Amongst the School archives is a small green photograph album presented to Enid Thorpe in 1916 on her 12th birthday. It contains a number of, often faded, images of Clapham and some of the pupils and staff. Some of them are dated 1921 making them now 100 years old and others are presumably older than that as who receives a lovely new photo album as a birthday present without having the desperate desire to put photos in? Unlike today’s instant photography/selfies stored on a phone without identification, many people who kept photo albums labelled the images. The similarity to today’s digital imagery is that labelling was often idiosyncratic or incomplete. An image tucked away somewhere labelled (say) ‘Molly in the garden’ or something similar is fine – except that one can’t remember who Molly was, or whose garden or when it was taken! When a personal photograph album is discovered where the individual is not known at all it is impossible to get into the mind set and try and identify the people in them. They are still a valuable record of a moment but they will never mean as much to others as they did to their owners at that moment in time.
This is Enid Beatrice Hedley Thorpe who owned the album which was later presented to the School. She was born quite some distance from Clapham – in Uganda to be precise. Her father, a civil servant, was deputy treasurer of the Uganda Protectorate. Sadly he died aged only 36 whilst the family was in Uganda. He is buried in the Entebbe European Cemetery, Kampala.
Death record of William Thorpe. The National Archives of the UK; Kew, Surrey, England; General Register Office: Registers and Returns of Births, Marriages and Deaths in the Protectorates etc of Africa and Asia; Class: RG 36; Piece: 2
By 1911, Enid and her widowed mother had returned to UK and are found in Hove with Enid’s grandfather (and father of Emily Thorpe, Hedley’s widow). This confirms that Enid was the only child of the marriage.
As Enid’s father was a member of Cricklewood Lodge, she was eligible for support as the daughter of an indigent freemason and in 1911 she was balloted for a place at the School. She was admitted in February 1913 when she would have been just shy of her ninth birthday. Her early days at the School, however, were somewhat marred by her contracting scarlet fever almost immediately in March. She was treated at Tooting Grove Hospital, otherwise known as the Grove fever hospital. Between 1916 and 1920 it became a military hospital and ‘Most of the Grove Hospital buildings were demolished in the 1970s’ https://ezitis.myzen.co.uk/grove.html but it was clearly the ‘go-to’ place for infectious cases at the time.
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This was a somewhat inauspicious start to her school career. Scarlet fever, sometimes called scarlatina, is a bacterial infection which can spread very quickly in places like schools where people are in close proximity. Nowadays treated with penicillin or amoxicillin, these treatments were of course not available in 1913. Rather than treatment, prevention of its spread was the watchword with invocations to wash hands and keep space. Oh, they sound familiar!
Enid was not alone in being sent to Tooting Grove as Ilene Chumley was another pupil at the same time who also contracted it and went to the same fever hospital. Mary Bickford contracted it in 1914 which may, or may not, have been part of the same outbreak but episodes of it continued to be recorded at the School until about the 1940s. After this, whether there were fewer cases or it was not being recorded by the matron is anybody’s guess.
Scarlatina was not the only medical problem encountered by the girls. Enid recalled diphtheria, pneumonia, bronchitis, catarrh, hay fever and tonsillitis.
Having returned to health, the remainder of Enid’s time at the school seems to have been uneventful. When she left in 1921, she attended Brighton Technical College following a commercial course. That’s a rather catch-all expression but whatever it was it enabled her to obtain a post in 1922 as a clerk with the London County Westminster & Borough Bank in Brighton. It is not recorded whether this was where she met her husband but as he was a bank cashier, it seems a possibility. They married in 1928, had two children and lived in Hove. In 1943 she is listed with an address that will delight fans of I’m sorry I haven’t a clue – Mornington Crescent! Admittedly it was not the one in London that inspired the complex and unfathomable rules in the panel game https://isihac.net/mornington_crescent.php .
But back to Clapham Days as recorded in Enid’s little book.
As can be seen, the quality of the images shows their age but as a record of buildings that no longer exist they are informative. The interior shots are even less distinct, probably simply because they are inside with little natural light.
These show two images of the dining hall (one identified as such); what appears to be a lecture room (bottom right) and, rather delightfully, the swimming bath with water and bathers. The School does not possess any other images of the pool in use. In winter, the water was drained away, the pool covered over and it became a gym, complete with hollow thuds upon vaulting exercises. This immediately identifies that the image must have been taken in summer. A school with an indoor pool in the C19th century was apparently a rare beast and is a clear indication of the efforts to provide the best for the girls who went there as supported pupils.
Another summer image, marked on the reverse ‘Miss Mason’s birthday’, shows 4 girls either on their way to play a tennis match or perhaps having completed it. Unfortunately the girls are not identified individually but may well be the ones who feature elsewhere in the album. At a time when school holidays were few and far between, the half-holidays given to celebrate the birthdays of the Matron and the Headmistress (Miss Mason and Miss Dean respectively) were very much enjoyed. Miss Mason’s birthday was on 15th June but the year in this instance is not given.
One photograph which does identify and date the instance is this:
Which Evelyn and which René is far less clear cut. There are no Renés listed in school records but there are Irenes and as this was usually pronounced I-reen-ie at that time, it can probably be assumed that the René referred to is an Irene. That gives 2 possible contenders – Irene Davidson and Irene Davis both born in 1903 which is contemporaneous with Enid. There are two possibilities for the Evelyn mentioned too: Evelyn Denman and Evelyn East both b 1903. More than that it is impossible to say. The only other named girl is one who is 4-5 years older than Enid. Asia Bickerton appears in the album.
Here she is clearly not wearing school uniform but appears to be painting lines on the grass (tennis court maybe?). Although Asia left in 1916, she did stay on as a pupil teacher for a while so perhaps this was taken of her at school.
Enid stayed in touch with the school via OMGA after leaving and sadly it was in Masonica that we learn of her death at the age of 49. Like her father, Enid died relatively young but her lasting legacy to the School is a set of snapshots preserved in an album capturing lost times, lost friends and lost buildings.
RMSG History Extra 
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