Sixty Years Of Senior Prefects
7th May 2004
After 150 years the Senior Prefects gathered to celebrate 150 years of College education and to exchange their memories. It was hard to recognise the entrance to College and very strange to look across the garden from an unusual angle at the buildings. I could orientate myself around the big copper beech tree but the most poignant memories came from the faint but familiar smell of polish and wood in the Princess Hall. It was all still there but apart from the smell - so very much changed.
I did my entrance exam to College in St Bridget's which was then the Junior School and where I met Betty Mather (1935 - 1943) who has been a friend ever since. The Junior School was built shortly after we began our time in College, in 1935, and I have vivid memories of walking past the small black gate in Bayshill Road where bulletins of the dying Principal, Miss Sparks, were pinned just as bulletins of George V's demise were being pinned outside Buckingham Palace. Queen Mary visited College from her wartime home in the Cotswolds and College curtsied in unison, one, two, three, one, two, three, as Miss Townsend raised her arm behind a pillar in the Princess Hall. The Dream of Fair Women has been unveiled in the Princess Hall and they are dramatically eye-catching and indomitable. Is this why they were covered up in those far off days?
In Downside I thought I had been sent, at 10 years old, to a lunatic asylum because while we had our temperatures taken every morning we had to keep our toes off the fireside mat in the dormitory while Matron gave us 3 mouthfuls of pink gargle. Betty and I both have memories of walking from House to College in a silent crocodile, as a house punishment, because someone had scraped their chair after Grace at breakfast and no-one would own up. We still laugh when we remember Miss Wickham falling flat on her face with a pile of exercise books spilling across the floor and raising her head just enough to say "When I don't laugh it's not funny." I have passed that little educational gem on to two more generations.
I was thrilled to be invited to a buffet supper with surviving Senior Prefects to celebrate 150 years of College education. Memories do not take account of an ageing process, so I had imagined meeting Senior Prefects of revered memory before me and younger ones who had succeeded me just as they were when I left. I expected to see Shirley push back the green velvet curtains and walk with slow dignity onto the platform carrying Miss Popham's books or Bess, short and bouncy and smiling as she was when we met again at Medical School. But it wasn't like that. No-one older than me turned up and I only recognised Collette's name (The Hon Miss Colette Clark 1951) because her father had introduced me to Art History in a memorable lecture before she arrived.
34 of the 60 years of successive Senior Prefects attended and many were supported by their deputies. Jemima Kettle (Senior Prefect 2004), in her researches, may have discovered that we had more duties in common than I can remember but we had all walked the walk with the prayer books and had all read the lesson giving us our first experience of facing an audience in the Princess Hall.
It was a great education. We sat our exams, chose our careers and our husbands and decided how to manage our lives. It was marvellous to meet so many who knew College so well and highly entertaining to exchange our memories. I know we are all very grateful to Mrs Tuck, her staff and all those who assisted her in giving us such a very happy day.
Lady Joan Slack (Wheelwright, 1935-44)