AOSA CENTENARY HISTORY 1841 - 1941
page sixty-four
Contents
Chapter I
Chapter II
Chapter III
Chapter IV
Chapter V
Chapter VI
Chapter VII
Chapter VIII
Chapter IX
Chapter X
Chapter XI
Chapter XII
Chapter XIII
Appendix
The dominating personality was, of course, Miss Wells. I see her now, cheerful, brisk, healthy, the pivot on which the girls’ side turned. Even as children we knew she was unique : hockey, ‘medicines,’ prep., bedrooms, tea, geography, Scripture, Sunday walk, swimming, packing, unpacking, hobbies, pocket money; she did them all. Her energy was phenomenal, her devotion supreme. To the young and timid she was kindliness itself, and her friendly teasing has saved many a homesick tear; to the slacker and defaulter a terror in the singleness of her purpose and the sternness of her eye, and to ordinary, normal schoolgirls a living example of a life guided by high principles and devotion to duty; a standard by which to judge.
I remember other members of the staff who have since fulfilled themselves in many ways : Mr. Dobbing, who argued and talked and discussed with us, and who aroused thought and curiosity and made us think for ourselves in a way that few teachers can; whom we knew and counted as a friend; Mr. Littleboy, who taught us maths, on the Dalton Plan, and who achieved three distinctions and two credits out of the five of us who first entered for the joint Northern Board Matric. at Ayton; Mr. Cons, who lived up at White House where we occasionally visited him with great delight, and who talked to us in meeting of dreams and sleep from a psychological point of view which greatly interested us; Miss Thorne, who was young and full of enthusiasm, which she managed to pass on to some of us, who believed in training the back to be straight by standing always with arms folded behind her waist instead of in front, and in training the memory by learning something by heart every day; Mr. Stapleton, who took us through the whole field of English Literature in the Vth Form and made us work neatly, methodically and systematically as no other member of staff did; Mr. Mosscrop, of whom the girls saw little and whom I remember chiefly for his marvellous ‘Topicals’; Miss Lawrenson, who brought the freshness and interest of an artistic temperament into our midst and who taught us to draw in spite of the fact that art was always something of a romp; and all the younger men and women who came and went and played their part in the life of the school.
I remember the feeling of awe which came over me as I first sat in a Quaker Meeting and I remember, too, being childishly surprised that this wonder soon gave place to boredom on subsequent Sundays, and that I even found myself joining in the prevailing habit of writing in chalk on my gloves as an interesting variation on the usual deaf and dumb alphabet. Though, perhaps, that first ardent spirit never quite returned, interest and earnest conviction came in its place, and I left Ayton as much a convinced Friend as a child of seventeen who has been brought up in another denomination can be. For me, Ayton has always been first and foremost a ‘Friends’ school. In that first summer term it was for the good life and the happy life that I loved it, and since I have grown older I have realised that the goodness and the happiness arise from an honest attempt to live a life and run a school according to principle, and that to be a member of a Quaker school, whether as a child or as a member of the staff, is to be learning to live, and living, a life founded on and permeated by the spirit of Christianity.
Kathleen Carlton (Mrs. Munro), 1922-26
I WAS at the school for four years, the first half as a boarder, the second as a day scholar, so that I saw two rather different sides of school life. On the whole, I think boarding is to be commended (although it was unlikely that I should be at home after my schooldays, and my parents did not want to lose me entirely at the age of twelve), but being launched on a new world at twelve was probably the making of me, and having been once a boarder, I never felt myself on the fringe, as I think some day scholars did. But that by the way; in any case, I believe things are different now.
Above all, the school was broad and well balanced; we played hockey and tennis with vigour, cricket with reluctance, and adored the swimming bath, but we had not the sport-above-all outlook of some public schools, though the house system flourished, and provided an outlet for our enthusiasm and esprit de corps. The dull and stupefying cramming of our efficient secondary schools was even farther from us. Lessons were varied and interesting, at least to the sixth-former though the little junior recalls little of them, if somewhat haphazard. True, we suffered from Oxford locals, I did British eighteenth century history three years running in different forms! and we were blissfully unaware of the dangers of not being brought up on Latin, that’s really a criticism of our universities, but in ample compensation we had Mr. Cons’s weekly talk on International Relations and Mr. Dennis on Pacifism; Miss Lawrenson on the history of painting awakened the interest which afterwards led me to the distinguished feet of the late Professor Baldwin Brown, and a course of elementary physiology, thanks to which my medical husband regards me as not quite the ignoramus a layman is expected to be. Other academic recollections are the joys of the old Centre Library as a sixth form room, a practice begun in my day, and of the system which left so much of our day free for private study; strange to say, we didn't abuse this; also, the awakening of an interest in contemporary English literature, stimulated, oddly enough, in Mr. Dobbing’s French classes. My point is that Ayton does produce the chrysalis of a cultured person, rather than one merely stuffed with clichés or rule of thumb.
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