Memories of Rannie’s
In last year’s magazine we included an article about Rannie’s, more formally known as the Eastbourne School of Domestic Economy, run by Miss Randall, and asked if any OEs had memories they would like to share. hideout ‘The Place’. The journey from Silverdale Road to ‘The Place’ was undertaken by some of the more adventurous ‘cookers’. My first ‘cooker’ girlfriend invited me to stay with her parents in the school holidays and they took me to the theatre to see Showboat during term time. All was going swimmingly until the next year when I was ‘dumped’ in favour of one of my great friends: a necessary but painful lesson. However, other friendships were made as the years passed and when I left, I was still a ‘cookers’ boy. This time with a Scottish lass who invited me to stay with her family in a shooting lodge at the foot of Ben Nevis. This friendship ended when she left Eastbourne to work at the London Hospital and with me ensconced in Oxford, meetings became uneconomi - cal and rather pointless. As a coda to these brief notes, I would like to mention that my housemaster had married a ‘cooker’ and later my first head of house followed the same path. With a little more leeway, the College and the cookery school could have started a full matri- monial agency. The nearest I came to falling foul of the authorities due to my time spent with a ‘cooker’ was on a hot summer’s Sunday in 1953 when I took the Scottish one by bus to Alfriston for a country ramble. Stupidly, I misread the bus timetable and found on a Sunday the one that would get me back to Chapel on time did not run. I phoned a great friend who lived in Carlisle Road and was in the cricket team with me. He ‘borrowed’ his father’s car and drove out to pick us up and I just made Chapel with moments to spare, probably removing bits of grass from my blue shirt as I took my place. Richard Masefield (School 1956–61) also shared his memories: Whatever did or didn’t happen in 1949 [when the Daily Express reported: ‘College boys say: We can’t see girls’, see page 37 in last year’s magazine], there was certainly a good deal of ‘interchange’ between the two establishments during the fifties and sixties. As a case in point, my sister Vicky whilst at Rannie’s actually climbed through a School House window on a dare one summer night, I think in 1955, to wake anyone asleep by ringing the house bell. This to the amusement rather than consternation I was told, of a young house tutor who was himself no stranger to Rannie’s! Later in the sixties, a number of us fifth and sixth formers ‘went out’ with Rannie’s girls – if not exactly openly, then confidently enough to pay a photographer to take the spoof ‘team photo’ in front of School House, complete with cup and draped school scarves. The depicted ‘miscreants’, as our housemaster Peter Phil- lips often called us, were Christopher Dane, Richard Masefield, Tony Booth and David Garst. The girls from Rannie’s included a Nikki seated at either end, with Joanna and Theresa between them. The surnames of all but my own girlfriend now escape me. Later that term I persuaded my mother to introduce her to Barbara Phillips at a parents’ tea in the housemaster’s house, as ‘a friend of the family’. Although having done so, she rather blew the gaff by turning back to Jo to ask, ‘What IS your name dear?’! In the days before we were officially banned from fraternising with girls from other schools, our first illicit girlfriends were from Moira House, before we graduated to older girls from Rannie’s. Some even aspired to dates with the still more glamorous students from the Foreign Language College at Compton Place. But I was never sophisticated enough for that!
David Atkins (Gonville 1949–54) told us: A ll the female students were known as ‘cookers’ to all who cared. The girls would be enrolled after school and would average 17 years old and come from what could be clas - sified as upper middle class. It was a serious offence for College boys to fraternise with the ‘cookers’ and Silverdale Road, its home, was out of bounds. I don’t think the girls had boundaries – in the geographical sense – and a lot of them seemed to be interested in brass band music for they gathered at the bandstand soon after the College Sunday morning chapel finished. At a distance of some 70 years, I can’t remember how intro - ductions were made but from the age of 15 until the last of my schooldays, I befriended the students, not only of cookery but sewing and other domestic economies. The risk of anything from being beaten to expulsion seemed a worthwhile one for the pleasure of feminine company. Looking back, it was all very pure company, walking, talking and exchanging letters were the norm. It can now be revealed that a small group of Gonvillians had found that the road from Meads that wound up to the Beachy Head road left little pieces of unexplored ground within its many twists and turns. Overgrown but very secretive, we named our
The spoof ‘team photo’ in front of School House
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