Memories From Students
Margaret Barringer (Mrs Denny) 1938–40
We were welcomed into College by a second-year student designated our College Mother. This title caused some misunderstandings: at that time trams ran from the end of Lothian Road to Westminster or Victoria for a tuppenny fare, and someone overheard the following exchange on the upper deck of a tram: ‘Who are these girls?’ ‘I think they come from a home for unmarried mothers.’
We lived under the firm control and amazingly bright blue eyes of the Principal, Miss Florence Johnson. Hats and gloves were required to be worn outside College, and no milk bottles should be carried visibly from Lothian Road. Life was time-tabled effectively. We were contained within the College buildings, in additional student accommodation in neighbouring residential flats, and in Tower House across the park, supervised by a tutor. We wore buttonholes of lilies of the valley to commemorate Founder’s Day. The portrait of Charles Edward Brooke hung in the Dining Hall.
We lived cocooned from the outside world: there was a newspaper and radio in the Junior Common
Room but we rarely had time to hear bulletins. Consequently I still feel embarrassment remembering
when I sat next to a tutor at the dinner table who asked if I had been to Chamberlain’s
funeral. To my shame I replied, ‘Is he dead?’
School Practice was formidable. My first took place in the Victorian Church school of St John the Divine, opposite Vassal Road on the Camberwell New Road. For my second I was sent to Brixton. A child came out of the front desk and announced that she was Harry S. Pepper’s niece (he directed the Black and White Minstrel Show on radio) – there was not one coloured child in the class at that time. One day I put a blackboard down in the middle of the playground, intending to draw a plan of the area. I knelt down and the entire class climbed on my back. Saying ‘Find a place alone’ (a favourite command of Marjorie Eeles), or ‘Run anywhere you like’ meant the class disappeared from view. One learns the hard way!
Before we went home at the end of the first year some of us were allocated to local schools to help in the event of evacuation. War broke out in September 1939, and I travelled to London full of excitement. My grandmother was housekeeper to Lady Grosvenor, and had a bed-sitting room for her private use in Shepherds’ Market. Having collected the key I walked to the Queen’s Hall and attended a Prom. The following morning I reported to Comber Grove Infant School. Small children were lined up across the playground. To us students it was a great adventure; it never occurred to us what trauma it was for the mothers. We assured them that we would take care of our charges, and boarded buses to be taken to the reception centre at Icklesham in Sussex. When we arrived, the children were selected and finally disappeared. The staff were apprehensive and exhausted: they had left behind homes and perhaps elderly relatives, but we were enjoying our first real responsibility. Before we went to our billets we explored the village and knew more or less where to find the addresses of our charges. Parents soon began to travel down to see their offspring. After one solitary siren sounded nothing happened, and soon everyone went back home.
College reassembled in October. We were protected by a barrage balloon in Myatt’s Fields, and strict black-out was enforced. Matron left her messages in our cubicles: ‘Dust your drawers’. We wrapped ourselves in eiderdowns to keep warm. Inevitably, in due course, final exams came along. My partner living in the other committee members’ room in Lower East remembers answering a question on her History paper: she wrote at length about Sparta invading Athens, and emerged from the exam room to be told that the Germans had entered Paris.
During the ensuing summer incendiary bombs claimed the College roof, but the students were unharmed. My sister, who should have been in College that September, was sent to Doncaster. Apart from her visit for interview she never set foot inside St Gabriel’s. Arrangements were made for us to use facilities in the local Girls’ Grammar School, and St Gabriel’s assembled only at weekends when the School Hall was available. I was able to go on for a third-year PE course at Southlands, evacuated to Weston-super-Mare, but third-year courses were terminated the following year.
Students are invariably critical that College does little to prepare them for the classroom, but St Gabriel’s was a good place to have spent one’s developing years, and what could be better than spending time in the heart of London?
Several years ago in the village church a new arrival said, ‘When I was in College we were taught to light the Epistle Candle before the Gospel Candle.’
I asked, ‘Where were you at College?’
‘St Gabriel’s.’
‘What year?’
‘WHO ARE YOU?’
We are now in our eightieth year. The last time we were in St John the Divine Church was for Miss Johnson’s Memorial Service. I hope that some of us will be well and able to attend next year’s celebration.
