Hilda Mary Grove

Hilda Mary Grove

Mary Grove was a true daughter of St Ives, living much of her life in the town. She preferred to use her second name rather than Hilda, her mother’s name. She inherited much of her mother’s independent spirit, which served her well during her teaching career in Kashmir, Northern India, in England, and public service in local politics.

Early years

Born in 1903, Mary was one of ten children and the second daughter of Dr Reginald and Hilda Grove. She spent much of her life in St Ives, initially at Slepe House, Cromwell Place, where her father ran his medical practice. Besides a groom for the horses, the Groves employed a cook, a housemaid and two nursery staff, who all lived in.

She recalled in later life that she had had a happy childhood and that as she was the third child, her parents had finished experimenting on parenting by the time she was born. But hers was a plaintive plea to the nursery nurse when she asked if ‘nothing can be done to stop all the babies coming into our nursey!’ Her mother gave birth to a new baby virtually every year until her last child, John, was born in 1913 when she was 42.

Because of the spread of their ages, there developed a natural grouping of the older ones as the ‘upper set’, and the younger ones as the ‘lower set’. Veronica, her elder sister, and then William, Mary, David, Sylvia and Norah were in the upper set and the two oldest sisters took on a role of looking after the younger ones in the ‘lower set’ when the Governess was not around.

Mary’s upbringing was typically Edwardian middle class. ‘I throve on a well-established nursery routine with plenty of security with a certain amount of healthy neglect. Those of us who were born at the beginning of this century were surely an especially privileged generation. We have seen so many changes in our domestic living as well as all the wonderful inventions which emerged like lighting, gas, electricity, the installation of bathrooms in large houses with plumbing, and no night carts (to collect sewage), and telephones (No 6 was our number) and no gossiping allowed using it. It was the age of motor cars which made it unsafe to play with whipping tops in the street outside the surgery at Cromwell Place’. EW 6 was the number plate of Dr Grove’s second car which showed how few cars had been registered before his one in Huntingdonshire.

A handwritten birthday programme of family entertainment dated April 1909 has survived from this period of the family history. On the front cover, besides the date, one child has drawn a border of black beetles. Entertainment was provided by ten-year-old Veronica, Willie aged seven, and Mary aged six.

   

Duet: ‘Moonlight’ (Barnard)	Veronica
Recitation: ‘The Little Fish’	Mary
Pianoforte Solo: Sonatina (Schmitt)	Veronica
Recitation: ‘My Shadow’ R L Stevenson	Willie
Pianoforte Solo: ‘Warblings at Eve’ (Richards)	Veronica
Recitation: ‘In Shelter’	Mary
Song: ‘Two Little Kittens’	All
Recitation: ‘The Owl Critic’ (J.T. Fields)	Veronica
Duet Scotch Snr	Veronica and Willie
God Save the King

Without television or radio, Edwardian families made their own entertainment.

The Grove children had a reputation for being well behaved. Edith Pratt, who was a maid at Stanley House in Market Hill, working for Mr and Mrs Ellis, spoke with affection about them in her autobiography, many years later. Edith’s master and mistress at Stanley House had no children themselves, but often entertained their nephews and nieces who brought their children. River trips and tennis parties were often arranged, as were children’s parties, and the Grove family were invited to these – all ten of them.

The Grove family, with Mary standing next to her father, c1913.

‘I remember all of Dr Grove’s children’, Edith recalled, ‘there was Veronica, Bill, Mary, Norah, David, Sylvia, Jane, Frances, Lettice and John, the baby, quite a large party. They always walked crocodile style in twos with doll’s prams and trikes etc with their nanny. That’s how they came to us and that’s how they went home, too’.

Mary recalled years later the daily afternoon walk of the Grove children. Jane in a pram, wheeled by the nursery governess, ‘Jilly’. Her sister Sylvia and brother David in a green mail cart pushed by Betsy, the nursery nurse. The rest of the older children on foot accompanied by two black dogs called Jilly and Mac. Fanny Jillings was the nursery governess, from Suffolk. The children affectionally nicknamed her ‘Jilly’. Betsy Chandler was 18 at the time of the 1911 census and was a local girl from Colne. The entire troupe was known as ‘the walking village’ by the townsfolk.

