PRIDEAUX’S HAT

Elisabeth Bletsoe, Curator, Sherborne Museum

This rather battered old Panama was once part of Lord Digby’s School uniform belonging to an extraordinary pupil named Rosetta Elizabeth (Betty) Prideaux (19132003). She lived on Marston Road during the 1920s and won a scholarship from Sherborne Preparatory to go to the ‘Big School’ in 1925, where she eventually became Head Girl.

The museum has a few typed pages from Betty describing this idyllic time which are especially evocative, with classmates and teachers vividly remembered. Lord Digby’s was then housed in a Palladian-style building ‘long since razed to the ground’ formerly known as St Swithins Laundry, and Betty describes how it stood ‘four-square in her memory’ and that she could ‘walk about it blindfold’. She wrote of her enormous debt to Littleton Powys, Chair of the Board of Governors, with his brilliant smile and his passion for literature and natural history which particularly inspired her.

Betty was overcome with joy when, after several years of negotiations, the school finalised its move to Sherborne House in 1931. The head teacher Miss Billinger allowed her alone into the beautiful grounds to gather flowers for an arrangement for the Governors: ‘it was like being given the key to The Secret Garden… I registered every tree and shrub’. She recalls how proud they all were of the hall and staircase with their famous murals, and how she so loved the kitchen in the oldest wing, where she learned to poach salmon and make mayonnaise. The ‘lasting influence of schooldays spent in this small historic town’ lingered throughout her long life.

Following the sudden sad death of her mother in February 1935, Betty took to an unusual existence at sea with her father, Captain William Prideaux, who was in the Merchant Service. After almost four years she had sailed 100,000 miles with him in the tramp steamer Jersey, having signed on as a stewardess. Her wages of a few shillings a month were donated to a seaman’s mission. In 1938, on arrival at Durban from New York with a cargo of coal from Colombo, she was interviewed by Natal Mercury; a report repeated She was described as ‘a girl who has made the sea her home…her whole life is wrapped up in the sea and its traditions. Miss Prideaux does not sleep and eat her time away. She has many interests, and after she has mended the pants and darned the socks for her father and attended to the hundred and one things that a good daughter or stewardess could do for the captain, she gets busy with her hobbies. Miss Prideaux keeps a photographic record of her travels, and at each point, she goes ashore and bargains with stamp collectors.’ sherbornemuseum.co.uk

‘I love the sea and ships, and the men who sail in them are really gentlemen when one gets to know them,’ Miss Prideaux told her interviewer. ‘The men I have met at sea are most self-respecting, and they display a spirit of fellowship that is not often met with ashore.’ This astonishing chapter of her life eventually came to a close when she married Wilfred Dunell, a GPO wireless operator, in Yeovil in the autumn of 1939. The couple moved to Kent and had two children, Eric and Pamela, and sometime during the 1970s relocated to a small village southwest of Cambridge. Wilfred died in 2002 and Betty followed him the year after. Both are commemorated, with Betty’s parents, in Sherborne Cemetery.

Sherborne Museum is open Tuesday to Saturday 10.30am–4.30pm. Admission is free, though donations are welcome.

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