St David's School - Senior School

We are proposing to hold a Reunion lunch of the 'O' Level class of 1965 this autumn in a central place - London or Birmingham. We already have good interest in doing this.

If you would like to be included and want more details please email annsmith.foxwood@btinternet.com who will pass on any messages to us.

The South Wales Reunion due to take place on Saturday, 9th May, in Cowbridge has regretfully had to be cancelled due to lack of support. OGA

This will be a special occasion to celebrate the 70th anniversary of the evacuation from Ashford to Powis. The Earl of Powis has been invited to attend. After lunch a visit to Powis Castle is planned, followed by tea.

The Earl has expressed a wish that he would be interested in seeing memorabilia. We are also looking for lots of photographs to display. Please contact Helen Jones (email: helen.thebell@btopenworld.com) if you are able to bring or send some.

This will be our special Reunion for 2009 - do please come and support it ! For those who weren't in Powis Castle during the War Years - come and see what it was like! With your permission we would also like to put old photographs taken at Powis on this website.

There will be a display of paintings by the Late Miss Marie-Louise Reiss, former staff, who bequeathed them to Eira James [Mrs. Rowley].These will be available to any Old Girl in exchange for a Donation to the St. Martins in the Field Homeless centre, who helped Miss Reiss when she was a destitute refugee.

As this is the 70th anniversary of the School’s evacuation to Powis Castle we are planning to visit the Castle afterwards to have a photograph taken on the steps and have a cup of tea.

Vida Thomas-Jones was born in Llandudno, North Wales when her father was in France serving as a Chaplain in the Royal Welsh Fusiliers during the First World War. She grew up in vicarages primarily in Llanidloes and Caernarfon where her father was a Canon of Bangor Cathedral.

After leaving Ashford, Vida went to the Royal College of Music to study violin and piano. However, the war intervened and she felt that she should take a more active role and so went to the Royal Infirmary, Liverpool, to train as a nurse. Having qualified as a State Registered Nurse she joined the Queen Alexandra’s Royal Army Nursing Corps. She served in various parts of the UK before being sent to India for two years. Her war experiences made her a committed pacifist for the rest of her life.

She returned to North Wales after she was demobbed and trained as a midwife in Bangor. She married Jack Lloyd-Jones, a Caernarfon solicitor, in 1950 and they had four children. The family moved to Cwmbran in South Wales in 1958 when Jack was employed by the Cwmbran Development Corporation, a body set up by the New Towns Commission to build Wales’ only new town to meet the post-war housing need. She was widowed in 1989.

While bringing up her family Vida was an active volunteer, working in family planning clinics and for the WRVS. In later years she also volunteered for Oxfam and helped to set up and run a lecture club, Cwmbran Forum, bringing musicians and authors from across the world to South Wales. Latterly she was also a founder member of the Llantarnam Grange Art Club and was made their first life member on her 90th birthday. She enjoyed art both as an enthusiastic visitor to galleries and as an amateur painter throughout her life. She was also an avid reader.

Ashford was extremely important as a formative experience to her whole life. Vida attended reunions in Wales each year, although she missed this last year, and the friends she made in school stayed important to her to her death. She is deeply missed by her family and many friends.

Ten years ago she wrote this poem, drawing together the phases of her life and ending on a characteristically defiant, independent note.

Valerie was born in Wallington, Surrey but early in the war moved with her parents to Coventry to escape the London bombing. When Coventry was bombed just as badly they returned to Stanwell only to see ‘doodle bugs’ flying by.

She started at WGS in 1947 where she spent eight happy years. She was a member of the School Choir, with whom she sang in St Paul’s Cathedral and the Royal Albert Hall, the Girl Guide unit, was Head Day Girl and participated in so many more of the school’s activities before leaving to qualify to teach English. She also became a certified Wimbledon coach. She sang in choirs all her life; was still playing tennis at seventy and Guiding remained a lifelong passion.

In 1960 Valerie left England to teach in Sydney Australia. She met Michael and married him instead of returning to England. His work took them to Hobart, Tasmania and teaching was put on hold to raise Merilyn and Coralie. Home was a very important place. She then retrained to teach English to foreign students. She and Michael attended Boys Brigade camps in Sweden, Ireland and Jamaica as well as visiting missionaries in Argentina, Chile, Peru, Paraguay and Uruguay.

In 1989 Michael took early retirement and they moved back to New South Wales to serve God in many short term missions over the next seventeen years, helping with English teaching and administration support as well as looking after missionary children in Botswana, Tanzania, Senegal, Sudan, Turkey, Brazil, Venezuela, Mexico and Korea.

