As the Crow Flies — Stop 4
Mr Pickles Visits St John's
Mr Pickles flew over Mossley looking at the queues of people outside the employment exchange. Work had been drying up in the town as the machinery in the mills started to grow old and out of date. Now the General Strike had made things even worse.
Illustration by children of Milton St John’s School
When Mr Pickles felt sad and needed to think, he went to rest on one of his favourite perches. It was a cross set in to a large boulder. The cross was a memorial to soldiers who had died in the war and because of that and because men also left Mossley to find work, there were less and less young men around.
Mr Pickles preferred to think about the boulder, which the Vicar of St John’s often talked about. It had been found by some St John’s school boys digging in the garden before the school had merged with Milton and the pupils had moved there. It was a glacial boulder from the Ice Age, before Mossley had even existed. The stone mason who had cut the hole for the cross said it was the hardest stone he had ever worked on.
Mr Pickles sat on the granite boulder and looked across the sloping roof and factory chimneys. He took comfort in the thought that despite all the changes the little valley of Mossley had seen with the coming of industry and the Great War, it was a fraction of time compared to the thousands of years it took to make the valley in the first place.
The school here opened in 1865 and was originally called Roughtown School.
it was badly damaged by fire in 1912 and eventually merged with Milton School in 1979. The best known teacher at St John’s School was Alfred Holt, the Head for many years before his death in 1932. His 1926 publication ‘The Story of Mossley’ remains an informative and popular read.