School Dinners in the 1960's

My favouwas rite pudding at a small village school (the food was delivered each day) was cold pink rice pudding!

At my school dinner tickets were bought weekly and a little hole was punched every day on entering the refectory. The first child 4s/11d, the second child 3s/6d and I can't remember the downward trajectory thereafter. All purchased on a Monday morning from my registration teacher. When I reached the age of 14 yrs I would keep the money and buy something from the local shops. That was until my mother somehow became aware of what I was doing and asked to see my dinner ticket...parents could sometime be an absolute pain in the proverbial!

In the late 70s at Grammar School we had no choice - option and no packed lunches. Three sittings with allocated seating, mixed ages and teachers together, rotas for clearing up. Chips once every 3 weeks and if you had to change your sitting that day you missed them. Still remember having lettuce with mashed potato!

School dinners then cost a shilling....(5p to our younger grans). I hated school dinners and everyday would go to the shop and buy two packets of crisps and a Mars Bar, which cost...a shilling. That is still my benchmark for cost of living increases!

We had a noxious dish which we called "babies heads "!doesn't that sound yum.? They were suet puddings with some sort of mince. The nuns would walk around (this was at the grammar school) telling us to "remember the poor starving children in India"! We used to wish they would package up the food and send it to India!

No, Linsco 56 is not exaggerating. At secondary school, one day, the disgusting stew that was dumped on my plate consisted just a 4 inch tube of cooked intestine with gravy and the usual lumpy mash. No point complaining - I just went hungry. Two senior girls were chosen to sit top of table to do the serving out, obviously they got the pick of the gruel.
What joy it would have been if we had been allowed to take sandwiches.
Needless to say most of us were on the skinny side.

Our dinners weren't too bad but I hated Butter Beans and I haven't eaten any since I left school. The other thing I hated was Sago pudding (Frogspawn). It almost made me wretch everytime I swallowed it. Oooh sorry I feel quite sick thinking about it again.

I remember pink blancmange that was like wallpaper paste too. Yuk.

The meat pies were nice with mash potato and gravy. I think school dinners have improved vastly since I was at school.

My daughter thinks I'm exaggerating when I say that a fridge was a luxury when I was first married. I used to keep milk in a bucket of cold water to keep it cool.

Bluesmum, DH has just spent a couple of days in hospital and he thought the food was wonderful. Says a lot about my cooking!

My school dinners were not at all bad, and we simply had to eat everything on our plates! Unlike hospital food these days, now that really does have to be seen to be believed! My elderly friend was recently in for a hip replacement and all the food, even the toast in the mornings was completely inedible. One day she chose fish and chips - the "fish" was a quarter inch thick 3" orange coloured square! She scraped the coating off, only to be confronted by a slither of grey/black slime, through which you could see the bottom layer of orange batter! If I had not seen it for myself, I would not have believed it, it was totally uncooked too! Another day she chose a " tomato omelette" and she got a lump of yellow plastic like substance with a sachet if tomato sauce! If it were not for friends and family taking food in, all the patients would have died of starvation!

Oh yes sago and tapioca - yuk - with someone standing over you waiting for you to finish it, and dinner ladies who ladled food onto your plate saying "it's good for you so you must have some"

I laughed at that Tudorrose....fine mouthed indeed! Cheeky madam. At home I was always taught that it's polite to leave a little food on your plate.

I remember getting dinner money from my poor old mother and not spending it on school dinners. As my school was close to a variety of shops, it was no problem to buy chips, cakes etc. At the beginning of the week, when I was comparatively well-off, I enjoyed bags of chips, sometimes accompanied by a battered sausage or fish cake (couldn't run to fish, even in those days) followed by iced buns. By Friday, when funds were depleted, I was reduced to eating 2ozs sweets, a sherbet dab, or threepenn'orth of broken biscuits. I was joined in these illicit feasts, which were normally consumed in a nearby 'back alley' away from the prying eyes of roaming prefects, mothers out shopping etc. by a couple of my friends. Our walk back to school took us past the boys' Grammar School and, of course, we were scandalised by the catcalls and wolf whistles which happened every day!
Sorry to go off-topic, but the mention of school dinners set me off thinking. My mother never found out what I was doing.

