In the first article in this series we looked at 28 The Parade – The Billups Family and their pivotal role in the formation of the Salvation Army.  In this article we look at the next occupants of the house, Cardiff High School for Girls or Cardiff Intermediate School for Girls as it was originally called when it began in a large ground-floor room at No.28 The Parade back in Jan 1895 with 95 pupils.

The importance of child education was being quickly realized throughout the 1800s.  Private schools and church schools were established. By 1870, Board Schools were being established to provide free education for children up the age of nine.  Many of the Primary Schools we see in Cardiff today started as Board Schools and are often still using the same buildings.  Some are still inscribed with the original Board School stone inscriptions if you look carefully up at the roof apexes, such as on Albany Road Primary.

University education in Wales was also becoming established.  University College opened on Newport Road in 1883. The Intermediate Education Scheme, established in the Act of 1889 aimed to bridge the gap between the Board Schools and University education and provide education for the 9 to 17 year olds who were not able to afford the privilege of a private education. That’s not to say that attending an Intermediate School was free but the fees were not allowed to exceed £5 per annum and there had to be scholarships and bursaries available amounting to not less than ten percent of the total number of pupils in the school. The Welsh Intermediate Education Act of 1889 pre-dated similar legislation in England by a dozen years.  The Intermediate Act was also designed to cater for those not necessarily destined for university by providing a technical aspect to the curriculum too but to what extent this aim was born out at 28 The Parade I’m not sure.  A quarter of the cost of construction of an Intermediate School had to be raised by public subscription. Presumably the same applied if a school was purchasing an existing building.

The nearby Howard Gardens Higher Grade School was established earlier in 1885.  Again I think the aim was to bridge the gap between the Board Schools and University. Howard Gardens became a Municipal Secondary School from 1905 and abolished fees in 1924 somewhat disadvantaging Cardiff High School for Girls that still had an entrance examination and fees.

The original wish had been to have the girls and boys Intermediate school on the same site in Cathays Park but Lord Bute could not see his way to grant a site inside the park.  In the end the girl’s Intermediate school opened in The Parade before the boy’s school in Newport Road.

The money used to purchase 28 The Parade was presumably 25% public subscription with some or all of the remainder supplied public funds. Some or all of that funding it seems came from charities or endowment funds such as the Craddock Well Charity and the Howell’s Charity. 

The Craddock Wells Charity

Craddock Wells died in Cardiff in 1710 and bequeathed two houses in High Street, £28 in cash and a small close of land in Canton (~1¾ acres) to provide for the education of six girls and six boys in Cardiff.  The £28 cash was to be used to purchase 3½ more acres adjacent to his existing land. The trustees invested well and by 1895 some 17 acres of land was owned by the charity and income of £17,000 derived off it.  By 1955 it was worth £60,000 with an annual income of £3,800.  The money was used to award scholarships to those both in school and university education. During the 2020-2021 financial year the total value of assistance approved to former and current pupils was £96,897.84 and Pupils of Cardiff High School benefited generally from the provision of land and buildings by the Charity for the purpose of the school.  The Charity held investments valued at over £3 million and land and property valued at £21 million.

Howells Charity

The Howells Charity goes back even further than the Thomas Wells Charity.  Thomas Howell was a philanthropist.  In his will, published in Spain in 1540 he left 12,000 ducat.  That money was invested and some of the proceeds of which were used to set up Howell’s School in Llandaff.    .

In 1893, the two charities were combined for administrative purposes.  It appears it was money from these combined charities was used to in the setting up of Cardiff Intermediate School for Girls.  The money was used to purchase both 28 The Parade from Mr Billups and the freehold from Lord Tredegar.  

(In 1910 the combined charities were renamed the Cardiff Intermediate and Technical Education Fund. In 1955 they legally merged under the name of the latter and on 9 May 1966 the combined Charity was renamed the Cardiff Further Education Trust Fund).

