Audio File
Ida Carroll
Northern School Of Music (NSM)
2019

Dorothy Ardern describes the atmosphere of the Northern School of Music from her student days in the 1940s & 1950s.

Dorothy: I think we were like a family really. It’s not like when you go to university when there’s hundreds of students. We all sort of knew one another vaguely, or in some cases better, but we were a small community and I think it was the fact that we were small that kept it very much a family set-up and everybody was… there was never any trouble. I can’t recall anything unpleasant happening at all… and we had a little canteen in the basement, and there was a lady ran that, and you could just get drinks and snacks there, that’s all. But it was all very simple, I think. There was nothing complicated and notices were put up by the chap that helped Ida Carroll, and he was in the office and you’d see him putting little notices up of what was going on. I think it was kept… because it was small… that it was trouble-free. There wasn’t anybody on the fringes, we all sort of stuck together

Part of the #NSM2020 project "A 20/20 Legacy: the centenary of the Northern School of Music" supported by the National Lottery Heritage Fund.