Anne Mitchell (Class of 1950)

George Watson’s Ladies’ College

(A name selected by the founding fathers to ensure that young ladies would use their apostrophes correctly.)

The School at George Square

I started school at George Square when I was four and a half years old and, as I had two older sisters already attending the school, it was a very painless transition and I do not remember anything about my first day. My father, who lectured at the Heriot Watt in Chambers Street, always took us to and from school and I clearly remember walking across the Middle Meadow walk every day. My dad had had an accident which damaged the palm of his left hand and so my sister and I competed for who held the nice smooth right hand and not the rough skin of the left on the way across the meadows to school! We had to wear little pork pie hats and a blazer (still the same) in the summer and a gaberdine trench coat when it was colder. I can clearly remember the few days when we were able to leave home dressed in our little cotton dresses with a tiny check of pink, blue or green. We had heavy velour coats for winter but my mother kept these for best and we only wore them to school in extreme weather! Mum was very fussy about our uniforms and insisted on the best pure silk tussore blouses with deep yolks and long sleeves. The standard three pleat gym tunic had to have a girdle at the waist and most of our cardigans were home knitted by my granny. The standard school jersey had maroon and white stripes on the collar. Our house badges (Melville always) were sewn on the left side of the gym tunic yolk. We really looked quite sweet! Regulation black shoes were latched with a button but we were not allowed to wear these in school. We had dancing pumps to wear in class and gym shoes with elasticized front gussets for gymnastics. The inside shoes were kept in a special bag which had to be hung on your own personal hook in the class cloakroom. My mother was very proud of the linen bags she embroidered with crinoline ladies for us, and dad carefully wrote in indelible Indian ink scores of name tags to identify all our worldly possessions!

My first teacher was Miss Wilson and she was an excellent and lovely teacher. I don’t remember anything about learning to read or write or early arithmetic – I think I just absorbed it without any trouble. The thing that I clearly remember about her class was our little music time. I had been given the triangle to play in our little band (accompanied by the piano, I suppose) and I was intrigued and absorbed by this musical instrument. I must have been unaware that the group had stopped playing and I had continued to ding away at the triangle! Anyway, I was put in the corner by Miss Wilson – the ignominy of it! Since then I have never taken up any musical instruments apart from the piano! One remembers the bad or scary things and I remember when I tripped on the stairs and hit my head on the banister, which would have been about the height of my head! I had quite a gash on my forehead and so my dad was summoned. He took me in to the Infirmary (which was just on the other side of the Middle Meadow Walk then) and I was stitched up by Mr Mercer one of the most eminent Scottish surgeons of the day who was known to my father! I still have the scar on my left eyebrow. The school buildings were an extraordinary group of old houses altered and added to over the years. We loved it for its idiosyncrasies and history but it was quite unsuitable as a large secondary school with about 900 pupils at the time. I don’t think we would be allowed to use such a rabbit warren of a place nowadays! It was a complete fire hazard and the stairways were extremely dangerous. There was no chance of someone with mobility issues being able to attend such premises. It is hard to imagine 900 boys being crammed into such a place but we were expected to be Ladies. It was therefore a very restrictive place to educate young girls. There was no outdoor space at all, and we were only allowed out in fine weather in complete, correct outdoor uniform including hats, in twos only, to walk sedately around the square. We were not allowed access to the gardens, so all break time had to be spent in the school almost entirely in the basement. A great deal of our time was spent in the windowless bowels of the place – all eating, physical education, any recreation we could think up was down there. The admirals kitchen was where Mrs Hubbard reigned supreme. She was a large lady whom we thought of as ancient, but I expect she was just a really nice homely body who enjoyed looking after little girls. She looked after the sick room and also dispensed hot drinks at morning breaks and at lunch time especially to girls who didn’t take school lunches. She presided over the tables in the Admirals kitchen and was in charge, probably, of the cookies and iced buns which were sold in the court at break time. As prefects we also had a hand in keeping control of the surge of girls who descended on the place to find something to eat. The dining hall was also down there, and we were lucky during the war years and after to get a two course meal at a very minimal cost. Sometimes the food was pretty awful and we would entertain ourselves by firing spoonfuls of water up and down the tables, but we were very fortunate to have a hot meal every day when food supplies were so minimal. If a bomb had fallen on us we would have been sitting ducks as there was no easy exit from the eastern end of the basement. At lunch time we played with paper dolls, scraps and watched the older girls. Actually, we only started attending school in the afternoons at junior four – that was about age nine or ten. When we were a bit older we played dodge ball in the hall, table tennis and other games which were only as wild as we were allowed to be! The gymnasium was extremely small and I take my hat off to the staff who did a very good job of keeping us fit with such poor facilities. Dancing with Miss Angus was one of the highlights of the curriculum. She taught a brand of music and movement which allowed us a degree of self expression which was non-existent in the rest of our program. We danced in the hall under the gallery. Many a time a delivery boy would linger on the gallery googling at the young women in their lock-knit knickers and white shirts prancing about in extraordinary poses below them! Dancing was to be one of my fondest recreations later.