In 1893 and agreement was set out whereby boys from places like Llandaff and Penarth would be allowed to attend Cardiff Intermediate School for Boys and  girls from Cardiff would be allowed to attend Howell’s School, Llandaff. Whether this was just a temporary agreement until the Cardiff Intermediate School for Girls was established is unclear.

The school proved a success and was quickly expanded to the purpose-built premises that included 24-25 The Parade and cost £30,000 and opened in 1900 by which time there were 250 girls on the books.   Nos 26 and 27 The Parade were still both private properties in 1910 so the school was just built around them.  It wasn’t until the late 1920’s that the leases of No’s 26 and 27 ran out and in 1930 that the building of the school as we finally knew it really took place. Part of the original gardens of 26 and 27 were retained, entered by a door at the end of the main corridor, just before the Hall. 

 The school was renamed Cardiff High School for Girls in 1910.

As the school expanded 28 The Parade became the Lower School.  In later years 28 The Parade became the sixth form. The caretaker continued to live on the upper floor which included the octagonal copula. One of the frequent memories ex-pupils have of No.28 is the smell of polish used to keep the floor and elegant staircase shiny.

The exterior appearance of 28 The Parade changed little over the 74 years Cardiff High School for Girls occupied the building. J.B.Hilling in the Glamorgan Historian described the building as ‘designed with a mixture of styles incorporating a Doric portico, Dutch gables, tall Tudor brick chimneys and a large octagonal copula over the staircase hall.

The first headmistress at the school was Miss Mary Collin.  Born in Cambridge in 1860 she was educated in Notting Hill School and Bedford College, London where she studied languages.  She then taught for seven years in Nottingham High School before moving to Cardiff.  At the time of the 1911 and 1921 census she lived in 29 The Parade, a property which at some stage became part of the school.

Mary Collin was an English teacher and campaigner for woman’s suffrage during the early part of the 20th century.  She taught her pupils to ride bicycles, seen as a symbol of the growing independence of women and their determination to cast off chaperonage.

Mary Collin was active in the Cardiff Suffrage movement, which included Professor Millicent Mackenzie, founder of the Cardiff Suffrage branch.  Collin would host women at The Parade from the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies such as NUWSS organizer Helen Fraser when she visited Cardiff to speak.

Mary Collin had her work cut out.  When the girls and boys intermediate schools were set up it was deemed that among the subjects boys would be taught would be natural science but for the girls domestic economy and the laws of health were to be substituted. Similarly boys would learn iron moulding, modeling in clay and the use of tool whereas the girls would instead learn cookery, needlework, cutting out, and laundry work. Decades later when Mary Collin submitted plans for the expansion of what was then Cardiff High School for Girls she asked for a chemistry laboratory.  When the plans were returned the laboratory had been refused and substituted with a sewing room. Eventually she got her was and a laboratory was constructed.

She retired in 1924. She died at the age of 95 soon after the diamond jubilee celebrations of the school in 1955.

The school song was “Hail Glorious Sun”, written by Miss Woodward, who was a mistress at the school from 1896 – 1936.  The school motto was Tua’r y Goleuni (‘Towards the Light’).

The school playing fields for both the girls and boys High Schools were at the Harlequins ground off Newport Road. The ‘Spinning Wheel’ book describes the Harlequins being ‘gifted’ by Lord Tredegar. Whether the leasehold was gifted or sold I’m not quite sure but Lord Tredegar was held in high enough esteem that his portrait hung in the school in The Parade

The Old Girls Association (OGA) itself has a long history.  It was established in Nov 1899, just four years after the school itself opened.  It established a reputation for their dramatic entertainment. In 1932 it put on a performance of The Bat described as one of the most complicated and strangest stories imaginable but it made for fine entertainment with capable acting from every member of the cast. Two years later Jacqueline de Guélis played a leading role in a production of ‘The Aristocrat’ in front of a full house with the proceeds going to the Infirmary.  Tragedy was to strike a few weeks later when Jacqueline was knocked down and killed by a motor van on Penylan Hill.  Her brother, the spy Major Jacques de Guélis was also killed n a motor accident at the end of WWII.  Their story is told in our article The tragic coincidence linking the deaths of the De Guélis siblings.

