Gleam Flying Onward: A Century of Bruton School for Girls

by David Parsons

July 1900 was very hot. Hay-making had been actively carried on during the past three or four weeks in Bruton churchyard and, for the first time within living memory. a very fine rick had been made there. One particularly fine day a group of public-spirited local people were meeting to choose the first Head Mistress for the new school they were building. Arriving at Cole Station on the Somerset and Dorset Railway, one of several applicants for the post, Edith Radford, had her first sight of the still unfinished school. She was only 31 years old, brought up in a town. William Knight, headmaster of the recently opened Sexey's Trade School in Bruton (1889), and one of the interviewing panel, had sent three of his children, Ethel, Arthur and Edgar, to Cole Station to meet her. She would have worn a long skirt after the fashion of the day. Bustles and corsets were out in 1900, and the skirt was continuing its relentless rise past the ankle, while the Rational Dress League was calling for women to abandon dresses - for knickerbockers; but Miss Radford clearly had no use for such trends. (An early pupil who had trodden on the train of Miss Radford's skirt received a quick reprimand: "You'll never make a lady if you don't look where you're going.") Her hair was probably drawn back severely, with a centre parting. Perhaps she wore a high frilly collar such as we see in a 1909 photo. Early in that year Henry Hobhouse, at one of the many meetings he attended on County business, had bumped into an old friend, the Reverend Doctor Thomas Scott Holmes, Chancellor of Wells Cathedral, and had told him that a school was being built and equipped on Sunny Hill. "We still have to find a Headmistress," he confessed. "It is giving the Governors some anxiety." Chancellor Holmes immediately replied, "The Governors need not be troubled about that. I know someone very suitable." And the name he had suggested was Miss Radford.

302 pages, Paperback

First published December 31, 2001