8 Manor Gardens,
Thorner,
Leeds.
12th September, 1961
Dear All,
I should like to try to set the scene for the 21st birthday party. After a week of rain and storm we were very fortunate to have a day of sunshine and warmth.
At 3.30 p .m. about 110 old scholars, former parents and friends gathered in the music room. For those of you who remember the music room, picture the chairs in a semi-circle facing the fireplace, decorated with flowers from the dance the previous night. Kenneth and Frances in the centre front facing the platform (for us, a black and yellow formica-topped table). Mr. Lockett, a parent since 1942, was the Chairman and with him were Professor John MacMurray, Chairman of the Governors since the school's inception, Barry Whittaker, one of the first pupils and Louis Jones; and everyone knows how long Louis has been on the staff. .On the table, a small vase of dark red roses; and, well-covered from view until the actual moment of presentation, laid out on black velvet were the gifts - a Swedish stainless steel tea and coffee set and tray, a cheque and a book containing the names of all those associated with the gifts. It was of dark green leather with Wennington School 1940-1961 in plain gilt lettering on the cover, the inside covers depicting the life of the school (designed by Colin Dick).
Addressing the gathering Mr. Lockett said:
"Friends of Wennington School, I am not going to say Ladies and Gentlemen, this is a family party and we are all friends of Wennington School.
On Friday night I noticed my wife was reading a book called "A Delivery of Furies" and I was taken back 20 years to a day when I was standing on Green Aire Station, Lancaster, with my small son. This was in January 1942 I think. A gentleman approached me and asked would I mind taking his children up to Wennington. Looking back I think he handed over to me a commando of the British Army. Then a lady approached me and made the same request. I ended up with quite a few children all going to Wennington and they were all talking about someone called Kenneth and Frances.
When the train came in they spread themselves over the whole coach, and when we arrived at Wennington they exploded out of the train. The train was still left there intact which was some form of consolation. The children went straight through the village of Wennington, leaving me far behind, and that was my son's fond farewell; I didn't see him again for 12 weeks. I went to the school and said to the man at the door "Please sign for one delivery of furies". The man signed "Kenneth" and he wrote underneath "unexamined". Kenneth then went inside and met Frances and said "The furies have arrived" Frances immediately put half a sheep into the pan. Then Frances met Louis and said "The furies have arrived", and Louis put a further load of fuel on the pottery kiln. Louis then said "Phyllis, the furies have arrived", and Phyllis promptly said a prayer for the safety of all children, and then said "let battle commence".
Well this has been going on for 21 years. Now this afternoon we are here on a great occasion. It is not a solemn one. We are here to pay tribute to Kenneth and Frances for the way they have run the school for 21 years, and we are going to show them our esteem and affection for them.
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The train at that station 20 years ago always amazes me. The children just disappeared. They left the adult world and went into a world of their own which they shared with Kenneth and Frances, or rather they weregoing into Kenneth's and Frances's wold and were going to share it with them. And the same applies to me. For 20 years I have been coming to this school. There must be something about the school which makes children disappear into it. I don't know what the formula is for a good school; I don’t know if there is a formula for such things.
Early this year I came across a quotation from Paul Claudell, a French scholar and author and a great lover of music. He says this "We absorb them into the concert; they are nothing but expectation and attention". That to me - and I hope to you - describes this school. The children were absorbed and their expectation was high. The word concert is a wonderful word, it means everybody doing something altogether. The Wennington concert has been going on for 21 years, and I would like to say that Kenneth is the conductor, and that the leader of the orchestra is Frances.
This afternoon I would like you to feel as I do, that we are all of one heart in this, that this is a concert and we are here to show our appreciation for the 21 years in which Kenneth and Frances have laboured on our behalf". Applause.
He then asked Professor MacMurray to say a few words about the school, he said:
"Kenneth and Frances, and Friends of Wennington School.
I cannot tell you how happy I am to have an opportunity to speak to you for a moment or two about Wennington and to share with you the celebration of its coming of age. Twenty-one years is a long time if you are running a school. I have been closely in touch with this school from the very beginning, and I wish I knew how to express in a few words my admiration of the purpose and ingenuity necessary to get the school to function at all in the early days, and then to bring it through the years of its youth to its present state, where we can be sure it will go on as one of the established schools but with a quality of its own, something of its own to contribute to the life of the country. There have been plenty of crises in these 21 years; indeed, behind the scenes, crisis has been a usual condition. There have been few times when everything was cosy and everything went uneventfully.
The best crisis was when the school moved from its first few years of life at Wennington, to Wetherby. The founding of Wennington was marvellous enough, for it was founded in the first of the heroic years of the last war, at a time when there was nobody available for teaching unless exempted, when it was almost impossible to found anything, and when everybody's energy and thought were occupied with what was happening in France. The seemingly impossible was actually achieved. I can still remember those very early years when nobody, to begin with, had any salaries and everybody shared and shared alike, including the headmaster, whatever was available. Then after a few years the school moved to Wetherby, having bought, by a piece of financial wizardry, this magnificent house. This piece of achievement alone would make a wonderful record. Since then we have become an incorporated school with governors and all the usual paraphernalia; that didn't really matter, for the business of the Governors was, and always remains, to support Kenneth and Frances.
