was still young, her mother would often return to Beara for school holidays, sometimes accompanied by her friend Sylvia. It was an unusual arrangement, but made to work. Claude and Evelyn Whitehead never divorced. When Evelyn was back home, she would take Frances to Sunday worship at the ancient Church of St John the Baptist in the village of Lustleigh, a few miles north of Bovey. Frances found the services more friendly than those in the Bovey Tracey Parish Church of St John the Evangelist, which her father continued to attend. The vicar in Lustleigh struck Frances as a humble, gentle, kindly sort of person, and the service was lower-church in its style. It was the personality of the vicar and the warmth of his preaching which made them want to keep going back.
To Malvern
At the age of 13, in 1938, Frances was sent to Malvern Girls’ College in the spa town of Great Malvern, Worcestershire. The Belfast-born writer and Christian apologist C S Lewis had also received his schooling here, a quarter of a century earlier, at the boys’ school, Malvern College.
Malvern Girls’ College, founded towards the end of the nineteenth century, was situated in the former Imperial Hotel, opposite the railway station. The girls were a familiar sight to townspeople with their heather-coloured tweed overcoats and maroon hats. By the time Frances entered the school, Miss Iris Brooks had been Headmistress for ten years. She was a controversial figure from the start of her tenure, and evidently commanded authority, not only over the staff and pupils, but, by virtue of her redoubtable presence, over the Council. According to Pamela Hurle, the school’s historian, there was a sense in which she resembled Muriel Spark’s character – or Maggie Smith’s screen interpretation of it, in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. In the first year of her appointment, the Council reduced its own rather inflated attendance allowance at meetings, settling for a modest sum and ‘the democratic third-class railway fare’. Should a steam train in the station be making enough noise to disturb the headmistress, a member of staff would be dispatched across the road to seek out the station master, and the noise was subdued. ‘Her standards must have been difficult to meet,’ stated the school historian. ‘One girl seeking a reference from Miss Brooks was told that she could not make bricks without straw, while another girl quietly doing some non-examination work was told to give up and switch off the light since it was not worth using the electricity for her efforts.’10
Summerside House
The Middle School was divided into six Houses, all situated in nearby roads. Here girls from Lower lVth to Upper Vth ate breakfast and dinner together. Frances was in Summerside House, in North Albert Road, just a few minutes’ walk from the main school building, where the senior girls lived. Each morning the Summerside girls would assemble in a crocodile, to walk down to the main building, supervised by prefects, returning together in late afternoon, when they could change out of their uniforms and into their home clothes. In summer the tweed coats were exchanged for plain blue blazers or, when they became seniors, stripy blazers of red, white and blue.
After a year, war came, and the buildings were requisitioned by the Royal Navy. At this point the school was relocated to Somerset and split up by year groups. Frances’s year moved to a mansion house in Hinton St George with several staff. However, the evacuation lasted only one year, after which they moved back to Malvern, as the Navy had not needed the buildings.
A particular aim of public schools11 has always been that of nurturing confidence and poise. To this end, Miss Brooks had introduced a custom whereby all girls, from the age of 13, were required to deliver a three-minute speech to their whole house each term, with the Housemistress present. No instruction was given on how to choose a subject or on how to craft a speech; and the girls were not appraised for their efforts. Frances tended to speak on horses or riding, and no doubt marshalled good content. But she, like many others, dreaded the delivery, and she was able to enjoy term only when this ordeal was over. She was probably not the only girl who left school vowing never again to speak in public.
Girls were required to write to their parents weekly. Frances always knew there would be a letter from her father, as Captain Whitehead wrote weekly to his daughter. Other girls’ fathers hardly ever wrote, and they envied Frances her letters from her father. Her mother wrote too, but not as regularly. Her father’s letters were full of encouragement to be the best and expressed his high expectations. If anything was worth doing – study, sports or the pursuit of interests in school clubs – it was worth doing well. Her father instilled in Frances that she must always aim high. Claude Whitehead continued to retain a close interest in his daughter’s education, as he had when she was under a governess.
As with all public schools, the chaplain prepared pupils for confirmation in the Church of England. Other than those from a different Christian tradition, all the girls were confirmed, in Malvern Priory, by the Bishop of Worcester. Wartime travel restrictions meant Frances’s father was unable to be there for the service, but her mother made it, as did a few other parents; the confirmation candidates, all dressed in white, knelt at the communion rail, one by one receiving the Bishop’s blessing. For such schoolgirls this was more a rite of passage than a public confession of faith; and so it was for Frances.
It became second nature to work hard at everything. At Malvern Frances attained Grade 8 at the piano and, in middle school, she would accompany the hymn-singing in house prayers. Having begun piano lessons when very young, Frances’s love of music, particularly classical music – Schubert, Chopin, Bach, Mozart, Beethoven – was to last throughout her life.
Sport also continued to play a big part in her life until it was crowded out by work. Frances competed for Summerside, and for the school, in tennis, and also played lacrosse. She loved the rivalry of sports, and the fun of piling into coaches for away games. Malvern life contrasted so starkly with life at Bovey Tracey.
In her Vth form, Frances was made a prefect, and appointed Head of Summerside House, a role involving some discipline of younger girls, supervisory duties, and arranging walks for Sunday afternoons. She was evidently showing both leadership and administrative gifts. In her oversight of the girls she worked to reflect the values instilled by her father. He urged her to be honest about what she had done at all times and never to tell untruths, no matter how bad the situation seemed.
The eleven commandments
From the time Evelyn left home, Claude Whitehead would take Frances with him to bridge parties in the school holidays. It was a natural progression for him, as he wanted her to learn his wide range of skills. In addition Claude and Frances began to go up to Welstor Farm after church each week, for Sunday lunch with her cousins. Frances would drive the Austin Seven from Beara to the main road, as was now customary, and then take the wheel again when they were up on Dartmoor, as soon as they turned off the road into the half-mile-long drive up to the farmhouse.
Welstor, one of several farms owned by the Whitley family, had a large, old-fashioned farmhouse, and other houses on its land. Frances’s Uncle William was Master of the South Devon foxhounds, and a keen huntsman. Frances, a competent horsewoman from her early teens, would join the foxhunt. The family had wide interests in the natural world and in history. Frances’s Aunt Nonny (her father’s sister) was a keen collector of flint stone-age arrowheads to be found among early settlers on Dartmoor.
William Whitley was highly-regarded in the county, both as a landowner and for an unusual initiative he took in 1928. A staunch Anglican, he was troubled by attempts to introduce a new Book of Common Prayer, considered to have a ‘popish trend’. Stanley Baldwin’s government rejected the move, to his relief. To mark this outcome, Frances’s Uncle commissioned a well-known sculptor, W A Clement, to engrave the Ten Commandments on two ‘tablets of stone’, two adjacent rock faces which lay up at Buckland Beacon, just above Welstor; this was a major undertaking on a very exposed promontory. The work, now a local landmark, was completed on 31 August that year.
As some space on the stones remained, Clement suggested that Mr Whitley might like to add an eleventh commandment, which he did. So the Ten Commandments end with John 13:34: ‘A new commandment I give unto you, That ye love one another, as I have loved you, that ye also love one another.’ The engraving is completed by a verse from the hymn ‘O God, our help in ages past.’
The closeness Frances shared with her father was precious to