A Grounding for Life – A History of Maltman’s Green School –
By Cynthia Walton with Pauline HodderPrice £9.99 Mail order £10.50 including P&P
from Barn Books Ltd, e: cynthia.walton@gmail.com
Other information available from 0121 705 7178.
‘As well as providing an interesting and delightful record, the book stands as part of the history of educational experiment – a valuable resource for people working for better experience for our children.’ ’Professor Berry Mayall, Institute of Education, University of London.
A Grounding for Life – A History of Maltman’s Green School –This history describes an old and beautiful building in Gerrard’s Cross, Buckinghamshire - a house and land with occupants with Quaker connections in the 1700s to a Victorian family residence in the late 1890’s. In 1918 the building became Maltman’s Green School, founded by Miss Beatrice Chambers, Girton College Cambridge, to put her new educational ideas into practice, one of a handful of progressive or modern schools set up at that time. The book provides a unique insight into life in a girls’ boarding school, with first hand accounts from many old girls in her time as well as the eras of successive head mistresses ending with Maltman’s Green School today.
Miss Chambers’ aim was to ‘enable children to be themselves and put them in full possession of their lives.’ The school met the needs of the individual child and gave a grounding for life. Freedom and responsibility were its watchwords and girls of different ages were mixed up at tables at mealtimes and in dormitories, giving a family atmosphere. In the early days, there were no rules, no marks and attendance at lessons was voluntary. Known as the school which did no work, girls nevertheless gained places at universities and training colleges. The school aimed to develop intellect and character, and to encourage self expression, resourcefulness and initiative. Following the flu epidemic in 1918, there was great emphasis on good health and fresh air. Fresh good food was provided, much of it from the school gardens, and many girls slept out in the grounds and on the balcony. As well a normal academic subjects girls had practical work such as carpentry and pottery and there was great emphasis on the arts, especially music. Music has been the golden thread running through Maltman’s Green from Miss Holland’s provision of music lessons to talented girls at 6d a minute in 1918; memorable carol services, including When Christ was Born by Reineke so cherished by girls in the 1930s and 1940s; then on to Shirley Massey’s We’re all going to Bethlehem in Miss Burke’s timei and her yearly musical entertainments in the 1970s and 1980s, and finally to MG’s musical apotheosis in 2003 when the first Celebrate competition for Senior and Junior schools was put on by the BBC, and Maltman’s Green won the Junior Songs of Praise School Choir of the Year.
In 2001 Cynthia Walton, a Maltman’s Green golden oldie from the 1930s, put an advertisement in Saga Magazine’s reunions column, saying ‘let’s meet, let’s write a history of the school’. Pauline Hodder a retired Head of Art at Maltman’s Green School from 1968-88 was one of the people who replied. During the 1980s she had begun to collect historical material relating to the school, and had built up a considerable archive. Cynthia and Pauline met, Pauline Hodder lent her archives, and so the book began.
Cynthia Walton contacted many of her contemporaries in the 1930s for information about the early years– and there was an ever widening pool of knowledge, anecdotes, photos and artwork. Of special note was material from Ruth Behrens, Peggy Neal Green, and members of the Robinson family. Pauline Hodder’s material was augmented by reminiscences and photographs from her many school contacts. Miss Julia Reynolds the present Head of the school, and the previous Head, Mrs Madeleine Evans, contributed notes about their educational ethos and educational activities in their eras.
After Miss Chambers died in 1945, Maltman’s Green changed into a girls’ preparatory school. At one point the future of the school was threatened when the Bank of Scotland wanted to develop the school grounds, over 11 acres, as a housing project. But the school survived, grew and adapted to changing educational needs.
Today, Maltman’s Green School is a different school . It is alarge, well established non denominational day school for pupils from the age of three to 11. Apart from academic work the school excels in music and sport and has held onto its founder’s ethos of fulfilling a child’s potential and nurturing self expression, responsibility and confidence.
Some of today’s education academics such as Prof. Berry Mayall would like to see more pupil led schools, and more acceptance of the social spirit and imagination of pupils, and using teachers as facilitators. Tony Hubbard who prepared an Annual Digest of Inspection Reports for the Independent Schools Council in 2002, wrote that ‘the combination of public examinations with league tables often amounts to spoon feeding ….posing a risk of something British schools have always been good at, turning out young people to be inventive, creative, independent minded, even awkward.’
Mrs Evans, a Headmistress of Maltman’s Green in the 1980’s said ‘the great challenge in education today is to fit children for a future that we can only guess at. All we can say for sure is that it will be different from the past and will require a flexibility of skills and attitudes that most of us were not taught at school.' The wheel has come full circle. Many of Miss Chambers’ original ideas underline this educational philosophy, she abhorred spoon feeding and her ideas about project work, learning through play, less mass instruction and more group work, resourcefulness, initiative and the importance of extra curricular activities such as music, are vindicated.
Years later many old girls commented on the effect Miss Chambers had on their adult life –
‘a tackle anything’ quality as Pamela Neal Green an MG girl from the 1930s put it.
This is the very quality which is needed in our uncertain work of today.
For more Barns Books including 'Birmingham Made A Difference' by Cynthia Walton & Audrey Court.
