I’ve recently been asked to join the Governing Body of my old school. I’m very excited by this opportunity! So I thought I’d repost here something I wrote back in 2011 about my school, and about how I and two of my colleagues became classicists as a result of our education there. Hope you find it interesting.
From SHS to the OU – Lorna Hardwick (Stagg, SHS 1956–1963), Helen King (SHS 1969–1976) and Carolyn Price (SHS 1968–1982).
When Helen joined the Open University in 2011, we discovered that Lorna, who recently retired as Professor of Classical Studies at the Open University, and Helen, who had just been appointed to this position, are both alumnae of Sutton High School. In different ways, both Lorna and Helen take a very broad view of the role of Classics, Lorna having concentrated on reception studies – how different cultures have used Greek and Roman texts and ideas to talk about their own experiences – and Helen focusing on the role played by ancient medicine in later European ideas about the body, particularly the female body. They reflected their experiences of SHS – the opportunities they had to learn about the ancient world, but also their broader experience of the school, and their teachers – and this is what they came up with. While they were writing, Helen discovered that their colleague in Philosophy, Carolyn Price, is another SHS alumna, so she joined in too!
Lorna: I don’t think I always responded to Classics in the ways that we were supposed to. I had been excited by the ancient myths and stories from an early age. There was a wonderful book by Mary McGregor that I used to read under the bed sheets when I was supposed to be asleep. It was full of stories about Achilles and Hector of Troy, and also about the Athenian politician Pericles, so the mysterious differences between myth and history were just about creeping into my mind before I went to Sutton. When Latin started in the Lower Fourth it was not what I expected. I could never understand why all those farmers seemed to spend their time throwing spears around in the woods. Thanks to Approach to Latin 1 I did learn the verbs but also realised that this wasn’t enough to satisfy. The more interesting parts of the lessons were when Mrs Quinton could be persuaded to talk about why the Roman generals quarrelled with each other (or better still, what her son Tony was up to at university).
Another persistent memory was of Miss Charlesworth talking to us about Caesar’s Gallic Wars. Although she was headmistress, Charlie kept up some Latin teaching, probably so that she could get to know how hard (or whether) girls worked. I remember that she asked us to think about how it might have felt to be a Gaul (or indeed a Briton) with the Romans tramping round your patria building fortifications. Many years later it was a great privilege to be able to contribute the entry on Lilian Charlesworth to the New Oxford Dictionary of National Biography and I think it was when I was researching this that I started to think more about how my time at Sutton had influenced the interests that I developed in my professional work. In particular, it was at Sutton that I came to take it for granted that Greece and Rome tied in with a lot of other things, not just in raising questions about the relationship between the conquerors and the conquered, but also in pointing to the ways in which Greek and Latin literature and ideas had a life that extended over the centuries.
Studying Racine’s Phèdre with Miss Rowe for A level French and Goethe’s Iphigenia auf Tauris in Miss Donald’s German class meant that I never thought of the ancient world as something that just ‘ended’ many centuries ago. The awe-inspiring and inspirational Miss Wood helped us to understand how reading ancient literature was not just a matter of decoding the grammar but rather of getting to know and love the poetry. Mrs Wellbourne insisted that if we were studying King Lear we must see it staged, so my first ever experience of ‘live’ theatre was Paul Schofield’s Lear at Stratford. I was hooked on theatre from that day. All those strands influenced my choice of university course and, much later, led to a research project on how classical texts have been translated, rewritten and adapted in the late twentieth century. That in turn enabled me to work with colleagues in the Caribbean, Eastern Europe, Ireland, North Africa, and South Africa, all of which are contexts in which the use of classical material has been important in struggles against internal and external oppression and in the creation of literary and theatrical masterpieces. Recent winners of the Nobel Prize for literature such as Wole Soyinka, Derek Walcott and Seamus Heaney all make extensive use of Greek and Latin poetry and drama. So my lasting memories of classics at Sutton are of how those brilliant teachers opened up a whole new world for me, a world that is still expanding.
Helen: When I arrived at Sutton High School at the age of 11, I was already interested in the ancient world – thanks to my parents’ choice of my name, I had been fascinated with Greek myth throughout my childhood and devoured books like Roger Lancelyn Green’s Tales of the Greek Heroes. We started compulsory Latin in Lower IV and I was not particularly good at it; we were rewarded with a sticker if we managed an A for our homework and I had very few stickers in my book. The teaching method was mostly that the teacher wrote up sentences on the board and we translated them; she would rub out the sentences after a while and write up more, so if concentration lapsed it was very easy to get behind.
