Message from the WHSU committee
The WHSU committee has been able to meet several times in the last year at the school and get to know Ms Kennedy who has been so welcoming to us and we have followed with great interest the amazing and innovative building project on the site.
Another year seems to have passed by so quickly but we have emerged from lockdown and generally got back to some sort of normality albeit all slightly scarred by the horror that was Covid.
The school has grown enormously since I was there in the 1960s and 70s with incredible facilities and amenities offering amazing opportunities for all the pupils at the school. However, although the school itself looks very different (particularly from Wimbledon Hill), the heart of the school, which we all consider to be the Senior School Hall with its amazing oak gallery, has changed little over the years and is still in daily use. Everyone who comes back to visit, often decades after leaving, is amazed at how unchanged it looks although most remember it as much larger. Please do come back to one of our events and see all the changes and you can go on a tour around the school, it brings back so many memories.
WHSU Committee
Sarah Mitchell, Class of 1978 147 Burwood Road, Hersham, Surrey KT12 4AR 01932 240928. drawingrooms@btinternet.com
Sue Davidson (née Huggins), Class of 1972 9 Cross Lane, Faversham, Kent ME13 8PN 01795 532800/07940850099
Alison Raffan, Class of 1982
2 Erridge Road, Merton Park, London SW19 3JB 0208 540 1755/07865 547826. araffan@googlemail.com
Anthea Richardson (née Fry), Class of 1962 antheafry@icloud.com
Fiona Gunn, Class of 1978 fionagunn239@btinternet.com
Mandy Miller, Class of 1976 mandy.miller75@gmail.com
It is so nice that we always get such a positive response from Old Girls to this annual newsletter. Our members are particularly interested in news about Old Girls and their lives and if you have memories of your school days or would like to let us know what you have been doing since leaving we would love to hear from you. We can also help put you back in touch with classmates you may not have seen in decades. Although we cannot pass over personal details we can certainly let Old Girls know that someone would like to be in touch with them and if they are happy to be reconnected we can make that possible. We also arrange lunches at the school for specific leaving years which have been so interesting and this year the Class of 1963 are having a lunch at the school on Saturday 10 June 2023. If you were in this year, even if just briefly, please do come along. Those who do attend such events all say that they were anxious about coming or had some reservations beforehand but were so glad they did and are back in contact with friends they lost touch with decades ago.
In 2018 the Class of 1978 had a reunion lunch at the school and following that a group of us decided to go on a short break away. In May 2022 (after Covid-related delays) I joined 5 others from my year on a short break to Seville and it was wonderful. Seville of course was beautiful but the best thing was the way we just all reconnected so easily. Please do read the lovely article written by Angela Dix about our trip and hopefully you may be inspired to do something similar.
The WHSU committee continues to look for new members. There are no requirements except that you are an alumna of the school or former staff member and that you are interested in the school and its history. We meet once a term at 6pm on a weekday evening for an hour or so and we have an annual reunion lunch held in the school hall in the spring.
Being on the WHSU committee is good fun and we hear news about the school and are often invited to events there. If anyone is interested or would like to come along to a meeting to see how you like it, contact either Sue Davidson or Sarah Mitchell. Please do join us!
Best wishes to you all from the WHSU Committee, Sarah Mitchell, Chair.
The Class of 1978 trip to Seville (May 2022)
It began in 2019 at our WHS Reunion Lunch when somebody said “We’ll all be 60 next year, wouldn’t it be nice to celebrate our 60 years together somehow?” Jane Hicks took the initiative, suggesting Seville. A hotel and flights were duly booked for May 2020…but it was to be three years of re-bookings and occasional zoom chats, before six of us flew off for a long weekend in 2022.
Arriving at Gatwick to meet Jane, Sarah Mitchell, Alison Sanders, Anne Patrick and Fiona Gunn (names we knew each other by at school) was heart-warming. Everyone seemed hardly to have changed.
After landing at Seville airport, we problem-solved the best way to get into town and settled for the airport bus. This constructive team spirit prevailed and would have made our sports teachers proud!
Our hotel, ironically a converted convent, was in the old quarter. We met on the roof terrace for drinks and took in our first view of the nearby Giralda, the Cathedral’s bell-tower, formerly a minaret.
We enjoyed leisurely breakfasts in a nearby café, sharing stories of loves and lives, with some surprises.
I had not known Anne and Alison well at school, so it was nice to get to know them better. Jane, Fi and Sarah felt like long-lost family as we’d been at school together since age 5!
rooms, gardens and fountains reminiscent of Granada’s Alhambra.
On Sunday morning, we attended a flamenco class run just for us by a patient, engaging teacher. As Alison said, “we felt transformed into dancers - briefly!”
