The Chestnuts 1887 - 1921

The Chestnuts 1887 - 1921

Ambitious plans

When James Allpress Smith died in 1887, Hannah purchased The Chestnuts with a £605 mortgage (around £67,000 today) from the Cambridge Permanent Benefit Building Society, fully repaid in 1925. She also acquired the freehold from the Duke of Manchester for £54 (today £6,000).

Now sole owner, Hannah had ambitious plans. She added an extension behind The Chestnuts, today 7a Church Street, providing dormitory and classroom space. Pupils enjoyed tennis courts, allotments, and pigsties. It appears the purchase included land referred to as the old football ground, where Hannah allowed Huntingdonshire Boy Scouts to hold their 1925 Annual Rally.

Changes to The Chestnuts late 1800s.

She renamed the school the Collegiate School and celebrated in typical style, hosting a supper with songs and toasts for the builders, Skeeles & Sons. Contemporary adverts called it the Collegiate School for Girls, St Ives.

By 1890, Hannah proudly advertised that of 55 pupils entered for public examinations, 53 passed, 22 with honours. That year, she also launched a morning boys’ preparatory class as a kindergarten and introduced Sloyd to the curriculum.

The 1891 census recorded 14 boarders at The Chestnuts, along with Hannah (36), her niece (19), two teachers (music and English) and two female servants. Apart from one boy, Henry Saint (8), all boarders were girls aged 6 to 18. Surprisingly, half were born in St Ives, children of local businessmen who chose to board them at the school. Most of the rest came from elsewhere in Cambridgeshire.

By 1899, the school had a staff of 12, including both resident and visiting teachers. Mrs Barley of Cambridge taught dancing; Rohan Clensy of London taught violin. Pupils sat external exams, including those of the Royal Academy of Arts and the Royal College of Music.

In 1900, two pupils passed French and geography exams for the University of St Andrews. That year’s school concert was held in the Corn Exchange, with an extensive list of exam passes distributed by the Mayoress, Mrs Hankin. Speeches followed from the Mayor and Town Clerk, and the pupils performed a full programme of classical music.

By 1901, the school had 25 boarders, plus four boarding teachers, a nurse, and three female servants. Of the 15 pupils from Cambridgeshire, only one was born in St Ives. Another was born in India.

A strong theme at the school was healthy outdoor recreation, with Hannah actively involved. At the 1905 prize-giving, local businessman and future Mayor G. G. G. Wheeler said it was to Miss Pattrick that the establishment of golf links in St Ives was due, and said she had earned the gratitude of many who now played golf, and many who attempted it. This was 18 years before the town’s nine-hole golf course was laid out near the Thicket path.

In 1906, fun sports were added to the annual prize-giving, held on the lawn at Westwood House. Events included three-legged, slow bicycle, and egg-and-spoon races.

By 1907, Elizabeth Fordham shared top billing with Hannah in school advertisements. Formerly a boarding music teacher listed in 1901, then the youngest at 27 and from London, Elizabeth was now co-principal. The 1907 advert listed ten resident and visiting teachers in addition to Hannah and Elizabeth.

The 1910 advert highlighted home comforts, modern education, and the school’s growing achievements.

A window on the world

The Norris Museum holds the geography exercise book of Maggie Chew, a 14-year-old boarder at The Chestnuts and the daughter of a farmer from Oldhurst. She later became a supplementary teacher, possibly at The Chestnuts.

Written between 1904 and 1905, the notebook is mostly text, with a few maps and diagrams. Maggie’s handwriting is neat, and occasional corrections suggest she reviewed and revised her work. The notes appear to be personal, possibly copied from the blackboard, reflecting a teaching style where key points were written up for pupils.

Maggie's diagram of the River Nile.

The content begins with basic geographical definitions and moves into physical geography, though without much structure. Topics include products and the countries they come from, glacial features, climate, atoll formation, and winds. A now outdated classification of human races also appears. European transport routes and English rivers and towns are covered briefly. A more detailed section on Africa reflects a colonial perspective, likely influenced by the recently ended Second Boer War. Maggie also includes four hand-drawn river maps.

The notebook suggests that Maggie was engaged and curious, gaining a broader understanding of the world than was typical for many of her peers.

