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From France to Filey – A school reunion will celebrate a remarkable education provided by exiled nuns. John Woodcock reports.
In October 1904, a dozen French nuns responded to the anti-Church republican government in Paris by departing for an alien world. They became missionaries at the Yorkshire seaside.
Without a word of English, they crossed the Channel, caught the 8.45am train from King's Cross and arrived in Filey, where they had their first culture shock.
They were served tea, cakes and goodwill at a reception welcoming them to a town dominated by Nonconformists. Catholics were so few they had no church or priest of their own. Yet in the coming months, the Sisters of Charity of Our Lady of Evron, in north-west France, began moulding the lives of generations.
The political harassment at home which had prompted the community to establish a mission in England was a God-send for the Bishop of Middlesbrough's ambitions to establish a Catholic presence in Filey. He wanted to cater to the spiritual needs of its visitors, and also provide a school.
Visitors had included Charlotte Bront, the composer Frederick Delius, and opera singer Jenny Lind. A woman was employed to teach the nuns English and to explain the customs of their new land. With financial help, the Sisters rented and then purchased properties around The Crescent where they created a convent and chapel. Then, in 1907, they opened the Convent of the Sacred Heart School for day and boarding girls, mainly the daughters of well-to-do Yorkshire townsfolk and farming families.
During expansion work the Sisters taught wherever they could find room – needlework classes were held in T'Oard Ship Inn. They also took boys up to the age of nine. Among them was Charles Laughton, the son of a Scarborough hotelier, later one of the great actors of his generation and a Hollywood star.
Recently, in a bungalow in Pickering, committee members were organising the 60th annual reunion of the school's Old Girls' Association.
"We were taught the French equivalent of old English," said Pamela Johnston. "It was such a dated and formal version that when I used it in France there were baffled looks from the locals.
"The school was lovely, like a big caring family, and the Sisters instilled lasting values for which I'm grateful. But in other ways, life there was no preparation for an 18-year-old emerging into the Sixties. Talk about innocent – we didn't have a clue."
She recalls sitting on a radiator when someone burst in with the news that President Kennedy had been shot. For Pamela the image is as vivid as the time The Beatles stayed at a Filey hotel. They signed her exercise book, and she traded the autographs for goodies from the tuck shop. It was part of the awakening from an education which might have been wanting academically, but was strong in the arts.
"Religion was never forced on us," said Pamela, "and there was no pressure to become a Catholic. We were being groomed to be wives and mothers."
After Sunday prayers, farmer's daughter Angela Normandale remembers sitting on a school bench darning her socks to the accompaniment of Two-Way Family Favourites on the BBC Light Programme – a Forces' request programme which was encouraged at Sacred Heart because some of the girls had relatives serving abroad. No such indulgences for Betty Devonshire (nee Pearce) who was at the school for seven years from 1926, by which time the original 12 nuns had been joined in Filey by others from France, Britain and Ireland. In Betty's day, pupils could listen to the wireless only once a year, officially. "The set was brought into a classroom so that we could join some of the Irish nuns and hear the commentary on a big horse race. It was the Grand National I believe." Betty is now 93, and president of the Old Girls' Association.
Her daughter Margaret is secretary of the association, and confident that more than 100 former pupils will be at the celebrations. They'll revisit a place where a ruler was rapped on knuckles, where Pope Pius XII sent congratulations, and where Sister Germaine reprimanded Ann Baxter in the 1950s for hanging from an apple tree "and showing my knickers".
Other former pupils include one of the country's first women judges, the mother of the BBC journalist Stephen Sackur, and Bradford-born Lana Bowen-Judd, who under the pseudonym Sara Woods became a successful crime writer.
Filey Convent School closed in 1968. The building is now council, community and business offices, and a concert hall, all under the title of the Evron Centre in tribute to its French background.
Today, there are few reminders of that. There's a plaque on the building placed by old girls a decade ago, and affection remains among older Filey people for the nuns and their project. Finding out more takes a bit of research. The town's public library has a copy of a book on the history of the English Province of the Evron Sisters, whose work now focuses on social issues across the Pennines.
With the passage of time those divisions and fears now seem nonsensical. Overlooking the sea, five Evron nuns, three of them French, are buried not far from where they strove to fulfil their motto, To Work and to Pray.
Two marble headstones give their brief details, but there's no mention that they lie in ground consecrated by Catholic priests before the Reformation, and which is now part of the Anglican churchyard of St Oswald's.
For some of those they taught, the lessons of history don't come much closer to home.
The Old Girls' Association reunion is on Sunday, April 19. Former pupils interested in attending should email margaret.devonshire@tesco.net or phone 01723 363701.
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Sunday 12 February 2012
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