Michael describes his time teaching sculpture classes at Wensum Lodge. He talks about the changes made from residential courses through to a varied offering for the general public and the challenges that brought.
Teaching sculpture at Wensum Lodge
I worked at Wensum Lodge from 1986 to around 2002. Quite a long time before that, I’d attended life drawing classes mostly taught by Diana Lamb. Then I went to the Art School as a mature student, and graduated in about 1985. Then the teacher, Roz Newman, who was running the sculpture class at Wensum Lodge, was leaving and Diana Lamb asked me to take her place. I just walked in the door, and the Davises, who ran the place, didn’t interview me at all as I remember. I’d never taught a thing in my life. Then the classes started in September, and I just worked through.
The attendance was very good. Perhaps about 14 people which is quite a lot for a sculpture class. I always found it very difficult to get round to everybody because there were people with quite a lot of experience and some with none, which was quite a difficult challenge. That carried on for a number of years. The Davises left and other management came in and things were altering.
The County Council, as far as most of us were concerned I think, were always edgy about Adult Education and I remember I started a petition about the closure of Adult Education in Norfolk, particularly at Wensum Lodge. I think that was probably before I worked there. I’ve got a letter from the local newspaper about it which I can show you later. Then new management came in and they were obviously trying to make it more professional.
Wensum Lodge as a hub
Wensum Lodge offered lots of other things. I went to a German class, and I tried to do a French class there. It was a centre for students from other countries to come and stay at. It also had accommodation for these youngsters coming over, so there were Spanish and French children there with their teachers. It was also a centre for people who were learning to be paramedics and ambulance drivers.
So, it was quite a hub. It did lots of different things and different managers came along to try to make it more professional. Eventually, I think probably through Health and Safety procedures getting more and more stringent, the accommodation closed. And again, a lot of us thought there’s more and more people taking up more and more office space and it became quite bureaucratic.
At the same time, I suppose, funding was being cut from the government. So, what happened was that the courses were made more stringent and we had to have a sort of throughput. In some ways, this was an advantage as some classes were made more for beginners, which helped the language classes I think. Then there was an intermediate stage and a higher stage. So, more paperwork was demanded and more results needed. Also at the time, I think there was a move for funding for these things because you got more money if you were teaching literacy and numeracy.
I’m not sure of the order of these things but we went through a succession of different people who thought they could manage all this, and it became harder. For instance, after I had been teaching for seven or eight years, I had to go on a little course to prove that I was able to teach adults and that was quite a few weeks of preparing lesson plans. Being someone who just goes a bit like a red rag to a bull with paperwork, it became more and more difficult.
Sculpture in the pottery room
So, these changes were taking place gradually. At this time, the classes I taught were in the pottery room. So, it was very difficult because some of the materials I was introducing to the students were quite dangerous for potters. For instance, if you use plaster and you get it mixed up in the clay, when the clay is fired, the plaster bursts out of the pot or whatever it is that’s been made. Because it had been a pottery before anybody did sculpture, the pottery teachers were quite jealous of what went on. So that was quite a tricky time, actually, dealing with that side of it.
In terms of the building, we had the main room, and then there were some steep stairs to go down to store things, which entailed students balancing often quite large, heavy items down these stairs. Then at the far end of this storage space, there was a sort of tunnel-like under croft, and in there, people would use it as a shooting range, a shooting gallery. In the evenings, when I was running my classes, you could hear the people down below firing their guns. The club was a bit intermittent but then later on it was closed, obviously on Health and Safety grounds. I think there was another shooting range in another part of the building. There were lots of underground bits, and I believe in Jurnet’s bar, a caretaker actually did fall down a hole, and it turned out that it was tunnels to the river. Jurnet’s bar was in Jurnet’s house which was the first brick-built house built in Norwich. It was built by a Jewish trader, and they think that he had these tunnels built down to the river to unload his goods.
There were about 12 people in a class. I think the numbers that you had to have for the thing to run varied. I think it started off at somewhere around eight, and then eventually I think it was at least 12 to get the thing running. I think at some stages I probably had 14 or 15 people. That would be on a Tuesday morning from 9.30 to 12.30 with a break in the middle. Then I did an afternoon class, two ‘till four or something, which had slightly less people, usually round about 10 to 12. Then there was a period where I ran an evening class as well, from 7 ‘till 9.30, I think. That was a little more hit and miss because it usually started off with about 10 to 12 people and finished the year with about eight. I don’t know how I did that, really. Three classes in a day. I’d come home in the evening from finishing at half past four or whatever it was, and tidy up, have a bite to eat, and then go back down on my bike again for 7 o’clock. But they were quite an enthusiastic bunch, and I suspect because they’d been at work all day, they were ready to do something. We had quite good fun, I think, doing that. We did things like plaster casting, and worked a lot, mostly with clay. I’m no carver, so I couldn’t teach people carving and that sort of thing, really. So, it was mostly making, building up, rather than cutting away.
