Education: Frightfully Gamesy

Victorians were appalled, but the Lawrence sisters saw their duty and did it. Nellie, Millie and Dollie Lawrence thought that young English ladies were too delicately nurtured; what they needed was a more robust schooling—the kind Eton gave to boys. On a breeze-bathed seacoast near Brighton, in 1885, the sisters built their new Roedean (rhymes with so keen) School.

In time the bouncy, bumpy Roedean Girl became a national byword, as British as roast beef and Yorkshire pudding, and the butt of music-hall skits. She wore a bright-colored, shapeless wool Mother Hubbard called a djibbah,* talked in a full-voiced, fruity accent. The Roedean Girl knew how to play cricket and to “play the game”; she never “let the side down,” never “sneaked,” always “pulled her weight.” In caricature and often in fact, she was a mannish, muscular, back-slapping bluestocking.

By 1924 Nellie Lawrence was too old to high-dive from Brighton’s pier any longer; she and her sisters turned over Roedean to big-boned, red-cheeked Emmeline Tanner. Last week, at 70, stately, awesome Miss Tanner was ready in her turn to retire.

Under Miss Tanner “the girls’ Eton” was more interested in career-mindedness than muscle. The headmistress thought that “every woman should earn her place in the world, and should be able to give back in some measure all the world gives her.” She encouraged Roedean girls to go on to a university (one in eight does, a high average in England), was pleased that many of the present crop planned professional careers—in medicine, law, music, art. By current-events classes, Miss Tanner tried to make the 367 girls conscious of the world outside, not long ago held special prayers for U.N.’s Trygve Lie (father of Old Roedeanean Guri Lie).

Playing Fields. In Roedean’s cloistered life, the girls have few chances to meet outsiders, are apt to give an impression of embarrassed uppityness when they do. Miss Tanner has sought to keep Roedean unsnobbish by banning makeup and jewelry, allowing the girls little pocket money and decreeing a Spartan, uniformed existence. As in most girls’ schools in Britain, the girls wear identical Navy jumpers much of the time; they get what individualism they can out of choosing the colors of their suppertime djibbahs.

Roedean last week braced itself for the advent of a new headmistress. In her forties, tweedy Norah Horobin is a “Christian Socialist” and a lady of the likes of the Lawrence sisters. Miss Horobin is strong on discipline, science and sports, and already the word has spread to Roedean that she is “frightfully gamesy.”

Alumnae are proud that World War II was partly won on the playing fields of Roedean, by Old Roedeaneans who became officers in the women’s services, radio operators, ambulance drivers. Roedean itself was evacuated to Keswick, in the Lake District, while the Royal Navy took over its dormitories. The story goes that sailors billeted there almost wore out the buzzer system when they discovered neatly lettered signs: “If you want a mistress in the night, ring the bell.”

*From an Arabic word meaning a Mohammedan’s long cloth coat.