Cuckfield Museum
SCHOOL DAYS: THE BEST DAYS OF YOUR LIFE?
To coincide with the start of the new autumn term, Cuckfield Museum’s main display features photos and memorabilia from some of the many schools that have been part of the local community over the years.
Local residents may remember Hatchlands, the private girls’ school in Broad Street, formerly the home of the prominent Payne family. A whole-school photo from 1983 shows how popular it had become since it was established in the 1920s, complete with tennis courts, croquet lawn and its own Pony Club. The small modern Hatchlands housing estate now occupies the site of the school and its grounds.
Some are long gone beyond living memory, such as Wyllies in Deaks Lane which in the 20 years before WWI, operated as a “crammer” for “the sons of gentlemen” needing better exam results than they had managed at school to gain entry to Oxbridge, Sandhurst or the legal profession. Perhaps it was thought that the relatively remote location down a country lane would not offer many distractions from their studies but school magazines in the museum’s collection reveal what a large part the students played in Cuckfield’s many sporting and social events around the turn of the 20th century. Wyllies was later known as St. Elizabeth’s, a pre-preparatory school where both local GP Dr. Todd and his wife Mary attended as young children. The house reverted to private ownership in the 1930s
We feature the Cuckfield Park School of Domestic Science from the 1950s and 60s at which girls were taught cookery, laundry, housewifery, upholstery, dressmaking, sewing, first aid, home nursing and infant welfare, in preparation for running homes of their own. The year-long courses seem to have been quite rigorous: one student’s certificate records no less than 620 hours’ work to achieve a Certificate in Housecraft!
Possibly less well known are Warden Court School for Girls on a site adjacent to what is now Warden Park Secondary Academy, Macaulay College, operating for a relatively short time before and during WWII as a Jewish School at what became Ockenden Manor Hotel and the little British School, established in 1902 attached to the Congregational Church in Broad Street, the schoolroom being in what is now the dentists’ car park.
Examples of school work span the 20th century, from 1920s copybooks (accompanied by a bottle of the dreaded red marking ink), to an album of children’s paintings of Cuckfield from the same era, to an example of a Warden Park Year 8 pupil’s 1990s sewing project. Presiding over the display is the forbidding figure of a headmaster with his cane, a reminder that corporal punishment in state schools was banned in 1986 but for private schools not until 1998.
To date we’ve identified eleven Cuckfield schools, including Court Meadow Special School and Mill Hall School for the Deaf, for all of which we’d welcome more information and pictures for our archives. A special photo file and location map accompany the main display so do come in and see if perhaps there are familiar faces among our class photos and year books.
For more detailed background information, the booklet “Education in Cuckfield” by Joan Ward is for sale in the museum’s shop.
If you are interested in this or any other Cuckfield topics, why not visit us in the museum.