The French fashion

In the early 1900s, it became fashionable among France’s upper and middle classes to seek an English education for their daughters. French schools, often large and regimented, prioritised discipline and order, with distant, authoritarian mistresses shaped by convent traditions and religious orders.

By contrast, English education was seen as superior. Some French schools even adopted English curricula. English dame schools were typically small and homely, with schoolmistresses fostering maternal-style relationships. Friendships between pupils were encouraged, and the curriculum was broader, promoting intellectual development rather than just traditional or religious instruction.

Hannah’s school, with its relaxed, sporty, and wide-ranging curriculum, fitted this trend well. The 1911 census lists seven French pupils, five from Paris and two related, among twenty boarders aged 10 to 19. None were born in St Ives, though seven were from the surrounding area. There were also three boarding teachers, plus Hannah, Elizabeth, and two servants. No other school in St Ives is known to have attracted French pupils, further highlighting the school’s distinctiveness and appeal.

By 1913, Elizabeth Fordham had moved on. Hannah’s advertisement promoted tennis, boating, and golf, and promised entire care for pupils whose parents are abroad. Previously, fees were available only on request, but the new advert stated terms from £40 (today £4,000, and almost certainly for the year ).

Indecency in Church Street

All may have been calm and cultured within the walls of The Chestnuts, but the surrounding neighbourhood told a different story.

In July 1913, Frederick Barrett was hawking goods outside the school when two young women, possibly Hannah’s pupils, ran from him in alarm. When a man he approached refused to buy or even glance at his wares, Barrett responded with abusive language.

Reported to the police for selling indecent postcards, Barrett insisted they were works of art. The authorities disagreed. The postcards were deemed very indecent, and Barrett was sentenced to 14 days in prison.

Norah Wolfe remembers

Attending Hannah's school for three and a half years from 1916, Norah Wood shared her memories in two articles, one published in 1996 for The Choice magazine, the other in 1999 for Cambridgeshire People. Aged 84, she recalled her time there fondly.

Norah Wolfe with her younger sister Enid.

I arrived there in the headmistress' pony and trap which had met my widowed mother, sister Enid and me at St. Ives Railway Station. Cinderella's coach could not have been more magical to a five-year-old.

Deposited at the white-painted porch of what seemed to be a pleasant country house, we were charmed by coloured glass strips jingling in the moving air when the headmistress herself opened the front door. Miss Pattrick, a white haired lady of tiny stature, henceforth transformed the topsy-turvy world of the Great War, when fathers were killed and mothers made widows, into an ordered existence. 

That was seventy-nine years ago and I was five years old. My father had been killed on the Somme in 1916, so my sister Enid and I were sent to board at The Collegiate School in Huntingdonshire. 

I did my best to upset normality by falling backwards off my stool at the first three meals in the dining room. A high-backed chair miraculously appeared! At first I rejected the lumpy porridge at breakfast, but soon learned that nothing else came in its place and that good manners demanded no food be left on our plates. We learned to tuck arms in to our sides, never to stretch for bread and butter or to cram mouths full, and throughout dinner to speak nothing but French! For me, silent dinner ensued for a term. 

I loved our white pinafores with starched shoulder epaulettes which elevated me to either fairy or angel status - I wasn't sure which! In the babies' dormitory there were five iron beds and a washstand bearing two enormous white bowls and ewers. We washed in cold water which then had to be poured into a slop pail. One icy winter day I dropped a bowl. Miss Pattrick’s reprimand was as icy as the water. 

The schoolroom, with its anthracite stove, was divided into sections. Lessons were a joy. We wrote on slates. (“Please, Norah, don't let your pencil squeak so much!’’) Maps and charts lined the walls, and spinning globes showed brown mountain ranges, green lands and large expanses of pink British Empire. Religious studies meant colourful texts and pictures to insert in our bibles.  

A Parisian Mademoiselle and an English Miss Randall taught us French and English lessons. We made our own relief maps in plaster and coloured them. We had fun learning both arithmetic tables and spelling by rote and competitive games in the schoolroom. We printed and drew. How I loved climbing on the pink-painted window-seat in the infant's dormitory and leaning out to see the pony in the yard, that I could draw him for the external Royal Academy of Arts examinations which the entire school sat. No pony ever had as knobbly knees as the ones I drew!

Our religious education continued on Sunday with church, which occasionally had its perils. The penny allotted for the collection plate frequently escaped my sticky grasp, meaning an ignominious crawl around the pew floor to retrieve it. 

