Memories From Staff
Marcia Scowcroft (Mrs Holmans) 1953–77
Principal’s Secretary and Registrar
My first memory is of trying to find the College on the day of my interview, a threepenny bus-ride from Victoria to Lothian Road. The tramlines were being removed from Camberwell New Road, the area was in chaos and the bus was not able to stop until after Flodden Road! On finding the College there was more chaos. The front garden was just like a builder’s yard and the imposing figure of Mr Riley, Clerk of Works for the builders (Holliday and Greenwood), greeted me with suspicion but did finally guide me to the front door.
There were about two hundred students when I arrived, of whom only half a dozen were non-resident. By the 1970s the number had risen to almost four hundred, almost half of whom were non-resident. With no chance of further expansion, it was inevitable that the College could not survive.
There were many changes during my twenty-four years: changes in national education policies,
changes in personnel and changes in the local environment. There were many historical events:
the Coronation; the Silver Wedding of the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh; several royal weddings;
the lying-in-state of Sir Winston Churchill; the Tutankhamun Exhibition at the British Museum
for which I queued for over four hours; and an unnerving time when the IRA bombing campaign
was at its height – the explosions were clearly audible in College.
My first base was Flat 10, Dover House. I can’t remember how many stone steps there were per flight but I do know that one soon learned to take everything one needed in the first instance. It was a long way up if something had been forgotten. I was more than grateful to be promoted to Tower House.
One of my duties was to run the College Shop. Sweets were still rationed in 1953, but the constant stream of students for other commodities, particularly stationery, gave me a marvellous opportunity to learn names.
Often in my first few years Ursula Kay, the Deputy Bursar, and I used to tackle the Times crossword with Mrs Holland in the Senior Common Room. Her adept flick of her monocle always fascinated us and her dark-coloured clothes struggled permanently with blackboard chalk and cigarette ash, bless her!
On 3 November 1953 Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother visited the College for the Service of Thanksgiving for Restoration and Rededication of the College. It was a splendid occasion with one Archbishop and six Bishops in attendance. Never had so many street sweepers and dustcarts been seen in the area until that morning. There was a crisis in the Chapel when two of the larger members of the Governing Body occupied three seats and Dr McKie found herself without a seat – a little discreet shuffling around in another row solved that problem. Whilst the Queen Mother was having tea in the Principal’s Drawing Room with all the dignitaries, her personal detective was manning the kettles in the Principal’s Office.
Modern students would never believe that curfew was 10:30 p.m. every night except Wednesday and Saturday when it was 11 p.m., and that fines were imposed on late returners.
Smog was still a feature of South London as the local area did not become a smokeless zone until several years after my arrival in Camberwell. On one particularly bad evening one member of staff returning to her hostel apologised to a lamp post, and another collided with the letter box. The atmosphere was smelly, yellow-coloured and very dirty, and my mother was quite convinced that I did not wash my petticoats properly because the bottom nine inches always looked grubby. If one picked flowers in the garden at any time of the year, even after the advent of the smokeless zone, one’s hands were filthy.
Formal dinners on four nights each week were a nightmare for those students who had to sit at High Table with the Principal and resident staff (and sometimes very hard work for the staff too), and this arrangement continued for a time during Miss Atkinson’s principalship. Students also read the lesson in Chapel every morning. Resident maids were a refinement enjoyed for several years, but they were gradually replaced by day staff and their accommodation reallocated.
A phrase which perplexed me at one of my first committee meetings concerned ‘tell-tales’. They were mentioned in connection with Brooke House, the students’ hostel in Dulwich, which was gradually slipping downhill because it was built on London clay. Tell-tales are strips of glass which are fixed across wall cracks: if the glass splits, the wall has moved.
We all regretted the loss of a large part of the front garden when Stannard Hall was built, and the recent photograph of Sir David Eccles which accompanied his obituary in the Telegraph brought to mind the vision of him standing on the front steps looking over to Stannard on the day of its opening. We also lost the side garden when the Students’ Union was built. When Stannard was built a reasonably sized car park was created. In 1953 there were usually only three cars in the drive – the Principal’s, Miss Barnes’s and Mrs Holland’s – but as time went on the number of cars soon exceeded the spaces available.
