News from Old Girls

Once again Joan Gurney (Appleton) 1938-51 has sent a fascinating article.

It is almost seven decades since I left CCHS in 1951 after three years in the Sixth Form. School Certificate and Higher School Certificate were behind me, ‘A’ levels had just been introduced, and gap years were virtually unknown. I said goodbye to Grey Friars and North Hill, where the two departments of the school were based - two buildings which I loved and have written about extensively since then. I now feel that it is time to move on and record what happened later in my life; and so, with a few backward glances to the past, here is “What Joan did next!”

I was not very good at creative writing and imaginative composition during my schooldays but the paintbox was always my friend, and art was secretly my favourite subject with meadow flowers and wildlife being my chosen subjects, even from the age of six (left). Water colours gave way to pastels, charcoal, oil paint, collage, brass rubbing and finally photography. My creations were never prolific but art has remained with me ever since those early days.

I had already decided that I would make teaching my career. I will not disclose which member of staff, when advising me on my future, said “If a girl is thinking about going into teaching she must study science; there is no future in art!” And so I succumbed, but I have never had any regrets; a university combined subject course in botany, zoology, geology and geography suited me very well. My mother had bought me a ‘New Look’ coat in the style created by Dior in the late 1940s (right - Victoria and Albert Museum).

I wore this for my interview to Reading University.

In the autumn of 1951 the effects of World War II were still evident. There was partial food rationing and clothing was in short supply. I still treasured a pair of pyjamas made for me - rather liberally - out of parachute silk abandoned locally after a plane crew had ejected. My parents farmed in Dedham and so we were relatively well-fed during the war years with meat, poultry, rabbit, milk, eggs, butter, vegetables, fruit and honey; there was even wool for blankets and feathers for pillows. In later years I felt extremely guilty when other people suffered so many shortages but managed to survive by ‘Digging for Victory’ and ‘Making Do and Mend’. Nothing was wasted, however, and meagre scraps went into the ‘swill bucket’ which most households kept for feeding to the pigs in their back gardens.

We had no fridge - food was kept cool by lowering it down the well in a bucket. Clothes were washed in the kitchen sink and then put through the mangle. An open fire and a kitchen range heated the downstairs room and in winter there was often ice on the inside of the bedroom windows where there was no heating. I only remember a short period before electricity was connected and candles were abandoned. There was, of course, no television, but we often huddled around an art-deco style wireless for our entertainment.

My parents did not have a car (petrol had also been rationed) and travelling locally was on foot, bicycle, horseback, pony and trap or a walk to the nearest infrequent bus service. The school bus was a legend and deep snow never gave me a holiday from school! Steam trains, however, were the love of my life. I regularly tried to outrace them on my pony along a mile-long stretch of meadow which my parents owned, and ending at the Dedham signal box (left), long since demolished after the Beeching reorganisation of rail

networks in the 1960s.

In the 1950s a journey by steam train from Manningtree station to Reading was a lengthy process and quite an adventure. I packed my trunk which would go in advance, picked up by carrier from the farm gate by putting a flag in the front hedge to alert the driver to stop. It was then taken to the nearest railway station to start its journey by train. I had not been away from home for more than a week ever before. Farming families never took holidays. I found myself allocated to a room in one of the all-girls Halls of Residence, overseen by a very fierce Warden who had strict rules about who you could entertain in your room and when! I did not feel at all liberated after my free-and-easy life on the farm but my studies acted as a consolation, although I missed my pony, Bronch, so much. He had been very successful in gymkhana events and together we had won many prizes.

There were elements of my time at Reading - both academic and social - that I remember with gratitude, affection and surprise, and the friends which I made and kept in contact with for many years. The scientific nature of my studies involved a lot of laboratory and practical work, dissections, field trips and research. No internet in those days for quick references! Vacation visits to far-flung places of the British Isles, such as the Isle of Arran, were all part of the exploration process.

One highlight of my studies was the collection of 100 pressed wild flowers which I had to assemble as part of a botany project. Each specimen had to be correctly identified and mounted to show the leaves, stem, flower and, where possible, the root and seed, together with a record of its habitat and date of collection (right). At that time the countryside was rich in wild flowers, hedges were not slashed with mechanical blades, or pulled out and flattened, nor were roadside verges frequently trimmed. Collecting complete botanic specimens was not considered a crime and with hindsight perhaps there should have been more concern for the preservation of the environment, although I tended to avoid uprooting the rarer varieties, such as early purple orchids, which grew in abundance in one of the farm meadows. The collection took me a year to complete and the pressing procedures occupied a whole room in the Dedham farmhouse!

