Memories of St Swithun’s
Parents’ Day at St Swithun’s, 1949 Kindly written by Beryl Cooke neé Rowland (Venta 1950) I started in the new ‘Transition’ department in the summer term of 1943. I was seven on May 2nd and, as I remember it, there were only 5 of us in the form. Miss Mack was our form mistress, newly employed I think, to teach very young children. Miss Hobson was very much around too; in fact may have taken us before Miss Mack came. We had a form room on ground floor of Chilcomb looking out onto the garden with a slope just made for rolling down! Susan Jennings was a classmate and Judy Watson joined too. Miss Mack was lovely and so was Mrs Wilson, who joined the staff in those wartime days, to help teach the ‘little ones’. She was one of only two mistresses who were titled ‘Mrs’ although she may have been widowed too. She was gentle too but then she didn’t have to try and teach maths to people like me! We were soon given a form room upstairs which seemed like the attic! Claire Hensley joined us after that and she became my best friend. Unfortunately, she was whisked off to board at Cheltenham Ladies’ College a while later and that was the end of that. The same thing happened to my best friend, Sarah Burrowes, whose father was Archdeacon of Winchester, and who lived in a lovely house in the Cathedral Close.
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OGA Chain 2021
When Sarah came to tea with us (at Christ Church Vicarage) she thought it odd to see my mother washing the kitchen floor herself ! I do remember once being invited to an evening party at Sarah’s, which was to celebrate her somewhat older brother, Simon’s birthday. Every day, we had to walk along the road, lined with sycamore trees, to the Senior House for lunch, then back again. It was fun when the wings fell and we would stick them on our noses! In the grounds of that house (near the top of St Giles’ Hill), there was a ‘building’ where we could play indoor games. Once we even rehearsed and put on A Midsummer Night’s Dream and I was Monsieur Mustard Seed! Sometimes we had our school dinner across the road in Palm Hall, which we was called ‘Waiting House’. The girls who boarded there were waiting to be placed in one of the established boarding houses: Earlsdown, Hillcroft, High House and Hyde. Le Roy was the junior boarding house and that was based in a house next door to Chilcomb. I was a day girl, as we lived in Winchester. In those early days, my parents had arranged for me to get to school each day in Miss Hobson’s old Austen 7 and she used to pick
