"I was the first one to come to the school to be a full-time technician.

The Chemistry laboratory had just been built; it was over the dining room, and the Physics lab was at the top, and the Biology where you have your staff room. I had to put batteries on trays, and then, when the bell went, get between all the girls on the stairs and carry these trays from one lab to another lab and down again, and all the equipment as well. It was quite hard going.When I was carrying batteries down the stairs, and the girls would hare down the stairs, quite often – they’d think I was quite stroppy – I’d say "Walk, don’t run, you don’t run anywhere in this school, and if you see us coming, wait until we’ve gone by you, if we drop these batteries they’ve got acid in them!"

The Chemistry lab, at the end of it there’s a little room that overlooks the entrance gate, that used to be the prep room. And the one for the Biology lab was where I presume you make tea and coffee now. That was quite primitive as a matter of fact. We had to take quite a lot of stuff from the Chemistry lab down to the Bio lab.

And the Physics lab we didn’t have a prep room as such. They did have a store up there that we could keep equipment in. There were the tiered seats up there, and then the teaching bench, and then at the other end of the room there were the benches where they came down and did their practical work, and the sinks were round.

It was up and down stairs all day long – it was murder. Especially when I was here on my own, and I was here on my own until about 1965 when the huts went up. Then there were two of us. Sometimes there was such a lot to do, and with classes going on all the time it could be Chemistry, Physics and Biology all going on all the time, so you had to dive through break time, clear up from that and get the stuff down to the next lab or wherever you were heading for.

Girls did a lot of practical work in the 1950s.. I’ve since been told that they don’t do so much practical work in the chemistry lab. It was non-stop, period after period..

I used to make test tube racks and so on myself, doing the carpentry in the basement of school house.

It wasn’t just biology, physics and chemistry that was done in each lab. It could be anything. They could move from one to the other. Other than Physics. Biology would move upstairs if they weren't doing dissection, that would stay down here.

I could tell you a lot about dissection... it was the sixth formers who did the dissection…I got very friendly with them. Some of them didn’t like doing it but they did it. By the end of my time here, they weren't still doing dissections like that.

The room on the staff room end of the huts was used as a multidisciplinary laboratory, without a lot of equipment, no burners, but a sink.

The biology garden was still used as such until the staff moved into the staff room, then they wanted to sit in it and it fell into disuse. It was originally used for botany, I can’t remember the four orders of plants it contained, if it still did, but the girls used to go and get worms from it. You get worms by pouring potassium permanganate on the soil.

They were talking about Cecil Place for about two or three years before 1976, when we moved. We had to set up the new building, and it was horrendous trying to carry boxes over. The caretaker used to do quite a bit for us, put it on his trolley, take it up. But quite a lot of it we had to take over ourselves. But we did it. Just the two of us then.

And there was quite a lot of new equipment, it was nice to move to a nice new building. But still just the two of us, with five labs to look after. It was easier for us because we had that nice big prep room. We did still have to carry some stuff around.
We were always promised that we’d have a pond but we never had a pond. But we had plants. In the bio lab, there were plants in the bay windows, all the plants were in there.

And the Art was there as well, in the downstairs physics lab. And one room for maths. Next to the staff room was this empty room and after that they put computers in there."
from an interview