July 2008

Anne Canning In conversation ...

...with Anne Stammers (formerly Wales). Anne arrived in 1948 at the age of 20 to take up her first teaching post at Reydon School. She settled here married her husband John and they brought up their family in Southwold. Her involvement with the local schools has spanned over 60 years.

Did your family originally come from this area?
No, towards the end of the nineteenth century my paternal grandfather had sailed from Dublin to Liverpool to work for the GPO as a marine engineer. When he became involved in some sort of legal rights protest the GPO hastily called him to London and told him he was to be posted to the Lleyn Peninsula in North Wales. He settled there and was responsible for the telegraphs through to Ireland. I think my father was one of eight children, and being the second child was sent to London with his brother to Kings College School as a boarder. From there he went on to train as an electrical engineer. He had a break from this during the First World War, when he joined the Royal Flying Corps. He married my mother in about 1925. My mother’s family were from the Midlands and my maternal grandfather was an architect. My maternal grandmother was one of a large family.

Did your parents settle in Wales or the Midlands?
Neither, when my parents married they lived in Streatham Common in London, which is where I was born. My father obtained his degree and had a job with the GPO as an electrical engineer. When I was about two he applied and was accepted for a job in Madras in India on a four and a half year contract. So, in about 1929 I think it was, we all sailed to Madras, where father was to lecture at the college of engineering at Guindi. I think my grandmother came too. I had a very sort of loving, careful and quite protected background I suppose and most of my contacts were with the children of ex-pats.

One of my father’s sisters was also there working as a governess to the Nawab of Hyderabad’s children (two little girls). Just before we came back to England we were invited to the Nawab’s home for Christmas. By this time suppose I was about six and now had a small brother who was about two and a half. My memories of that Christmas are that the Begum (the Nawab’s wife) was in purdah, which meant that when they had the Christmas party she couldn’t attend. My brother and I were taken with her and the other children to a landing where there was a little window. Through this window we could look down and see the party going on. It was an evening party, definitely for adults only, and it was exciting to be able to view it if only from afar. A few days later we were taken to a party for children. What I remember most about it is travelling in the purdah car with all the blinds down. It was a strange experience.

They had a third child, a boy who the Begum didn’t see very much because he was being educated completely differently to the girls (who my aunt was governess to).

I didn’t go to school in India, but attended the odd kindergarten when we went up to live in the hills during the hot season. When the contract was up my parents decided to come home, my grandmother having already gone back to England after my brother was born. I was six and a half by the time we sailed home and needed to start proper school. When we arrived back in England we lodged near mother’s relations in the Midlands. We did a sort of grand tour of father’s relations in Wales and mother’s in the Sutton Coldfield area, while they decided what father was going to do and where he was going to work.

What did they decide?
Father was keen on London so they finally bought a semi-detached house on a new estate at Hatch End near Pinner. There were still houses being built around us when the four of us moved in. I went to a small private preparatory school in Hatch End and my brother joined the same school later. Father had mostly lecturing jobs and money was tight – I don’t think father was a great one for budgeting. However, we never lacked because we always received lavish presents from our aunts and grandparents. We were taken to London periodically for shopping and sightseeing trips. I have a memory of being taken to London for the funeral of King George V; we all wore black armbands.

Were you living in Hatch End during the Second World War?
During the holidays we would go and stay with relatives in Devon. There was a great uncle who ran a boarding house and a great aunt (his sister) who was keen on children, so we would go and stay every September. The aunt was a bit of a pain actually; she was stone deaf and was always sort of doing her best for you – which we children found rather tiresome.

By 1939, when I was just coming up for my 12th birthday, they had moved from the boarding house to Bantham in the Kingsbridge area, which was where we were staying when war broke out. My father, having been in the Royal Flying Corps, was immediately called up. This meant that my mother, brother and I ended up staying there while father was posted.

We were still on school holidays from our prep’ school and my brother and I were out one day with friend when we were stopped by an attendance officer who wanted to know why we weren’t at school, because the local schools were all back by then. The upshot was that he visited my mother and we had to immediately start school in Thurlestone.

It was soon discovered that at 12 I was too old for the primary school so I then had to go on the bus to Kingsbridge. This was good for me in the long run, but my rather precious childhood meant that I hadn’t really mixed with other children very much. I found I got teased terribly, not least because my clothing was different. An aunt had a niece at St Felix so I ended up with some of her “mufti” clothes. This didn’t help at all, because a grey flannel suit and an umbrella were not the usual attire for the children at my school. I had a dress with an eight-inch zip at the back and everyone in the dinner queue undid it. We stayed in Devon for two years so I just had to learn to deal with it and to mix with the other children.

