Lockers
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#1: Lockers Author: Laura, Location: London (ish) PostPosted: Wed Jun 08, 2005 11:53 pm

Pim's drabble inspired this, by the way - why are lockers called lockers if they don't lock?

Did they lock, and were they simply not given the keys for fear they would lose them?
Does the name originate from something far more obscure?
Does the name simply relate to the idea of a compartment of a large shelving unit thing with a closing door - but in which case why is it not a compartment?

Sorry, this is all rather random, but it's been annoying me for a while in EBD... and it's all a bit incoherant because I've been up since five this morning learning history!

 

#2:  Author: Róisín, Location: Dublin PostPosted: Thu Jun 09, 2005 12:04 am

I would have thought they locked. Is there a reference to them not locking in the books?

 

#3:  Author: Ally, Location: Jack Maynard's Dressing Room!! PostPosted: Thu Jun 09, 2005 8:11 am

I was thinking that perhaps the girls were honour bound not to investigate other lockers, but obviously not given the occasions when they did. Perhaps they just werent given a key for fear of losing it.

This piccy is from And Jo and it does seem like there are locks! Confused

 

#4:  Author: Laura, Location: London (ish) PostPosted: Thu Jun 09, 2005 8:41 am

Róisín wrote:
I would have thought they locked. Is there a reference to them not locking in the books?


Didn't whoever it was take something out of someone's (how specific!) locker in Trials? Is it even trials?! - the one where they shove everything in lost property!

And I don't think there's ever a mention of people actively unlocking lockers. They just shove things in!

 

#5:  Author: Alison H, Location: Manchester PostPosted: Thu Jun 09, 2005 8:54 am

At our school we had to padlock our lockers and provide the padlocks ourselves ... the school kept a pair of cutter/plier things because at least once a day someone would lose their key and have to have their padlock cut open. Maybe girls at the Chalet School were considered more trustworthy than we were!

 

#6:  Author: LadyGuinevere, Location: Leicester PostPosted: Thu Jun 09, 2005 10:55 am

I think of them as kind of wooden things, that didn't have a lot per se, but had a kind of swing round bar that would keep them closed.

Certainly the thief in Highland Twins didn't have much trouble rummaging through!

Ours at school were locked, key provided (school had master), but you had to pay a deposit which you didn't get back if you lost it. We very rarely used them.

 

#7:  Author: Alice, Location: London, England PostPosted: Thu Jun 09, 2005 11:01 am

We had lockers that you could pay for a key for a term if you wanted one and you had to share them with another person. I didn't use mine very much because the girl I was sharing mine with was a thief!

 

#8:  Author: JackieJ, Location: Kingston upon Hull PostPosted: Thu Jun 09, 2005 12:56 pm

Now you come to think of it, it doesn't make much sense, after all

Buffy wrote:
Lockers! First syllable 'lock'!
Very Happy

Didn't they have locker-desks once they went into a certain form though - or is that my memory playing tricks again?

JackieJ

 

#9:  Author: LizB, Location: Oxon, England PostPosted: Thu Jun 09, 2005 1:24 pm

They did, but I can't remember at what stage in school's life that was.

Liz

 

#10:  Author: MissPrint, Location: Edinburgh PostPosted: Thu Jun 09, 2005 1:34 pm

Are locker desks just another way of describing the sort of desk with a lift up lid and a compartment underneath for books? If so, I don't remember them ever actually locking. We used them for our books in the junior and middle school, and we had metal lockers that actually locked in the seniors. I hated those desks, especially the ones with the extra deep bit at the back, I have really long thighs (don't snigger) and I was always banging my knees on them.

 

#11:  Author: LizB, Location: Oxon, England PostPosted: Thu Jun 09, 2005 1:36 pm

I thought they were desks with a small cupboard underneath at one side - we had some like that at school - rather than the lift-up-lid type.

