NEWS FROM OLD GIRLS
Joan Gurney (Appleton 1938-51)
Joan had prepared her following article in July, when her husband sadly died suddenly, so when referring to Gerald, it is written in the present tense, which Joan wanted to change but we agreed that the article would remain as it was. We pass our thoughts to Joan at this sad time.
WHAT JOAN DID NEXT - Part 2
In 1956, five years after I had left school, I met my husband, Gerald. I was in my first teaching post at Ipswich and he was completing a postgraduate Diploma in Education at Cambridge, having had his student days delayed by a year because of the necessary National Service which was mandatory at that time.
Our paths must have crossed many times earlier during our childhood days spent in neighbouring villages. These places might have included the former site of the Tendring Show where I rode my pony each year, and which was immediately behind the original Great Bromley rectory, Gerald’s childhood home. Not far away was the old blacksmith’s shop where my pony was regularly ‘hot shod’. Later, I know that I must have watched him playing tennis for his school team (CRGS) against CCHS and even later I was part of an innovative scheme between the two schools whereby a small group of girls from CCHS, who needed chemistry for their future studies, took part in an exchange with a few boys from CRGS who needed biology for the same reason. At the same time neither school had the laboratory facilities of the necessary level.
Once or twice a week, therefore, I was part of CRGS well before girls were officially taken into the sixth form there some decades later and I might have passed Gerald in the corridors! He did not register on my consciousness however until, as a schoolgirl spectator, I saw him in the annual CRGS all-boys production of ‘Richard of Bordeaux’ in 1949. I liked what I saw!
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Several years later my father’s car, which I was driving, broke down and a very helpful young man, who I thought I must have seen somewhere before, stopped to help me and, with a piece of string, tied up something under the bonnet. It worked and the rest, as they say, is history! I have had many used cars ever since (but
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(but never a new one) so he always jokes that he has been tying up my cars with string ever since!
We were married in 1960. I never imagined that I would marry one of the ‘Purple Blazer Brigade’. I defied tradition and wore a short wedding dress and veil, the skirt of which was held out and enhanced by a very fashionable ‘can-can’ underslip (left). We went to Norway for our honeymoon which included a completely unplanned trip on the small coastal delivery boat which called at every port and fjord as it travelled northward. This was well before it became a popular tourist attraction.
We bought a house on our return and started our new jobs - mine at the Gilberd Technical School on North Hill and Gerald’s at Colchester Royal Grammar School - teaching respectively biology with swimming and English with tennis. We were both delighted to be returning as teachers to the buildings where we were educated. It seems strange today, when so many people commute to and from London to work, that we even considered whether we might be too far from Colchester - at 7 miles - to travel easily each day. But then we were out in the country with an ancient Morris 8 Tourer which sometimes had to be pushed up a steep hill! We survived the prolonged winter of 1963 by walking across the fields to catch a local bus when we were completely snowbound.
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Our sporting and art interests were not exactly mutual. Gerald can only swim a few strokes and I am not very accurate with a ball, so we took up two new interests - punting (right) and brass rubbing. Our usual punting route was from Stratford St Mary upstream to Higham where the bed of the river is hard and acts as an anchor for the punt-pole. The soft muddy river bed downstream
from Dedham to Flatford sucks the pole and punter to a wet disaster! Gerald did the skilled pole work whilst I relaxed in the bottom of the punt!
We travelled all over Essex and Suffolk to rub brasses (left). Here I did the artistic rubbing whilst Gerald did the mundane preparatory work of dusting, brushing and aligning! We arrived at one church with previous permission to rub, only to find that in earlier years the brass had been plundered. I had the audacity to write to Nikolaus Pevsner, the renowned record of English architectural gems, in whose informative and famous books ‘The Buildings of England’ I had found the reference, to politely tell him that there was no brass in that church. I had a delightful letter signed by him which I still treasure.
With help from my parents, we prepared our newly acquired house for occupation. Built in 1950, it needed a lot of redecoration and the grounds required attention. A table, two chairs and a bed were a starting point, quickly followed by a pair of curtains. I took with me my very modern record player which I had bought with my first pay cheque. It replaced the ancient, but much loved, wind-up gramophone (right) which could only play 78rpm records and most of these still bore the crackle and buzz caused by constant childhood playing of classical music with a worn steel needle. It always reminded me of those early days at CCHS when singing lessons included such songs as ‘The Raggle Taggle Gypsies’ - which today would be considered not very politically correct - to an accompaniment on a very tinny piano. In contrast ‘God be in my head’, the school hymn, was sung at the final ‘breaking up’ ceremony of each term with much more gusto and excited anticipation of the holiday ahead.
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We had fun searching antiques and second hand shops for furniture which fulfilled our tastes for early pieces. We sometimes liked, but rejected, post-war designs and G-plan models which were appearing at that time. The pieces we chose, however, mixed unbelievably well with
the vivid colours and abstract patterns of the 1960s curtain materials which I have continued to search for in boot fairs ever since.
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The whole preparatory process brought back memories of my childhood on the farm in Dedham. Duvets had not come into being and cosy feather beds were underneath you as you slept between starched white cotton sheets. I remember a group of my teenage friends at CCHS going on a week-long French exchange trip in the late 1940s and returning with stories of sleeping with a feather bed on top of them, and this, they said, was called a ‘continental quilt’!