Throughput – running classes
But talking about the changes and class sizes, with this throughput business, what it seemed to me, that the authorities didn’t realise, was that you needed a little core of people who always returned. If by luck you made them welcome, or they wanted to carry on with friends that they knew, there was a terrific social side to it. I think with this throughput business, you were expected to have, like I said, the beginners. Then they went on to an improvers’ class, and then they went on to something else, and they went on in their educational world. But it became very difficult to get 12 people, 12 new people, on your books each year. It might have worked for adult language learning, or numeracy, or learning English as a second language because there was quite a lot of immigration at the time, But we all thought, in the life drawing and the portrait painting classes and all that, you had a core of people who came back, and they made up the eight or ten. Then you might get another seven or eight beginners, if you were lucky, and three of those might stick through the next year. I think that’s when it began to get difficult to run the classes, and I’m quite sure that’s where they ran into the trouble, because it became more like a university.
The blue rinse brigade
The social side of it seemed to be ignored. I mean, it used to be called ‘the Blue Rinse Brigade,’ because people thought, and I’m not sure if I wasn’t one of them actually, that it was for posh retired people. But when I worked there, I soon realised that, yes, there were a lot of retired people, but they had done a lifetime’s work. There were retired nurses, doctors, people who worked on oil rigs, risking their lives every day, solicitors. It wasn’t all a high level like that, but there were people who had been in the army and served their country for a long time, lorry drivers, all sorts. Yes, of course, most of them were older, but then in the afternoon classes and the evening classes, there was a younger group. The younger ones were at work and raising their families, and it was a bit of a break for them. So, that social side of it was quite important, really, I felt so anyway, and I felt that it wasn’t registered enough.
But it was all an aim to get money, I think, to keep the place going. In the background, obviously the building was getting older. It became more difficult to house people in there. There was no disabled access to much of it. And I think it probably became a puzzle as to how to run it, how to get the people in safely, and the cost of maintenance and all that sort of thing.
Selling off the site – the thin end of the wedge
The other issue was they wanted to sell off the site. They wanted to get rid of it. That was a few years ago, when they sold off the Sports Hall. They built a big Sports Hall next to Wensum Lodge, and it had a leaky roof, and they couldn’t stop the leaks. So, they thought they’ll sell off the site. A group of people, the Friends of Wensum Lodge and the Sports Hall people, got together and persuaded the County Council to turn it over to them. But they wanted the car park. I remember that. The Sports Hall people then obviously rented out the car parking spaces, because that’s how they got a lot of their money to fix the roof. So, if you’d come from Swardeston or somewhere, to a class, (people came from Beccles and all over to my classes) they were faced with paying for a car parking space, which had been free before. That caused quite a lot of consternation, as it would. But even when it was free, people still moaned. It was laughable really, because people wanted the whole of Norwich turned into a car park, so that they could go to their classes.
I suppose that the wedge was being driven in all the time. And then, I think they tried to spread their classes around. But that was hopeless. You had to carry everything there. The chap, Ron Spriggs, who took over from me at Wensum Lodge did a class in a church hall, and it drove him mad, because you had to take tables and chairs and everything there. I mean, how he did it, I don’t know. The clay and everything, and then you’ve got to take it back to Wensum Lodge to fire it up.
Ron Spriggs took over the sculpture class straight away from me. There were pottery classes going as well and life drawing, because all through that time, I’d been going to the Norwich 20 Group Thursday night sessions for life drawing. They ran these drawing classes, which were, again, quite popular.
People kept coming back to the classes
I had a very good, loyal team of people who, I could never understand why, but they kept coming back. They all knew each other as well, quite well, so it was a good place to come on a Tuesday, and you knew who you were going to meet. I don’t think they wanted me to go, really. Whether it broke the sort of chain of things or not, I don’t know. But I got a lot of cards and gifts, and the day I left there was quite a celebration, or wake, or whatever you call it. So, yes, it was alright and yes it was good. I was glad to leave, but I like to think we did quite a lot there for people. I know quite a few people went on to further education, through the classes. For years, I used to come across people who said, ‘oh, I went and did a degree after that.’ So, yes, I think we did some good in the end.
Michael Chapman (born 1948) talking to WISEArchive on 11th March 2025 in Norwich. © 2025 WISEArchive. All Rights Reserved.
