A.O.S.A. 2004 ANNUAL REPORT

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I feel privileged to stand before you today as your President wearing this beautiful medallion of office, worn by Presidents down the years ever since it was given to our Association in 1929 by Fred Mitchell during his year as President. More recently we have acquired the spouse or partner’s pin; it has as its centre a shield which was an ‘award for excellence’, that marked sporting or academic achievement. The silver surround was designed by Mary Reader and the work executed by Hillary Hawkins an Ackworth OS who is a distant relative of Joyce Spinks. The pin was presented to Evelyn Nicholson when she retired and was left, on her death, to Ruth Harwood, who, in turn, gave it to the Association. Margaret Whittle was the first person to wear the pin when her husband Peter became President in 1996. It is being worn today by my eldest daughter, Helen Rollinger.

The first woman to become our President was Elizabeth Dixon, 1902-03, wife of the first Superintendent, she was the 13th President of the Association. It would be another eighteen years before we had our second woman President - Florence Legge 1920-21, and it was not until 1937 that the system we have today, with a female President one year, followed by a male the next, came into being.

With my inauguration, the Association has evened the score for Presidents from my year - Dorothy Dawson and Arthur Grainge representing the A stream and Dick and me the Bs. In the years which followed us, A and Alpha replaced A & B and it was never quite so easy after that to tell the academic ‘haves’ from the academic ‘have nots.’

I came to Ayton in the summer term of 1950 when my class was two thirds of its way through third form and as I really should have been in the year below from the start, transferred in September 1952 following the departure of the majority of my classmates at the end of 5th Form.(Well not so much transferred but rather waited for the form below mine to move up.) Not only did I divide my time at Ayton between two different year groups but I also had the privilege of being a pupil under two very different Headmasters; J. Stanley Carr and John Reader.

I was not much of a scholar, (my chequered educational history of six schools and gaps where I received no schooling at all prior to coming to Ayton, finally caught up with me;) and I was totally useless at games, but I did have a bit of a ‘flair’ for English which kept me from sinking without trace. The change in 1951 from School Certificate and Higher School Certificate where the student had to pass specific blocks of subjects, to O and A levels gave me a fighting chance, because one could take, and if fortunate enough, pass as one can today, individual subjects. I wrote poetry for the Beckside and always aspired to win the J. W. Steele Poetry Prize; having recently reread some of those early efforts I am not really surprised that I never did.

I was a bolshy kid, who had many a scrap with Evelyn Nicholson, not all of which she won. She was, however, one of the defining forces in my life and she is the real reason why I am standing here before you today. Asking me, on two previous occasions, if I would be willing to take on the job of editing the AOSA Annual Report, she finally approached me not long after my husband John died in 1988 with an offer that I could not refuse. She told me that she always knew I would one day accept. I am grateful for her perseverance.

Music always played a very important part in the life of Ayton School and although I did not play a musical instrument, I gained, by a sort of osmosis, a love of classical music. Bernard Porter was the music master when I arrived in 1950 and he gave me my lifelong love of Elgar. BJP was a devotee of Kathleen Ferrier and her beautiful voice, and because he attended Summer Schools where she performed, knew that she was suffering from cancer. I can still remember him getting up on the morning she died (8th October, 1953) and putting “What is Life to me without You” from Gluck’s “Orpheo and Euridice” which she used to sing so magnificently, on our little Decalion gramophone - there was not a dry eye in the Meeting House.

Along with many another, I used to love the occasional Sunday evening ‘pop’ music concerts, classical of course, put on for those in the senior school, by 1930s’ Old Scholar Brian Baird, and have never forgotten the frisson which went round the Meeting House when he played ‘The Foggy, Foggy Dew’. It was considered so risqué in those very innocent days.

got to: Presidential Address - page two

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