Museum exhibition to showcase Eskdale School memories
An exhibition celebrating memories of 70 years of Eskdale School is to staged at Whitby Museum.
The display was originally at the school in summer 2024, just ahead of its closure, and attracted hundreds of former students, staff and the wider community, with a long queue stretching back from the main entrance of the school to the tennis courts.
Now Whitby Museum will host the exhibition until Sunday December 14.
The display of archive material runs from its opening through to the present era, with photos of form classes, sports pictures, press cuttings and much more.
Fittingly, this includes the successful battle to save Eskdale from a previous closure threat in 2016.
The decision to merge Whitby’s secondary schools, resulting in the permanent closure of Eskdale in 2024, caused huge controversy and sparked a campaign to save it from angry residents and parents.
Once the closure decision had been made, staff started to gather an archive to record the school’s long and and illustrious history, and with permission from the head of the newly-merged Whitby School, that archive was donated to the Whitby Literary and Philosophical Society.
The task of the museum’s archive team is now to sort, classify and preserve the archive, which includes thousands of photographs from every decade.
This exhibition is a call to every staff member, pupil and parent with memories of their school to come and tell the museum about those days.
Do you recognise anyone in the photographs? Do you have stories to tell? Memories to share? They want to know!
The museum is open from Tuesday to Sunday 10am to 4.30pm, last admission 4pm.