversmithing, upholstery, yoga and many of one-day courses on history.
There were volunteers who had been working under Ken and Brenda. They’d done an awful lot to get Wensum Lodge up and running, even helping do up some of the buildings, painting bathrooms and all those sorts of things. We still had people who came and volunteered. I worked quite closely with one volunteer, Frances, who came every day and did all the student enrolment forms, completed all the registers, then sorted and filed them. She did this every single day for no payment. A friend of hers came from Sheringham once a week on the train and helped her out – again for no payment. Although this was lovely in one respect, it was also difficult for some of the other people working in the office who would sometimes feel that perhaps they didn’t have enough work to do. They would want to do the enrolment forms and the registers, but they couldn’t tread on the toes of the volunteers, so it could be a sensitive relationship between those employed and the volunteers.
There was a great camaraderie between the students and the staff. I know one of the ladies who worked in the office, Pat, who was a larger than life character, would often say if she was in Marks and Spencer’s, people would come up to her and say hello. She had no idea who they were but they’d recognise her from her time at reception at Wensum Lodge. She was always quite fascinated that they remembered her. There was always chat and very much a sense of community with the students, the staff, and the tutors.
It all seems quite old-fashioned now, the words that were used – the tutors, the wardens – and that gradually changed. It became less of a school I suppose. It had a school feel with people coming to classes and being taught by a teacher. It became a bit more social as things moved on.
The new warden, Simon, had great ideas for refurbishing the Sports Hall, which have now been done. At the time he wanted to do it, there was no money but he had great ideas, making it very inclusive. He would have loved the changes. When he moved on, I worked with Vanessa, who became the warden and eventually her name was changed to the manager. Wensum Lodge became much more part of Norfolk Adult Education and had to fit around the courses that were provided throughout the county.
Residential courses
We had to fit in to Norfolk County Council a lot more. Because we had bedrooms we ran weekend residential courses. We’d look at other colleges and see which courses were successful – maybe a couple of days of life drawing classes or a couple of days of pottery. Vanessa would get a tutor involved and then we would design brochures to send out to students. We would photocopy the brochures and because I am right-handed and she’s left-handed, we discovered that we had to be very careful to put the papers together in the form of a little booklet, because she was putting them down one way and I was putting them down the other. We developed a plan in the end.
Norfolk County Council didn’t decide which residential courses we put on. The Council wanted us to make money so we had to put on courses that would attract enough people in to cover the costs. Obviously, when you had the residential course you had to have a warden sleep in over the weekend which had a cost, and you had to provide food, which provided employment for people, but you had to cover the costs.
People came from far and wide for the residentials as it was very much about homing into people’s interests and there were quite a few adult education residential places in other parts of the country. The WI had a residential courses as well so we tried to dip into the people, who were maybe following a tutor, and they would come for the weekend. We had one lady, who said she would like to bring her support cat. There were a lot of discussions if a cat could come to Wensum Lodge. We were about to accommodate guide dogs, (not that I think we ever had a guide dog), The person promised it would never leave her shoulder and would stay in its harness. It did come, and it was a great hit.
We also tried to hire the bedrooms out, maybe for young people who were on a course within the area or who would use them as cheap hostel accommodation. Obviously, they were just bedrooms, they were not ensuite, but some famous people stayed. Once we had the Greenpeace demonstrators who had ripped up a field of genetically modified rape. They’d been taken to court for causing criminal damage and they stayed at Wensum Lodge for the duration of the court case, which was held in Norwich. It included Lord Peter Melchett who was, the chairman of Greenpeace at that time. So that was quite an exciting time, and they were exonerated in the end.
Every year there was a big Jehovah’s Witness conference at Carrow Road for a couple of days, and several families came and used the bedrooms. They returned year after year, and they really enjoyed it. So, the building had a lot of uses and it was nice to see different people coming and bringing their children.
We started other campaigns to get local people in. People came from outside of the local area to Wensum Lodge, having checked our data for the day-to-day courses, but the people who lived nearby did not. It was quite hard to engage with the people who lived around that area at that time. It’s changed a little bit now, but Vanessa and I walked up Normandie Tower posting our brochures into all the flats. We had to take a bit of a breath on floor seven.