My brother was about nine and he had no difficulty. He was always off with his school friends who were mostly the children of farm workers, many of whom had to wear sacking to keep them dry when it rained. You could buy milk at break time for a halfpenny a bottle and my brother, who always had plenty of halfpennies, would stock up with bottles of milk to stave off any hunger and then disappear with his friends, getting into all kinds of escapades. Mother would worry about what he was getting up to. He hadn’t made himself very popular with our great uncle either, especially when uncle fell into the tank trap that my brother had dug in the garden. Because of the families’ concerns, it was decided to get him into the Bishop Vesey’s Grammar School at Sutton Coldfield. This was near my grandmother, who would be there to keep an eye on things. So my brother went there as a boarder and I stayed on in Devon with mother.

Where did you go from there?
Soon after my brother went off to his grammar school, father was posted to Lincolnshire and mother thought it would be a good idea for us to move there to join him. Everything was fixed up, but it turned out to be a completely abortive attempt. We had moved up to Sutton Coldfield as a sort of first stage of the journey. Then, almost as soon as we were due to move to Lincolnshire, father was sent to man a radar station in Kingswear which was about fifteen miles from where we had been living in Devon. The idea was abandoned altogether; father went to Devon and we went into lodgings for a time in Sutton Coldfield.

Apart from all the upheaval of moving homes and schools was there anything else that affected your lives during the war?
Harking briefly back to the beginning of the war, we used to see all the flashes of the bombs going off at Plymouth, but we weren’t really affected. By the time we got to the Midlands they were beginning to raid Birmingham and we spent a lot of time under the stairs in the lodgings. The couple we lodged with had strong religious beliefs and maintained that if we were going to be hit we would be, so they hadn’t dug any air raid shelters or anything like that.

Some cousins of my maternal grandfather had a large house in Four Oaks and decided, as part of the war effort, that we should go and stay with them. That was fine because my brother stayed at the grammar school as a boarder and came home during the holidays. I just had to walk through their three and a half acre garden to get to my small private school, where I was back with the sort of children I had mixed with before. Everything started to feel much more normal for me. We stayed there until I was 16.

Did you carry on with your education?
My father maintained that every girl should have a career and wasn’t the sort that kept you for a “good” marriage. I spent some time considering my options. I’ve always been quite keen on plants and wildlife and my father had been a great one for bird watching and I had picked up a fairly good knowledge on those subjects. I toyed with the idea of going into forestry, but decided against that. I thought about being a librarian, but the fact that you needed Latin wasn’t very attractive – doing the basics hadn’t made me feel I wanted to do more. Eventually, a teacher suggested that I consider teaching infants (I had thought of domestic science but wasn’t very keen to teach it) so that was it - I made the decision that I would teach small children. I had a year off and took various private jobs looking after children for the princely sum of one shilling an hour.

At that time most of the colleges did two-year courses. However, the aunt who we were living with had other ideas, having herself always longed to go to university but not been given the chance to. She was keen for me to do well and insisted that I should go to the best and she would pay. It was decided that I should apply to the Froebel Educational Institute. I went to the interview with a friend who had also applied and I was accepted but unfortunately she wasn’t, which was sad and embarrassing.

Anyway, father met us in London. It was in the spring of 1945 and, in the aftermath of the war, London was very interesting and exciting - many of the places, which had been shut during the war years, were being opened up again. Father took us to Genario’s, which was a restaurant near the Trocadero. I can tell you what we had, it was jugged hare and I had my first glass of sherry.

So it was off to college next
Yes, the college had been evacuated during the war to Knebworth and Offley in Hertfordshire. After the war they decided to keep Offley. The students did their first two years at Offley and their final year at Roehampton, which was the college’s original home. The idea I think was to encourage more students to take up jobs in rural schools. I was one of sixty going to Offley; we had three resident lecturers and others visited from Roehampton. All our teaching practice was done in the Luton/Hitchin areas. We cycled everywhere or hitched a lift. Lodgings were found for us and we had our meals in the college.

In my final year at Roehampton I lived in. All the teaching practice was done in the London area and the suburbs. There was great scope in connection with anything to do with children; for instance we would go on trips to museums or to the children’s cinema on a Saturday morning just to see what it was like.