At her Funeral service, led by Bishop Reg Piper at Gymea NSW Anglican Church in May 2008, the emphasis was on Valerie’s love of all things Welsh. The Hymns were; Guide me, O though great Redeemer, The Lord’s my Shepherd, O for a Thousand Tongues and God be the Glory. Bible readings were Psalm 121, and from Corinthians and John. It ended with the Welsh National Anthem. The Eulogy, given by one of her sons-in-law referred to Valerie as a devoted wife, mother and grandmother (to Henry and Sarah), and a very good mother-in-law. She had tremendous Faith and had always served the Church wherever she lived. The three characteristics of Valerie were WISDOM, GENTLENESS and STRENGTH.

She had already been at WGS for a year when she made me welcome in 1948. We were both day girls and lived within walking distance of each other and she lived next door to Jenny Roberts, another day girl. Our interests were tennis and hockey and during the 48 years she lived in Australia we always exchanged news at Christmas. From time to time, the telephone would ring and Michael would say they were in England and when could we meet. The last time was in November 2007 and the diary said impossible, but at WGS we were taught that nothing was impossible so rapid rearrangements were made and with the help of Celia Jacobs the five of us met over a two hour tea! I’m so thankful that we did.

When the telephone rang at the end of May 2008 I cheerfully said “where are you, Michael?” Sadly it was not good news; Valerie had died in Australia on 26th May 2008.

Granddaughter of George Charles Herbert 4th Earl of Powis “our Earl”, Davina died on February 24th 2008. She was born on the 3rd July 1938 and when young, often went over to the junior house at Rhiewport to have tea with the girls on Sunday afternoon. Sadly, her father died on active service in March 1943 and, had she been a boy, she would have succeeded her grandfather. In time however, she did inherit the title which was passed down through the female line. She married Rupert Ingram and they had three children. In 1964 as the result of a car accident her husband was killed; and she received injuries which left her paralysed from the neck down. Although she regained some movement in her upper body she was confined to a wheelchair for the rest of her life. She championed sport for the disabled and went on to lead the movement that resulted in the foundation of the Paralympic Games. After the House of Lords Act 1999 she became an elected peer. She was a keen proponent of education, especially for the disabled and contributed to support many education bills. In 1996 she was appointed DBE for her services to the disabled.

Sadly with Meriel’s death, I like so many others, have lost a very dear friend who will be missed greatly.

I was among the large congregation in the lovely old Parish Church in Pewsey at the service to celebrate her life. Her son Jeremy gave the Address with a perfect picture of Meriel, her varied life encompassing so many friendships and her love of her family, part of which is set out below.

Meriel’s daughter Philippa is an Old Girl and we extend our sympathy to her at this sad time.

And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;

Our Mother wasn’t much given to poetry but, amongst the treasures she brought back from that defining year in America in 1948 as an exchange teacher, was a book called English Writers. She gave it to me when I went away to school and it became my literary bible as it opened up riches of English and American literature. Among the gems contained in it was that poem The Lake of Innisfree by W B Yeats, which Mum loved and quoted and handed on to me. It speaks of an Idyllic place, perhaps remembered from childhood, which represents peace and simplicity and which becomes an oasis of reflection at other less tranquil moments in life, held as it is in “the deep heart’s core”.

Innisfree is in County Sligo in Ireland, but in our mother’s case it stood for some other much-loved and well-remembered place where “peace comes dropping slow”. Like Trefin in Pembrokeshire, where she used to cycle to see Auntie Bec when Mum was an undergraduate; the place she returned to with my father and her three children for summer holidays when we were growing up; the place where Sian and Paul now have a house, which Mum loved to return to regularly, the place where at her request her ashes will eventually be scattered.

She was herself a kind of Isle of Innisfree, a rememberancer, a person who held our memories and who, as the matriarch of our family, held our far- flung, complex and sometimes dysfunctional family relationships together. It was as we visited her here in Pewsey or spoke to her on the phone that we gathered news not only about her bridge and her golf and her undiminished zest for entertaining, we also found out through her about family and friends, people’s successes, achievements or disasters; in all of which she took a genuine, compassionate and caring interest- an interest which she shared with all of us. She was a communicator par excellence.

We all know, even though she retired from the profession in the early 1970’s when she married Ken, that she was a born teacher. I think of her as a teacher of brilliance, whether she was teaching maths to students in secondary schools, where she of course made many life-long friends: or instructing the young in the finer points of tennis, a sport at which she herself excelled and achieved distinction as a county player. It’s true that her skills as a maths teacher never made much impression on her children who, in the numeracy department, must have been a huge disappointment to her and our accountant father! However, what we did get from her was her belief in us and our potential, her interest in what we were doing and her encouragement for us to succeed. It was that same encouragement that also marked her relationships with her wider family, her friends, colleagues, neighbours, students, or indeed virtual strangers.

People whom she met in this country or abroad didn’t stay strangers for long (particularly if there was a whiff of a Welsh accent). Mum had an instinct for friendship and we who gather here today are just a drop in the ocean of her friendships and will have our own stories to tell. Her elegant flowing script wrote countless letters as she kept in touch with friends all over the world. When letter writing became too laborious the phone was her link with the world. Her other form of communication was her car; increasingly immobile she may have become but that didn’t prevent her travelling at high speed the length and breadth of this country and beyond. Welsh School reunions at Welshpool or Devon, visiting sick friends in Bangor, reuniting with family in Pembrokeshire and even taking another eighty year old on a trip to Bruges! If the lonely Honda could talk, it would have a tale to tell.

