Leigh School and World War II

LEIGH SCHOOL and the SECOND WORLD WAR   (Joyce Field, for Leigh & District Historical Society, June 2025)

EVACUEE CHILDREN ARRIVE AT LEIGH SCHOOL

On 1 September 1939, the evacuation of London schoolchildren began and Leigh received 176 children and 4 teachers from St Vincent RC Convent School Westminster and other evacuees (from other schools). The School Log figures differed, recording that “approximately 230 children were received today at the School under the Government Evacuation Scheme.  They belonged to the party brought by St Vincent’s RC School.”  (The school was used as a disbursing point).

As the Leigh School itself did not re-open until 2 October (following the hop-picking holidays), the evacuee children initially used the Institute rooms.  The girls and infants of St Vincents (plus a few brothers and sisters from other schools) attended from 2pm to 4.30pm, the boys from 9am to 12.30pm.  Once Leigh School re-opened (on 2 October) for Leigh children, they would attend from 9am to 12.30pm. This school sharing arrangement did not last long and the school began working full-time again on 6 November 1939 pupils were accommodated as follows:

Leigh School seniors and juniors in Class 1 room and small room;

Infants, with St Vincent’s Infants, in Infants’ room;

St Vincent’s Seniors (mostly girls) were accommodated at the Institute;

Juniors were in Class II room at the school premises;

Senior 1 St Vincent’s at the Institute.

The Log also listed the LCC staff (Local County Council), namely Miss C Leigh, Miss Clark, Miss O’Callaghan, Miss Griffin, Miss O’Brien, Miss Vanstone, Miss Fergus (Girls Dept); Miss V Fletcher, Mrs Joiner, Miss Lapthorn.  It is unclear whether these were all St Vincent staff, but Miss O’Brien, Mrs Joiner and Miss Linthorne were.  There is no mention of the regular Leigh staff in this list, such as Miss Ellis or Miss Buxton.  The school roll, which included the evacuated children, in December 1939 stood at 590.

Eventually the evacuees set up their own school in the village hall. The School Log.

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EVACUEE CHILDREN

Reactions from local children to the evacuees were mixed: “the St Vincent’s children were a little alien.”  However, many of the children got on well with the families on whom they were billeted, some forming lasting friendships, but it would have been desperately lonely for them. In the event, with no shots being fired or bombs falling in the early part of the war, by 1940 many evacuees began to return home.  But some did remain throughout the War.

Miss Winifred Ellis said that on 1 September 1939, “the school . . . suddenly found itself dealing with a large group of Roman Catholic evacuee children from Kensington, complete with their own, quite clearly, extremely forthright teachers who were nuns”.  She recalls how they assembled on the Sunday to receive the newcomers.  “There were 230 of them, plus their nuns and priest, Father Hatherway (sic).  We had some great fun with the evacuees but it wasn’t always easy.  We had the school in the morning and the evacuees had it in the afternoons.  Their head infants’ teacher was a nice little person but I didn’t always get on with her”.   (The reference to the school being divided was only until 6 November 1939).  She continues, “However, it was difficult with two schools sharing.  And they eventually moved down to the Village Hall.”

On 10 July 1944, the School Log reported on flying bombs and that “owing to increased enemy aerial activity it has been decided to evacuate those schoolchildren whose parents so wish.”  All the St Vincent’s party and 9 local children at Leigh school were sent away to Exeter. The school remained open as there were still 44 children in attendance, but there was still no lighting in the shelters which were frequently used during school hours.  The Log went on to say that “many children have been sent away privately and others are being taken by the parents with younger children when the official scheme begins later in the week.  A number of parents are refusing to send their children at all for the present.”  It goes on to say that “from today the mid-day meals which are brought from Edenbridge Cash and Carry kitchen are being served in the main classroom of the school.  The first class is now being held in the small classroom.”

