WE’VE been overwhelmed by readers’ contributions to our series of stories on the Sidney Hall in Weymouth.

First off, thanks to Lyn Mumford for this photo of her husband Gary after a boxing bout in the hall.

She said: “There has been quite a bit of input by readers about the Sidney Hall – that it was used as a school, roller skating, dancing, etc, but one thing has not yet been mentioned and that is boxing.

“It was regularly used in the 1950s for boxing tournaments and my husband Gary boxed there many times.”

The photo on the right was taken in 1957 when Gary was 14-years-old after he had just won his fight.

Lyn said: “On the same bill that evening was Dick McTaggart who was one of the top amateur boxers of his time and who had won the Olympic Gold medal the year before in Melbourne, Australia.

“At the end of the evening, he gave my husband his vest.”

Christine Hawker, as she was known at the time, was a pupil at Holy Trinity School when it was at the Sidney Hall and got in touch with Looking Back.

She said: “I think the teachers names were Miss Pavord, Miss Swatridge, and Miss Richardson, but I might be wrong.

“I remember that our PE was done outside on the left of the hall.

“We had to take off our skirts and do it in our knickers and tops. One girl refused to take off her skirt but the teacher insisted.

“The poor girl did in the end and she was wearing men’s underpants. I think her name was Audrey. We all laughed, of course, like kids do, but I often thought how sad it was for her.

“Miss Pavord used to take us for poetry and I can see her now reciting this poem.

“I don’t know what it was called, it goes ‘Cherries ripe cherries the old woman cried ‘In her snowy white apron and basket beside.

‘Little boys came, eyes shining, cheeks red; ‘To buy bags of cherries to eat with their bread.’”

Christine said a teacher offered a prize to the smartest dressed girl for a week.

She added: “I won that prize, which was half a crown, 2/6.

“Each night I used to wash my white ankle socks and put them on clean the next morning “From a classroom window I used to love watching the firemen sliding down the tower to the fire engine below.

“When they had roller skating at the Sydney Hall, I won a pottery dish, which I still have, in a race around the hall. Those were the days!”

Thanks also to Alan Brown, of Moordown, Bournemouth, who wanted to point out that the school in Sidney Hall was there because the original Holy Trinity buildings in Chapelhay were destroyed by bombing in 1940, having been built there in 1853.

Alan’s mother Betty Brown (nee Orchard) attended the school in Chapelhay in the 1920s and 30s before going to Weymouth Grammar School. After the war the school moved to temporary accommodation just off Rodwell Road, in Longfield Road, and Alan went there for a few months in 1951 before his family moved out of Weymouth.

Silvia Noakes contacted us to say she was in the Holy Trinity School when it was destroyed on August 11, 1940.

She said: “The school was used as a Sunday school on Sundays at that time and I remember there was no time to reach the air-raid shelters in Rodwell Avenue so we lined the walls of a reinforced room as the bombs fell all along the street.

“I still vividly remember standing next to a boy about my age when a shard of glass came from a reinforced window and buried itself in the wall between our thighs. The shard was easily 12 inches long.

“A kindly ARP warden took me home insisting that I wore his helmet because tiles were falling from roofs.”

Silvia, of Roundham Gardens, Weymouth, also said the Sidney Hall was used as ‘a Cookery Nook’, where you could buy a coupon-less meal for a shilling and as a dance hall.

She also went to weekly Brownie sessions in the early evening.

She said later Holy Trinity School moved to the former Old Tech College in Commercial Road, where her class teacher was a Miss Woolacott.

n LOOK out for more memories of the Sidney Hall in Looking Back next week.