I was a primary school teacher in the 60s and we got a free lunch in exchange for eating with and supervising the children. The meals were cooked on the premises and very good but the head cook took it as a personal insult if anyone left any food, including the staff! She patrolled the dining room to see that everything was eaten. I had the temerity to leave something which I didn't like and she said"you are very fine mouthed aren't you!""

My SIL's Auntie Vi use to be the school cook in the school in St Agnes in Cornwall and she was a wonderful cook. She told me many of the mothers asked her for recipes. I was a nurse and she told me she wanted to be a nurse but she had to stay home. I reassured her that her cooking was the best medicine for those children and she did as much good for health of the community as she would have done as a nurse. Lovely lady.

You are not exaggerating about the school dinners. I didn't even like the chips we had occasionally. They even managed to make them horrid, let alone the ubiquitous cabbage. The only meat I remember was mutton.

Rare good points - the Manchester tart, and the 10 portion Cornish pasties

Milk puddings, cod in parsley sauce yuk!

I must have been lucky at both primary school and grammar school as school lunches were fine. My especial favourite was spam fritters, mashed potato and peas. Favourite pudding was rhubarb tart and custard.

I went home for lunch, but kept begging for school lunch ( more time to play!)
When at last my mother relented, I got cottage pie and grated carrot, followed by cornflakes and figs. I never asked again.

When I worked in a school, I loved the spaghetti pie, but ours was a puff pastry base topped with tinned spaghetti and grated cheese. I tried to make it once or twice, but it wasn't the same.

I hated school meals with a vengeance. They weren't cooked on the premises but brought into school on aluminium containers/trays.

The only thing I loved was chocolate cement. After I got married I tracked down the recipe from an old school cook and my children and now the grandchildren love it. Only trouble is I had to pack a lot of things away when DD and her family moved in with us. Can't wait until the extension is done so I can find my recipe files again.

I don't remember the dinners as much as the puddings. On the down side, rice pudding, tapioca and semolina. Just awful. The mere sight of them now is enough to make me gag. The ones I loved were gypsy tart, very common in Kent, jam role poly, chocolate sponge pudding and spotted dick.

I grew up in the same area as you Newquay though not in poverty or in the slums.
I had dinners for the last two years at junior school and like yours they were cooked on the premises and were excellent. The cost was 3/9, 9d a day for all that deliciousness.
Grammar school dinners were awful and such a shock after the previous experience. I took sandwiches in the end, the cost had gone up to 5/- by then and mum thought it was money wasted as I did nothing but complain.
I can still remember my friend picking out all the currents from the sponge cake and getting severely reprimanded for it. I must ask her if she can eat a current now or if she still picks them out.?

Since my schooldays I have not been able to eat rice, semolina, tapioca, custard, jam roly poly, milk the list goes on- each of which would make me sick now as we were forced to eat them.

I was also forced at home to eat what was served. My mother said that there were starving children in Africa and my retort was they could have my portions.

I seem to remember semolina, tapioca or rice pudding in a wide variety of colours.

Also suet in many , many forms.....meat, treacle ,sultanas, jam rolly polly, Apple.........the list goes on. Master chief? Indeed.

I did eventually take a packed lunch and don't think I have had suet since, except in Christmas pudding.

I didn't have school dinners until I went to grammar school in 1954. Before that most all of us in my primary class went home at lunch time as most mothers did not work .
We had lovely dinners at grammar school. We lived near watercress beds , so in summer had wonderful salads with fresh watercress. First time I had ever eaten it. Also a strange ,very hard shortbread , which we called concrete.
There was a prefect on each table and good manners were actively encouraged. I remember getting 100 lines for spitting out some very sour rhubarb.

Am I the only one who liked mashed potato and beetroot? It makes a very pretty pink on the plate.