Changes in Adult Education
But slowly it become difficult to recruit enough people for the residential courses and the decision was made to get rid of the bedrooms. We couldn’t recruit people as the courses had become too expensive. Times changed, Adult Education changed, and I think the government of the time wanted people to get an education, everything was geared to qualifications.
Learning had to have a purpose, you couldn’t just come to do a life drawing class, you had to prove that you had progressed. You could start at stage one, tutors had then to fill in forms to show that you were much better at your life drawing by the end of the course. Then in the second year, you had to progress again and that was not really what some people wanted. People wanted to progress but not necessarily towards a job, but the money that was coming in from the government was very much focussed on trying to get people into jobs.
I think the language tutors really struggled with this. For instance, I did a French conversation course myself with the idea of learning a little bit of French to help when I went to France, to be able to order drinks, book hotels and trains and that sort of thing. But then, you were not able to just do a course, you had to get a grade for it, which meant the tutors had to have set learning aims. They had to fill in a lot of paperwork to say that you had progressed. A lot of the tutors decided that they would find another venue, hire a room privately and people could come to them. They could still do that course without having to tick boxes and that’s what a lot of people wanted. There were other people who did want to get exams and that was fine, but the cost of the courses did increase and became much more expensive, so it became harder to recruit people. You’ve got a big group of people who like to do a French beginner’s course, then people drop out. So for grade two French, there are not so many people and when you go on to the advanced level you’ve only got a small group of people. A small group of people doesn’t pay the bills. There was much more emphasis on people getting GCSEs, getting people back to education and back to employment.
But these people require a lot of specialist help to get them to come back to courses and specialist teaching, which isn’t necessarily the sort of skill set that the original Adult Education tutors had. They had the skills, and they were willing to pass them on. Like the upholstery person who was an upholsterer so he would show you how to upholster a chair and help you do your own scheme. But after a while that wasn’t considered to be Adult Education because it couldn’t be proved that you were going to move forward and be able to upholster other people’s chairs and get a job. I think Wensum Lodge found itself in a bit of a cleft stick because what it could offer wasn’t wanted anymore.
They had a pottery with all the kilns, all the equipment you would need. People came and enjoyed learning the pottery skills, enjoyed making pots and found it was a really good use of their time, but you can’t say that making pots will help you to get a job in the future. So again, you have to put the prices up because you’ve got to cover the cost of the kiln. You’ve got to cover all the other tutor costs and everything and it just becomes unviable which is a real shame because I don’t know many places that have a kiln. They also had a special silversmithing workshop and the upholstery workshop. I think these little nooks and crannies come from when Ken and Brenda were there. They happened to know people who had skills and who could teach them to other people, and that’s how it grew. But then it had to be fitted into what Norfolk County Council and the government of the day saw as education in a different setup.
Change to offices
So the residential courses stopped, and Wensum Lodge changed into being very much an office-based facility. There was a lot of admin because we were then doing quite a lot of examinations. These generated an entire plethora of forms that have to be filled in, invigilators to be recruited and appointed for when the exams were taken and a lot of admin staff to process it all. I’m sure people who went to Wensum Lodge will remember the Crown Room as the room off reception. It was a good meeting room if you had a history topic that a lot of people would attend and in the summer it became the exam room.
So things changed and residential courses just disappeared. It just seemed to be case of ‘we’ve got the room at Wensum Lodge, we’ve got some car parking, let’s bring all the office workers in from other places’ Different groups came including Business Bite, who were using Adult Education as a way forward. It was very much a case of using the space for offices. The library that had been there when I originally started was completely taken away. I think the books probably went to local libraries because it was no longer used. People didn’t come to look at old books anymore.
State of the building
The building changed over time. At one time what had been the warden’s office and house where the warden stayed on the ground floor, just opposite the entrance to reception, became a really lovely nursery I think they got funding and had all brand-new things. But then they decided that it wasn’t quite the place for a nursery, so again that changed.
