Remembering Loved Ones

Joan Milne was born in Glasgow in 1939, the daughter of Leslie and Mary (née Berry). Her father had left school at 14 to work as a barrow boy in the Glasgow food market, eventually becoming an auctioneer then setting up his own business. Wishing to give Joan a start in life they did not have, but knowing little about private schools, her parents sent her to Park School for Girls in Glasgow, then St Hilda’s School for Girls in Stirlingshire. Unhappy at the latter, she heard friends talking about St Leonards, a girls’ school in St Andrews that modelled its curriculum on that of boys’ public schools in England to the point of making the girls play cricket on the windy Fife coast. She convinced her parents to let her go there, and after three years at the school she worked as an au pair in the Rheims home of the Heidsieck family of champagne makers.

She studied history at St Hilda’s College, Oxford, where she became the President of the Junior Common Room and helped Paul Foot and Richard Ingrams to produce a magazine, Parson’s Pleasure. She was friends with a historian at Merton, Michael Clanchy, who enticingly was the owner of a car, but they did not get together until both had moved on to teacher training. They married in 1963 and had two children who survive them: James, a lawyer, and

Kate, a teacher and writer. Michael died two weeks after his wife.

Clanchy’s first teaching job was at Woodberry Down School in London. The family then moved to Glasgow, where Michael had been offered a lectureship in history at the university. With her weighty social conscience, Clanchy wished to stay in the state sector, though was told that Glasgow district council did not employ married women, so took up a post at her alma mater, Park School, instead.

At the age of 36 she became the Headmistress of St George’s School for Girls in Edinburgh, to which the family upped sticks. As they were leaving, their next door neighbour, the editor of The Glasgow Herald, ran a news story about how Michael would now have to commute to Glasgow for his wife’s convenience. He meant this as a friendly gesture, but Clanchy made sure he knew how inappropriate she thought it.

Joan Clanchy, Headmistress, was born on 26 August 1939. She died of lupus on 15 January 2021, aged 81