This Is Guernsey

It will soon be 100 years and out for St Sampson’s School, which celebrates its centenary today as a replacement is being built at Les Nicolles. Chris Morvan looks at a story of Guernsey life seen through the entries in the school’s logs. MUCH of what we know about St Sampson’s School is taken from hand-written logs, dutifully maintained by teachers over the years.

They are so informative the school recently compiled a timeline based on them. It begins with an entry for 16 April 1907: ‘The new schools were opened today.’

The building had been completed the previous year and the reference to schools, plural, indicates the segregation that existed in those days. There was St Sampson’s Boys’ School and Delancey Girls and Infants.

The logs give a real flavour of their times. In its splendid location on top of a hill by Delancey Park, the building is exposed to the elements and the entry for 25 January 1910 demonstrates what life could be like in the days of inefficient heating and insulation: ‘A cold morning. The temperature of classroom 1 is only 46 degrees.’

In May that year someone wrote: ‘The death of His Most Gracious Majesty King Edward the Seventh’, followed four days later by: ‘Holiday for King’s accession and proclamation (George V).’

Two years later, in 1912, an entry explains that an outbreak of measles had closed the school for three weeks, something unlikely to happen now.

In 1914, with the First World War under way and many Guernsey men fighting for the UK, the patriotism of the period shows up on 21 September with the entry: ‘The National Anthem is sung every morning before work is begun.’

Less than a year later, on 29 July 1915, a note from Adeline Franklin Butler announces: ‘I resign my duties as Head Mistress of this school.’ We may never know if it was as dramatic an entry as it looks. Presumably she was somewhere else on 24 May the following year when the log says: ‘Empire Day: Lessons have been given on “The growth of the Empire”. A half-day holiday will be given this afternoon.’

The relative poverty of many in Guernsey early in the 20th century was indicated that November: ‘A week of very rough weather - many children absent through insufficient footgear.’ Four days later the Spartan resolve cracked: ‘Fires have been started this morning.’

A possibly unrelated entry the following January says: ‘Owing to several burning fatalities due to wearing of flannelette, a demonstration was given to the older girls by the head teacher. Specially prepared material was burnt.’

In the mid 1920s times were still tough for many people. ‘Mr H. J. Blampied visited the school to obtain information as to the advisability of starting a soup kitchen for the winter months.’

As we will hear from Kathleen Luxon, who first attended the school in 1910, there had been a soup kitchen before in the building known as The Rink, now used by Gadoc, on the corner of Robergerie Road below St Mary & St Michael School.The timeline goes on down the decades through royal visits, births and deaths and the Occupation when, with most of the children evacuated to the UK, there were just 25 at the school by the end.

Rebirth was not long coming, though. On 9 September 1946 St Sampson’s Secondary Modern School was created, with 295 children. And nutrition appears to have been a top priority. On 19 November: ‘Mr Wragg left early during the morning session to attend a Horlicks hot drink demonstration at the Vale School. Three days later Horlicks was being provided for the children.’

On 9 June 1947 we learn that: ‘Bathing parades recommenced today and will be held for the rest of the term at the Jetty, near Vale Road, when weather and tides permit.’

The ravages of the Occupation were still being felt however, with this alarming note in March 1948: ‘Children warned to exercise great care during the Easter holidays when frequenting areas where German ammunition and explosives were still being found. Anything of a suspicious nature should be reported to the police.’

In June 1965 there was a meeting of the Education Council ‘about 1st CSE exam’.

The last of the logs, in April 1968, ends with the news that: ‘Mr James retires and Mr Harry Wragg is his successor (previously deputy head).’

The school is currently run by Hazel Tetlaw, who has been head teacher for seven years. Having lived in Guernsey as a child and been educated at Amherst and Ladies’ College, Ms Tetlaw was delighted to move back here from her former position in south Devon and described her role at St Sampson’s as ‘the job of my dreams’.

By sheer coincidence, the two former pupils we contacted for their memories of St Sampson’s School in its early days turned out to be cousins. Both came from a large family and they hadn’t seen one another for decades

Kathleen Luxon is a 101-year-old for whom the word, ’sprightly’, could have been invented. Now living in a residential home, Mrs Luxon grew up in Victoria Avenue and first attended St Sampson’s School in 1910. The young Kathleen Falla received her basic education there and remembers Mrs Robilliard being the headmistress of the infants’ school at the time. While reading, writing and arithmetic were very much the order of the day, Kathleen’s fondest memory is of the maypole, which, by another coincidence, features in the photographs given to us by Stan Falla. Kathleen’s sister, Marie, was one of the school’s first May Queens.

Large families such as the Fallas tended to struggle and Kathleen remembers lunch involving a trip to the soup kitchen nearby at The Rink, where she would be fed for one penny. For a while she and some of the other girls stayed in at playtime to make a trousseau for a teacher, Miss Robin, who was getting married.

Kathleen’s schooling was cut short at the age of 11 because she was one of 13 children and was required to leave school and start earning some money to help support the household. Only one brother and one sister survive today. Mrs Luxon talks of her ‘baby sister’, 20 years younger and therefore a mere 81, who has lived for many years in The Netherlands.

Like many working class girls of her era, Kathleen went ‘into service’, looking after the family of a Mr Hutton, who lived at Cambridge Park. He was a grower for whom her father worked.

Soon Kathleen met and married Eric Luxon, only for him to die tragically young in 1935. When Guernsey was evacuated early in the Second World War, St Sampson’s School went to Glasgow and Kathleen to Lancashire. Although spending the first six months not knowing where her three children were, she was able to be close to them for much of that traumatic time, whereas many families were completely split for the whole of the Occupation, with only occasional letters exchanged to maintain contact.

Former head boy Stan Falla is 87. He started at St Sampson’s in 1922 at the age of two and a half, his mother having come to an arrangement with the headmistress, Miss Ogier. Mrs Falla had 10 children and needed to go out to work to make ends meet. Her husband was a grower and she worked in the same industry, picking grapes, melons and tomatoes.

Even with his mother’s contribution to the family exchequer, Stan vividly remembers her from time to time in tears on a Tuesday because there wasn’t a penny in her purse and wouldn’t be until her husband was paid on the Friday.

A bright child, Stan got along well at school and remembers coming top of each class he was in, all the way up through the years until he left in 1933 at the age of 14. He represented the school at football and cricket, but it was his out-of-school sports activities that paid dividends in later life: he learned to play snooker and went on to be crowned island champion twice.

That was after the Second World War. Stan had volunteered for the army in 1938 and spent eight years with the Royal Corps of Signals, serving mainly in Egypt, where he was when war broke out. Having reached the rank of sergeant, he was eventually invalided out (with kidney stones) and forbidden by doctors to go back to hot climates.

Back in Civvy Street, Stan took up where he had left off as a plumber, having been ushered into the Leale’s firm by a relative who worked there. Leale’s took him back after the war and he stayed with it until 1960, when he joined the States Water Board as a plumbing inspector and rose to chief inspector before retiring in 1984.

Stan has been married to Vera, a Manchester girl, for 62 years, having met her in Chester during the war. She too was in the Signals regiment. The couple have three daughters, all of whom attended St Sampson’s, and there are now three great-grandchildren.

Stan remembers his former school with great affection. He and Vera live less than a mile from it in New Road, St Sampson’s.

For today’s head boy and head girl, Alex Link, aged 15, and Vicki Merrien, 16, this is a crucial year in their schooling with GCSEs to take. Both intend to go to the Grammar for A-levels, with Vicki planning a career in the police force and Alex thinking he would like to be a photographer.

Article posted on 16th April, 2007 - 12.00am