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MEMORIES FROM EVACUEE CHILDREN

The evacuee children had their own stories. Gladys Edwards (later Gladys Hale) was seven when she came to Leigh.  When she and her fellow evacuees from St Vincent’s arrived, they were “all put into the school and local people came to choose us”.   Gladys had come with her three sisters and little brother.  “There wasn’t room for our school to go to the village one, so we were in the Village Hall, what’s called the Large Village Hall now I gather”.  She remembered that for Christmas 1939 they decorated the Village Hall with paper chains and did a little Nativity Play and had a party. However, she does not mention her time at the school and when her sister became fourteen that following summer, she had to leave school and go to work. And, so, all the Edwards children moved back to Victoria.

Another evacuee was Monica Gray who spent six years living at Oak Cottage. She had been sent from her Catholic School in Kensington (St Vincent’s) with others to Leigh.  She says that  because they were Catholics “it was thought better that we did not go to the Village School.  Anyway, we had brought our own teachers with us”.  She goes on to say that, “There was ill-will between the village children and evacuees.  We barely mixed with the village children.  There often used to be fights”.

Tony Scragg was another evacuee who was seven when he arrived in Leigh.  He remembers, as a small boy, holding his sister’s hand in the schoolplayground, in pitch darkness (the blackout) with our carrier bags of goodies, which our teachers had given us after we got off the train and looking at the grown-ups who walked along the line contemplating who and how many of us they could take into their homes.  But he again does not mention life at Leigh School, rather his life in Leigh  “My stay in Leigh was the most wonderful period of my young life! I was billeted on a small farm.  I had never seen a live cow, or any of the other animals.”  But he does recall the Battle of Britain raging overhead, the one time he mentions the word ‘school’.  “We were let out of school to watch the local Spitfire pilot do victory rolls over the village and occasionally drop little parachutes with messages.  I think he was Lord Hollendon’s (sic) son but that might have been wishful thinking”.

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THE SCHOOL DURING THE WAR

Some things did not change: in January 1940 the Managers’ Minutes reported severe weather which had frozen the water supply to the lavatories and the schools had to close until the supply was restored

There are occasional references to the War: on 16 August 1940, it was noted that “owing to an air raid warning the afternoon registers were marked late today”. 

The Blitz air-raids which began on 7 September 1940 (and would continue until 11 May 1941) meant that, at times, the numbers allowed to attend the school was limited and, again in the autumn of 1940, those who attended could only do so for half a day.  However, full attendance did recommence by December 1940, despite the Blitz, as verified in the School Log.

The Leigh School Managers’ meeting of January 1941 discussed plans for an air raid shelter which entailed moving the Schoolmaster’s wood shed and garage. It was completed during the summer of 1941.

In March 1942, the Managers agreed a scheme initiated by the Kent Education Committee and the Women’s Volunteer Service (WVS) to provide dinners for all schoolchildren. Meals would be sent from the “Peoples Restaurant” at Penshurst by the WVS Van and would be given out by local members of the WVS under Mrs Twitchell (of Park House), at the request of Mrs Sealy, the Vicar’s wife and WVS Village representative. Later, when the provision of school dinners became compulsory, this would be done by paid helpers.  School staff collected payments from the children and the headmaster was responsible for financial arrangements.

 

3 JULY 1944

There was one incident reported in the Managers’ Minutes that did have an impact on the school.  On 3 July 1944 an unexploded cannon shell (fired by an aeroplane) had been surreptitiously brought into school by James Longhurst.  It occurred during the temporary absence of the headmaster from the classroom. The boy began playing with it and the shell exploded with fatal results to Joan Chandler and himself.  Several children had fortunate escapes from flying fragments. The School ‘Correspondent’, Rev. Sealy, attended the Inquest and testified to the careful instructions given by the headmaster as to the danger of touching any such objects during the War and also to the absolute confidence of the School Managers in the headmaster’s care of the children. The School Log reported the incident. “At about 9.50 am a fatal accident occurred in the main classroom.  One of the boys James Longhurst and a girl Joan Chandler lost their lives owing to the explosion of a cannon shell which the boy had brought to school.  I immediately closed school for the day and on the advice of the chairman of the managers decided not to open tomorrow 4^th.”

The Log noted that on 5 July the Coroner’s inquest on the above had been held in the school ‘today’ and that the Coroner had reached the verdict of accidental death in both cases and had expressed his sympathy with the bereaved parents and the headmaster “whom he also exonerated from any suspicion of negligence”.