I would not have opted for Greek later on, but happened to be off sick one day when the BBC was showing an Aristophanes play, Clouds. I was immediately hooked. How could people who lived so long ago have had the same sense of humour as me? I was interested in every aspect – the conventions of Athenian drama, the social and political context of the play and, of course, the jokes. Lorna has pointed out to me that this production’ was part of the very first Arts Foundation course at the OU; using TV meant that the course really was ‘open to all’, though actual OU students had to work at set books and printed course materials as well. I was fairly average at Greek, although I liked learning a different alphabet, but had a stroke of good luck in the first exam. I didn’t feel very well so after having a half-hearted bash at the translations, I asked to go to the sick bay. Actually, if I had stayed in the room, it would have made no difference to my results – I had done all that I could, and it wasn’t much. But because I left halfway through the exam, my mark was doubled, taking it from just a pass to a stellar level, meaning that I went into Division 1. This was taught by Mrs Goldberg, who was a superb teacher. I loved the subject, but after As at Latin and Greek O-level, I decided not to continue them at A-level, instead taking Pure Maths, English Lit and Ancient History.
The Latin side of Ancient History was taught by Miss Hodgson, from her own collection of sources in translation. There were only a handful of students but her method was to have the words of each author read by the same student, always. I was, amongst others, Plutarch. The girl who read Cicero had a very high-pitched voice and I still hear Cicero in her voice today. With this teaching method, it was much easier to remember which source said what. If we used a textbook, we were marked right down; it was an excellent training for university, where I took Ancient History and Social Anthropology at UCL, keeping up my languages by sitting in on Greek and Latin courses. Then as now, it wasn’t necessary to have taken A level Ancient History to do a degree in it, but I found that my SHS training in one half of the degree made it much easier to get to grips with the other half of it!
Like Lorna, I owe my interest in theatre to SHS. In particular, we were taken on an outing to see Peter Brook’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. I had not previously seen any modern productions, and this one, very athletic and set in a simple white box with trapezes, made me realise what theatre can do.
Carolyn: As with Helen, it was through Roger Lancelyn-Green’s Tales of the Greek Heroes that I first discovered the ancient world. But it was Mrs Quinton’s Latin classes that transported me there. Our Latin textbook featured two Roman boys, Quintus and Lucius, whose daily doings – restricted though they were by the limits of our Latin vocabulary – seemed wholly credible to me. As they mooched around the forum, played catch, fled from dogs and annoyed their teachers, I could easily imagine myself with them in Rome. It was the language I fell for, though: I loved its elegant, intelligible structure, revealed by Mrs Quinton’s charming insistence that different cases were to be underlined in different colours. For me, even now, Latin sparkles with all the colours of the rainbow.
A year later, I got my hands on a copy of the Iliad. I got it mainly to show off, and I read it ostentatiously in breaks, sitting up on one of the ‘cheeses’ – the sloping concrete roofs of air raid shelters which were dotted around the school. (Are they still there, I wonder?) Parts of the poem bored me to tears, but the squabbling gods and all too human heroes enchanted me: Rome was forever replaced by Greece in my affections. When I discovered that I was allowed to do Greek as well as Latin at O-level, I jumped at the chance, and found myself in a cosy class of four. Greek grammar turned out to be even more satisfying than Latin. (Who would have guessed that singular and plural aren’t the only possibilities?) And Greek came not only with Homer, but with Sappho, Euripides, Aristophanes and Plato. Caesar’s Gallic Wars could not compete. So when it came to A levels, I chose to continue Greek, but not Latin. At that point, I still didn’t know I was going to be a classicist.
A year later, I had realised my mistake. I will always be grateful to my classics teachers and to Miss Cavendish for persuading me to apply for Classics anyway, and then allowing me to stay an extra year to take Latin A level. The whole sixth form timetable was re-organised so that I could attend all the lessons, and throughout that year, I was treated – with incredible graciousness – as a fully fledged adult. That was the year that I discovered that Miss Hodgson was remarkable, not only for her formidable intellect and astonishing furry ear rings, but also for a dry wit – which knocked the stuffing out of Cicero in the most delicious way.
I shall always be grateful to Sutton High for helping me to change course and make the most of my abilities. The Open University aims to do that for people too. But what I remember best are my four classics teachers: Miss Hodgson’s precision; Mrs Quinton’s illuminating rainbow; Miss Griffiths’ sense of fun; and Miss Cowperthwaite’s infinite patience. They turned me into a classicist – the path that took me to philosophy. But they helped me understand how to be a teacher too.
Helen: I remember when I was at SHS the unofficial school motto, taken from a notice on the external door by what was then the gym, was ‘This door opens outwards’. From an outward-facing school to the Open University – maybe a logical move!
The retiring academic 