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The school wasinspected and recognised and put on the map, but all through these years there has been no respite; for these two people it has been a continuous struggle to see that the school's needs were met. We were always in the curious position that if only we could have a few more pupils we would be perfectly happy and would be able to face the coming year without the feeling that we might go bankrupt in the middle of it. If only we could have a few more pupils then we would be able to provide a few more rooms; but we couldn't take any more pupils because we did not have the rooms. Thus we were frustrated both ways. So we waited, until we discovered a few years ago for the first time that the school was really established, established in the sense that we could now feel that the future was secure and we could look forward, not wholly without worries, but certainly without thefear that something serious would happen.
I would like to express to Kenneth and Frances what you would all like to say to them on this occasion, for all of us who have any connection with Wennington owe something to them; and we would very much like to use this opportunity, on the school's twenty-first birthday, to show our appreciation. Now what shall we say?
I think I might begin by saying, on an occasion like this, that Wennington School is Kenneth and Frances. It is their creation, and their ideas make it the kind of school it is. Their labour for fulfilment, their determination and courage, have carried it through these years; and this we shall not forget. They are the people who have made the school and who are expressed in its character and its detail, in what it does for its pupils. We would like to say, too, how much we admire Kenneth; he is, of course, a very remarkable person. There are not many like him in the world; if there were it would be a better place, also a more energetic one for one of the things we do admire is his inexhaustible energy, which makes the rest of us feel dizzy. That energy is not merely guided by insight and common-sense; it is expended in love - love for children. For each individual he has a place in his heart and there must already be a large number, some hundreds of people, pupils of this school, who look back with gratitude and think of what he has meant to them. We are full of admiration for what he has done, and we are proud of him and would like to express that admiration of our pride. With it our deep affection.
For Frances the same things must be said. And this - that she has stood by Kenneth, and that takes a bit of doing! She has helped to keep him on the rails. She has always been the kind of person on whom, in the last resort, one falls back, knowing that she will cope with the crisis, whatever its nature, whether it is domestic or teaching.
So together they have made this school and earned our admiration and gratitude and affection, and this afternoon we are here just to express how happy we are to have known them during these years and how grateful we are for what they have meant to us, how proud we are of the great work they have done. They have made the school stand for something in our lives, and in this respect there is, so far as I know no other school like it.
We thank you, Kenneth and Frances, and would like to wish great things for you in the years to come".
After much applause Mr. Lockett asked Barry Whittaker to present the gifts to Kenneth and Frances. He said:
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“We hope you will accept this tea and coffee service, which will remind you of us occasionally. Also this cheque, which is to be regarded as purely personal, not to be used for any school purpose, with the best wishes of those whose names are inscribed in the book”.
Amid much applause Kenneth rose to reply.
“We knew this was going to be a moving experience and we have been bracing ourselves against our tears. The detailed nature of this occasion was kept secret from me and I had no speech ready; I don’t know what to say. What I have found under the black cloth is very welcome and you may be sure that it will be used very often to entertain members of Wennington and our many visitors, and that we shall always remember you when we use it.
Mr. Lockett has, however, given me an opening for a speech, by his reference to the train from GreenAire to Wennington. It gives me an opportunity to tell a story of the very early days of the school during the war and when it was in Lancashire. It's a story worth telling, if only because it shows the unexpected results of our unusual habit of using Christian names.
We had been advertising for a teacher and I arranged for a young woman to come to the school for interview. I went down to Lancaster Castle station to meet her and I knew I should recognise her, for I had met her once or twice some years previously. Now between Lancaster Castle station and Green Aire there is a little electric connecting train. The train from London was very late and I knew it was going to be difficult to get the young woman over to the other station in time to catch the train to Wennington. Seeing her get out of the carriage, I just yelled “Come on!”, grabbed her and ran. I got her over the bridge, threw her into the connecting train and off it went. When we jumped out at Green Aire, the Wennington train was just starting; I pushed her into the last compartment and hurled myself in after her. It was a long war-time train and it had to stop twice at the intervening stations, the passengers at the back end having to wait to get out until the train had moved up a bit. I expected it would do this at Wennington. The front end duly discharged its passengers and the train began to move. I was looking out of the window, waiting for it to stop again. The signal box is at the lower end of the platform at Wennington and the signalman knew me. As I passed he shouted; "They're not stopping pull the cord!” This gave me my first and only opportunity to pull the communication cord, a legitimate opportunity, an opportunity I couldn't miss. I pulled it, but nothing happened immediately except the hissing of air into the brakes. The engine driver, who had a very long train and was on an up-gradient, just put on more steam and the train went on struggling up towards Bentham. About a mile out of Wennington on the way to Bentham there's a pool in the river Wenning that the school used to use for bathing. When the engine finally gave up the struggle, the train stopped with our compartment just opposite this spot. Now I am usually very shy where females are concerned. (I know my girl pupils will not believe this is true, but it is - or was twenty years ago)…But there are times when one has to act and when there is only one thing to do. I opened the door and jumped down on to the track. If any of you have got down on to the track from a railway train you will know how high the floor of the compartment is above the ground. It is enormous, and the bank shelved down a long way. I found my eyes on a level with the girl's feet. Now what do you do when you've got to get a girl out of a train and she is way up there? The only thing to do was to look up and say “Jump!” She
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was a very attractive girl too...The whole school was by this time looking up at us; they would be bathing just at that time of course: They roared their applause as I held up my arms to her and she jumped. At that moment the guard arrived. There was a contrast between the romantic scene and the guard's language, which was largelyasuccession of B---s. The school enjoyed that too. I told the guard that I thoughtthe signalman was in supreme charge of the line and that therefore I had done the right thing. We got away from him eventually and walked down the track to Wennington. That isn't quite the end of the story. I interviewed her and saw her off again, saying that we would discuss the matter further by post. In the correspondence that followed she addressed me as “Dear Kenneth". It was a pity that her qualifications weren't quite what we needed.
