Rhubarb 2017

ST EDWARD’S r h u b a r b

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Very few women were on the School’s full time teaching staff before the 1970s, with one notable early exception being Sylvia Richards, a Scholar of Girton College, Cambridge (First Class, Classical Tripos) who was hired in 1918 to take on the Lower Fourth and Classical Fifth Forms, mainly due to there being no suitable males left to fill the job. She was well accepted and was singled out for special praise when she helped nurse the many staff and pupil members who went down with the ‘Spanish Influenza’ epidemic in December 1918 until she too caught the infection. She left in the Easter Term of 1919 having ‘stayed a term longer than she intended’ ( The Chronicle ). Despite being the first female teacher, she never warranted any mention in the School Roll - a grievous oversight, corrected in 2013. With her departure, the School would wait another 53 years before engaging a second full time female teacher - Elizabeth Weeks in 1972, who would be Head of Spanish for 19 years. Part time or visiting female teaching staff were employed from time to time, but here again there were very few. By 1977 the full time female teachers of the School numbered four, reducing to three by 1981, a number that stayed constant until the late 1980s when six were in place. After the move to co- education began in 1983, the female contingent of the Common Room expanded significantly as the number of girls entering the School increased. Space does not allow me to include every lady who worked at the School prior to co- education but hopefully I have described the most prominent. The attitude to the opposite sex was well summed up by Warden Henry Kendall’s refusal to allow girls from local schools to ballroom dances with the boys, suggesting ‘they should use cushions’ instead! Frank Fisher at least made some progress by agreeing to allow girls to these events but with stringent conditions! Eventually, Warden Fisher was further persuaded to allow local girls to be invited to join the School drama casts, the first being in 1964 for Fred Pargeter’s production of Under Milk Wood. Likewise, the School’s Choral Society in the 1960s

A R C H I V E S

‘Mother’ Blencowe at the window of the first school shop 1897

started a long collaboration with Milham Ford School, Wychwood School and the Oxford High School for Girls to jointly present concerts far and wide, especially beneficial at a time when the School’s treble pool seemed to be dwindling! Additionally female members of staff families had started to be embedded in both musical and drama productions often taking lead roles.

Penny Brown (nee Burke), first female pupil to enter St Edward’s

The 1985 common room, with just four ladies included. Linda Lyne and Pauline Ely are in the third standing row, Jeanie Bee in the second and Elizabeth Weeks in the first. While few in number, jointly these particular teachers served the school for a total of 95 years.