June Austin, an Elliott girl in wartime at Guildford. 

I was evacuated from Peckham in 1939,  two days after my 10th.birthday.  By 1941, I had been through the experiences of most London schoolchildren who were taught in the fragmented circumstances of shared schools in country towns and villages.   Eventually I was moved again, this time to the Elliott School in Guildford which was a 45 minute bus ride from home.

My first class with The Elliott was in a room at the Park Street Institute by the Guildford bus terminus.   Here, we registered with Mr.Kear for the day and other teachers came and went for various subjects.   It was the time of the Free French freedom fighters, so Miss Casley taught us to sing “La Marseillaise” and put pictures of the Cross of Lorraine around the room.   We also learnt basic French.  Girls only there, if I remember.

My next promotion was to the building of the Guildford Central School at the top of the High Street.  Here we had one room,  with Mr.Bennetto as our teacher.   He had massive eyebrows which went up and down like brushes when he spoke.   He could be very fierce and, in this mixed class, always had the cane ready as deterrent for any boy who was talking instead of working.

The final move was to Guildown House – an elegant mansion with beautiful grounds about 15 minutes walk from  Guildford High Street.   Here was the stability and educational expectation which I had not experienced since 1939.   The atmosphere was more like that of the private schools of today, with an ethos to match.   Heaven help anyone seen outside the school without the distinctive uniform complete and tidily worn.   And as for eating in the street while wearing the Elliott identity of black and red hatband or tie with the enamel elephant badge, well there was always a lurking prefect to report you.   Then up before the austere Headmistress, Miss Hewetson, for letting down the school by sloppy behaviour!

I remember the sudden order to pick up our books and lead out of class and down into the caves under Guildown House (which were presumably the wine-cellars) to continue our work when an air-raid warning had been given.      We had hot meals, for the first time, and queued in a long corridor for meat stew and tough orange jelly made with rose-hip syrup topped with semolina.  We carried the meals back upstairs to our classroom and ate them at our desks.   The person on duty was often Miss Rolfe, a strict maths teacher, who inspected our plates to make sure we had not left a mouthful – however distasteful – as ‘there were people starving in Europe and we should be grateful’.   There were both teenage boys and girls at Guildown House but I now realise that the girls often had a different programme to the boys as a recent contact said he remembered neither the caves nor the hot meals.

We had school assembly in a church hall in one part of Guildford and then dispersed to walk as quickly as possible to our various bases.    We walked miles!   I remember going to Stoke Park School in a crocodile of girls for our cookery lesson, back to Guildown House for dinner-time, and then down to Shalford Park for hockey.   With the walk up the Portsmouth Road in the morning to start with and then back to the bus at night, this meant at least 4 miles of walking on some days, just to be somewhere for lessons!

Playtime and lunchtime meant the girls of Guildown House could use the lovely garden with its paths and seats but the boys were confined to the tennis court to play their cricket or active games.   The resident gardener, Mr.Wells, housed in his adjoining cottage, made sure that nothing like that happened in the ornamental grounds, so we girls wandered around sedately like young ladies from a Victorian novel.   In keeping with the custom of the time, after that first co-ed class, the boys led a separate existence within the same building so, although we were aware of them in that small environment, we had no contact to speak of unless we saw them going to or from school.

Our curriculum was shaped by the space, opportunity and teachers available so, as it was obviously not possible to include any of the science subjects, this was substituted by a programme of commercial lessons.    These were typing, shorthand and book-keeping, and carried as much weight in the final exams for the Oxford School Leaving Certificate as English, maths, etc. and the results included in the final tally to decide if you had achieved Matriculation level.   I remember climbing flights of stairs to a cold attic room at Guildown House for typing practice, with the boys queuing outside until the girls had finished!   For many of us, this grounding in secretarial skills was to help much more in getting immediate work than any science lab. topics could have done.

Not all of us were able to follow the school back to its base in London after 1945 as circumstances prevented my family from returning.   Peckham Rye was substituted for the hills of Surrey.  Career became marriage and children.   The predictions by Miss Hewetson that I would make a good teacher (if I worked hard!) did not come to fruition until I was able to become a mature-student.   I like to think that if I was any good at it for those 20 teaching years, it was based on the examples set by those redoubtable men and women of The Elliott who taught us at Guildford in the difficult war times.

June Broomer  (June Austin)
e-mail: JBroomer@aol.com
24 November 2007