By the summer of 1948 I was doing my finals and had to start looking for a job.

Where were your mother and father living by this time?
My parents had kept the family home in Hatch End (renting it out during our time away) and had moved back there in 1945. Of course by this time we didn’t know anyone in the area and there was very little social life there. I joined a tennis club but that was about it really. When I started to look for a job I decided that it would be a mistake for me to live at home. Furthermore, I wasn’t very keen on the idea of teaching in London. I was the sort of person that would have happily sat at home and I realised it wouldn’t be good for me to do that.

I started applying for jobs in various parts of the country, within easy travelling distance of London so that I could get home for weekends and that sort of thing. I had a couple of disasters. The first post I unsuccessfully applied for was in Wiltshire (I won’t go into that) and after that I went for an interview in Bedford, which wasn’t much better. When I was interviewed in Ipswich for an East Suffolk post I encountered an entirely different attitude. They were keen to offer me a job at Southwold or Stowmarket and took pains to reassure me that I should go back if I had any problems - they didn’t want to lose a Froebel trained teacher. I decided to look at the Southwold job, which turned out to be at Reydon Area School as it was then called.

Did you know Southwold?
Not at all, a distant cousin had gone to St Felix, but I probably didn’t realise the connection at the time. I travelled by train from London and when I arrived at Halesworth station I thought it all seemed a bit grim. Anyhow, I got a bus to Reydon corner and walked up the Lowestoft Road eventually reaching the school by about a quarter to four. The headmaster, Mr Williams was there to greet me and he was very pleasant. He showed me the classroom and I met these two teachers who seemed elderly to me, but of course I was only twenty at the time - it all seemed quite old fashioned. The Williams’s were very kind and, after I had been shown around the school, they took me to their home for tea before putting me on the bus back to Halesworth station. On the train back to London I met Southwold’s optician and had quite an entertaining time. He lived in Willesden with his wife and daughter and I believe he came up to Southwold about once a month to his practice near the Post Office. Much to my mother’s horror he had offered to take me to dinner if and when I got to Southwold. I didn’t ever take him up on it though. The journey from Halesworth to London was very slow, and my optician friend had time to get off at Ipswich to get us a cup of tea.

I assume you took the job?
Yes, I started in September 1948. Before I started work I had a look around the school and found that there was very little in my classroom. It was after the war you see so there was nothing up to date at all. In fact I remember that the P.E. syllabus I was given was very old (either late 1800’s or early 1900’s). I wish now that I had kept it. The college had taught us on the 1933 syllabus, informing us that, although it was out of date, there was nothing else to replace it. Unfortunately, even that was not available at Reydon.

I was very nervous on my first day, but lo and behold I had thirty, five-year-olds just starting school so there was no time to think very much. There were tearful mothers and children trying to get out of the door so I just had to get on with it. By the next summer the number of children in my class had gone up to forty-four. It was quite an experience.

I suppose all the children were local at that time?
Yes, they were all from Reydon, with the exception of the odd one or two, who were bussed in from South Cove. In the main the children at Reydon School were the children of farm workers, some had parents who worked for the brewery and the odd few were shopkeepers and artisans. The fishermen’s children mostly went to school in Southwold.

Where did you live?
When I first arrived, the head, Mr Williams had found me lodgings with a member of staff. At one time I lived at Regency House on South Green with another teacher, which was very pleasant.

It must have been quite difficult for you coming to a strange place, away from your family and friends.
I was used to change and by that time I had learnt to mix in with people. Anyway, I was there and there I stayed. Fortunately after the first summer they did get in a third teacher so I didn’t ever have to cope with as many as forty-four children again.

Mr Williams liked to have a showpiece at the school and when I arrived they had just built this wonderful puppet theatre (through Mr Paisley who did the woodwork). When I, this young infant teacher, arrived I got things like water trays and sand trays built for me. Looking back, I suppose we didn’t do a lot of the three R’s. I was still teaching children to do things like cut out and paste, the sort of thing that children nowadays do at nursery school.

It was common practice that, at the end of your third year at a school, it was the time to look for another job. So I started applying for various posts and even gave my notice in. In that April of 1951 on my way back after the school holidays I met John, my husband to be, at Halesworth station. I dropped my tennis racket and he picked it up for me. He was a farmer’s son and was doing a stint in the Fleet Air Arm because he had got fed up with the farm workers' wage his father had paid him and wanted a wider life. He was very much a local boy and had, in fact, started his schooling at Reydon Area.