Rather more seriously, one of the brightest memories in my mind is of Dorothy Lockett, in semi-military uniform, descending from the driver's cab of a large blue van. I forget what were the letters on the van, but they were of some wartime government department; and this reminds me warmly of the way parents came and left their children with us, going away to do their war-time business or to their posts in the armed or civil defence services, making us feel overwhelmed by the trust they were putting in us at a time when people needed help with their children so much. A delightful characteristic of this school, from then onwards and to the present day, is the intimacy and warmth of the relationships between us and parents, making us feel that the school is not just an institution but a rather large family. Several of our recently-leaving pupils have said that so strong was this feeling in them that the thought of leaving was distressing to think about in spite of the interesting life that lay ahead.
The Chairman of the Governors has said some very encouraging things about Frances and myself, but this makes us feel very humble. It is a humbling experience to be running a school. When I make something good in the workshop, perhaps for fun during holiday leisure, I can look at it and say “By jove, that's jolly good!”; but running a school you cannot behave like that, for you have very little idea how much you have done or not done for a child. When boys and girls leave the school who are really fine people, you cannot say “that is my work and it's good” for they mighthavebecome the people they are whatever school they went to.
Last night I was dancing with one of the girls - one about to go to college - and she remarked on the number of old scholars present, asking me wasn't it rather a wonderful experience and wasn't I proud. I said “No, it makes me want to go and hide in a corner”. "Why ever do you feel like that?" she asked. I explained that all these people who have grown up before my eyes seem so big and confident, so well away into the world; they seem like travellers on important business who have gone off on a train, leaving me behind on the platform. Saying good-bye to those leaving is often like that - a somewhat melancholy feeling.
But this occasion is also a very encouraging one, for so many have come back to look at us. And there are sometimes unexpected events that help me to take a pride in the school. One of this sort happened the other day. We needed to make a new appointment to the Governors to replace Mr. Eric Cockcroft, who to our sorrow had to resign recently. We had thought of a certain university don, and it happened that I had to see him about other matters. I left my request to the last possible minute, for I was hesitant, knowing that he was one of the busiest of men, with a great deal of administrative as well as teaching work to do. Eventually I plucked up the courage
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to ask him whether he could possibly find the time to help us in this way. He sat straight up and said "Why this is an honour!" He put out his hand, with the words: "Right, I'll do it.” Kenneth sat down amid much applause.
Finally to calls of Frances, Frances she stepped forward and said:
“Well, Kenneth has said so much; he does not leave me a great deal to say. Thank you all very much. But I also want to say that this ramshackle castle in the air would not have been built and would not have been kept going if it had not been for all the various staff who have joined us and who have worked with us from the time we began right to the present day. Many of those past staff and present staff are with us today. I want to thank you very very much for the way in which you have supported us. I can quite see we have a character, we two! Thank you very much forthis magnificent present; I shall simply love having it.”
And when we had shown our appreciation of all that had had been said, in the usual way, Mr. Lockett announced that tea would be served in the Junior School Garden. And there, under the beech tree was a beautiful 21st birthday cake which by some happy chance was twice as large as was expected so every one was able to really taste it. Kenneth and Frances cut it and while everyone had tea, Mr. Whitehouse, and Tommy James wielded knives right merrily until all were served. Meanwhile guests renewed acquaintance and much was heard of “Do you remember and have you seen”, until a long time later, reluctantly, good-byes were said, the remains of the cake carried indoors and the shadows lengthened under the trees. Time indeed for all those connected with arranging this very happy ceremony to gather once more in the Library and begin work for another year in the history of the Wennington School Association.
Yours sincerely,
MILDRED WHITEHOUSE Hon. Sec.