Old Princethorpians

Having been here six months already, it is very satisfying to see that some of the main projects that I have started since joining the Foundation are beginning to come together. These will make the archives at the college easier to search and use for everyone.

One of the key areas that both myself and Nick Baker before me identified was the need to tackle the organisation of the photos relating to Princethorpe College. We have roughly 5,000 photos stored in our strongroom but the way that they were stored made it very difficult to know what we actually had. Many of them were stored in unlabelled envelopes in mixed boxes with no reference to what they were about. Looking for a specific photograph showing a member of staff or pupil was very much like searching for a needle in a haystack. With the help of a very dedicated sixth form student, Charlotte Ecclestone, we are now at a point where the photographs have been roughly sorted into archival boxes based on their subject. They will need another sort through to put them in to a rough date order and weed out any duplicates before they are catalogued and look more like the ‘after’ photo than the ‘before’ but it won’t be long before I am calling on Old Princethorpians to lend me their knowledge about people and events to catalogue the photos fully. What is funny is that because the same faces and names come up regularly in the photos, I have started to feel like I actually know some of the staff members that left long before I started here.

Talking about cataloguing leads nicely on to the second big project that is steaming ahead; the purchase of a new cataloguing system. Having looked at a number of different options, we are in the final stages of agreeing the purchase of one and the most exciting thing is that it will include a public searchable catalogue, replacing the PDF versions that are online currently, and we will be able to provide access to items within our collection that has been digitised, including old magazines so that you can take a trip down memory lane yourself. I look forward to being able to share the link to the website as soon as it is available.

Finally, all of the material donated by Crescent since it joined the Foundation in 2016 has been accessioned so we know exactly what we have. After a recent meeting with Joe Thackway, the headteacher at Crescent, I was delighted to be able to add their Admission Registers to the collection. The registers start in 1948, when the school admitted its first pupil, and carry on until 2017, when the decision was made to store the information in a purely digital format. Admission Registers are a fantastic source of information about past pupils, which are used regularly by both myself and the Development Office when we receive enquiries about pupils as they contain information such as dates of birth, as well as the dates an individual pupil joined and left the school.

We are always looking for new material to add to the archive, so if you come across any material from your days here at the college that you no longer want, please don’t hesitate to get in touch as we would be delighted to have it.

Janette Ratcliffe
Foundation Archivist

The recent performances of ‘Arabian Nights’ got Archivist Janette Ratcliffe thinking about sharing some of the beautiful programmes we have in our collection from the St Mary’s Priory days in the Old Princethorpian. We hold more than 100 programmes dating from the 1850s to the 1950s, each one beautifully designed and illustrated by one of the pupils at the time. There were two plays performed by the girls each year, with the main one being performed at the start of February for the Reverend Mother’s Feast Day. It was a day of celebration in which all usual routines were broken with and the girls were even given permission by the Reverend Mother to talk in their Dorms at night!

The early plays were performed in French as a mark of respect for the Reverend Mother of the Priory and the programmes front cover reflects this as you can see in the front cover of the play ‘Sainte Elisabeth’. Later plays were performed in English and the programme design itself was much more varied. I have shared two of my favourites here. On the cover of one, the well-known nursery rhyme ‘What are little girls made of?’ seems to have taken a slightly sinister turn as the angels try to put the little girl in a pie. The other programme shows a small mouse blowing bubbles and if you look carefully, you can spot the words ‘Votes for Women’ inside them. With the centenary of women over 30-years-old getting the right to vote, it is interesting to see the influence of events in the wider world on the work of the girls here at the Priory.

I was one of fourteen boys of all ages who were founder pupils at St Bede's back in September 1957.

The first headmaster was Fr. O’Leary who taught the older boys, of which I was one. Then there was Fr Sheahan, who taught the boys between ages 7 and 11, although he was replaced that Christmas by Fr. Ryan, and Mrs Mcarthy who taught the infants.  The school had previously been used as a Dr Barnardo's home so it was very easily adapted to a boys school.  I was a pupil there for three years.

I am missing from the school’s opening photograph because I had been selected to go to the main house in Dublin, they thought that I might have a vocation. They should have sent my Mother; she was the one with a vocation!

I was quickly rejected and sent back to finish my studies at St Bedes. I had left the school by the time that the move to Princethorpe College was set in motion.  I knew Princethorpe very well as I was an altar boy at St Austin’s in Kenilworth and Cannon Swift used to send us lads to all of the convents in the area and we served their Mass and usually got fed in return.

I also helped with the moving of all the desks and other furniture from St Bede's to Princethorpe, as I had the necessary licence to drive the large van we hired for the occasion. For several years I played tennis at Princethorpe partnering Fr. Liam O’Callaghan against Fr. Jim Ryan and Fr. Jim McManus, they were both dreadful losers but even worse winners.

I trained as an Industrial Archaeologist and later specialised in the WWII German fortifications in Europe. Almost twenty year ago I moved to Normandy to be near the Bunkers.  I have two history websites that make interesting reading if you would like to take a look: www.atlantikwall.org.uk and www.normandy1944.org.uk.