But the one thing that really marked Meriel’s friendship as something really special was her smile. She smiled at people as she smiled at life and transformed life’s possibilities and restored people’s hope with that smile. Together with her sparkling blue eyes it is what we shall miss most and will live on in our memories of her.

Meriel was not a regular churchgoer but she was the daughter of a priest as well as the sister and mother of priests. The riches of Christian teaching and its best practice ran deep within her and shaped her view of life. We may not look to her as an example of formal religious observance but if you wanted a good example of Christian love in practice, without ostentation or fuss then you need have looked no further than Meriel Lawrence.

Sue was born in Singapore but the family returned to England on one of the last passenger ships just before World War II, and at some point, moved to Park Avenue, Staines, where my family also lived. By then Sue’s brother John had arrived.

Sue started at WGS as a day girl, but became a boarder when her father was posted to Germany as Economic Adviser to the British High Commission.

We all face the odd problem in our lives, but Sue seemed to have more than her fair share throughout her life. Sue suffered severe tonsillitis when she was taking her O levels, sitting some exams in isolation as she was infectious (or is it contagious – I never know which is which!). Although not academic, she got by in the difficult circumstances and the dreaded tonsils were later removed. I remember visiting her in a strange little cottage hospital in Hampton where she was very lonely as she had had no visitors.

Sue suffered with a bad back which was exacerbated by a fall whilst skiing during her teen years and later it transpired that she had rheumatoid arthritis and this was a tremendous trial for her throughout her life. Two major back operations failed but she pursued treatment of various kinds to keep it fairly tolerable. She made huge efforts for special occasions, subsiding into miserable pain and migraines afterwards.

When Sue left WGS she was sent to finishing school in Switzerland, which she very much enjoyed. She then went to Leicester College of Art and studied design, specialising in lingerie. For some reason she did not finish her course, but took a job with Kayser Bonder and then Taylor Wood, both well known lingerie companies.

She met David Baker at a party and they married in Goring-by-Sea near her parent’s home as, by then, they were living at High Salvington. Sue and David had two children, Susannah and Richard. She was immensely proud of their achievements and also of her grandchildren, Alexander and Isabel. She was very funny in her efforts to anglicise her American grandchildren. How about a Marks and Sparks check school dress worn by Isabel in an American school? How she loved their visits and her trips to New Jersey. She was also so happy when Richard was married in a civil ceremony early in 2006 and it was a great sadness that she couldn’t be with him and Lina when they had a grand white wedding ceremony in Lithuania in August 2006.

Sue’s great talent lay in design and colour although she had drawing skills as well. She could conjure up beautiful clothes out of almost nothing. She loved flower arranging and belonged to Beaconsfield Flower Arrangers’ Club. Pink was her favourite colour which she used in floral arrangements in her home, both fresh and silk, but from three feet I would defy you to know the difference.

Only two months before her death, in April 2006, with enormous help from David, Sue was my witness at my wedding. She chatted to so many people, talking of the future and never looking back.

Sue showed incredible courage and dignity through the terrible cancer which started several years ago. In the last year of her life the disease had spread to her liver and spine and she was told in August 2005 that she had three months to live. With enormous support from David, the local hospice and Marie Curie nurses she defied it and lived a further ten months, strengthened by her faith in God to the end. The Vicar of Hedgerley was a great support and visited her as did many friends and relations. She was loved by all who knew her and one friend at the funeral told me Sue was one of the most beautiful women she had known. How Sue would have laughed but she did have a great aura about her. I feel honoured to have been her oldest friend and to have been able to pay tribute to her at her funeral.

It was lovely to have Ann Jones (Mrs Johnson), Judy Walley (Mrs ?Lewis), Julia Pritchett (Mrs ?) and Jennifer Millward (Mrs Tiptaft) at the beautiful Hedgerley church which was decorated in Sue’s favourite colours and flowers, - pink Ballerina roses and white lilies. The doctors and nurses who had looked after her so wonderfully were also present as was all her family, apart from her mother. She was laid to rest in the little wooded churchyard amidst much sadness, but great love.

Our gentle, caring Sue was a shining example of the qualities of our school motto – Wisdom, Gentleness and Strength.

Valerie Lee (Mrs. Newman) died on Monday 26 May 2008, after being diagnosed with a disease which in turn affected her heart. A stroke was suffered early in the morning and she passed away at 6pm on the same day.

Valerie, leaves behind, her husband Michael, two daughters, Merilyn (and Richard) and Coralie (and Steve) and two grandchildren Henry and Sarah.

Valerie devoted her life to serving others, being a school teacher, Guides, Church Worker, Missionary Service, Husband, Mother and Granny.