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More memories came flooding back when the decorating work reached the bathroom. My bath time on the farm as a child was taken in a small tin bath in front of an open fire, where the hot water was ladled from an ancient wood-fired copper and afterwards the soap suds were emptied in the garden. And as for the toilet .... I will pass over this briefly! A draughty, battered weatherboard privy stood at the bottom of the farm garden and a chamber pot was under the bed at night!
Shortly after we moved in I wanted some sturdy but bold patterned crockery for kitchen and everyday use. I settled on Cornishware (left) - the simple blue and white banded items which had first been produced in the late 1920s by TG Green in the Derbyshire Potteries. It reminded me of my rural roots. I bought the more usual pieces - plates, bowls, dishes, cups and saucers which were still being produced - and then discovered that there was a mountain of older pieces out there in secondhand shops and at antiques fairs. I was smitten! What had started as a utilitarian necessity became an unintentional collection - storage jars with unusual and misspelt names, teapots, colanders (and even a clock) filled my kitchen shelves.
Several of my items appeared in the book on Cornishware by Paul Atterbury, which was published in 1998.
My main collection of Bathing Bygones started slightly earlier and more deliberately. The changing fashions of bath attire had always intrigued me. My father’s bathing costume which he had bought when he lived in Australia in 1908 sparked my interest. It was a two-piece made of heavy dark grey flannel. The vest section had long sleeves and extended to the top of the thighs. The pants, similarly, had
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legs which reached to the knee. My father insisted on wearing this costume right through to the end of his life in the late 1960s. It was viewed with hilarity by my CCHS teenage school friends and those of my university days who, by this time, were clad in the most miniscule bikinis! This fashion had shocked the world in 1946 when it was ‘invented’ in Paris by Louis Réard because it dared to expose the navel! As my working life evolved and the more swimming teaching I did, the greater my interest in bathing fashions grew until I was writing articles, giving talks and exhibitions and lending items to museums, including the Krefeld Textilmuseum in Germany and the Fashion and Textile Museum in London. Today I have approximately 500 costumes (men’s, women’s and children’s) dating back to the 1890s (right) as well as posters, silver, jewellery, postcards and other ephemera and accessories.
Gerald’s collection of racket sports arose in a similar way, after his youthful participation in many of them, and with an equally wide variety of objects assembled. It outshines my collection in every respect, and he has travelled to many parts of the world to give exhibitions. We both look back to our childhood and
schooldays and remember the changes in equipment and clothing used in these sports. Wool, cotton, linen and silk gave way to man-made fibres for bath costumes and wood, gut and leather for rackets were replaced by fibreglass, plastic and nylon.
Special designs in rackets also appeared. I particularly remember one fifth former at North Hill having an unusual tripe-shaft racket (ie - a Streamline Green Star Racket - left) designed by Bunny Austin, a Wimbledon singles winner in the 1930s, which was supposed to be more aerodynamic and therefore gave you an advantage over your opponent. How envious we were that time! Today, any racket of this design is a valuable collector’s item! Changes in clothing for sport were also influenced by Wimbledon. What shock would have ensued in my CCHS school days if any of us had dared to show even half an inch of frilly knickers under our length tennis skirts!
Back at our new home I soon set about the garden which was an interesting wilderness. Two orchards and a small meadow were set between several neglected lawns. My busy farming parents had had little time to be devoted gardeners, but were wildlife enthusiasts and had passed this interest on to me. I also remember my biology lessons at North Hill in the rather dreary basement laboratory (which always smelled of formaldehyde) and the emphasis placed on photosynthesis for plant life. So when I heard about a local nursery which forced daffodils under glass (so that the cut flowers were ready for sale in January) and then cut off the leaves and threw out the bulbs, I asked them to throw a few lorry loads in my direction! We had bulb-planting parties for 2 years knowing
that we would not see them flowering for another 2 or 3 years because their ability to photosynthesize had been cut short by removing the leaves. But a sea of gold eventually emerged under the fruit trees and grew bigger every year (above right).
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The small meadow already had the beginnings of a wildflower haven and with some additional seed scattering and plug planting it continued to produce a rich carpet of colour in most seasons. But what about the grass? An aged pony came with me to graze the meadow and with the help of a little haymaking it is always under control. What images from the past are conjured up when the tractor arrives to start the cutting in late summer after the wild flowers have gone to seed. But that is another story!
A flock of geese were set free daily on the orchard to feed on the grass and ignore the daffodils when in flower. And what good grazers and vocal watchdogs they became! It is not difficult to imagine that in Classical Civilisation they were given the task of guarding the gates of Rome - a fact subconsciously absorbed from my CCHS Latin lessons!
Our son was born in 1966. One fashion feature from that era is implanted on my mind. Stockings and suspenders were gradually being superseded by nylon tights. Not only were these much more accommodating for long legs but wrapped themselves more comfortable around a pregnancy bulge which, at that time, was modestly concealed (not displayed) by a loose fitting tunic. Long gone were the days of CCHS and thick fawn or black stockings held up by suspenders and even further in the past were these suspenders attached by buttons to a liberty bodice!
Now the 1970s were fast approaching. Hemlines were getting higher and hair was getting longer. As I record the events of 15 years since I left CCHS and became, in turn, a student, teacher, wife, householder and mother, I can recall the many changes and developments which have taken place during that time and acknowledge that yet many more were still to come.
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