With the closure of Brooke House, the two Calais Gate flats, Armytage House, Kingston House and White Lodge, student accommodation was all within a few minutes’ walk of the main building. Brooke Hall was literally opened with a fanfare of trumpets. Trumpeters from the Royal Military School of Music at Kneller Hall almost raised the roof of St John the Divine, Kennington, to which Dedication Day services were transferred when the invited guests outnumbered the accommodation in the College Chapel.
Rooms kept changing their identities. The Science Department moved to the Refectory and the Refectory went down to the Lower Ground Room. The Junior Common Room moved to the new Students’ Union, the former JCR housed part of the St Gabriel’s Collection and the Great Hall became the dance/drama studio with its unique lighting grid.
The winter of 1962–3 was unforgettable. Plumbing ceased to work in several of the hostels – we were lucky at Tower House because the gymnasium was centrally heated and all facilities continued to function. Students walked round inside Tower wearing innumerable layers of clothing, because only student rooms had fires (gas, elderly and not 100% efficient), and there was no heating on the landings or halls – but we were much hardier in those days. Snow several feet high was swept into the gutters, completely covering the drains, so even when it thawed no water was able to get away and it froze overnight making the roads very slippery. Eventually council lorries came and the snow was shovelled up and taken we know not where, but it had been with us from December to March.
During the summer of 1963 central heating was installed in Tower and Sandy joined me. He spent the day in my office in College, and everyone seemed pleased to find a four-footed canine on the premises. On many occasions I would see a student sitting on the stairs in Tower pouring her heart out to Sandy and obviously feeling better for doing so. One night he became a hero: someone bent on breaking into Tower was deterred from attempting to force a window when the response was a roaring bark from within.
The instigation of rural Teaching Practice in Suffolk for first-year students was a major change. Connecting these students with their grant cheques meant a Saturday-morning drive to Bury St Edmunds to meet the students in the Teachers’ Centre. I was not at all popular if I was not in possession of everyone’s cheques.
There was a period one winter – I cannot remember which – when there were many power cuts. They were at designated times which was a help, but electrically powered machines stopped in mid-operation which was very disconcerting, and much to my concern, students had to use candles in the hostels.
The Bon Marché, Morleys and Brixton Market were regularly frequented by staff and students. With the arrival of Jamaicans in the area, glorious technicolour also came as they dressed their children in such bright colours. We also found different fruit and vegetables on the market stalls and different aromas wafted out from their kitchens when they were cooking their traditional dishes.
The males of the species had at first been lonely souls in the form of the College Chaplain and the College Accountant, but as time went on we gained many male members of teaching staff. Canon Fenton Morley used to join us for breakfast after the Sunday morning Communion Service – always an entertaining half-hour, particularly when he recounted his prowess as the family marmalade maker.
The long postal strike in the 1970s made life very difficult, as it occurred when students’ teaching-post applications were due to be submitted. I could not do much countrywide, but I had a most eventful time delivering as many applications as I could to the Education Offices of the London Boroughs. How I wished street name-plates were uniformly positioned.
For more than twenty years, a group of former members of staff (though alas in a diminishing number) has met each year at a mutually convenient location, usually a stately home, where we have been able to have lunch, a jolly good chat and a visit to the pile in question. Norah Bentley and Gwen Rolph were in the original group and now Nina Brough, Jean Enock and I are about to arrange our venue for 1999.
I enjoyed my years at St Gabriel’s. I always believed that the College had something special to give and that our students had something special to offer.
Nevertheless I must say how much I am enjoying my retirement. I can look back on my years at St Gabriel’s and latterly Christ Church College, Canterbury, with great affection, but it is amazing what retirement can bring. I have been fortunate enough to marry a wonderful husband, I have learned to play golf, I’ve appeared on two television shows and my husband and I have become ardent motor-caravanners. Between all that we have been to Australia and New Zealand, Canada, Norway, Madeira, Malta, Sicily, Portugal, Sweden and Finland and also had three holidays on English canals. Life is never dull, it’s great!
