Who Remembers Miss Overy?
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An email received a few days ago from a genealogy site I subscribe to suggested that I should:
Discover if your gran was a 1920s trailblazer with a new directory of teachers.
As it happens, she was, but, by 1927, she had left teaching to look after my mother and my aunt. My mother, born in 1920, was already in the ‘Pre’ at CCHS. My aunt followed in her footsteps 7 years later, so 1927. I knew both were taught by Miss Overy in their early years at school so, killing time whilst waiting for a phone call that I knew would be challenging, I decided to keep calm by checking the directory to see whether she was mentioned.
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And there she was: Mildred Mary Overy (right)
The Maria Grey Training College opened in 1878 and was the first teacher training college for women in Great Britain. It closed in 1976. But what of her qualifications? Challenging phone call forgotten (I never did get it!) I puzzled briefly over NFU Hr. Cert. Miss Overy taught me Biology but a National Farmers’ Union qualification? Hmm, somewhat unlikely. Light dawned as my mind drifted back to my own teacher training. National Froebel Union! According to Chat GPT, a ‘Board of Education Teacher's Certificate (Elementary) awarded in 1927 was a, if not the, primary qualification for teachers in public elementary schools in England and Wales during that era.’ I backtracked a little and had a look at the 1921 Census, taken in June. I found her recorded as living with her parents and five siblings at Abbots Langley. She was
born there in 1901. She is listed as a full time student at a ‘Kindergarten College’.
Miss Overy moved to Colchester within weeks of that Census, to take up her post of Assistant Teacher at Greyfriars, concentrating on the young children in the Pre. I don’t know where she lived in those early days but, by the 1939 Census, she was living in her flat at 1b, The Avenue, where she remained until a move to Dedham shortly before her death in 1976.
Initially employed, I believe, to teach in the ‘Pre’, which took both fee paying girls and boys from age 6 to 11, she stayed at the school following the abandonment of fees and its conversion to a fully selective High School in the late 1940s.
I remember Miss Overy as my Biology teacher but she taught Liz White, OGA Chair, English. Liz remembers her immortal words, "All right is not all right, unless 'all right' is two words!" Teaching two verydifferent subjects to girls who had all passed their 11+ was not bad for a Kindergarten teacher, was it?
I have many memories of Miss Overy, whom I both liked and
respected. The one that I think really stands out is of her cycling slowly and rather sedately to and from Norman Way to her flat in the Avenue. The bike was ancient and of the black, ‘sit up and beg’variety. It had a huge wicker basket on the handlebars. The basket was ALWAYS full of bundles of exercise books. Nothing distracted her. She was in a world of her own on those journeys!
Incidentally, I noticed something whilst checking both the 1911 and the 1921 Census. Miss Overy’s father worked for the Board of Guardians, who administered workhouses. I
wonder whether that is where her passion for fundraising for Dr Barnardo’s originated? If you remember Miss Overy, you may well remember these (above right)!
We were all very much encouraged to take one home to fill with loose change, returning it at the end of each term to be emptied and reissued in time for the next. Strangely nostalgic!