JOHN Taylor's recollections of Park Hill Drive, Allerton and some of the people who lived in the neighbourhood, prompted regular T&A correspondent and Bradford bus driver John Murphy to take a walk down memory lane to his own school days.

He said: "John referred to a school teacher as being a neighbour? Good chance it was Mrs Constance Green, who lived at no. 9. In my my first year at St Edmund Campion Secondary in 1968, in my first form class was Mrs Green's son, Duncan.

"I recall not knowing whether to envy him, as all the teachers knew who he was, or feel sorry for him with his mum being a teacher there. Either way, we became good friends and I was invited to the house quite a few times. It seemed poetic that he eventually became a teacher himself and taught at Edmund Campion.

" I was a Governor of the school for a short time. It really was a wonderful school, but a victim of middle school policy that reduced the roll from 800 to fewer than 350 pupils - a recipe for it's demise. For a building dating from 1963, to suffer demolition before 2000 seemed to me ridiculous.

And how life can be influenced by circumstance? if Campion had been a sixth-form school I would have definitely stayed on and certainly snared the two GCE A levels necessary to begin teacher training. Though I have few regrets in how things did turn out for me.

"I often do the 607 and sometimes the 615 routes and always glance across to where the bottom pitch would have been - now the Pupil Referral Unit building."

There's much more about Edmund Campion on Martin O'Connell's website Bradford Eye. Martin, who used to manager the Camera Exchange shop on North Parade from 1975 to 1982, highlights the youth club which the school's teachers ran on Monday, Wednesday and Friday nights.

He said:"Although a Catholic school, Edmund Campion did not exclude anyone coming, from what we would call in those days a Protestant school, in fact pupils from other schools, some from the other side of the city, would attend the youth club.

"Many of them were from Rhodesway, our so called arch enemy. In those days we used to have snowball fights, they having the advantage of throwing down on our school, being the more elevated of the two. I believe the Youth Club brought both schools together. It was very difficult to be hostile to the school opposite if you were associating with pupils from that school three nights a week. Now, there's a lesson for today."

John Murphy would like to hear from old school pals. His address is: murphyj241@gmail.com.

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