Grants for higher education, unlike today’s loans which often inevitably result in postgraduate debts, were more readily available and tuition fees did not exist. I was awarded a Teaching Bursary but working for some part of the long vacations was still essential. I did fruit picking, potato lifting, vegetable gathering and other rural pursuits. This did leave time for additional studying as well as cycling and youth hostelling with friends, sometimes abroad.

Out the outset of our journeys we watched in trepidation the vehicles being swung by crane and dropped on to the deck. There was no roll-on, roll-off car ferry at Parkeston Quay in those days. We cycled across the enclosing dam of the Zuider Zee and eventually reached Denmark. During one vacation we acted as ‘guinea pigs’ at the Research Unit for the Common Cold. Neither of us caught a cold but each of us had an uninterrupted week of isolated study.

I followed my time at Reading by entering a teacher training college in the north of England to gain my Certificate in Education - yet another full day’s journey by steam train each term. Here I added an additional dimension to my biological qualification by taking an extra certificate in Physical Education, which included the teaching of swimming. How could I possibly have foreseen the importance that this chance decision, almost taken on a whim, would have on my future life?

The swimming training was arduous - everything you were going to teach you had to be able to do yourself, and most of it took place in a pool in Newcastle. I had never been in an indoor pool before and the smell, heat and acoustics were such a contrast to the River Stour at Dedham and Flatford where I had learned to swim as a child. My school friend, the late Ruth Wheeler, lived in Flatford and we used to walk, or cycle along the river bank, meeting part-way between Dedham and Flatford to have a swim amongst the waterlillies, mallards and minnows, beside a stark pollarded willow (left).

This was not the only activity which we enjoyed together. In the hard winters of those days, the water meadows near Flatford bridge were deliberately flooded for ice skating (right) and this continued well into the 1950s. Ruth and I always hoped that the ice would be thick enough, while we were both on holiday, from our respective work, or studies.

My parents bought me a very special camera for my 21st birthday to encourage my interest in photography and help me to record essential

images for the projects which I was still engaged in during my final years of study. I went home for the weekend to help choose it from a shop in Ipswich. It was immediately after the 1953 East Coast Floods, in February of that year. The journey by bus and train from Dedham to Ipswich along the estuaries of the Rivers Stour and Orwell presented a scene of devastation which I shall never forget, but it provided me with images of future flood defences, for a final thesis. The camera was a great success and gave me another interesting experience when I had to declare it at customs on returning from the continent. A small detail on the receipt was incorrect and I was held in custody at Harwich, like a spy, until it was rectified!

The mid 1950s to the mid 1960s I remember as my teaching decade. My first post was in a secondary modern girls’ school in Ipswich. After three years, I moved to Harwich County High School. By this time I had learned to drive and my father had bought a car - which of course I borrowed! Women drivers were still very much in the minority and were treated with great respect and some surprise! After another two years I moved to the Gilberd County Technical School, in Colchester. In each of these schools I taught biology, PE, geography and swimming. The latter became more and more part of my role in the curriculum. Memories of all subjects are still in sharp focus - the Fore Street Baths in Ipswich, a listed building, the icy cold wind lashed with salt spray which, in winter, sprinkled both teachers and sportsmen on the playing fields high above the estuary at Harwich and the little butcher’s shop at the bottom of North Hill in Colchester which supplied 5th formers with hearts, lungs, kidneys and eyes for dissection. How they loved being asked to collect the items for me!

More and more swimming teaching came my way. Saturday mornings were taken up with life-saving classes at the former Garrison Swimming Pool. So many young people have since told me what an important part it has played in their later lives - as training programmes recorded rescues and awards for bravery.

My move to the Gilberd Technical School in 1960 where I stayed for five years, was the first of two extraordinary moves which brought back the past so forcibly. This was because the site of this school was no other than “North Hill” (left) which was the CCHS building I had left as a pupil in 1951 and here I was, once again, returning to it as a teacher! It had not changed a bit. The terraced site still had its tennis and netball courts and the lower sloping field was still there where we tried so hard to play hockey with the difficulty of hitting the ball uphill.

It hardly seemed that it had been nearly ten years since I was here in my school uniform and gym shoes with, occasionally, a violin or tennis racket under my arm and now I was laughing and sharing with my present day 5th and 6th form pupils the joys and surprises of changing fashions and musical tastes in this new era - the Beatles, Mary Quant, the Beehive hairstyle and the emergence of the miniskirt. But the rest of the story is still to come. How I love recording it!

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