A Very Busy Time

The end of June 1956 is a very busy time in Alice’s life, not only does she have revision for the looming exams but has teaching practice write-ups to complete.  Repeat school visits in Hertfordshire are also on the cards to look at schools selected for their architecture and good results.

The Demonstration appears to be an important event in the college year, Alice is attending practices and is involved in scene shifting, dress changes, policemen (sic) and waitressing; although it appears that the 2^nd & 3^rd years will be actually putting on the demonstration.  The annual church fete is also on the calendar and the 1^st years are in charge of running this.   

The 4^th July is the Inter Year Athletics meeting which Alice is training daily for and complains she is in the 800 yards this year which means extra training as she has further to run. There is also a 3^rd year sale on the same day where she plans to buy items cheaper in preparation for next year.

A visit to Mullion Camp in Cornwall is also looming large as Alice requests some extra items to take with her and reminds her parents the fees are now due for it.

A surprising element to Alice’s teacher training is a visit to Cambridge for dissections which she states:  ‘not a particularly enjoyable day but very interesting’

The final part of Alice’s letter home tells of spending Sunday ‘stitching and tailoring for a 3^rd year’, in preparation for the Demonstration, a sewing machine was borrowed from the vicar to help with this and Alice was very pleased with the results.

The final paragraph tells of her getting her hair cut by another 1^st year student who did well but ‘cut off so much we had to find a carpet sweeper to clean up the mess.’

Making alterations for Demonstration Day, 1933

Demonstration Day Programme, 1956

Dance Demonstration performed by senior students, c.1942-1945

Wet, cold and uneventful

On the 10th June, 1956 Alice writes home to report a safe journey back to a Bedford that is unseasonably bitterly cold and wet. The poor weather seems to affect many aspects of college life: washing and ironing is one of the few activities they can get on with although, with no chance of being allowed to have fires lit in their rooms, snuggling up in bed seems to be the preferred place to be. 

Lessons must go on though, regardless of the whims of weather, and Alice has a very busy workload doing prep for classes as well as being out with the children.
A nature walk on Dunstable Downs has to be cancelled because of steady rain and even some thunderstorms. 
Outdoor pools proliferated in the first half of the century and even into the 1950s it is likely that those such as the one at Bedford School would still be in use; perhaps it is here or at the High School where Alice finds herself teaching a class outdoors one damp Friday morning. She ruefully comments that it was wetter for the instructor than for those actually in the water. 

Alice’s writing paper on this occasion also warranted an apology as it was so thin that the ink on the reverse showed through and made it quite hard to decipher in places, which she acknowledges in a footnote suggesting to her parents that holding the paper at an angle might help.

As we cannot do that here, a transcript of the third paragraph is given, showing that the ladies of the college have interests far beyond Bedford and are encouraged to maintain a world view:

Wednesday evening some of us went to a missionary meeting in the town for news of a Bedford [sic] in India and 2 friends of college in Pakistan. The talk was given by a man who used to live opposite college. He said he knew quite a lot about the P.E. college therefore!

In the 1950s the communality of college is still part of the day to day norm but even this is disrupted due to bad weather when one Saturday, languishing in their beds after a cold and tiring week, most of Alice’s house oversleep thereby missing breakfast completely.

 

Bedford School's outdoor swimming pool, mid 20th century

May 1956

Alice arrives back in Bedford for the summer term in early May 1956 and finds herself in the midst of a hot and sunny spell. Writing home on 6th May she says that the area around the College has been transformed, with the leaves on the trees along Lansdowne Road now hiding the houses. She and the other students are making the most of the sun.

The College’s new gymnasium is preparing for its official opening on 29th June and Alice sent her parents a cutting from a feature story on the gym in the Bedfordshire Times and Standard. Stories about the new gym also apparently featured in the Evening Standard and the Times Educational Supplement. The students resort to subterfuge when out and about in town to ensure that the Daily Mirror does not learn anything about the new building, as they are also interested in the story.

Term started on Saturday 5th with an Anatomy class and Athletics trials. On the day after Alice writes her letter, she is scheduled to take part in swimming, tennis and Modern Dance.

The following day, Tuesday 7th, a group photograph of the College’s students is due to be taken.

 

Towards the end of her letter Alice mentions that she is on her ‘locking up week of 11pm’. The college’s rules stated that students could have evening leave until 11pm (9.30pm on Sundays) by signing in and out of the book in their house. Lock up was at 11pm unless a student received special permission for a later return.

College Plays and Performances

In her letter from 24^th March it is nearing the end of the spring term and Alice refers to end of term activities such as teaching her last lesson, receiving grades, sitting an anatomy test and fundraising for a conference trip by having a bob-a-job week. 

Among the things she mentions is a College Play ‘Christopher Columbus’ which was an adaptation of a play for radio by Louis MacNeice, first broadcast on the BBC in 1942. Alice was not in the play herself but these were clearly important occasions in the College calendar as Alice talks about inviting an external visitor along and waiting for critiques to appear in the local press. Tickets for this production were charged at 2s 6d and 1s 6d, which would be approx. £2.80 and £1.60 today. By Alice’s time at the College, posters and programmes for these performances were printed (as below) but in the earlier days they were all hand produced. The Archive holds some beautiful handwritten and illustrated programmes from earlier years, including some believed to have been illustrated by Cicely Read who was a student at the College from 1909-1911 and went on to become Principal for a short time before her sudden death in 1949.

Programme for the production 'Christopher Columbus'

Dancing and Ice skating

It is February 1956 and very cold, with snow and freezing conditions.  Alice mentions a Varsity Fives match being played between Oxford and Cambridge in Bedford.  This was a Rugby Fives* match which was won 238-228 by Cambridge.  The Varsity Fives matches were played from1925 to the present day with the matches from 1949 to 1956 being held at Bedford Modern, so Alice met players from the final contest here in Bedford.

*Rugby Fives is a handball game similar to squash played in an enclosed court between two players (singles) or between two teams of two players each (doubles), the aim being to hit the ball above a ‘bar’ across the front wall in such a way that the opposition cannot return it before a second bounce.  The ball is slightly larger than a golf ball, leather-coated and hard.  Players wear leather padded gloves on both hands, with which they hit the ball.

The cold conditions mean that Alice experiences some different sporting activities in her week at college, with ice skating taking place instead of hockey.  Alice and other students often skated on the boating lake for fun, although it is unlikely that actual lessons took place there as students described having to jump onto the safe part of the ice!  We know that in the 1920s, ice skating took place on flooded fields in Goldington village.

Alice had the excitement of a first year dance to help warm up and in her previous letters, she describes decorating the gym with enormous back cloths made of pasted together newspapers with wall paper strips on top of them.  The theme of the dance was air travel and Alice sent the following request home for items to wear to the dance:-

 

 

Skating on flooded fields in Goldington, c.1920s