Later, we wandered through the majestic, high-ceilinged Cathedral, admiring paintings by Goya and others. We climbed up the Giralda for views of Seville. As the sun set, we ate at a restaurant in a square beside the Cathedral.
It was the last weekend of the Feria de Abril festival which meant some women swished passed us in flamenco dresses as horse-drawn carriages clattered across the cobbled streets. The fireworks finale was by the Guadalquivir, so some of us ran through the streets to catch it. This was a hilarious, unscheduled activity, by which point we had probably become school children again!
Angela Dix
Jane’s itinerary was meticulous. On Saturday morning, we went on a four-hour bike tour which produced nerves in some initially. We crossed the bridge over the river to the west of the city, where workers and gypsies, including the fictional Carmen had lived. In one orange tree-lined street, our guide told us about Seville’s glut of oranges and their different uses throughout the year. It left such an impression that this February I made my first batch of marmalade.
By the time we got to the Plaza Espana, it was hot, but the nearby palace park had seats and group photo opportunities.
After lunch and a well-earned rest, we visited the Alcazares Reales, with its ornate courtyards, exquisite
“We all got on…it was marvellous and remarkable that we reconnected so well, and so many interesting and wide-ranging conversations”.
Alison Sanders
Celia Nyamweru (née Washbourn)
Class of 1961
I was at WHS from 1956 to 1960, doing my O levels in 1958 and my A levels (Geography, Physics and Pure Maths) in 1960. My love for Geography was instilled in me from a very early age, partly as a result of my having lived in four different countries (Britain, Belgium, Sweden and Finland) before I was 11 years old. It was further nurtured by the excellent teaching at WHS from the redoubtable Miss Bloss and her younger colleague Miss Darby.
Their classroom teaching was supplemented by the residential field schools we attended; I have vivid memories of a week in Shropshire and another near Perth in the Scottish Highlands. My Sixth Form year was a very special one, in that six of us qualified for admission to ‘Oxbridge’ – myself, Robyn Malcolm and Marylou ScottJoynt (White) to Cambridge and Anne Baker (Pimlott), Naomi Cohen and Susan White to Oxford.
Our headmistress, Miss Burke, was extremely proud of this achievement and during our first term at Cambridge, she came and took the three of us out for lunch at the Garden House Hotel. We sat rather timidly in these opulent surroundings and probably all ordered steak and chips; I remember how impressed I was by Miss Burke’s air of sophistication as she ordered red wine.
I greatly enjoyed my time at Cambridge and was excited to be selected to proceed from the BA degree into the PhD programme; in those days there was no need to do any further studies to be awarded the Cambridge MA degree, and the PhD required no further coursework. In September 1964 I plunged straight into my research topic, which was to look for evidence of large freshwater lakes in the Kenyan Rift Valley. I had several months of intensive fieldwork, on rock slopes and often in thorny bush land (sometimes closer to buffalo, lion, spitting cobra and python than was ideal).
Eventually I found enough of the appropriate evidence (mostly fine-grained white sediments and rounded watersmoothed pebbles) to show that in the basin that in the mid-1960s contained two shallow highly saline lakes there had been, about 9,600 years earlier, one freshwater lake about 600 feet deep. During those months of fieldwork I fell deeply in love with Kenya and its people. Immediately on being awarded my PhD in January 1968 I returned there to teach, first at a high school and then at a technical college. In July 1972 I joined a brand new Geography department at Kenyatta University College (later to become Kenyatta University).
Over the years that followed I was busy with teaching and university administration, including being Chair of the Geography Department and later Dean of the Faculty of Arts. I continued my research on evidence of climatic change, finding traces of former large freshwater lakes in other parts of Kenya, including the now extremely arid Chalbi Desert. I also developed another research area, tracking the eruptions of the active volcano Ol Doinyo
Lengai, which lies in the Tanzania Rift Valley south of the border with Kenya.
My personal life also kept me busy; in 1975 I met my husband, Njuguna Mwangi, and our daughters were born in 1978 and 1980. By the late 1980s, two forces were beginning to make themselves felt. One was the increasingly challenging situation at Kenyatta University, which like all Kenyan educational institutions was suffering from greatly expanded student numbers and shrinking resources. A class which I had in the 1970s taught to between 50 and 80 students now held over 400! As a parent I wanted more for my own children than this, so this was the second force at work.
