A CULTURAL ICON OVER A 90-YEAR CAREER

The Girls’ Day School Trust, along with Nottingham Girls’ High School, were delighted to award June Spencer CBE the GDST Exceptional Contribution award in July 2022.

June has been bestowed this award due to her remarkable achievements and the longevity of her services to broadcasting. Last summer, she retired from playing the much-loved character, Peggy Woolley, in the famous BBC radio series, The Archers , recording her last episode at the age of 103.

June completed her education at Nottingham Girls’ High School almost 90 years ago, in 1934. Her dream to become an actress meant she left school early, aged just 15, although her initial request to leave school was denied by the Headmistress at the time, Miss Phillips. She remembers standing in the Headmistress’s office with Miss Phillips saying to her, “You’ll never make anything of yourself without your certificate.” How wrong Miss Phillips was, and how differently she would have been supported at NGHS today.

Growing up a beloved only child in Nottingham, where her father travelled around on a bicycle as a salesman for Crawford’s Biscuits, June caught the entertainment bug early. When the 'talkies' began, she started to speak with an American accent, alarming her parents who sent her off for elocution lessons with a teacher who gave her a love of poetry and introduced her to Shakespeare. “She was also the producer of the very busy amateur dramatic theatre in Nottingham and when I was about 15 she said, ‘I think you might like to join the society to get some experience in front of an audience.’”

She was on holiday in Eastbourne with her mother when the Germans invaded Poland on 1 September 1939, and recalls her father driving across country to take them home “because the trains were full of little evacuees”. On her 21st birthday the Nazis marched into Paris. She had made herself a dress for a party in a local hall. “There were 42 of my friends there, including all my boyfriends, and so I danced with each of them in turn,” she recalled in her autobiography, published in 2010. “I knew it was probably the last time we should all be together as they would soon be joining the forces.”

One of her guests was “a fairhaired blue-eyed boy with a cheeky grin” called Roger Brocksom, who “always seemed to be around”. He was serving in Northern Ireland when the couple married in 1942, but a few months later was posted to India and Burma. “I simply went on living with my parents. It was three years and four months before we saw each other again,” she wrote. “By then he was a major and my life had completely changed.” Her first big career break came when the local repertory theatre was casting around for someone to play a 12-year old. Reluctantly, because she was well into her 20s, the theatre manager entrusted the role to her, rewarding her success with a contract to play in weekly rep, two shows a day, for three guineas a week. It was to be the first of many child roles for Spencer, who says, “Even today if I just close my eyes I can be any age I’ve ever been. I know the feel of it, the atmosphere.”

The arrangement broke down after she demanded a pay rise for taking the title role in a Christmas production of Alice in Wonderland and her boss made the mistake of suggesting that she should be grateful for being spared war work. “I drew myself up to my full 63 and a half inches and said, ‘I’d rather fill shells than work for you’.” She marched off to the labour exchange and landed a day job as a “hello girl”, staffing the telephone switchboards, while volunteering in morale-raising shows for the forces in her spare time. “We had a repertoire of two plays and away we would go in a cranky old bus with our scenery stashed down the centre aisle.”

In 1943, she passed an audition for the BBC’s Midlands region and became a regular broadcaster in all forms of radio drama in its Birmingham and London studios. The Archers has been running since New Year’s Day, 1951. It is the longest-running soap opera in the world. Characters – and actors – are born, mature, age, and die in it, at the same pace as listeners’ own lives. June Spencer appeared in that very first episode and, with a short break in the 1950s when she left to look after her children, has been in it ever since. Not that it was a particularly momentous start: June found out she’d been cast in the new programme only when a colleague mentioned it to her in the canteen queue at the BBC’s Birmingham studios.

In that first episode, the Peggy Archer that listeners encountered was a young, cockney in-comer (her accent softened considerably over the years), who’d met her husband, Jack, when she was in the Auxiliary Territorial Service (ATS) during the war.

The Archers was made in collaboration with the Ministry of Agriculture and designed to dispense farming advice to its listeners while also educating townies about the countryside. Her outsider status meant Peggy could ask all the daft questions that listeners might be thinking, and get quite lengthy technical replies from the chaps. Her marriage to Jack, who drank, was already rocky; and so it would continue.

She also doubled as a couple of other characters: a Scottish maid and a flighty Irish baker’s assistant called Rita Flynn, who tried to lead Phil Archer astray. She once had to play two of her characters in a single scene, meaning a sharp about-face on accents.

“Practically everything was live,” she said in 2020. “When it came to The Archers , though, we were recording on very large discs. We would rehearse scene by scene, then record the whole episode in one go. If anyone made a mistake, they’d be very unpopular – you’d have to go right back to the beginning and re-record the whole thing again. That didn’t happen very often because we were used to going on air live. There was practically no television, so we had it all our own way. There was lots of lovely work.”

Her storyline with Peggy’s second husband, Jack Woolley, was to prove one of the most taxing of her career after Jack developed Alzheimer’s. Spencer’s own husband, Roger, also died after suffering from the disease. “It opened up a whole new life for me because the Alzheimer’s Society approved and invited me to speak.” She went on to become a patron of Alzheimer’s Research UK “because I felt it was something that needed to be brought into the open”.

Over seven decades of The Archers , Peggy became the matriarch of the show - a fully human character inconsistent and flawed, capable of great thoughtlessness, but at times rising to her very best, magnificent, loyal self.

In what we now know was her final scene, broadcast during July 2022, Archers listeners heard her cradling her new-born twin greatgranddaughters – a handover of the generations, if you like.