Then the Council found the funding to change the bedrooms into offices. It was not necessarily easy to do because of the age of the building and problems with the flooring. So there was a lot of concern from the start. I think they had to redo some of the work because the offices sagged in the middle. The desks and the computers weighed down the16th century flooring! As I was leaving, it got to be more dilapidated as things could not be upgraded. The toilets got a bit shabby and the coffee bar by the riverside which had been clean and nice, was closed because there wasn’t enough trade to keep it going. Then things started to deteriorate.
When I was first there, there was a gun club in the bowels of Wensum Lodge, which very few people knew about apart from the gun club. It was like something from James Bond where you had targets that went out on pulleys. You fired at the targets and then you used the pulleys to bring the targets back. For quite a long time that was seen as not a good thing for Adult Education to have on their premises, so it was kept quite quiet and eventually had to go. But having gone, they then couldn’t find anything to do with that space, so the space just deteriorated.
Jurnet’s Bar
I think Jurnet’s Bar at one time was really thriving. That would have been in the 90s when it had a folk club on a Friday night. People also used it at lunchtimes. After I left in 2000. I think it was only open in the evenings, but I know when it closed for Covid it couldn’t be re-opened. The damp has got in and now it is a really big problem. I don’t know how they’ll open it again but it’s a real shame because it’s the oldest crypt in Norfolk. It should be able to be seen by people and it is such a shame. It was a working place that people could just go to and now it’s completely closed up and will just deteriorate.
It’s quite hard to square a bar with Adult Education! When Ken and Brenda had Wensum Lodge as a place, it was a mixture of things but when it was taken over by Norfolk County Council it was funded from certain pots of money and the emphasis had to change. So it’s quite difficult. The meetings I went to were always about struggling for the money. There were pots of money which could be used for the classes, but then if you needed repairs, the maintenance had to come from another pot of money’ and that’s always difficult.
Courses at Wensum Lodge – the Friends
I did a yoga class at Wensum Lodge and with the old-style building the floors were not quite level. So, yoga was a bit of a challenge. You had to be careful in your plank that you were nice and steady, otherwise you felt you were actually moving downhill!
One of the things that we did get was a new computing block as computers came in, and I did a computing course. I think quite a lot of mature people really enjoyed the computing courses because you could know nothing and be helped along in a way that was helpful to more mature people rather than going in a class with young people who already knew everything. That was very valuable and so money was spent on a really nice computing room. But of course, they take quite a lot of money to maintain because you’ve got to keep upgrading your computers and so you need investment all the time.
I also used to play badminton in the Wensum Lodge Sports Hall, and I know now that it’s been taken over by what was a sort of a subsidiary of what had been the Friends of Wensum Lodge. When I first started to work there, the Friends were like the PTA of Wensum Lodge. They were like the extra parents who would come and do fundraising, have Christmas fairs and fetes. The pottery that some of the people made in the pottery class they would bring along to the fetes and you could buy a really good vase or a slightly wonky vase at the Christmas and summer fairs. They were all organized by the Friends. I think the Friends actually ran the Sports Hall where you could play badminton which I did. It was a really good facility, and they had two squash courts which were well used. I think that it now runs very well and has been updated to make it into a really good ‘state of the art’ place with a gym, which is really good. I think it’s now completely independent of the Council and they make their money from the car park as I understand it.
Interacting with the local area
The leafleting we did in the local area had quite a minor effect. It was quite a difficult area at that time when I first was there. It was very much the ‘red-light area.’ You do tend to forget now that there’s lots more houses built, and the area has changed completely. I do remember an instance when a person collapsed on Wensum Lodge premises and an ambulance was called. A lady was sent out to flag the ambulance down and was shouted at by a lady across the street who thought she was trying to steal her business. Luckily, the collapsed person was fine.
Changing times
You do tend to forget it was a very different environment when I was first there working, typing on the computer, or an electronic typewriter, and everything else was paper based. The registers were written by hand as I’ve said, ticked by hand and put in filing cabinets. It’s so hard to remember that when everything is now on a computer and our records are not so visible and so the work is not the same.
Patricia Brooks talking to WISEArchive on 9th April 2025 in Mulbarton. © 2025 WISEArchive. All Rights Reserved.
