Cheltondale

Always more than a mere building, Cheltondale continues to live on in its community of Owenites. Forty years on from the sale of Cheltondale to the hospital in 1981, we have gathered some snippets from the Archive and memories from some Owenites, to look back over its 85 years as a House.

Built in 1869 as one of the College Boarding House Company’s projects, Cheltondale made an impression, though not necessarily the desired impression at the time: the local press described John Middleton’s design as ‘an architectural abortion.’

‘Stop Press News’ from the Owenite Magazine, November 1918.

The most celebrated former Owenite was Field Marshall Sir John Dill, the CIGS who fell out with Churchill in WW2 and was despatched to Washington. His photograph hung in the Sweat Room. In summer we used to take our Shacks beds out onto the lawn to sleep overnight. One night, the conversation centred on seances. One bright spark persuaded us that if we all put our beds headfirst into a circle and held hands, with Dill’s photograph in the middle, we could commune with the great man. We did this, and as one by one we drifted into sleep, I fear that the Field Marshall’s spirit did not see fit to join us.

1869

1941

During an air raid in 1941, an unexploded bomb fell nearby. Gordon Wallace-Haddrill (Cheltondale, 1942 and Cheltondale Housemaster 1964-72) explained that ‘years later, when I was the Housemaster, our gardener, digging near the gate into what we knew as Corpse Lane, came across a bomb buried in the earth. It was probably only an incendiary but it meant police, a bomb disposal team and minor publicity. ‘So that’s where it landed!’ exclaimed Dick Juckes (Cheltondale Housemaster 1934-49) when I told him. ‘I knew one came down very close to the House but I never found it!’’ The first Housemaster, Rev J Graves, was succeeded by Rev James Owen in 1872. As the names of early Housemasters have given the collective noun for the boys of their House, the boys became known as Owenites. 1872

1918

1940s

Lord (Michael) Jopling (Cheltondale, 1948)

1965

1969

When Gordon Wallace-Hadrill became Housemaster, 1965, I remember being on the periphery of a conversation between him and the gardener about what to do about the vine in the greenhouse on the back of the wall of Shacks Lawn. I remember the gardener saying, ‘You should bury a dead cow under it, or a donkey might do’.

Dr R M Aickin (Cheltondale, 1967)

1974

Cheltondale was the first House to be modernised, in 1969, to provide the boys with more comfortable accommodation. On one floor, a 28-bed dormitory (image on the right) was converted into 18 single bedsitters furnished with a bed, desk, cupboards and shelves (image on the left). The refurbishment proved popular and the BBC and ITV came to photograph the new approach to boarding school life.

1970s

As a House, Owenites never quite settled on an emblem; a Tudor rose was tried but never officially adopted. The surviving issues of Henry, a House magazine from the 1970s with poems and stories written by Owenites, are adorned with a series of cheerful looking elephants.

It was nothing like what College must have gone through with Covid but we had our own mini crisis during the Three-Day Week in the Easter Term of 1974. David George (Hon OC and past staff) and James Perkins (Cheltondale, 1976) – who is still a friend – saved the day by rigging up a generator in the back yard and connecting it to the Sweat Room and the rest of the House. They then spent many evenings replacing blown light bulbs. I was rather surprised when I looked up the Three-Day Week to see that the restrictions on electricity use for commercial users lasted from 1 January to 7 March. I don’t think that we were affected for all that time. Philip Weaver (Cheltondale, 1975)

My first memory of Cheltondale was being dropped into the jungle of the Sweat Room where reputations were made, friendships forged (Nick Curtis, Richard Walker, Kit Juckes [all Cheltondale, 1980] in my case), and a few of us were picked by prefects as their fags for the year. This was part pain and part honour since it did provide a connection to the top of the House, but also meant running errands into town and cleaning muddy rugby boots to a military standard! By the time I reached the dizzy heights of prefect myself, ‘fagging’ was long gone.

1975

Robert McWilliam (Cheltondale, 1980)

1981

With the hospital intending to expand, College Council decided to sell Cheltondale before the inevitable compulsory purchase order could arrive. In order to avoid a reduction in the number of boarding places at College, the Council also decided that the remaining Houses should all be developed to accept an extra ten boys each. Owenites still at College saw out their last days in Roseleigh Cottages on Thirlestaine Road.