Chapter 8: Miss Hayhurst and Exmouth House School
The closure of the school, and its traces
The school seems to have closed shortly before the Second World War. In its issue for 22 July 1939, the Hastings & St Leonards Observer gives a notice of Miss Hayhurst’s retirement, and the same issue contains an advertisement for the school furniture. In fact, Mrs Fearnside recalled a similar school, Laton House School, at 4 Laton Road, kept by a Miss M.A. Dewe, which at about this time was taken over by a Miss Mary Howells, who was a friend of Miss Hayhurst, and apparently she bought the Exmouth House School desks, etc., when the school closed. In the 1939 census, the registration date for which was 29 September that year, Elizabeth G. Hayhurst’s occupation is given as ‘occasional nurse & Principal of Girls School, retired’ (the other occupants of the house were Ellen Hayhurst, whose occupation was given as ‘unpaid domestic duties’, and Jean Sweet, born 1926, described as ‘at school’ - perhaps a girl whom Miss Hayhurst continued to teach after the rest had left). The last Street Directory in which the house is described as school is that for 1940; thereafter, directories were not issued for several years, and in the next one to appear, that for 1948, no mention is made of a school.
However, memories of it lived on. Simon Bartlett, proprietor of Woodbase Joinery, about which much will be heard in subsequent sections of this narrative, was an Old Towner by birth, though he was sent to Australia as a child. He told me that, when he was a boy in the Old Town, Exmouth House was always referred to as ‘The Old School House’, and that is how he continues to think of it.
Relics of the school from under the floor boards
In addition, as if all this oral and documentary evidence were not enough, I also have archaeological proof of the former existence of a school at Exmouth House. As will be explained in the next chapter, when the house was returned from being a school to being a residence, the asphalted playground was converted back into a garden by simply dumping a large quantity of topsoil on the asphalt, to a depth of two or three foot. This meant that the level of the ground at the back of the house was raised above the height of the ventilation bricks, and the result was severe rot to the joists supporting the floors of the laundry room and the rear study. The laundry room floor was repaired as part of the whirlwind of activity in the early months of restoring the house which will be recorded in chapter 10 of this history, but the rear study floor was only restored in 1993, when access was made easier by the construction of French windows into the garden. At that point, I remember being visited by London colleagues, and particularly by Ken Arnold, Exhibitions Officer at the Wellcome, who was then married to my colleague at Birkbeck, Marybeth Hamilton, and he suggested that I should examine the debris that came out of the floor as the joists were removed to see what I found. I therefore sieved the rubble as it went into the skip, and found many objects bearing witness to the school years of the room in question. Thus we had lots of slate pencils for use with writing boards; wooden pencil ends, often with a metal casing; pieces of a homemade jigsaw made of plywood; a marble; a piece of oyster shell on which paints had been mixed; a tiny lead soldier; even a pen nib and pins (I think I got better at finding smaller objects as my sieving progressed!) It all vividly brought home a sense of the house echoing to the sound of little feet.