By June 1955 there were 5,500 Old Girls, ranging from 15 to 70 years of age, scattered all over the world. The summary in of the archives say “Some held unique or important positions; for example, one was the first qualified woman engineer in the United Kingdom”. The OGA was officially wound up in October 2006, although informal gatherings continued.  The OGA archives are held in Glamorgan Archives.

The school remained in The Parade until 1970 when it merged with Cardiff High School for Boys and Tŷ Celyn Secondary School in Llandennis Road to form Cardiff High School as a new Comprehensive School and over the next three years transferred to the Llandennis Avenue site. The move to Ty Celyn was gradual with the Sixth form staying at The Parade for a number of years until new facilities were constructed at Llandennis Ave.

Headmistresses

It is amazing to think that in the 75 years Cardiff High School for Girls was at The Parade it only ever had three headmistresses:

Miss Mary Collin 1895-1924, Miss Frances Rees 1925-1949,  Miss Eluned Jones 1950-1970

Notable Old Girls:

Bernice Rubens, Author.

Bernice Rubens (1923-2004) was the first woman to win the Booker Prize for Fiction in 1970, and the second winner overall. She was born in 1923 of Jewish decent and attended the school in the 1930s where she was in the orchestra. A Purple Plaque has recently been erected on the Rubens family home in Kimberley Road to commemorate her life.  Our article Bernice Rubens – Booker Prize winner records her life.

Irene Steer, Swimmer

Irene Steer, the first Welsh woman to win a Gold Medal at the Olympics. She struck gold in the 1912 Stockholm Olympics as the anchor leg swimmer in the victorious, world record breaking British 4×100 yards freestyle relay team. She was born at 290 Bute Street, Cardiff on 10 Aug 1889. Her father was a draper.  By 1901 the Steer family had moved to 32 The Parade. She attended Cardiff High School for Girls, a few yards from her home, from 1899-1906. 

Gillian Gill, Author

Gillian Gill née Scobie (b.1942) is a noted writer of biographies including ones on Victoria and Albert, Florence Nightingale and Agatha Christie.   An insight into her early life comes in a 2020 interview Shelf Awareness: Reading with… Gillian Gill.  In it she describes: ‘My loving, secure and extremely boring childhood world, I lived mainly in and for books’.  The very first book she remembers owning was Flower Fairies of the Wayside by Cicely Mary Barker. She explains she could barely tell a daisy from a dandelion, but loved that book and acquired a taste for doggerel.   In the section of the interview ‘Book you hid from your parents’ she responded: If you can believe it, The Blue Lagoon, when I was about 14. Later, I took a secret gallop through Lady Chatterley’s Lover for the dirty parts which I found a lot less hot than The Blue Lagoon.

Ann Beach – Actress

Ann Beach (1938 – 2017) had a varied career in film and on stage. Beach won a scholarship to RADA at the age of 16. After leaving, she toured with Frankie Howerd in Hotel Paradiso, and then came to London in the title role of Emlyn Williams’s Beth. She was Polly Garter in Under Milk Wood with Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor. She also starred in Notting Hill playing Hugh Grant’s mother.

Joan Oxland, Artist

Joan Oxland (1920–2009), was born in Westville Road. After leaving school she attended Cardiff School of Art.  She also studied at Wimbledon School of Art and later attended Académie Julian in Paris, 1962–3, before returning to teaching in Wales.  She taught at her former school in The Parade and before becoming head of the design department at Llandaff College of Education. She was co-author with Betty Whyatt of the book Design for Embroidery – An Experimental Approach, published in 1974. The regions of France, especially Brittany, Provence and the Ardeche, featured regularly in Joan’s work, and her interpretation of a French market won the prestigious Derrick Turner Prize in Cardiff in 1990.

