Audio File
Ida Carroll, Michael Baron
Northern School Of Music (NSM)
2020

Michael remembers the school's closure.

Michael: Yeah. It was sad because when it closed it—to me it closed for the wrong reasons. Yeah.
Heather: How do you think so?
M: Well… I don’t know if they couldn’t have taken us here… And you see… Ms Carroll wrote, and it’s in the book there, that the local education authorities were supposed to be taking this over. There was no such thing much certainly England as music lessons in local authority but they had had it in Scotland before we had because my wife had it. But you see we were piano students and if you are a piano student the local authority not interested in you, they want to make like… big orchestras. Because they do shop window. They are not interested in you and what you do, they are interested in what we do as a council so the music service, you know, becomes a sort of Cinderella puppet of what all the good things are of who the local authority is, you know. So we didn’t get catered for. But I didn’t give up. And it was done thoughtlessly, you know. Either Ida Carroll knew most people wouldn’t get catered for and just turned a blind eye to it all, maybe she turned a blind eye or she had to turn a blind eye to it or— Ms Cox or whoever, they knew this was going to come to an end, and that was the fundamental thing that went right back to the beginning of the school and it was abandoned. And when I was teaching, I was shocked and cross to find out that children were coming to the college that I was teaching and I said, ‘Well where did you learn this?’, ‘Well I go to Royal Northern on a Saturday morning’. Within a period of time it’d opened again and I thought, ‘That’s—that’s a tacit acceptance that that was mistake’, you see.
I was a bit… I was a bit yeah and you know, turned out some interesting people but I don’t— I think the continuity was broken and that… So yeah, it was a shame. It did it because it was expedient to do it or whatever the reason was, it wasn’t necessarily the right reason. That’s what I mean by that

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