A three-storeyed doll’s house built specially for Mary’s mother was given to her for Christmas in 1876 when she was five years old. With three storeys, it stood 3½ feet high, with a pitched roof and two chimney stacks, a fireplace in each of the six rooms. Mary’s mother and aunt's sisters played with the doll’s house when they were children. When Hilda Grove had daughters of her own, they also played with it. After a brief period of use by Mary at her school at Tenterleas in the 1950s, the doll’s house passed on to the next generation, slightly worse for wear. It now awaits one of Hilda Grove’s great, great granddaughters.

An Edwardian education

Mary’s parents were determined that all their children should receive a good education, as well as professional training in a career. The Grove girls had an abiding memory that they were encouraged and fully supported in further education. Their parents felt that if they did not marry, as five out of the seven were not to, they could support themselves and live independently in adult life. Some became teachers, one was a dress designer and another a pharmacist. This training in the professions was far-sighted by their parents and, to a degree, was ground-breaking for the early 20th century.

The children were home schooled initially. The girls all went on to Slepe Hall School in Ramsey Road, run by Miss Martha Lloyd. This is now listed Grade 2, built in the 1850’s. Mary went there aged six. The school was where her aunt Mabel, her father’s sister, had also been when it was run by Martha’s mother, Anna. She was the wife of the well-known Free Church Minister Revd Thomas Lloyd in whose time the fine church in Market Hill was built in 1863-4.

Martha Lloyd was an inspiration for all the Grove sisters. She was a remarkable woman. Having studied in France and Germany, she taught Anglo-Saxon. Known for her feats as an Alpine mountaineer, she became the co-principal of the school until her mother’s death in 1912. Martha then ran the school on her own until she retired in 1928. The school closed in 1966 and opened the next year as a hotel.

Boarding School and College

Mary then went to a girls’ boarding school, Queen Anne’s School in Caversham, near Reading, where all her sisters were educated. The school’s motto was ‘Quietness and Strength’, and its ethos developed a strong sense of vocation, ‘a desire to serve their generation’ as one old girl was to recall later. This sense of service was to be found in the Grove girls in later life.

The first Grove sister to attend was Veronica in 1913. Another girl who joined at the same time, Annette Cooke, reminisced later that ‘most of us came from the same stratum of the population, daughters of parsons, doctors, soldiers, in fact what used to be called the “professional class”’.

Mary joined in May 1916 at the height of the First World War, just before the battle of the Somme on the Western Front two months later. At Queen Anne’s she became the President of the Scientific Society and a prefect in the sixth form. Her younger sister, Lettice, was the last to join the school in 1924 when she was 12.

One of Lettice’s contemporaries was Joan Hunter Dunn, also the daughter of a GP, who became Head Girl. She was immortalised in John Betjeman’s poem ‘A Subaltern’s Love Song’, the first stanzas of which read:

Miss J. Hunter Dunn, Miss J. Hunter Dunn,

Furnish'd and burnish'd by Aldershot sun,

What strenuous singles we played after tea,
We in the tournament - you against me!

Love-thirty, love-forty, oh! weakness of joy,
The speed of a swallow, the grace of a boy,
With carefullest carelessness, gaily you won,
I am weak from your loveliness, Joan Hunter Dunn.

Getting all the girls off to school by train at St Ives station was a major undertaking, requiring several trips in the pony and trap and later by car, with those in the older set looking after those in the younger. At any one time there were three or even four at the school. Part of the school uniform was a full-length scarlet-hooded cloak. The girls made an impressive sight as they travelled back each term in their straw boaters, white blouses, ankle-length black skirts and scarlet cloaks. Such was the family’s affection for the school that Reginald and Hilda bought a chair for the school dining room when it was being refurbished which was inscribed as the ‘Grove’ chair.

Despite passing the examinations to study at Cambridge, Mary set her heart on training as a primary school teacher at the Froebel Institute in 1922 when she left Queen Anne’s. Two other girls from the school joined as well. In addition to an excellent reputation for its pioneering methods of child education, another reason for Mary and later, her younger sister Frances, to train there was because of Dr Grove’s respect for the founder of the training college.