(picture: Evening Reflections, 1961 in the National Museum of Wales)

Mary Pugh – Ophthalmologist and Eye Surgeon

Eye surgeon to both the Queen Mother and Queen Elizabeth, as well as developing the Pugh orthoptoscope for measuring and correcting eye squint.  She attended Marlborough Road School before going on to Cardiff High School for girls in 1911.  One thing we are missing though is a picture of Mary Pugh. I wonder if anyone has one? For more information on Mary Pugh see our blog: Mary Agnes Pugh, Ophthalmologist and Eye Surgeon.

Eira West – Pianist

The Royal Academy of Music awarded her a Scholarship in 1949.  In 1954 she was a member of the National Youth Orchestra for Wales.  She went on to be the pianist for the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra.

Muriel Kennedy née Williams – head teacher

Muriel Kennedy became the head teacher for the first secondary school for women in Iraq in Baghdad which opened in Apr 1935.

Doreen Vermeulen-Cranch – Professor of Anesthesiology

Doreen Cranch (1915 – 2011) was born in Abertillery.  The Cranch family moved to Cardiff and Doreen attended Cardiff High School for Girls before going on to study Medicine in Cardiff and become a house physician at Cardiff Royal Infirmary.  She met Jan Vermeulin, of the Amsterdam Shipping Company in Cariff and moved to Holland after WWII where she became a pioneer of Dutch anesthetic science. With her charm. personality, and above all. her intellect Dr Cranch has overcome any opposition from doctors who were somewhat hurt in their pride to be lectured by a woman. They soon realised she was their equal in general medical knowledge and superior in that of anesthesia. She was awarded  Commander Order of the British Empire, 1971. Her valedictory lecture was titled “Emancipation process”. Herself a fully emancipated woman, who inspired many female professionals, she was responsible for the emancipation of anesthesia in the Dutch academic world.  Miss Collin would have been proud of her.

Further Reading

The history of the school is set out in two books:

The Spinning Wheel: Cardiff High School for Girls 1895-1955. Its story assembled by Catherine Carr (pubs: Cardiff Western Mail and Echo. 1955)

Full Circle: Cardiff High School for Girls 1950-1970 by Barbara Leech (pubs: Starling Press Ltd. 1986)

It must be said however that trying to extract the history of 28 The Parade from these book was not an easy task.  The books mainly concentrate on personal reminiscences, mostly concerning the staff, lessons, trips, events etc rather than the fabric of the school itself. When the classrooms are discussed they are usually not identified as being in a specific building etc.  For a past-pupil the task would have been easier but for an outsider I found it a challenge.  The following extracts from the books are ones that specifically refer to No 28 The Parade and I hope give the reader a sense of the building.  Readers of this blog may wish to contribute their own recollections of 28 The Parade if they attended the school.

Some of the plans in question at the end of the first chapter concerned the transformation of a big house, 28, The Parade, into a School, at first the whole School, now Lower School. Miss Rees had an interesting experience in the early summer of 1936, when General Evangeline Booth, daughter of General William Booth, the founder of the Salvation Army, called at School. Her visit was unexpected, or, as Miss Rees said, it would have been a privilege to invite her to take Prayers. She had come in order to renew acquaintance with Lower School, where she had stayed as a little girl with a Mr. and Mrs. Billup, friends of her father. She went into the Welsh Room (the tree-darkened Form room to the left as you go through the front door) and said that was the dining-room. Upstairs, she found that the little dressing-room where she had slept had joined with a bedroom to make the larger Form room on the first floor there are still the two doors plain to see.

General Evangeline Booth told Miss Rees that the house was well-known in those days as one of the finest in the neighbourhood and it is common now for master craftsmen in wood or stone, who for any reason pass through Lower School, to lay hands lovingly on the shining heavy doors and to contemplate the elegantly carved staircase and say: “Substantial, you won’t find wood or work like that nowadays”. ‘Then there are the crystal door-plates and knobs, the crystal bell-handles by the fireplaces, the inlaid floors, the ceilings, the marble mantelpieces.

