Grove Park School

(See bottom of this page for a history of the school contributed by Anthony Sharp - November 2002)

Michael Charles Millard has created a Grove Park group on Facebook and is hoping to arrange a re-union - Please join

Grove Park School closed it's doors in 1964. Shortly after that, the building was demolished to make way for new houses. I was a pupil for about 3 - 4 years up until it closed. Another ex pupil, Mark Spill, who was also there at the end, recently discovered my web page and sent the picture of the school below.

From our collective recollection here are some names of people who were there at or near the end:-

Ansell / Baxter / Buxton (Son of Matron) / Blunt / Brooks / Callender / Cawson / Chambers / Coles / Cooper (1,2&3) / Dyer / Emmot / Galloway / Harding / Millard / Mortlock 1 (Me) & Mortlock 2 (My younger brother) / Onyeama (1,2&3) / Pepper / Randall-Page / Roberts / Shah / Spill 1 / Spill 2 (Mark) / St Clair 1 / St Clair 2 / Strand / Thompson / Todd / Vautier / Waddell / Weerasingha /

Mark Spill again kindly supplied the photo above, which I guess must be circa 1962/3. The photo includes Mark. I am there also, but am far too embarrassed to admit which one is me.

I was indeed most interested to find your home page on Grove Park School. The headmaster Vivian Sharp was brother to my Aunt. My cousin Elizabeth Cawson therefore sent her three sons David, Peter and Michael and I also sent my two sons there for a short time before moving to America. Her youngest Michael is in the photograph second from right in second row, my son Christopher was the youngest ever to go to the School and is in the front row, ( he got married last Saturday here in Texas), the other son David is also there somewhere but I have failed to identify him. Elizabeth's two eldest boys had already left for their Public School when this picture was taken. I will be in England this summer and will find out for you the history of the school before moving to Crowborough. I sent the page on to Elizabeth's eldest son, his comment was " It all brings back many memories, some good and some not so good". I presume the latter refers to compulsory cold baths and fairly regular use of the cane ! Keep in touch, what do you do now you are adult? I have just had my 80th birthday and am virtually retired.

Anthony Sharp informed me (November 2002) that sadly John St Clair has recently passed away.

My father Vivian Sharp started the school in 1926 with £500 borrowed from an aunt. To house the school he bought a house called Grove Park that had belonged to Lord Roberts and was situated north of London. In 1933 he married my mother, Violet Elizabeth Johnson, the younger daughter of a barrister, Sir Arthur Johnson, who lived in Hampstead. I was born in 1938.

In 1939 the school was evacuated to a lovely Queen Anne country house called Brightwell Park, north of Henley in Oxfordshire. The house was definitely not designed to be a school, but everyone did their best and I think things ran smoothly enough.

However the house was far from filled by Grove Park on its own, and in about late 1942 another school, Edinburgh House, was also evacuated to Brightwell Park. I do not think that this was at all an easy time for my parents and I remember that there was considerable animosity between the boys of the two schools. However a modus operandi was worked out between the two schools and they were run together until the end of the war.

After the war my father decided he did not wish to return to what had become very much a northern suburb of London, so he bought the house at Crowborough in Sussex. The house had originally been built in 1874 for Queen Victoria's Astronomer Royal; hence the round tower on which the telescope was housed, and the avenue of Redwood trees that was planted to stop lights reflecting on to the telescope's lens.

For some time before the war the building had housed a well known prep school called The Grange. The headmaster was a keen cricketer, and for many years the touring Australian test team played their first match on that ground.

A V2 flying bomb landed in the grounds, which apparently lifted the ceilings, but they fell straight back into position and no real damage was done.

My father continued to run the school there during the forties and fifties, and towards the end of the fifties he tried to find someone to take over the school, as sadly being a schoolmaster was just not something I wanted to do. After a spell in the Royal Navy I went into the City, and I have thoroughly enjoyed my career there.

Unfortunately he could not find anyone that he thought suitable, and so when he was taken ill in 1964, the school had to close.

Robert Griffiths who has supplied me with so much information about the Mortlock family tree, also coincidentally has some reminiscences of Grove Park:-

I'm more than just a Mortlock researcher! In 1944 I was packed off age 7 to Edinburgh House School, (which had been evacuated via an intermediate location) to Brightwell Baldwin, a country house in Oxfordshire (the Navy had requisitioned EHS' original home at Lee on Solent). I arrived to find EHS sharing the premises with Grove Park. The deal was that the 1st floor was for EHS, the 2nd (top) for GP, and the ground floor and all its living rooms were the classrooms where the classes were combined and the joint (but wartime-reduced) staff taught mixed EHS/GP classes. So we, red white and blue, shared with GP Purple and white, and Sharp taught Latin and boxing. Maybe other things, but not to me. My main memory of him is his trying to cure my chewing my penholder (wooden stick with metal nib stuck on the end - this is 1944 BBP = before ballpoints) by sticking the frayed, chewed end in brown bootpolish. I went right on chewing but it tasted horrible!

In May 1945 we had a huge bonfire with a guy of Hitler on top and by Christmas Sharp & our head, Cruickshank had found new quarters (maybe B Baldwin wanted their house back). So we went our separate ways, EHS to Great Ballard and, I now learn from you, Sharp & GP to Crowborough. The only lingering echo was a pair of brothers called Gwyther who transferred (perhaps a neat bit of poaching) from GP to us.

Even in the middle of the war we had a immense compulsory clothing list to be provided - vests, gym 3 etc. - but GP exceeded EHS in requiring striped blazers & white flannel shorts for all for cricket.

My only other distinctive memory that GPs of that date might share, is of what I later realised was seeing D-Day going in - that first summer term of 1944, one morning the sky was filled with a silver river of roaring aircraft, tall tail fins blazoned - NOW I know what that meant.

The staff, Heads apart, were either juveniles (our 18 yr old matron) or physical wrecks or recalled dropouts. Miss Honeyball shuffled about teaching geography in carpet slippers, for all the world like the old domestic in old Tom & Jerry cartoons.

Oh, Sharp took a party swimming in some muddy stream one summer day - I cut my foot so that messed that up. In winter we seemed to share the pitches with cattle judging by the hazards on the grass. For recreation we had an old hollow tree into which one boy could be put while the others howitzed bricks at him. Just once the outside world impacted us, when local boys tried to invade. To a battle-cry of OIKS! GP & EHS joined forces to destroy the enemy. I make it sound like fun but it was b awful really. However we were very well taught.

I would comment that the BBP pens mentioned by Robert were still in use in 1964. The classroom desks contained ink wells which were filled from a jug. Large amounts of pink blotting paper were used to clean up spillages.