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FROM THE CHILDREN AT LEIGH SCHOOL DURING THE WAR

The effects of the War on school life were visible in the attendance levels, in the changing number of evacuees, in the various war efforts and fund raising by the School and its pupils and in the after-effects of the tragedy of 3 July 1944, with led to the departure of both Miss Ellis and Mr Gibbons.

We also have some thoughts from the children who lived during this difficult period.

John Holden remembered Miss Ellis and Mr Gibbons (“Gibbo”).  He also recalled that “a lot of the lessons took place in the Air Raid shelters at the rear of the school” where they went every time the siren went. “The head’s son was a brilliant cricketer and played for Leigh”.  At 11, John went to Sussex Road School, to where Mr Gibbons had moved following the War and where he became John’s housemaster.

The tragic incident of July 1944 is recalled:  June Chadwick was in the class when the mortar bomb exploded.  “Joan Chandler who was killed, was next to me. All I can remember was that she stood up and I went under the desk.  My hands were quite badly burnt.  After it, there wasn’t any counselling like you’d get today but I don’t think it was necessary really: we all got together in our own groups and talked.  It must have been much worse for the teachers – they must have felt so responsible.  Mr Gibbons left soon after”.  Betty (Elizabeth) Clark also recalls the explosion.  “When I was fourteen, I had finished the school curriculum and I was getting bored with the revision, so they let me work in the Adult Library doing the milk money and fixing the stamps in the savings books and things like that.  I was there the day the bomb went off.  I don’t think the full story ever really came out.  You can see why.  It was in the summer and I had been talking to one of the boys, James Longhurst, before school began.  He had a thing – it was like a big torch battery with cardboard round it.  He’d been sticking pins in it.  He said he’d found a dump with lots of them and the next day he was going to bring in one for each of the boys. I went back the Library and Mr Gibbons walked up to the telephone box at the bottom of Church Hill – we didn’t have one in the school – to give the number for school dinners as he always did.  While he was out, there was quite a babble next door and I was talking to Joan Chandler whose desk was just by the Library door.  James must have been telling some of the others about what he’d found and it went off and I was thrown back.  I must have been stunned because, when I came round, I was across the desk.  I thought that I’d lost my legs.  I went out to the shelter outside the school like a zombie but I came back into the classroom and saw everything.  Joan was sitting still at her desk with wide open, staring eyes.  Mr Gibbons was at the far end of the classroom and he was shouting at me to go down to the shelter.  At the shelter there were some boys who were sitting on another boy who was screaming ‘my brother’s lost his arm – I must go to him’.  Joan Chandler was so pretty.  She died of shock.  It was so terrible.  I had nightmares and sleepwalks.  Lots of the children did.  There was no counselling or anything to help us.  It was so hard to work in the classroom – we went back to school after a week.  I still can’t talk about the details.  There were the two funerals.  The flowers that came – they came from everywhere – all the schools around as well as all the village.  But nobody shed a tear.  We were brought up that way”      

John Knock recalled that during the War, there was an epidemic of scarlet fever in the Infants’ Class. “Maureen Haste and I and a few others didn’t catch it but most of the class did – probably over twenty of them.  They all had to go to an isolation hospital which was in Otford.”  As he remarks, it was quite a common thing in those days and could be dangerous.  And on a visit to Leigh School in 1998 to talk to Leigh children, he referred to the death of the two children, killed in 1944.  But he also talked about some of the changes in the main structure of the school since he left in 1947: that now (1998) all the toilets were enclosed, but for him, the boys’ toilets used to be open. The classroom windows have been lowered and there is a door out from the little room.  Double doors from the “top” classroom to the middle one have been filled in. The headmaster’s house is now the reception class downstairs and the school offices are upstairs. There is a new playground at the back where there was once the air raid shelter during the War. In 1941, the Reception Class was taught by Miss Ellis in the classroom nearest the High Street.  There was a gate on to the High Street but this was taken away for road safety reasons and the fence (wooden) around the main playground has been replaced by netting.