On Sunday afternoons we penned letters home in neat script writing and, that task done, read or were read to by a mistress. My favourite book was L.T. Meade’s Beyond the Blue Mountains which, with the grapevine working, found its way into my Christmas stocking. John Bunyan’s Pilgrim's Progress was incomprehensible to a five-year-old, but Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland and Louisa M Alcott’s Little Women increased my love for storybooks and reading. 

Each pupil cultivated a small garden plot and ‘sin’ entered my world via Doris Armstrong’s particular Garden of Eden. Five radishes she had grown were left, washed and ready for eating, on the washbasin in the cloakroom. Relishing a supposed sweet, I stole one. Doris imperiously summoned possible suspects “Did you steal one of my radishes?’’ she thundered. “No!’’ My first lie, my first theft! I hid in the shrubbery behind the netball court and cried. Remorse? Or was it because the radish tasted horrible? 

The daily crocodile walks were either exhilarating or dull. If we turned right at the gate, we were bound for a thicket between the River Ouse and the golf links. At a kissgate we broke ranks, scampered, picked wild rosebuds and spotted squirrels. We learned to recognise daisies and buttercups by the path; riverside rose campions and loosestrife; swooping swallows and swifts; sparrows and strutting magpies. 

Were we punished for our misdemeanours? Yes! For talking after ‘lights out’ our dolls were confiscated. The penance for slouching at the dining table was a standing session holding a correction board across one's back. In a recent antiques programme on television, youthful experts failed to identify such a board, but seventy-eight years had not expunged its use from my memory.

In summer there were treats. We bathed in the town's open air pool filled with water from the river. Always on a sunny day, a boating trip on the Ouse was organised for the whole school. Somehow we all squashed into three long rowing boats hired from a boat yard on the town quay. Miss Pattrick, Miss Randall and Miss Lusher tucked small fry under their arms while coping with steering lines, inexperienced oarswomen and squirming children intent on seeing darting minnows in watery depths or snatching at wayward dragonflies. We played rounders in a river meadow and Henry, the odd-job man, delivered in the pony-trap a picnic tea of lemonade, jam sandwiches and buns.

When the same water meadows flooded and froze in winter, we were equipped with a motley collection of skates and taken to 'have a go'. I remember the skates having blades attached to wooden bases and being fixed to our walking shoes with leather straps. No boots! Contact with the ice was often undignified and painful: whatever we cut, it was certainly not a faultless figure-of-eight. 

One stormy Saturday afternoon, a terrifying crash, louder than the storm’s thunder, rocked the building. Had a thunderbolt fallen? Senior girls rushed out into the garden to see smoke ascending from the nearby church. A light aircraft had crashed into the spire. The pilot lost his life and the church lost half its spire. 

The 1918 influenza epidemic also interrupted normal schooling. During isolation in the school sanitarium I remember being told that the war was over. In our sheltered backwater, it didn’t mean much to me. The church had no bells to peal, but everyone was smiling and laughing, everybody except Beryl Master’s mother, whom we heard weeping as she walked up the garden path to the front door. Two days after Armistice had been declared, the dreaded orange-coloured War Office telegram told her of her husband’s death in France. 

St Ives did not celebrate victory until the following summer. On a July day afternoon lessons were cancelled and we were let loose in the soft fruit garden to finish off the whitecurrant crop (a hitherto unknown licence), then march to the flag-bedecked town to join a chattering throng craning to see the military parade with its splendour of coloured uniforms and flashing brass bands.

Miss Pattrick made boarding school an idyllic family home, but after three and a half years my sister and I left because mother married again. Miss Pattrick wrote to her, ‘I hope you will let me see the girlies from time to time. I love them dearly.’ We let her down, for we never again saw this remarkable, sweet woman. Life changed. She was that sort of headmistress: it was that sort of school.

Norah likely witnessed, but didn't mention, Hannah's accidental dip at the Holt Island bathing place. While overseeing her girls, Hannah bent to retrieve a handkerchief and fell in. Her voluminous skirts kept her afloat.

To read more instalments about this house, click The Chestnuts. To view stories of other interesting houses and their residents in St Ives in the style of David Olusoga's BBC television programme, click A House Through Time. To access more topics on the social history of St Ives, its resident and the surrounding area, click St Ives 100 Years Ago.