September 30th - Message from the Headmaster

Dear Parents

Tomorrow we celebrate the founding of the school now in its 99th year. I share with you today what the Head Teachers wrote about the school in their introduction to the first magazine in 1928. It will serve as a reminder to us all of our long heritage. You will find immediate echoes of our present school both in sentiment, educational philosophy and school procedures.

It has fallen to my lot to write the first words of the first number of our first magazine. Therefore I shall make this simply a greeting to girls both "Old" and "Present," in all corners of the world, from 1912 at St Etheldreda’s and the original girl (as she pleases to style herself) to those at Battle Abbey in 1928. We hope that the magazine will serve as another bond to hold our interests together. We want news of, and contributions form, everyone. Old Girls, we want to know where you are, what work you are doing, and whom you are marrying, - all of the utmost importance to those of us on this side of the Gateway.

Now, here on the terrace, looking down on thousands of white and purple crocuses opening their golden hearts to the sun, then up to our beautiful Gateway, I am conscious of our only ghosts-brown-tunic-ed and brown-legged. My thoughts stray from those who make a perpetual symphony of Youth around me to those who have passed through the Gateway to Life in the big World of Grown-ups, and to them I would send a special message. It is simply this, - To all who have loved their school, to them does it belong for ever. You are still links in a precious chain whose strength and work are drawing us slowly, but ever surely, up and always up away from the commonplace, nearer the Ideal. You wear our badge, and all you do does matter to us. In the hurly-burly of everyday life these things are not said, - they appear to be forgotten – they are not. The Gateway is ever open to you, you are ever welcome in our hearts and in our home.

Yours sincerely,
Margaret Jacoby

In the same magazine was a brief history of the school:

When St. Etheldreda’s was started, at Bexhill-on-Sea, in the summer of 1912, the School numbered only three pupils; in two years there were twenty three. In the Spring of 1922 Margaret Jacoby was taking some friends to see the grounds of Battle Abbey when it occurred to her that it would be an excellent place for a school, and in two months negotiations were completed, and the lease was signed on July 5th, 1922. When the move to the Abbey took place in September there were thirty five girls; the School grew so quickly that the next term there were fifty, by the following May seventy two, and very soon a hundred, the School’s full number.

By an interesting coincidence the School began its first term at the Abbey on September 22nd, the anniversary of the landing of William the Conqueror at Pevensey, and the first Hockey match was played and won against a boy’s school on October 14th, the anniversary of the Battle of Hastings.

The article goes on to describe the founding of the house system in 1926. Still later in the magazine Helen Sheehan Dare, the other co-founder of the school writes:

When a girl comes to us we set about preparing her for life but who knows what that life will be by the time she is 18. It is to the task of keeping pace with its ever shifting problems that the modern educator sets him or herself…….. I am going to leave one word of advice – keep your minds young. Nothing hinders human progress so much as the attitude of those vast hordes of so called educated people to whose minds all things new are denied access. Never turn round on the rising generation and tell it it is going to the dogs. Try to keep pace with it and find out where it is really going. If there is one real blessing I would issue it is that your education may never be complete.

Today we look forward and back, we hold fast that which is good and adapt to the demands of the changing world.

Roger Clark - Headmaster