Life In Oxshott In 1940s And 50s Royal Kent School

A Memory of Oxshott.

I remember my first day at the Royal Kent School – 8th November 1948 – as recorded at entry no. 1450 in the school's original Admissions Register. It was a few weeks into the Autumn term, as in September that year I had been in hospital having my tonsils out. All my friends had started at the beginning of term so after being kept away I was really looking forward to joining them. But seeing my mother walk away past the classroom window I couldn't help crying...

I don't remember having any proper lessons that day. In the Infants room there were various toys that we could choose to play with: boxes of bricks, jigsaw puzzles, ABC picture books. On one of the tables there was a basket of knitting wool and small squares that other children had started. My stitches kept increasing as I knitted new ones but didn't slip the old ones off needle. After a few rows like this I hid my efforts at the bottom of the basket and hoped that nobody would notice.

As you went into school through the front door there were cloakrooms on either side – girls on the right, boys on the left. These were just places for hanging coats and shoe bags; the lavatories were outside at the other end of playground (which was just as well as they were always a bit smelly). The school was very small with only three classrooms. The Top Class was at the front, with a similar room behind for the Juniors (Mr Skinner). There was a partition between the Top Class and the Juniors, which could be folded back to make one big room, for example, for morning assembly. The Infants was a small room at the back (Miss Foxall). It had small tables and chairs, but the other classrooms had rows of desks in pairs, with lids and bench seats. There was a blackboard at the front of each room, with white chalk and a dusty board rubber.

Everyone walked to school; for the brickfields children this was a distance of nearly two miles each way. Some of us also walked home and back at dinnertime. There was no school uniform, we girls wore a dress or skirt, a white blouse and a cardigan. The boys mostly wore grey shorts and jumpers, and white shirts.

The school day always started with assembly, with everyone crowded into the Top Class room. One of the teachers played the piano and we sang from small green hymnbooks. In the Infants the lessons were reading, writing and arithmetic. Reading was taught from the Beacon Infant Readers, not proper stories but "Ruth has a kitty. John has a dog. John’s dog is Rover. Rover has the ball. It is the baby’s ball." It was very boring as I could already read by the time I started school. But soon Miss Brown tried me on some more difficult books and agreed that I could indeed read.

To practise writing we wrote whole lines of the same letter till we could do them neatly and all the same size. Then we progressed to copying words from the blackboard. Our lined exercise books had red margins, but we were always told to write starting at the edge of the page as paper was scarce. The arithmetic books had lovely squared paper to space out the numbers and signs. We spent a lot of the arithmetic lessons chanting the times tables. By the Top Class we were expected to know them all, right up to the 12 times and 13 times tables. The 12 times table was important for shillings and pence and there was a more complicated table with 10s and 12s: "12 pence one shilling, 20 pence one and eight (1/8d), 24 pence two shillings, 30 pence two and six (2/6d), 36 pence three shillings" and so on. You had to know all these by heart and the teacher would point to individuals: "What is seven eights?" "How many pence in five shillings?

When I started school the Headmistress was Miss Brown. She seemed rather fierce, and always wore tweed suits and horn-rimmed glasses. After she retired Miss Mayo took over. She was much younger and wore her blond hair in a plait round her head. Mr Skinner was strict but fun. He wore a tweed jacket with elbow patches, corduroy trousers, suede shoes and yellow socks which I thought very smart. I tried to persuade my father to wear yellow socks but he wouldn’t. Miss Foxall was new about a year after I started school. She was young and pretty with dark curly hair, really nice, I’d do anything for her. Miss Walker was also new a couple of years later. She had previously worked as a teacher in China, and must have been forced to leave when the Communists took over in 1949. She was an older lady but very handsome and always smartly dressed. In cold weather she used to wear a beautiful quilted Chinese jacket embroidered with dragons.

Every Wednesday afternoon we had a scripture lesson from the Vicar, Rev Ford (and later with Rev Herbert Evans). He would tell a Bible story and we had to recite the Catechism or learn a psalm. The authorities of this Church school obviously took seriously their duty to educate our souls as well as our minds. I also remember the prayer we said together every day at home time: "Lighten our darkness, we beseech thee, O Lord, and by the great mercy, defend us from all perils and dangers of this night..."

At morning playtime there was school milk, in 1/3 pint bottles drunk with a straw. It was always horribly warm and cheesy from being stored next to the radiator, or left out in the sun in summer. Then we all rushed out to the small tarmac playground at the back. We ran around playing 'it' or hopscotch; some children had fivestones, marbles or skipping ropes. In the autumn we all played conkers, with plenty of ammunition from the overhanging chestnut trees in a neighbouring garden. The owner used to shout at us over the fence when boys threw sticks to knock the conkers down.

We had PE in the playground too. Two of the class carried out the PE box – beanbags, skipping ropes, quoits, balls, and coloured diagonal bands to mark teams. We'd start with 'parade ground' exercises like star jumps, then make circles to throw and catch the balls, or teams in lines for 'pass the beanbag' races. In the summer we sometimes went to the Oxshott Sports Club to play rounders. I was always last when the teams were picked as couldn't see ball very well, although I could run quite fast.

School dinners were cooked somewhere else and arrived in large metal trays with lids. They were served by a rather grumpy dinner lady Mrs Pocock who also acted as school secretary. Dinners were 6d per day, so only half a crown (2/6d) for the whole week. My sisters and I usually went home for dinner at 12 o'clock, although this didn't give us long as we had to be back at school by 1 o'clock. Sometimes if our mother was going out for the day we stayed for school dinner. This was a real treat, especially the time in the playground afterwards. As far as I remember the food wasn’t too bad, although it was never very hot and the custard was a bit strange.

In the Top Class everyone took the 11+ exam. There was English and Arithmetic in the morning, and an Intelligence Test in the afternoon. I was the only one who passed that year although other children had in previous years. Two years later my sister Carolyn was dosed up with Oblivon beforehand as she was said to be 'highly strung'. Even so she didn't pass, which she said was because the invigilators were making a noise talking all the time. Initially she went to Hinchley Wood secondary modern, but after two years there she passed the 13+ exam for a grammar school place.

When she was about nine years old my other sister Alison was taken out of the Royal Kent School and sent to The Rowans in Leatherhead. The Royal Kent was getting very overcrowded so the Top Class (hers) was housed in the Men's Club at the bottom of Oakshade Road. This meant that a lot of teaching time was lost walking up and down the road between assembly, lessons and school dinners. The Rowans was a very disciplined prep school run by two fierce elderly ladies. The children had no choice but to work hard, and most, including Alison, passed the 11+.

To accommodate the increasing numbers of primary age children in Oxshott a bigger school was planned for a new site in Oakshade Road. This was the area we knew as Mr Wilson's field which backed on to our garden in the Ridgeway. After a public enquiry, the site was eventually compulsorily purchased in 1954. The builders' first task was to surround the site with chain-link fencing. We found that we could still get into the field by climbing over our fence and bending the chain-link to crawl underneath. I'm ashamed to say that we scratched our initials in the soft cement holding the concrete posts – they're probably still there somewhere in the undergrowth. The new school opened in 1958 but I had left by then.

[more to follow soon: Oxshott shops]

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