Chronicle Spring 2022

42 ST EDWARD’S CHRONICLE

School histories. The archival correspondence between them is certainly very loving, but Skene was resolutely unmarried, despite having many admirers. It is said that one particularly enamoured suitor proposed annually for 18 years. Until Simeon’s marriage to Beatrice Wilkinson in 1883 there was

She was always a figure in the background of the School and a constant

listener and supporter of the first Warden, but in her later years her work as a prolific authoress occupied most of her time. When she died in October 1899 in Oxford, The

Times newspaper wrote: ‘There passed away a personality which between childhood and old age had been associated with the children of Royalty, the leaders of literature, and the outcasts of the street and the prison, and a noble and striking presence, the index of a character not more formed and permeated by culture than by warm and Christian love and profound and humble religion.’ She was buried in the churchyard of St Thomas’s, Oxford, a place where she had worshipped for many years. There were two memorial services, both attended by a grieving Simeon, and a memorial window was commissioned for the nave of the School Chapel. A blue plaque was installed in 2002, on the site of her house in St Michael’s Street. When Skene lived there the house was known as the ‘Skene Arms’, a shelter for prostitutes, the destitute, women fleeing domestic violence and a place for politicians and clergymen to seek her wise counsel.

certainly no one closer to him and when he fell gravely ill with diphtheria in 1872, it was Skene who personally nursed him throughout. She forced him to recuperate fully in Kennington, then a small village on the outskirts of Oxford, and brought him pork pies daily to build his strength. Whatever their relationship, she was always referred to as ‘Godmother’ as most certainly she was to most of the later Simeon children. It is no surprise then, that in early in 1872, Simeon asked Skene to turn the first sod in what was an onion field on the new Summertown site. Throughout the first years of the transfer from New Inn Hall Street to Summertown, Skene was ever-present, helping wherever she could as a part-time matron, part-time hostess and part-time secretary. Later she took on a more legal role, being a sworn independent witness for Warden Simeon in his row with his Headmaster Henry Dalton in 1883.

Above: The back of the new buildings on Woodstock Road, looking north, c.1895 Right: The memorial window to Felicia which graces the far right of the nave in Teddies’ Chapel