Our History in your Words EX HUMILIBUS 2020/21
I realise how fortunate I was from the beginning of my school days. Going to school was a big step – education was expanding at that time, especially for women and the GPDST offered girls an education equal to their brothers. I walked in a Women’s Suffrage procession through London – I remember how more than one man raised his hat as the banner passed along the Embankment. The tune of ‘March of the Women’ is with me yet.
The school fire was really rather an exciting event. How long would it take to rebuild? What would happen to us in the meantime?
9th November never passes without my casting a thought towards Wimbledon. Bumper celebrations accompanied the 75th birthday in 1955 including a service at Southwark Cathedral, we trooped there in a special train.
OU R H I STORY I N YOU R WOR DS Excerpts from WHS School Magazines
The revolutionary spirit of 1968’s Parisian students was a far cry from WHS and many of the major changes were destined for the years after we had left. Changes there were all the same and the 1960s seemed characterised by a growing informality in school life… we had never been unaware of the vagaries of fashion, ruining many a pleated skirt by rolling it over half a dozen times in an effort to take the mini skirt into school life. When I look back at my school days during the war, it is like looking through an old faulty telescope at the end of a seaside pier: tiny incidents suddenly leap into focus and then just as suddenly slip out of focus. So appear my memories of the wartime school days – tiny, vivid moments appearing in great clarity and as suddenly fading.
Then there was the fire watching – a strange but rather delicious activity since it entailed treading in all the previously forbidden places in the school. We did our homework in the formerly unknown land of the staff room – and then down to the kitchens, another unknown territory where we ate dinner amongst giant sized cookers and draining boards.
But the war years from 1914-18 were a different story. We and the staff set up to make “respirators” for the troops in France. Where they went and if they were any use at all, we never heard but nothing could have given us greater sense of making our own small contribution to the appalling struggle at the front.
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