This was Emilie Michaelis, whom Dr Grove and his father met by chance on holiday one weekend in Hastings when he was a medical student. Madam Michaelis was German-born, aged 58 years when she met Mary’s father and grandfather. She was the pioneer of the kindergarten system in England, and a translator, editor, and promoter of Froebel's writings. In 1875, she started one of the first English kindergartens in Croydon, London, and later a training college for teachers, which became the Froebel College. She was described as the ‘chief exponent of Froebelianism’ in England and coined the phrase ‘nursery school’ in translation from Froebel. In 1891, she started a kindergarten and training college for students which became the Froebel Educational Institute in West Kensington and was officially opened in 1894. Emilie Michaelis was its first principal, retiring four years before her death aged 70.

Mary, sitting behind her mother, with sister Frances, c1935.

After training at the Froebel Institute, Mary gained practical training at St Mary’s College, Lancaster Gate, London before teaching at the Little St Christopher School in Great Missenden which was a pre-prep school for boys and girls.

Her schools

Mary moved to Kashmir, in the north of India, in the mid 1930’s. She set up a preparatory school which she called the ‘Garden School’ in the capital, Srinagar, and also at Gulmarg to the north during the summer months. Her school was very successful and catered for up to 80 children, aged 4–9, drawn from the British expatriate community, such as civil servants, administrators, soldiers, businessmen and missionaries. Both day and boarders were accepted. One pupil remembered how all the children had to say ‘present’ when their name was called at the morning school assembly. Wistfully he said that he waited patiently each day for his present to appear, but it never did!

With the end of the British Raj in the summer of 1947, Mary had to close her school and return to England. She returned to Kashmir in 1980 to attend the centenary of the Tyndale Biscoe Public School in Srinagar and met many of the parents of the children she had taught.

On returning to England after World War 2, she joined Downe House Girls’ School outside Newbury in Berkshire as a teacher. Many of her pupils went on to distinguished careers in public life. Clare Balding, Miranda Hart and Catherine, the Duchess of Cambridge, are alumni.

Mary was 51 when her mother died in 1954, and she bought her parent’s house, Tenterleas in Tenterleas Road, St Ives. It was an ideal location to set up her second school. She was assisted by Norah Hill, her friend and colleague from the Garden School.

The school developed an excellent reputation for innovative teaching methods. Its large garden was used much during the summer for games and playtime. Fees were £14 per term (£400 in today’s values). One pupil remembers the fun of using potato cuts to print brightly coloured symbols onto old hessian sacks which local farmers used to store potatoes in. These then became pretend wigwams to play Cowboys and Indians in the large garden.

St Ives Town Council

Mary’s interest in St Ives and its development blossomed. Standing as an independent, she was elected to the Town Council in 1956. This was in the same year that Councilor Minnie Hudson was elected as the first woman mayor. It was also the first time that two women had sat on the Council. Mary was elected the second women mayor in 1962. Within 25 years, starting with Ethel Cuttill in 1968, there were seven more women who were mayors by 1987. One of Mary’s younger sisters, Jane, said on leaving school that she wanted to become a member of parliament; but it was Mary who was to become involved in politics - at the local, rather than national level, for 16 years.

Mary, St Ives Mayor, c1962. Shown also is her father's portrait, which hung in the Council Chamber.

In one sense Mary followed in her mother’s footsteps in public service. Hilda Grove was one of eight women appointed as Justice of the Peace in the 1920s in Huntingdonshire out of a total of 86. This was after the law was changed in 1919 to allow women to serve as jurors and magistrates. Hilda Grove was the first appointed in St Ives and with eleven men sat at the Petty Sessions held each Monday in the Magistrates Room in Priory Road.

Mary’s appointment as a woman Mayor was not without its challenges. With huge embarrassment, the Vice President of the Cambridge University Cruising Club, A.C. Armitage, had to withdraw an invitation sent to her as Mayor to their Club’s Annual Dinner as he did not realize she was a woman. The Annual Dinner was a male only occasion as the club was for men. She took the mistake with good grace!