Liz

 

#12:  Author: Kate, Location: Ireland PostPosted: Thu Jun 09, 2005 1:56 pm

I always call my bedside table a locker... it doesn't lock. It doesn't even have a door. Laughing

 

#13:  Author: Joyful, Location: Manchester PostPosted: Thu Jun 09, 2005 3:23 pm

one year we were in a form room with tables (not the lift up desks that most of the school was supplied with) and they gave us these small wooden square cupboard things along one wall which were called lockers. but didn't lock! although seeing as they were doing the job that desks would have done there wasn't really a reason for them to.
these were not to be confused with our actual lockers (downstairs in the cloakroom) which did lock and were metal!

 

#14:  Author: Dawn, Location: Leeds, West Yorks PostPosted: Thu Jun 09, 2005 3:31 pm

In the older part of my school there were a coupleof class rooms with wooden cupboards against one wall. The bottom row were just big enough to hide in when you were trying to avoid the nasty duty prefect who was trying to send you out on a very cold wet lunchtime. The ones above were much smaller. They were always referred to as lockers, although they just had doors that pushed to (or pulled to when you were inside Very Happy ). I thinnk they dated from around the 1930's

 

#15:  Author: claire, Location: South Wales PostPosted: Thu Jun 09, 2005 7:27 pm

They definately had lift up lids as in New Mistress the girls ask if they can pin their timetables to the inside of the lids

 

#16:  Author: Bess, Location: Cambridge UK PostPosted: Fri Jun 10, 2005 12:42 am

Could they've been combination locks of some kind? I hardly think they'd be using swipe cards yet! Confused

At school, if you lost your key, the Receptionists had a Master key for all lockers, but if you used a key from a locker number near you and a bit of judicious wiggling, they'd open. Confused And it saved a trip down miles of corridors to the reception.

But - like Kate - we also had doorless 'lockers' - wooden pigeon holes/cabinets, where you could dump your stuff At Your Own Risk, but they were a free for all and you couldn't leave your things all day/night.

 

#17:  Author: MissPrint, Location: Edinburgh PostPosted: Fri Jun 10, 2005 1:20 am

We had the doorless sort in Infants, but we didn't call them lockers, we called them cubby holes, and we had to put our satchels in them, two per cubby. I shared mine with Avril, which didn't suit me at all, as she was a messy child whose satchel was in a state of permanent stickiness, and frequently exuded squashed snacks. I think that was when I really went off oranges. Leather satchel impregnated with ancient orange pulp is not a pleasant odour. In Seniors, she had the locker above mine, and vile things continued to seep. Not as bad as anyone who had a locker adjacent to Louise, as her locker was most pongy, on account of her never taking her hockey kit home for a wash all season. We kept the same lockers all through Seniors, there was no escape! And Mandy's locker, two along from mine was always minty fresh as she had an absolute fetish about brushing her teeth, but not about rinsing her brush - uuuurp!

 

#18:  Author: Charlotte, Location: home yey! PostPosted: Fri Jun 10, 2005 8:43 am

we've got lockers... bug metal things for sticking your books in... I think they all used to lock... but now most of them don't even stay closed! the new ones that the sixthform are meant to use are slightly better, they do lock and you're given a key -you just have to pay a fiver if you loose it, but they don't open unless you hit them cuz when they made them they didn't seem to think we'd be using them.
At my old school we had desks with big spaces under the lid, and we pinned our timetables to the lid, but if you put too much in them the bottom fell out spilling all you're books onto the floor, and the guy who taught in our form room would then confiscate all of it... and you would get a black blob for it (a black blob was a little black dot that went on a funny charty thing and if you got 4-I think you had ten house points taken off. we all thought it was unfair so invested in tippex)

 

#19:  Author: Rosie, Location: Huntingdonshire/Bangor PostPosted: Fri Jun 10, 2005 1:15 pm

We had to have lockers in years 7-9 as we weren't allowed 'big bags'. The idea was to bring said Big Bag in the morning, stow it in your locker and carry a book bag. Naturally, only Y7 actually used those, the rest of us just managed as well as we could. Now they all use those drawstring bags. My locker (they did lock - they had to!) was at the bottom of the stack for my tutor group and it got kicked in by anyone waiting for a lesson... Oh, and I always got trodden on in the mad scrum at the end of the day. We used to have lockers in our classroom but that was possibly worse as my group tutor was appalling at getting there at the end of the day to let us in so it was a mad rush to get to the bus on time.