The noblest mantelpieces are in the largest room, on the right as you go through the front door.  At present, it is the Music room, and the envy of other subjects; for with its platform and the big bay window behind it facing on to The Parade, and with its pleasant view of the garden through French windows that open on to a fine terrace at the opposite end, it is still, perhaps, the most attractive room in School. Miss Rees used to say what a beautiful library it would make.  Old Girls who had the fortune to begin School with it as their Form room remember it more vividly than any other: to Ursula Scott Morris it symbolizes her school life, with its stage at one end, flowers at the other, and the desks between. Ursula Lavery recalls the garden scene resting lightly on the glass; the massive fire-grates, the carvings, and, above all, the exciting little platform where one solemnly recited or acted across to the red may and the laburnum that once grew together in the Spring, or to the scarlet rowan tree that still lights up the early Autumn. 

There it was, after the opening date had been twice postponed because the builders could not complete the necessary alterations in time in the gripping winter weather, that Miss Collin took Prayers on the first morning, January 24th 1895, with 94 girls and a Staff of five Assistant Mistresses and four visiting teachers.

Cloakrooms were unfurnished, pipes were frozen, and girls and Mistresses, too, for the fires in the massive grates, so good to look at, warmed only the near rows with any adequacy. But discomforts were trifles, mere thorns to the rose, in the excitement and enthusiasm of beginnings. In Miss Collin’s words, “Staff and girls, like a large family, were ready to meet any emergency and share both in the difficulties and the joy of work”.

Some of the 94 girls assembled there were no doubt filled with trepidation for they came from private tuition in their own homes, to what would seem to them to be a large unfeeling community. Some came from Board Schools that had been established following the Act of 1870. The majority came from smallish private schools.   

Moreover, I was recalling the gloomy forebodings of the family, as from our house in The Walk, we saw the large house in The Parade, with its gardens and stables, being transformed into a school, where I was doomed to lessons in a classroom and sedate games on an asphalted playground.

At first the School Buildings consisted only of the large, double-fronted house, every room, cubicle and cupboard of which was put to use. A Hall of two rooms running the whole depth of the house was used for the assembly of the whole school for Prayers, entertainments, admonitions, physical exercises, and so on. I seem to remember that P.T. was then called Callisthenics, but the only sure memories are of the scratchy feeling of the serge gym suit and one exercise performed at the bidding of Miss Hoskins, our first Gym Mistress : “Hips firm, heels together, knees outward bend.” I can’t remember any Singing classes until a real hall had been built connecting the original house with two others acquired next door but two. There I do remember Mr. Aylward teaching us voice-production, and ‘ intervals’, but when I left in 1899 we had not reached the stage of learning a song.

In the basements were the Dining-room, Cloakrooms, with the mouse-trap lockers, and arrangements for shoes, shoebags, etc., and those name tapes decorating everything, and the atmosphere enriched with the smell of macintoshes and goloshes and wet shoes.

And Silence everywhere, with the minatory mistress in the corner to prevent the breach of this and other rules! Plumbing was what you would expect of a last century house. And a week or two after the school was opened, it was closed for three weeks as all the pipes were frozen! What joy! And how educational the experience; for three weeks, frost enabled us to become expert in ice sports.

The higher your Form, the higher up was your classroom, as the latter were the smaller rooms. I started in a spacious room, the Lower Fifth, the most adventurous of my Forms, as we were a mixed lot in many senses of the word. With my gradual ascent, I ended up in a quite small attic in one of the new houses, at first only to be reached by a tour round the playground, but later accessible through a hall connecting the two sets of buildings.

Additional informaiton recived from readers of this article:

When the first formers moved into no 28 in September 1959 it was such an intimidating building, let alone the staff. The biggest room on the ground floor housed 1c initially and then went on to be the school music room.

The 6th form House in the 60s.

---

The third article in this series looks at 28 The Parade – The Parade Community Education Centre.