As seniors we pretty much wore the same uniform as you do. The striped tie was for general use and the plain maroon was reserved for prefects. We wore our hair short and waved by whatever means we could conjure up, and the January photos in the 150 calendar are very much as we looked. In fact, the chemistry girls look very familiar and were probably in the year after me. The picture of Miss Gilmour with her students reminded me of the day we entered the lab to find Miss Gilmour slumped over her bench unconscious! The ancient plumbing in the lab directly above had leaked and the solid old ceiling plaster had fallen right onto our teacher's head! As you can see, she recovered – she was a good teacher too.

One of our duties as prefects when we were in senior forms was to keep traffic moving in an orderly fashion on the stairs and corridors – no simple task in such a convoluted jumble of rooms on all sorts of levels. No talking was allowed and prefects were stationed at all strategic corners and crossing points to prevent uproar and chaos! We were allowed to give lines to any recalcitrant student and held a lines detention each week. The standard punishment was ten lines each consisting of: “On the stairs and in the corridors silence and orderly movement are the rule and I must obey it.” It took a poor little junior quite a time to write that out 10 times but I doubt if it did them any good! We also had the power to give detentions if a student was found without correct uniform outside school or running in the square etc.

I was a very enthusiastic hockey player and we always had one half day each week to attend sport which was voluntary. I can only just remember going to a junior sports day at Falconhall with my sisters as my elder sister had started school. Before the war houses were built on that piece of land beside the supermarket on Morningside Road and new playing fields were opened up at Liberton Dams. The choice of sport was only hockey in the winter and tennis in summer. As a member of the 1st eleven I had the opportunity to play schools throughout Edinburgh and we had annual challenges with a Glasgow school, Aberdeen and, I think Dundee. Our uniform was the old three pleat gym tunic white long sleeved blouse and long black stockings held up with suspenders! Huge gaps were created between the stocking top and our navy lock knit knickers and we just used our black school shoes with shin pads buckled round our legs. I can still feel the bruised lumps on my shins from hits with balls and other players sticks! It was a lot of fun, though and cycling out to Liberton for hockey and tennis allowed us to have some freedom.

Our annual prize-givings for the senior school were held at the Usher Hall, so I can now say that I have sung in the world famous Usher Hall! It was quite a palaver. The choir, and I was a very keen member though not a huge asset to them, I fear performed, and the school orchestra and the whole school usually had a couple of items to perform – everyone had to know the words of, usually, a traditional Scottish song. The entry to the choir loft was rehearsed to a fine art and was actually very impressive as students entered from each side and filled up the rows in a very short time! After my last concert we walked along Princes Street, the end of school on a lovely balmy July night and my school hat went into a waste paper basket there, so I do not have that keepsake today!