Mary appointed her predecessor as mayor, Councillor Cyril Haigh, as the Deputy Mayor. She chose her friend Sheila Day to be the Mayoress. She was daughter of George Lewis Day who had been a solicitor in St Ives for many years as well as being the Town Clerk. Her grandfather, George Newton Day was the first Town Clerk in 1874; Mary’s father had been the town’s first Medical Officer of Health during the same period and there had been strong social as well as professional links between the two families.

In her acceptance speech, Mary said ‘I am deeply conscious of the honour you have shown me and I stand here with a feeling of great humility for my task, but backed by a strong sense of family who have lived in St Ives for just over one hundred years, coupled with hope and courage to tackle with God’s help, the work that lies ahead’. She outlined this work, the main priority being a new sewage system, followed by improved housing, the upkeep of the river and the market and parking problems. ‘But always we are faced with the hard facts of finance’ she pointed out. The main job of Mayor, she went on was ‘people not policies and here I found the recent election increased my experience, for I took the opportunity of visiting as many people as possible. I enjoyed getting to know many people and hearing of their problems.’ She went on to say that she 'hoped that new arrivals would be made to feel welcomed, so that they would be able to bring their own special contribution to the life of the town'.

Even today Mary's kindness to newcomers is remembered fondly by Naseer Ahmed. In 1968, he was a young immigrant boy living in St Ives with his father and cousins. Mary knocked at their door in the Quadrant, speaking impeccable Urdu, and invited the younger boys to come for tea at Tenterleas. A few days later, he went with his young Pakistani friends, and in welcoming them she told them she had lived in their part of the world many years before. Kashmir was not far from their hometowns in Pakistan. When tea was served, there were not only biscuits, but slices of cake too and some games to play later. As Naseer was to say later, quoting The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James, 'There are few hours in life more agreeable than the hour dedicated to the ceremony known as afternoon tea'.

With a warm heart and listening ear, Mary took after her father in her concern for the needs of others.

The Annual Civic Service was held at her church, All Saints Parish Church, and conducted by the vicar Revd Alex Lawson, who was also the Mayor’s Chaplain. He had been at All Saints since 1946 and it was his last year before retirement. Beside the councillors, the local MP David Renton and his wife, whom Mary knew well, and Lord Hemingford, who was the Chairman of Hunts Country Council, attended.

Cold War

Mary had the honour of flying with her counterpart from Huntingdon, Councillor E.T. Lees, and four other mayors, as a guest of the U.S. Air Force (whose planes were based locally at Alconbury) on a two-day visit in February 1963 to visit West and East Berlin. The purpose of the visit was to show the ‘civic dignitaries’ some of the work of post war reconstruction, foster Anglo-American relations and that of international relations in Europe. The Second World War had ended only 18 years before. This was at the height of the Cold War when the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962 nearly led to a nuclear war between the United States and NATO and the Soviet Union.

Flying out on a Dakota, this was the second time she had flown in one. Her first flight had been 16 years earlier when being evacuated during the civil unrest in what became Pakistan at the Partition of India in 1947.

Mary visiting the Berlin Wall, 1962.

The group were given a tour of the British sector of the city, and the next day a bus tour of the Russian sector passing through the infamous Checkpoint Charlie. When asked by journalists about the Berlin Wall she said that ‘we were stunned. There was a dramatic silence in the coach as we approached it.’ In the Russian sector she said later in a talk given about the visit that ‘there was a general air of shoddiness and drabness about the whole district.’ In contrast West Berliners seemed ‘full of determination, faith in the future and belief in hard work…..no one who has ever seen that barbaric wall could remain neutral and yet I think it is better to end on a note of hope and faith in the inscription on the Freedom Bell presented to Germany by the American people and hung in the Schoneberg Town Hall. The inscription reads from Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysberg Address “that the world under God shall have a new birth of Freedom’’.’ She hoped ‘that every battle against totalitarianism can be fought without bloodshed and by negotiation.’ Just over a quarter of a century later, the Berlin Wall was torn down in 1989 in a peaceful revolution. Mary lived long enough to see the reunification of Germany in 1990.

After her term of office as mayor, she continued as a councillor and was later elected the first and last woman Alderman of the borough. She resigned her Council seat in 1972 aged 69. A former colleague said of her ‘If she had an opinion, she knew how to express it. She never said anything unless she had some pertinent point to make.’