Nottingham Girls’ High School

Last summer, NGHS alumna Susie Allen-Sierpinski visited the school to talk to Junior and Senior school students.

Susie is a Flight Systems Engineer for NASA on the lunar mission project Artemis, working to put the next man, along with the first woman, on the moon. Her role is to support the Deep Space Logistics team as its Human Systems Integration SME. Currently based at the Kennedy Space Centre, home to the Gateway Deep Space Logistics (DSL) project, Susie is working on the Gateway for Artemis which includes the module which will transport food, fuel and water to the moon, alongside other components of the Gateway.

According to UN Affairs

NGHS is proud to have an alumna helping to redress this imbalance, and so grateful that she visited to school to inspire pupils.

Oxford High School

Oxford High School’s Higher Education and Careers evening took place in February, bringing together alumnae, parents and university representatives. The event was a huge success, attracting over 450 guests and over 60 guest speakers, 40 of whom were OHS alumnae!

Students had the opportunity to meet professionals from a wide range of industries, from insights into the music and theatre industries, to careers in medicine and biomedical sciences. They also discovered wide-ranging career paths, and learnt individual journeys from university to becoming a skilled professional.

The event started with a keynote address from Reverend Catherine Bond, an alumna who talked about the highs and lows of entrepreneurship, as the ten lessons learnt during her ‘squiggly’ career.

Royal High School Bath

As part of Royal High School Bath’s focus on making connections with others, Years 8 to 11 have been writing letters to students at its sister school, the Crane Academy in Kitale, Kenya.

The partnership with the Crane Academy started in 2006 thanks to alumnae Alex Gruffydd-Jones (2003) and Chloe Alexander (2006). Before going to University of Nottingham to study medicine, Alex went to the Crane Academy on her gap year with African Asia Ventures and loved it. Her subsequent assembly about the trip inspired everyone at RHSB and especially Chloe Alexander, then a future Head Girl, who took up the reins in 2005.

Many of the girls at the Crane Academy are orphans, whilst others have parents who struggle to afford the modest fees. Despite its limited facilities and resources, the Crane Academy is doing valuable work to give generations of girls a better future. In 2016 the Crane’s first student, Evelyn, went on to study to be an infant teacher – a far cry from the original plan for her to marry at 14, a man in his forties.

RHSB is very proud that 17 years on, having raised over £75,000 and sponsored over 40 girls, the life-changing connections forged by Alex and Chloe remain strong.

Sheffield High School for Girls

Sheffield Girls’ continues to celebrate being crowned ‘Independent Secondary School of the Year in the North’ by The Sunday Times.

In its annual ‘Parent Power’ School Guide, which combines and reviews the results of both private and state schools across the UK, the school came out on top after consideration not only of Sheffield Girls’ record-breaking GCSE and A Level results but also the school’s holistic approach to extra-curricular provision, pastoral support and character education.

Head, Nina Gunson commented, “We are thrilled to be recognised as the 'Independent Secondary School of the Year in the North'. The girls’ exam results were such a wonderful reward for the positivity, hard work and innovation demonstrated by students and staff alike over the last couple of extremely challenging years, and to receive this accolade is simply the icing on the cake.

“Every single day I am impressed by the achievements of our students and proud of the values they demonstrate. I hope that every member of our school community can share my pride in this award - which belongs to us all.”

Shrewsbury High School

Shrewsbury High School is delighted to announce that its current Senior Deputy Head, Mr Darren Payne, has been appointed as the new Head from September 2023.

Since joining the school in 2007, Mr Payne has played a key role in the successful move of junior girls to their new home on Town Walls, and has ambitious plans for the future of Shrewsbury High as a leader in girls’ education. Alongside the outgoing Head, Mrs Jo Sharrock, he led the school through an ISI Inspection which rated Shrewsbury High 'Excellent' in all areas – the highest rating obtainableand introduced the highly successful and award-nominated Period X life skills programme into the curriculum. Speaking about his appointment, Mr Payne said, “I am delighted to be given the opportunity to lead Shrewsbury High School in the next stage of its history. The school is in excellent health, with an outstanding recent inspection report, successes in all areas of school life and a strong and supportive community. It will be a privilege to build on the strong foundations that Jo Sharrock has set down and I look forward to continuing to embrace the significant opportunities the Girls’ Day School Trust provides. These are exciting times for the Shrewsbury High community.”

South Hampstead High School

The millennium was a milestone in the history of the school, marked with outings to nearby attractions and even a trip to Paris. As part of the celebrations, the school also built a Millennium Playground – a space for pupils to relax and have fun. During its construction, South Hampstead invited parents, pupils and staff to make a donation towards the costs by purchasing personalised bricks, which were then incorporated into the design.

The redevelopment of the Senior School site and the creation of the new campus on Maresfield Gardens in 2014 meant that the Millennium Playground was repurposed; the bricks were carefully extracted, one by one, and saved whilst it was decided how best they could be used again. As plans got underway to create a new garden behind the Sixth Form Oakwood building, a solution was found. The new-look garden – generously created by an award-winning garden designer and friend of the school – now features curved gravel paths lined with the original, upcycled bricks.

The millennium bricks were just one of the ways its community has given back to South Hampstead. This March, the school welcomed back some of the original donors to reinstate their bricks at the Alumnae Reunion Lunch. These days, the focus is on the GDST 150 and South Hampstead’s Opening Doors Bursary Campaign, towards which the community continues to be supportive and truly generous. Thank you.