A postcard of Meadhurst from 1900
125 Years of Meadhurst T
his year should have seen a celebration for Meadhurst OUs at an event marking the long history of the House, which was planned to take place in June – another casualty of 2020. Instead we celebrate the 125th anniversary by sharing some stories through the decades, which we hope will bring back memories from your time at the School.
48 Feature
MEADHURST IN THE 1940s By Basil Frost (M 45) I arrived by train into Uppingham Station as a new boy in September 1945 feeling very apprehensive. My Housemaster was Tony Gilkes, an artistic classicist, and very good fives player. He left after my first year, going on to be High Master at St Paul’s and was followed by Denis Oswald, a gentle, kindly man, England hockey trialist and very good cricketer. He was in the Intelligence Corps during the War which disappointed boys in the House. We wanted someone a bit more ‘sharp end’ like Michael Pitt, a House Tutor
who had been in the Parachute Regiment. Only in 2017 was Denis’s wartime secret revealed that he had been at Bletchley Park as one of Alan Turing’s top codebreakers! Mrs Oswald, Dorothy, was an important person in our lives. In those days, the Housemaster’s wife was responsible entirely for the domestic running of the house, including feeding us – not easy as wartime rationing was still functioning. She was a cheerful soul and fed us all extremely well. We slept in dormitories divided into ‘tishes’ (partitions). 1947 had one of the severest winters ever recorded, snow was on the ground for about 12 weeks and so deep in places that even telephone wires in a dip on the Oakham Road were completely