Mary's interest in the town did not end when she left the Council.

The campaign for the St Ives Relief Road

The increasing damage caused by heavy lorries on the medieval bridge became a increasing cause for concern to those who loved St Ives. The St Ives Sand and Gravel Company lorries thundered over the bridge many times a day, often knocking into the sides, but more alarmingly, damaging the foundations. It was estimated that over 10,000 used the Bridge, and Bridge Street was one of the worst bottlenecks in the Cambridgeshire road system.

Mary was one of the first to join the newly founded Civic Society of St Ives in 1968. It was formed to fight the proposed plans to route the St Ives Relief Road down Ramsey Road, across the Waits and Ingle Holt Island and then across the river to Hemingford Meadow. This would have cut off All Saints’ Church and the houses around it from the rest of the town. She was vocal in her opposition to this both from aesthetic view of view as well as the impact on the running of her play school in the Parish Hall.

She instructed Day & Son solicitors to write formally on her behalf to the County Planning Officers in April 1972. The basis of her objection was that the 30 children who came to the play school would be put at risk as they came by foot or by car. Also, the ‘likelihood that the proposed development would be detrimental to the business.’ The eventual decision to build the bypass to the east of the town, came after a public enquiry was held by the Department of the Environment. This was built in 1978-80, with a 25 span viaduct carrying the new road, which followed part of the track of the old St Ives to March railway line. The medieval bridge then became restricted to pedestrians. The campaign to site the relief road there had been successfully championed by many, including Mary.

Besides her membership of the St Ives Civic Society, Mary was also a keen supporter of the Norris Museum and gave the museum some of her father’s medical instruments as exhibits.

Mary was intrigued by the origins of the well-known nursey rhyme and riddle about the town, ‘As I was going to St Ives’. She was interviewed on BBC Radio’s ‘Down your Way’ by the presenter Brian Johnson in February 1980. This was one of the most popular programmes on BBC Radio from 1946 until 1992.  Every week the presenter visited a different city, town or village and interviewed six local people about its history, traditions and customs. Mary was one of those interviewed for the programme about St Ives. She stoutly declared that the rhyme featured the Huntingdonshire, not the Cornish town. A recording of her reciting the rhyme in the medieval chapel on the bridge was played during this interview. New scholarly research by a local author, Bridget Flanagan, has now cast doubt on this claim.

Later years

Having sold Tenterleas and semi-retired, she moved to a small maisonette in Clare Court built in the grounds of the old vicarage of All Saints’ Church. She hired the parish hall opposite Clare Court to run a small play school for some years. It was rather fitting as All Saints had been her parish church in her childhood and she had spent many occasions at the vicarage, especially while Father Algy, whom she admired greatly, was the vicar in the early 1930s. Throughout her time in St Ives, she continued to worship at the church.

She spent the last few years of her life at Rheola care home in Broad Leas. It was a house which she knew well as her parents were friends with the Day family, who lived there until Lewis Day died and his daughter Sheila moved to Hemingford Abbots.

Mary died aged just short of her 95th birthday in April 1998. She was in good health until the end. Five weeks before she died, she enjoyed a three course meal preceded by a glass of sherry, at the Slepe Hall Hotel, where she was taken two of her nephews. As mentioned earlier, she had been at school as a girl there before it became a hotel.

Her funeral was held at All Saints’ Church where she had worshipped much of her life. It was a fine sunny day and the Hemingford meadow across from the church was flooded, the worst flooding in the area since 1947. The river itself was dangerously swollen, covering Ingle Holt Island, lapping up against the church wall, and flooding the Waites.

Four of her favourite hymns were sung, rather against the view of Father David Moore, the vicar, who felt that four were too many. But her wishes prevailed. He had known her for 14 years, and he gave an amusing eulogy at the service with a firm focus on the sure hope she had as a Christian in eternal life. There were about 80 in the congregation and tea was served in the Slepe Hall Hotel afterwards, a venue of which she would have approved.

Mary’s ashes were buried in the family grave with her father, mother and youngest brother John in All Saints Cemetery in Westwood Road, near the church where the Grove family worshipped.

Mary was the last out of three generations of the Grove family to live in St Ives.

Authored by Peter Flower, one of Mary's nephews.