Opportunities and Influences

I should say that the war was the greatest influence on our schooldays as for all of the 1940s we were restricted in very many of the things we now take for granted. There was a constant pall of fear and uncertainty about as we were always conscious of the ebb and floe of the progress of the war. At the start we had to carry gas masks wherever we went including to school and we had periodic air raid shelter drills and there were buckets full of sand in each classroom so that we could douse flames in the event of an incendiary bomb dropping on us!! There was very real shortage of all consumer goods and we were, as growing youngsters particularly affected by the rationing of clothing. We “made do and mended” and let down and let out, but as bras and other undies were in particularly short supply we were often faced with acute embarrassment when we knew that our garments didn’t suit our developing shape. Food, of course, was tough and especially so in the five years after hostilities ended when supplies of food were diverted to Europe where the need was far greater than ours. I was perpetually in a state of slight hunger and I vividly remember charging down the twisting stairs to the Court to try to buy the largest bun with the most icing on it! We were limited to one bun each. However, probably the most enduring legacy of the war, and the first war and depression which preceded it, was the effect it had on our teachers (and also our parents and the whole population).

There was a pervading atmosphere of despondency and uncertainty which affected adults who might have been encouraging us to branch into something new and exciting. Their reality had been wars and depression with many of their young male friends and brothers not returning from the 1914-18 war. Our teachers were almost entirely spinsters nearing retiring age and there was little up and go left in them. I think they clung to the values and customs of their youth in Edwardian days and found the post war young women too hard to understand. For instance, at the end of year we had a party called the Cookie Shine for senior students and staff to which we invited no guests. We were all dressed up and had ballroom dancing to recorded music and we danced with each other or members of staff. You can imagine the run on the half dozen or so male staff, poor souls, as dancing partners! All in all a very strange atmosphere which pervaded the school, as if the male half of the population did not exist. So we had some very dedicated teachers like Miss Boog-Watson who brought history alive for us and when a new head physics teacher Mr Bogie arrived with the Lancashire accent (we invariably tried to get him to say “fire a bullet from a gun”) he tried to bring us up to the level we should have attained before tackling university physics. However, Miss Simpson was so fussy about our French accent that I have been put off opening up my mouth in France! When I and some of my family were escorted to the battle fields of France by a Watsonian I was amazed to hear him converse with the local folk using his school boy French with a broad Watsons accent which was happily understood by the locals. I discovered after all these years that that is all that matters! Well, how did school prepare us for university? When we started out to study physics and maths we were about a year behind where we should have been. Our principal at that time didn’t think that it was natural for girls to be interested in science and we were never given encouragement. However, I eventually was for many years head of the maths department in a large girls school here in New Zealand and I made extra effort to encourage girls to enjoy maths and enter careers which used mathematics. Most girls found their way into nursing, teaching or secretarial work and stopped work on marriage. Many, however, were able to resume their career later. I think we were the first generation of women to return to work after having a family, and were trail blazers in the revolution of women having a career.

Values and Sense of belonging

Well, it was a very exclusive little community and we felt entitled and that we belonged. It was a very caring and compassionate place – provided you towed the line! We all, I think, keep up with lifelong friends who have that bond of membership as of an old club. School was a good time of our lives and it shaped us. In the war everything was attuned to sending things to our troops so we knitted peggy squares and grew vegetables in allotments, but our parents and grandparents were heavily involved in comforts for the troops. Later the whole country was involved in looking to the restoration of Europe and at school we had some efforts to have some Danish girls to visit in the summer holidays. But we never had the return trip as I think things were too tough in Denmark at the time. It wasn’t till after I left school that travel really resumed. Actually, we WERE the womens movement as my generation was the one who found ourselves uneasy with the status quo and believed that womens place in the world had to change. But that is another story and there is a long way still to go!

Anne Mitchell (Class of 1950)