As I said, by this time I had already started applying for other jobs, but didn’t find anything suitable. I started going out with John and he had a serious motorcycle accident, which resulted in him losing a leg. I ended up cancelling my resignation and carrying on at Reydon, putting in about seven and a half years there.

How long was it before you got married?
We married in January 1956, while I was still teaching. We lived in rented property, which had been intended originally as a holiday place, at the back of what was then Jellicoe’s office in Queen Street. My son was born in the following October, by which time I had stopped working. After he was born we decided that we couldn’t stay living there any longer. There had been plans for us to go to the other farmhouse owned by my husband’s family. It was going to be modernised for us, but as often happens in Suffolk, things moved very slowly so we started to look for our own property and ended up buying a house in Pier Avenue. It was the last one of the semi-detached houses, which had been built by the builder Mr Palfrey for himself so it was slightly larger than all the rest with a fairly large garden. That did us extremely well. My daughter was born in 1958.
The children went to Southwold School and almost as soon as they started I found that I could easily fall into a job. I did the odd bit of supply teaching and because, by this time Reydon Infants School had been built, I went there. I was lucky enough to be able to call my own tune to start with and just worked mornings.

To cut a long story short, I taught there until I finally retired in 1982 at the age of fifty-five. At that time we had been a three-teacher school, including the head who also taught. The number of children had dropped so they decided to reduce it down to two. As a result, I was offered early retirement; a golden handshake if you like, which I accepted. My eldest grandson was five and about to start school and it doesn’t do to teach your own children so the timing was just right.

Did you become a lady of leisure?
Hardly, not content with retirement I did some supply teaching and I also did a morning a week at the play school at Reydon village hall. Eventually I suppose I got too old for the supply teaching, but carried on helping out at Reydon infants until last summer. I eventually cut it down to just one morning a week hearing children read in the reception class. I just enjoyed the children you see. Anyway, last summer I had my second retirement.

Another thing I became interested in earlier on was helping foreign visitors. I had met a Dutch girl and then a Swedish girl both of whom had come to Southwold to improve their English. This led me to get involved in the Victoria League for Commonwealth Friendship, which was originally founded to promote friendship and understanding amongst the peoples of the commonwealth. The idea was to welcome visitors to the UK and give them a chance to meet and learn about British people during their stay. Basically they needed people to provide a holiday home for two weeks at a time for foreign nurses and students working and studying in this country. They paid you a minimal sum, but that’s another story and I would be here all afternoon if I went into that.

I thought it was good for the children to have people from different backgrounds staying with us. The population of Southwold only ever consisted of white people and this was an opportunity for them to mix with people from very different backgrounds. We had a big room which wasn’t used, so we were able to put them up in there, and we had a variety of people to stay, such as nurses and even Malaysian sailors who came for a fortnight.. For the six to eight years we did it we probably had one or two people a year during the summer – it was a question of fitting it round the summer holidays. We would try to take them out and about when the opportunity arose. It was quite interesting, with some entertaining attempts at conversations seriously hindered by the language problems. I can remember laughing together with one of the Ghanaian girls. When I thought she was asking me what is “the de – vasted”. Well, there is a limit to the number of times you can say pardon so eventually I said “yes I know I’m having awful trouble putting this chair up” and it transpired that she was asking me the meaning of devastated. Things like that were most entertaining.

We only had one disaster, which was when a Nigerian chap and his Spanish wife came to stay at Christmas. It was a big mistake. My husband and I had had a bit of a disagreement at the start. He thought we should have ladies only because they would fit in better. I had different ideas and put “either/or” when I filled in the form. Anyway, we ended up with this married couple at Christmas time. They were coming on the coach and my daughter and I ran along to the end of Pier Avenue to meet them only to see the coach leaving. Fortunately my husband went off to find them in the pick up van. It was just as well he did because, although they were only staying for a few days, they had the most enormous case. We began to realise our mistake when we found that he had brought with him evening dress and all his photographic equipment. It was a difficult Christmas, with all John’s valiant attempts at conversation leading nowhere fast. Looking back on some of the “conversations” we can still laugh about it. It was a bit like the travel stories you read – you know the sort of thing, when a British man goes to Africa to experience the life there. In this case, it was in reverse and our visitor was observing and taking photographs of us. One of which was probably entitled “English man carving joint of beef” It was hilarious really. His wife was very nice and we felt a bit sorry for her and wondered how her life would be when she got back to Africa.

