8 minute read
Patricia Hinman
PATRICIA HINMAN (Milford, 1939)
Our oldest OT talks Tudor in the 1930s
On a glorious afternoon in mid-autumn, Patricia and her daughter, Jane, joined a group of current staff and prefects for lunch at Tudor. The girls were keen to compare Patricia’s experiences at the School almost nine decades earlier with their own.
Patricia joined Tudor with her older sister, June, in 1933. The School was in a beautiful Georgian house in Chislehurst, Kent, which was only a small village at that time. It was her first experience of going away to school. “We settled in quite well, on the whole. Even though we all came from different backgrounds, and were of various ages, it didn’t seem to matter; we all got on very well together. It helped that Tudor was run by jolly nice teachers, who everybody liked – we gave all of them peculiar names,” Patricia recalls fondly.
At the end of the spring term 1935, Mrs Kelleher, the Headmistress, had to close Tudor Hall School due to lack of numbers. “Our families were sent a letter with options for alternative schools – one was near Folkestone, I remember, and Nesta Inglis’s school, Southlands, was at Harrow-on-the-Hill. A number of girls went, I believe, to Folkestone but, by sheer luck, my mother chose to send us to Nesta’s.”
During the first school holiday at Southlands, Patricia’s mother was away on a cruise, so she and her sister had to stay at the School during the break. They were taken for a day out shopping in Harrow, and she believes it was on this outing that she caught scarlet fever. “I remember feeling really sick and
Previous page: Patricia doing war work.
Left: Patricia (right), with June (centre) and her mother (left) in summer 1938.
Below: School picnic 1937.
being taken to the School Sick Bay. Scarlet fever was a highly contagious disease, so I ended up spending six weeks in Harrow-on-the-Hill Isolation Hospital.” By the time Patricia was well enough to go back to school, after the October half term, Tudor Hall had re-opened. Nesta Inglis had agreed to take over as
Headmistress and had moved to Chislehurst, where she re-opened the School on 1st October.
“It was lovely to be back at Tudor. And the School had grown – twenty of the pupils from Southlands had joined and the original Tudor girls all came back – so there were about thirty of us. We had a lovely common room with a radiogram, which was very jolly, and life just carried on rather happily. I remember the Lacrosse matches and the ‘team teas’. There was one school called Farringtons, who we didn’t much like playing, but their teas were the best! ‘Fitchy’, our school cook, also made beautiful cakes and we could choose our favourite for our birthdays. Sadly, mine was in August so I never got my own cake!”
Nesta’s influence at Tudor was to make it a more progressive school, following The Dalton Plan – an educational model that aimed to tailor each student’s study to their interests and abilities and to promote independent learning. The girls were given a month’s
Right: Tudor teachers including Miss Fitch, Housekeeper (third from left) and Miss Inglis, Headmistress (far right).
worth of assignments at a time for each subject, which they kept in a satchel. Every morning they had ‘free time’ during which they could select an assignment from their satchel for the subject they were in the mood for, take it to the relevant subject classroom, work at a desk there and then choose another subject to move on to. Teachers stayed in subject rooms and provided help as required. “Either you were very good,
Left: The 1938 Lacrosse team. Patricia is far right, top row and her sister June is second from left, middle row.
Right: 1938 School photograph. Patricia is second from left, middle row.
or you would put off your least favourite subjects so that, at the end of the month, you would find you hadn’t completed all of your assignments.” Those who had finished their assignments at the right time were rewarded with a day out, often to go ice skating. “I only got to do it once, I think,” Patricia laughs, “I never quite got there with completing everything. I would often find that I was left with a backlog of French.”
The next momentous event in Patricia’s time at Tudor was the School’s evacuation to Gloucestershire in September 1938. With war against Germany seeming increasingly likely, the whole School was evacuated in haste, with some girls, including Patricia, staying at The Bear Inn, Minchinhampton, and some at Prospect House,
Painswick. In the relative safety of the Gloucestershire countryside, the girls’ schoolwork continued pretty much as normal. The School only remained in this temporary accommodation for about a week because on 30th September 1938, the threat of war was allayed. Neville Chamberlain, the Prime Minister of the time, went to Germany to meet with Hitler in a last-ditch attempt to avoid, or at least delay, conflict. “I will always remember the picture of him coming down the steps of the aeroplane on his return to London, waving a piece of paper, saying ‘peace in our time’, and everybody cheering. I now understand that everybody was so happy because the Agreement he made bought the country time to build our war capability – aeroplanes, armaments, etc. We had almost nothing at the time.”
After their brief spell in the Cotswolds, it was back to business as usual. “The School in Chislehurst was only thirty minutes by train from Charing Cross, so the girls were often taken to the West End and that autumn we were lucky enough to see Twelfth Night at The Old Vic, which was to be our school play that Christmas and the subject for our School Certificate the following year. I played the Sea Captain and I think that whole process is how I received a distinction in my English exam!”
When the country ultimately did go to war in September 1939, Tudor was well prepared. It had already moved into its wartime location at Burnt Norton, near Chipping Campden, during the 1939 summer holiday. Patricia only had one term at Burnt Norton – she took her exams and was then old enough to leave. “My sister had joined the Wrens. I was too young to go into The Forces, but I managed to get some war work, thanks to a ‘semi’ boyfriend I had at the time, John James. He was very tall and slim and worked as an engineer, so undertook to get me a job testing bomb sites for Lancaster bombers at the factory where he was employed.” Not long afterwards, John joined up and so left the factory, but when Patricia was finally old enough to join up, she was told she could not leave because her job at the factory was integral to the war effort.
She therefore had to spend the rest of the war working in the factory on the Great West Road, which was an hour’s bus ride from her home in Surrey. On one occasion the bombing came very close to her, “I remember sitting up in this great glass-fronted test room and suddenly the whole thing shook. We all looked at each other. It had completely flattened one of the factories down the road.” She did also have a close encounter with a doodlebug one evening when she was going home on the train, “It came flying alongside us, it was flying quite low and you could see all the flames coming out of the back. There were only a few people in the carriage, but we all sat very still until, eventually, the train turned a bend and parted company with the
device. A few moments later a loud bang signalled that the doodlebug had exploded. It was quite sobering – you think ‘that could have been me’”.
As the war came to an end, so too did Patricia’s job in the factory. Her then-boyfriend, James Tilling, asked what she wanted to do next. He suggested that his aunt, Mabel Constanduros – a famous, slightly eccentric, playwright and comic actress – might have an opening for a secretary. “I only vaguely knew how to type and didn’t do shorthand, but she took me on anyway” Patricia tells us gleefully. “Mabel was a really lovely lady who lived in a fabulous house in Hans Crescent, behind Harrods; I used to go shopping for her in Harrods, go out for tea with her and drive her car around. I was just lucky to have got the job and I loved it!”
What advice would Patricia have for Tudor girls today? “I wouldn’t have any, other than to be kind and happy” she says emphatically. “I think most girls nowadays have much more confidence, are far more worldly-wise at an earlier age and have a much broader general knowledge of life than we ever had in the 1930s.” R
Left: The performance of Twelfth Night.
Below, left to right: Wendy Griffiths, Emilia LVI, Patricia Hinman and Jane Barnes, Patricia's daughter.
Above: Patricia (right) with her mother (centre) and sister (left).