The opportunity arose to apply for a job teaching at a small private college in far upstate New York, USA, which came with full ‘tuition remission’ for the children of employees. So in 1991 I made that move, from one continent to another, from a large public university to a small private college, and – something that I had not really expected - also from one area of specialization to another. It turned out that my new employer wanted me for my knowledge of Africa but had less interest in my knowledge of high lake levels or active volcanoes – so over the next several years I had to reconfigure myself as an anthropologist. This involved developing five new courses to teach, on themes that included the position of women in African countries, global famines, and indigenous environmental knowledge.
I also sought out new research interests, which over the years came to include sacred groves in coastal Kenya, the making of bark cloth in Uganda, the role of community elders in African societies, and the life of Mekatilili, a Kenyan woman who inspired resistance to British colonial rule in the early twentieth century. I was able to return to East Africa every year to work with Kenyan and Ugandan colleagues on these projects, which resulted in publications including journal articles, book chapters and a volume entitled ‘African Sacred Groves: ecological dynamics and social change’ which I co-edited with Michael Sheridan of Middlebury College, Vermont.
I retired from full-time teaching in upstate New York in 2009, but I continued teaching a couple of courses until May 2013. My research interests gained new momentum in 2017, when I started a new project looking at certain traditional institutions of the Akamba people. This group live mostly in semi-arid areas of eastern Kenya,
and despite over 130 years of missionary, colonial and now post-colonial influences, many of them have retained beliefs and practices that have been described as ‘supernatural’ or even ‘witchcraft’. I was able to interview over 80 Akamba of all ages and levels of formal education, and in my book I compare what I learned from them with material from published sources going back as far as 1860.
My husband and I now divide our lives between Nairobi, Europe and the United States; we have family on each of these continents. The oldest is my 100 year old father-
Hazel Morgan (née Grinyer)
Class of 1962
in-law in Nairobi; the youngest is our one-year old grand daughter in Long Beach, California (the youngest of our nine grandchildren). I am still in touch with Anne Pimlott (Baker) and Jane Lewis (Cable-Alexander) from from my cohort at WHS, as well as with my younger sisters Penelope (Cawthon) and Susan (Watson). I should mention that Jane took the photograph of me that illustrates this memoir!
For anyone who may be interested in Celia’s book, ‘Some traditions of the Akamba of Kenya’ it is available on Amazon (ISBN: 979-8753-6416-6-3).
“A group of 15 of us from the Class of 1962 have been meeting monthly on Zoom over the last two years covering a range of topics. We all acknowledge that we owe a lot to the education we received at WHS.
We have had different life experiences, but we have the common bond of spending our formative years together and we did meet at the school for a Now We Are 70 reunion lunch in the summer of 2014. Some of us have had caring roles; several are published authors; there are three emeritus professors in our midst. Two of the group live in the US, another divides her time between Greece and the US, a fourth lives in Belgium and a fifth in Norway while the rest of us are in England.”
Hazel has recently published a second book ‘The Joy of Knowing Pete: Much was said, yet no words spoken’ which reflects on the teenage years of her younger son, Pete, who had Down’s Syndrome and multiple learning disabilities and who died at the age of 18 but left a very positive legacy and enriched the lives of those around him. The book will be of interest to parents, practitioners, students in education,
Claire Strong (née Munby)
Classof1976
health and social care, researchers and policy makers. Pete’s death prompted Hazel to change career: she had studied Modern History at St Hugh’s College Oxford and taught for many years in secondary, further and higher education. She subsequently became a Co-Director of the Foundation for People with Learning Disabilities, then part of the Mental Health Foundation, overseeing research and projects. Now in retirement she is a trustee of People First Dorset and lives in Dorset with her husband and enjoys being close to her son, Philip, and his family, reading novels, researching family history and exploring the local area.
Hazel’s book published by YouCaxton Publications is available on Amazon (ISBN: 9-781914-424526)
I left Wimbledon High School heading for Nottingham University to study Chemistry that opened the door to a career that started with DuPont, working in Northern Ireland on their plant making Neoprene synthetic rubber
From there I moved back to Hertfordshire and worked in elastomer product development before changing career and moving into information technology and got outsourced. I ran a call centre providing 6 languages, delivered support for desktops, networks and datacentre services and ended my career as an account executive
responsible to various clients. I am now retired but I got into politics 28 years ago and I am still an elected District Councillor in North Hertfordshire. I’m a Rotarian as it’s a great way to give back to the community but when I’m home I love my garden and still up for doing some DIY.
The tradition of the whole school photograph lives on! Both Junior and Senior school assembled on 20th March for this unique opportunity to capture the whole school in one place.
POORNA BAIKADY
1972 REUNION
THE BIRTHDAY REUNION
THE JOY OF CHILDHOOD CONFERENCE
AUDITORIUM OPENING
ALIZA VAKIL CLASS OF 2016
Fionnuala