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

Michael remembers Ms Carroll's mysterious room.

So then you left that area—Oh, then the other thing that was in this corner, there was a connecting room to a recital room - connecting door. And that was the room behind 12, 13, and 14. In fact, I’ll show you on this diagram. The room behind 12, 13, and 14, was… Um… There. There’s the chairs, cupboard and Mr Haskein and things. This door opened outwards and this was the recital room with two pianos. Now in this corner here was a room which had a red or a grey door and it was permanently locked. We didn’t know what was in it and one day about 1970 I remember somebody saying, ‘Well have you seen in there, do you know what’s in there?’ And I said, ‘No, I don’t. I’ve never seen anyone go in, nobody come out’, and this was a store behind it because the door was in the recital room. So, anyway, one day we were sitting there waiting for our lesson and Ms Carroll turned up and she had a key and she opened this door and it was her private lavatory.
*Laughs* So when she sort of, you know, she sort of presumably went and as she went away we were talking, we said, ‘That’s a toilet in there’. You know. And one day it was left open and a friend of mine who was a student— or a pupil there at the same time called Jimmy Moorhouse who played brass said, ‘Hey, have you seen what’s behind this door?’ So I said, ‘What is it?’ And we had a look and it was this really… what would you call it… sort of delft blue patterned antique lavatory. You know, which was really slightly ever so posh. And that was hers, she had 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.