Rhubarb October 2022

First girls intake1983

CO-EDUCATION at Teddies

FEATURE

THE LADIES OF ST EDWARD’S PRIOR TO CO-EDUCATION The School’s history now stretches back nearly 160 years and for 75% of that time it was very much a male-dominated establishment. However, a few members of the opposite sex still played their part. One of the very earliest was Mrs. Reece, the butler’s wife at New Inn Hall Street, who worked in the dilapidated kitchens. By all accounts the food was pretty dreadful! Once ensconced at Summertown in1873, some of the wives of members of staff also became indispensable figures at the School.They included secretaries/housekeepers for the Wardens, caretakers and gamekeepers on the school farm, cooks, gardeners, seamstresses and the female members of the famous “Annies and Johns”, the teams who waited at table, carried out domestic chores and dealt with the mountains of washing. Matrons were always important, with responsibility not only for the medical care of the boys but also the production of clean collars once a week. Of the first tenWardens up to John Phillips, who was the pioneer of co-education at St Edward’s, five were married while in post and their spouses, in the main, played significant and visible roles within the School.Two of the bachelors, John Sing and Henry Kendall, ‘employed’ close relatives to act as their female ‘hostesses’ during their tenures. Lizzie Johnson arrived in T his year, as we celebrate 40 years since the introduction of girls toTeddies Sixth Form in 1983 and 25 years of full co-education since 1997, we look back at the role of women in the history of Teddies.We interview some of the first pioneering girls who joined Teddies in 1983 and ask for their memories and thoughts and we also consider what this meant for the boys at School during that time. David Christie talks about the journey to full co-education in 1997 and we hear from Alastair Chirnside,Warden, and the new Sub-Warden, Clare Hamilton, about why co-education is important in today’s society.

1887 with her parents to look after the Lodge and from 1910 she very successfully took over the management of the Tuck Shop and continued until 1943. She was succeeded by Maureen Cox who kept the Shop for the next 21 years. The first female teacher at the School was Sylvia Richards (educated at Girton College, Cambridge) who arrived in 1918, when there was a drastic shortage of men due to the war. She took over the Lower IVth and Classical Vth with great aplomb and proved very popular with the boys. She was also heroic in her nursing efforts during the Spanish Influenza epidemic at the School in 1918, until struck down herself. It would take St Edward’s another 54 years to hire its second full-time female teacher, ElizabethWeeks, as Head of Spanish in 1972. Once boarding houses were introduced by Henry Kendall in 1925, female House Matrons (or Nurses) were introduced to look after their inhabitants.The School Matrons were then employed in the custom-made School Sanitorium built in 1921/2 and they looked after the more seriously sick. In the decade before the arrival of Penny Brown, the first Teddies girl pupil, a few female teachers joined the Common Room – by 1977 there were four, rising to ten by the late 80s. The lack of females had posed many challenges through the years, such as filling the female roles in the School’s annual dramatic extravaganzas, getting the balance of voices in choirs and simply the education of interacting with the opposite sex such as on the dance floor! Up to the end of Henry Kendall’s time, there was no compromise of any kind, but graduallyWarden Fisher allowed local girls into dance classes, very reluctantly and with all sorts of provisos. From 1964 he even agreed to females being included in School plays, much to the relief of the various directors. In the 1960s the School’s Choral Society also began a long collaboration with several local girls’ schools in order to produce joint concerts.

By Chris Nathan, School Archivist.

Resources “The Female Influence at St Edward’s prior to Co-education” by Chris Nathan ( Rhubarb 2017). A History of St Edward’s School by R D Hill (1962). A New History of St Edward’s School, Oxford by Malcolm Oxley (2015).

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