The story of how Ruth Rudge (pictured) found herself teaching Latin at West Heath in the mid-1950s, before she became headmistress (1965 – 1988), was told in her own words in an old school magazine (see full account below).

It contains some delightful and whimsical reminiscences including when the staff cottages were so cold during the winter that she took a tip from London tramps and wrapped herself in newspaper (The Times of course) when she was in bed!

Miss Rudge also recounts being offered employment by former headmistress Miss Phyllis Elliott without even having an interview. She didn’t meet Miss Phyllis Elliott until she travelled from Australia to England to take up the position.

They still didn’t meet at West Heath! Miss Rudge was instructed to go to Miss Elliott’s cottage in Steeple Claydon, which was close to Claydon House where the school had been evacuated during the war – see full story about Claydon House by CLICKING HERE.

This seems to back up previous speculation that Steeple Claydon was where Miss Elliott spent her retirement years after leaving West Heath.

Miss Rudge also mentions how attractive the American and Japanese Gardens were in the 1950s. Her description of the Japanese Garden in this era seems to contradict other stories that the area was hit by a doodle bug during the war, and this was the reason behind its deterioration.

Can any of the older members of WHOGA remember the Japanese gardens in their splendour and why they were left to deteriorate?

Here is a reprinted version of Miss Rudge’s story from the WHOGA magazine:

IMPRESSIONS OF WEST HEATH

By Ruth Rudge

Seven Years on and now that the last of 10 children who were at West Heath with me have left, I feel distanced enough to write some of the lasting impressions the school made upon me.

I first heard of West Heath in the Staffroom of the school at which I was teaching in Sydney, Australia, when I received a letter from Miss Phyllis Elliott inviting me to take on the ‘teaching of Latin throughout the school and make the children love it’.

My first thoughts were that it must be a peculiar school if it had to scour the ends of the earth to find a Latin teacher, and to offer the position without even an interview to a raw young colonial. Then I thought that the headmistress must be both different from any I had known and confident in herself to make such an offer, so by cable I accepted.

My knowledge of English schools had been gleaned from the reading of Dickens, but I reckoned that I could probably survive a year before moving on to a more modern conditions in America. My primary school geography had told me that the Gulf Stream kept England warm, despite its northern latitude.

Seven months later, four days after my arrival in England, during the summer holidays of 1950, with great trepidation, I met Miss Elliott, not, as sensibly planned, at her club in London – a meeting I had stupidly aborted by failing to turn up – but at Bletchley station, from where we sped through my first country lanes to her cottage in Steeple Claydon, she giving, and I listening to, a visually aided account of the Civil Wars.

Several hours later, not knowing much about the school’s war years at Claydon, I was taken back to Bletchley Station, happily anticipating the coming year. Miss Elliott had surpassed my hopes that she would be ‘different’. She remained a great individualist and a born teacher until she died.

My first sight of West Heath on a late September afternoon could hardly have been less Dickensian. The spaciousness and colour of the grounds, the liveliness and friendliness of the staff, (notably Ida Clark Lawrence. Mademoiselle, Sally Walker and Grace Ward), and the keenness and responsiveness of the children, as well as their naughtiness, soon dispelled any lingering doubts as to my survival there for a year, although I did warn Miss Elliot that maybe not all the children would ‘love Latin’ by the time I left.

My first fears began as winter set in. Snow fell on 9th of December and in those years, the Staff Cottages were unheated, except for a shilling-in-the-slot gas fire in each bedroom. For one who had few shillings, the heat soon stopped.

In Australia, I had been told that tramps on the Embankment slept wrapped for warmth in newspapers. I decided to follow suit and wrapped myself in ‘The Times’ in an attempt to sleep during the long, dark, cold nights of that first winter. I was full of admiration for my colleagues who seemed unconcerned about our Arctic environment.  What, I wondered., would it have been like without the Gulf Stream?

However, May and June did eventually arrive, and warmer days too. The glories of the Japanese garden were still evident in 1951, with its red and black arched bridge, its pagodas and the wisteria-covered summer house. There was also the American garden with its ordered blaze of colour and heady, evening smells.

Winter was now forgotten, and Miss Elliott cunningly asked me to stay on, ‘to see someone through their A levels’. One year gently became 37 and a third.

The charm of a school where pupils worked in trees and slept in flowers never palled. The pupils enthusiastically threw themselves into school activities such as the ‘Christmas Oratorio’ to an audience squashed uncomfortably in the Common Room, or latterly to an audience with more breathing space in the Music and Drama Hall.

There was also the high drama of a Christopher Fry play, or the bounce and sparkle of ‘Salad Days’. There was a determination to win the Dartford or Benenden tournament – what joy when we did – and to do ones best in O and A level examinations.

Always, I was aware of the mutual support and encouragement and sympathy between those actively participating and those on the side-lines.

A schools inspector was nonplussed by his day in the school, but his verbal report to me rang true. “It’s a peculiar school. The staff and children seem mutually to like each other and work happily together,” he said.

And the result? A marvellous body of women, who over the years have given me such friendship and love as I would never have imagined, and who are positive, active participants in their own worlds, readily sharing their gifts and their goods, sociable, individual, good-humoured and generous.

I met Anne Williamson after she took over as Headmistress, at her invitation, at West Heath on a sunny May afternoon during half term. Her first words to me were: “I’ve heard that it was always sunny when you were here.”

I forbore to mention:

• The great hurricane of 1987 and its horrific destruction of the trees
• The three solid months of circuit training when the whole of a Spring Term the games field lay under the snow
• The violent storm one night when the chimney over Poppy was struck by lightning and crashed down into the courtyard
• The occasions when the beginning of the January term was postponed because of snow, and the wonderfully hectic early ends to December terms when road and rail disruptions were forecast
• Or the year of the great floods in Sevenoaks when the main school cellar was full of water for three weeks before subsiding and we bedded and fed a coachload of elderly, confused day trippers who were trapped in Sevenoaks until the roads were passable again
• Or those first unbelievably cold, and unheated winters…

Other than these, I agreed with her.

* Editor’s note: She did succeed with at least one – I LOVED Latin.