St Cyprian's School
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- For the girls school in South Africa, see St. Cyprian's School.
St Cyprian's School was an expensive and exclusive preparatory school for boys, founded in 1899, which operated in the early 20th century in Eastbourne, East Sussex, England. Like similar preparatory schools, its purpose was to train pupils to do well enough in the examinations (usually taken around the age of 12) to gain admission to Eton, Harrow, and other leading "public schools" (as the most exclusive private secondary schools are known in England). St Cyprian's was run by Mr. L. C. Vaughan Wilkes (the Headmaster, nicknamed "Sambo" by the pupils), and his wife (nicknamed "Flip"), and was attended, among others, by Eric Blair (who would later write under the pseudonym George Orwell), Cyril Connolly, Cecil Beaton, Gavin Maxwell, Henry Longhurst, and Philip Ziegler.
Connolly discusses his recollections of life at St Cyprian's at length in the book The Enemies of Promise, published in 1938 (with the name of the school disguised as "St. Wulfric's"). Orwell wrote scathingly and bitterly of his experiences at the school in the autobiographical essay "Such, Such Were the Joys," which was considered too libelous to be published during his lifetime and which appeared in print in 1952 with the name of the school changed to "Crossgates." Writing in the early or mid 1940s, Orwell claims to have avoided all contact with the school after leaving St Cyprian's and concludes "Such, Such Were the Joys" with the observation that his resentment towards it has diminished in recent years to the point where he no longer hopes that the Wilkes "are dead or that the story of the school being burnt down was true."
In fact, the school building, located at 65 Summerdown Road, was gutted by fire on 14 May, 1939, and one of the housemaids was killed while trying to escape from an upper window. Emergency accommodation was arranged at Ascham St Vincents, another preparatory school in Eastbourne. On 20 July 1939, St Cyprian’s moved to Whispers, near Midhurst in West Sussex. It stayed here for 18 months before moving to Rosshill in Gloucestershire. Numbers dwindled and the remaining boys finally went with the then Headmaster, W. J. V. Tomlinson (Bill), to join Summer Fields School, in Oxford.
A contemporary of Orwell at St Cyprian’s, John Christie, commented in 1981 that it was arguable whether Orwell’s criticism of the school and its owners had been justified. Christie had previously written an article for Blackwood's Magazine in defence of the school.
Orwell recalls the colors of the old boys' tie (the necktie that the alumni of a school wear to identify themselves as such) as "dark green, pale blue, and black." According to John Christie, the school uniform was a green shirt with a pale blue collar, corduroy breeches and a cap with a Maltese Cross for a badge. In April 1997, Eastbourne Civic Society (now The Eastbourne Society), in conjunction with the County Borough of Eastbourne, erected a blue plaque at the house in Summerdown Road which is all that remains of the school building.
[edit] See also
[edit] References
- Bernard Crick, George Orwell: A Life, 1980.
- Cyril Connolly, Enemies of Promise, 1938.
- George Orwell, "Such, Such Were the Joys." First published in the Partisan Review Sep.-Oct. 1952.
- Henry Longhurst, "My Life and Soft Times", Cassell 1971.
- Eastbourne Local History Society: Newsletters 37, 39
- Eastbourne Society: Newsletters 130, 131