The school for yrs 10-13 had lockers, but I think only the mad-keen sports people ever used them, it certainly wasn't compulsory. My only real memory of them is when I crawled across them all on my trek around the common room without touching the floor!

 

#20:  Author: Mia, Location: London PostPosted: Fri Jun 10, 2005 2:28 pm

Quote:
My only real memory of them is when I crawled across them all on my trek around the common room without touching the floor!


How very CS of you! Wink

 

#21:  Author: Elisabeth,  PostPosted: Fri Jun 10, 2005 5:38 pm

I don't think the CS lockers could possibly have locks because there were several instances of people borrowing/stealing people's belongings, the time when some of the kids put everything in lost property and also the time when someone takes things out of people's lockers and puts them in other people's.

I always thought that they probably were quite different from lockers as we think of them - especially as sometimes the girls sit on them.

 

#22:  Author: KB, Location: Melbourne, Australia PostPosted: Fri Jun 10, 2005 10:55 pm

Elisabeth wrote:
I always thought that they probably were quite different from lockers as we think of them - especially as sometimes the girls sit on them.


I think the lockers the girls sit on are different from the ones in the formrooms. If we use the picture Ally linked to (and it could be expected that it should be about this big, as it had to hold books in all subjects as well as extras like paintboxes, workbaskets, etc.) as the norm for book lockers, I think those in the splasheries would have been smaller, more the size of large shoeboxes. It seems to be there to hold outdoor shoes and perhaps washing things, so it wouldn't need to be that large. I suspect rows of these ran to about waist height in the splasheries so that girls could sit on them if they had a spare moment.

 

#23:  Author: Chair, Location: Kent, England PostPosted: Sat Jul 16, 2005 10:49 pm

Thieves sometimes went into other people's lockers but they were always caught in the end at the CS. When I went to school - I only left 6 years ago! - if there was a thief, they weren't always caught.

Last edited by Chair on Wed Jul 20, 2005 2:19 pm; edited 1 time in total

 

#24:  Author: Emma A, Location: The Soke of Peterborough PostPosted: Wed Jul 20, 2005 1:23 pm

In my secondary school, there were a few classrooms which didn't have desks (music rooms, labs, domestic science rooms) with storage space beneath the lids, so you had to put your textbooks and exercise books and files in a locker, which was basically a small wooden cupboard with no lock, that was actually situated outside the classroom that was your form room. This made it easier if you had forgotten a book for another lesson, in that you could dash up to your locker to collect the book without disturbing the class who were having a lesson in your form room (though not very Chalet School to leave a lesson to get a book that you should have had).

PE lockers were made out of wire mesh and didn't have doors, where you kept your lacrosse boots and PE kit (clearly embroidered with your name!). Lacrosse nets and coats were kept on your peg in the cloakroom.

I may add that this was not a private school and it was between 1984-1989. I don't remember ever losing anything from my lockers or coat pegs during my five years there.

 

#25:  Author: tiffinata, Location: melbourne, australia PostPosted: Thu Jul 21, 2005 1:45 am

In primary our lockers were small trays, on rollers to make moving them easier.

Secondary school we had lockable metal cupboards about the size of a computer monitor. If you lost the key the lock got changed. Generally we didn't keep much in them anyway.

After I changed schools at the end of year 10/form 4 I went to a school that didn't have lockers- too many theives around

 

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