Do you still live in Southwold ?
Once the children had married and moved away we really didn’t need such a big house and we thought it was time to move. My husband has an artificial leg and stairs aren’t a good idea, so we moved up to our bungalow in Wangford Road where we have stayed. We have no regrets about leaving Southwold. It has changed tremendously and parking can be a real problem.

Tell me about the changes you have seen
There used to be so much less traffic. You didn’t worry about the children crossing the road and I can remember thinking how different is was when I went home to Hatch End. We would whisk the children round London, although they were probably too young to appreciate it. Of course, my parents would also visit here. Father maintained that this was one of the coldest places on earth.
The shops have changed enormously too. At one time the baker used to deliver hot cross buns on Good Friday and I have, on occasion, had the butcher boy call to the house to find if I wanted anything from the butcher (which my mother described as Edwardian).

The seafront was very different when I first arrived, with much of the promenade not having been built.

Of course, there are a lot more houses in Southwold, but far fewer locals I’m afraid. When I was teaching there was a time when, between us, the school secretary and I knew everyone living in Reydon by name.

There was a cinema in those days, where the doctors’ surgery is now. We were at the cinema on the night of the January 1953 floods. I was living in lodgings in Reydon at the time and had gone that evening to the cinema with John (who wasn’t yet my husband). It was very windy. We had been to Lowestoft in the morning and it had been windy there too. I can remember buying a new skirt. When we came out of the cinema, at about half past ten we decided to go and have a look at the seafront. The thing that impressed me was that there were large heavy items (like the ice cream fridge from one of the kiosks) bobbing about on the waves. It was pretty horrendous. When we reached the pier the water was coming across the road and there were people trying to rescue boats that had been moored to the right of the pier. We started to drive back to Reydon, but were stopped at the corner of North Road by the depth of the water. It was soon clear that that we would not be able to get home. We knew a lot of people in Southwold, but the question was, who could we call on at 11 o’clock at night. There were friends who lived up near St James’s Green, so we decided to go there. It wasn’t our best idea. The husband, who was in the Navy wasn’t there and his wife was entertaining another man, so we didn’t stay very long. We ended up parking near Southwold School, which is where we spent the night. John joked that you always long to spend the night with your girlfriend, but there was nothing more miserable than this night. We periodically drove round to warm up the cab of the pick up van. It was very cold and actually started to snow for a while, but we had no choice and there we sat all night.

In the morning we thought we would try to get some breakfast at the Craighurst, which had been thoroughly shut up for the winter. When they offered us porridge or cornflakes, we went for the cornflakes because I had heard that porridge in hotels could be a bit dicey. Well, the cornflakes were so soft that we felt sure they must have been opened since September. Having said that, they did us very well and provided a much needed hot meal.

When we started to make our way back we found that there was an army lorry ferrying people across the bridge into Reydon. When I got home my landlady hadn’t missed me. She had assumed I was in bed.

I am sure our regular readers will be interested to know how your granddaughter Rose (“Rose in Romania”) is getting on. Can you update us?

She is fine and has another two years to do at Northumbria University. Rose felt that just being a qualified waitress so to speak didn’t do much for her CV so she has got herself a job looking after a lad who is 19 with muscular dystrophy and also at Northumbria university (doing a media course). She had to have a bit of training and her role is to drive him about in a converted van, help him take his notes and generally be a companion to him. She says she will have to improve her handwriting if the note taking is to be of any use! She also does things like taking him to the pub and I understand that she will be going to his home in Harrogate for a week later on. It is ideal for her, as she can more or less choose how many hours to work. She says the young man has a very nice personality and she is enjoying her role. She hasn’t lost her interest in Romania and is going back for a visit in August.

How many grandchildren do you have?
My daughter has four children, three boys and one girl. My son, who has taken over the running of the family farm from my husband, doesn’t have any children. My grandchildren have all found their own career paths and none are interested in carrying on with the family farm.

Once I retired I spent a lot of time looking after my grandchildren, which suited me very well. It was the best of both worlds, spending time with them and carrying on with my bits of teaching.
My son is fond of mentioning that there probably isn’t a child in Reydon that I haven’t taught at some time or another. He often has people say to him “I was in your mother’s class”. His standard response is “who the hell wasn’t?”