The Story of The Court

 

Brief History of Monkton Wyld School (1940-1982)

Kindly provided by Charles Bevan

The school was housed in what had been a large Victorian Gothic Parsonage built by a wealthy widow in 1847. She had the Parsonage and nearby St Andrews Church built to provide a living for her son-in-law to stop him taking her daughter off to live with him in India. She retained the services of Richard Cromwell Carpenter, a pupil of the famous architect Pugin, who designed the interior of Westminster Palace and Big Ben’s tower. It cost her cost her £10,000 (more than £1.0 million in today’s money). A smaller and easier to run rectory was built above the Church in 1900, and the Church of England sold the Parsonage to the Lawson sisters in 1901. They lived there until 1935 when they sold the building to Mr & Mrs Clarke, who used it as an up-market Guest House known as Monkton Wyld Court, and for a small preparatory school until the Second World War broke out.

Monkton Wyld School (MWS) opened in 1940 when the property was bought from the Clarkes by Karl and Eleanor Urban, with her university friends Humphrey and Joan Swingler for £3,000. Eleanor who was teaching at a school in Axminster before the war would have heard on the grapevine about the proposed sale of property, and around this time the government announced the ‘Pied Piper’ scheme under which children from cities were to be evacuated to the country. Encouraged by the scheme, the chance to buy the property and start her own school Eleanor persuaded a group of like-minded friends to join her in establishing MWS. The group included her old school friend, Freda Stooke, who had studied mathematics at Girton College in Cambridge, and Joan Swingler, Humphrey’s wife, who had been a colleague of Eleanor’s at Somerville College in Oxford. In 1943 Rosemary Mitchel, another Sommerville graduate joined the school.

Somerville College, or more specifically the influence of its famous liberal reform minded principal, Margery Fry, played a key role in the educational/intellectual philosophy of the school. Thus, it was non-conformist and more than a little anti-establishment. It was coeducational, children did not wear a uniform, staff were called by their Christian name, not ‘Sir’ or ‘Miss’ and the children played an active hands-on role in the running of the school: helping in the kitchen, with maintenance and on the small farm. Pupils also had an element of democratic influence in so far as they were encouraged to express their views on how things were run at whole school meetings.

MWS was one of a small cohort of ‘progressive’ schools that evolved in the early 20^th century in England. A weakness was it small size, in total there were usually only around 80 children ranging in age from of 8 to 18 at the school at any one time. This made teaching in traditional classrooms impossible as there were not enough children of similar age to fill a year group. Instead, children learnt individually in subject matter classroom using the ‘Dewey’ system. Children would visit a subject matter room and study on their own from books. If they needed help in understanding something they would go up to the subject matter teacher’s desk for assistance. A great strength was the practical education in the workshops and building maintenance run by Karl, a gifted craftsman. Over 42 years MWS provided an education for nearly seven hundred children, and while not a great commercial success it paid its way until its final years, and most, if not all, ex-students found employment.

It was set up as a company with the founders constituting a board of directors. However, in practice from the start all important decisions were taken by Eleanor. Problems began in 1960 when Karl died of lung cancer, and without him she began to lose confidence and sense of direction. In fact, she too was not well, and died in 1962 without appointing a successor. Her fellow founder directors, Rosemary Mitchell and Freda Stooke, who were planning their retirement, persuaded Peter Bide the longest serving senior staff members to become the Company Secretary or Principal. He managed to keep the school going for nearly 20 years. But changes to the national curriculum and too many children sent to the school by local authorities resulted in a fall in educational standards, and in 1971 there was the infamous Drugs Raid.

Thirty-three police officers arrived one morning to search the premises. They did not find any drugs, but they did find a girl’s notebook with tales of sexual activity. The Dorset press had a field day, and some children were withdrawn. One of the teachers at the time said with prescience that “the school will never be the same again”. Then in 1979 a pavilion inexplicably burnt down and Peter Bide decided to retire. In 1982 there was a third Inspectorate report that called for higher educational standards and better discipline, if the school licence was to be retained. Some of the staff tried to persuade the inspectorate to give them more time to make improvements, but by then the school had total debts of over £23,000, and without the founder’s determination and commitment to the school the majority of the staff accepted there was no alternative to closure.

At this point in time the school was effectively run by a single director, who, supported by his wife and a few of his colleagues decided to transform the school into a community. Legend has it that the director and his wife had visited the Findhorn Community in the north of Scotland, and wanted to start something similar at Monkton Wyld. They sold their house to pay off the school debts and effectively became the owners of the property.

 

Charles’ book ‘Monkton Wyld School: The history of a progressive school in Dorset, 1940-1982’, can be purchased from AMAZON HERE. It’s also possible to buy copies from Charles direct – EMAIL HERE.