The Old Elizabethan Association

From Bruce Parker

“I was caught by Henry Milnes there in Dorm 3, having a pillow-fight with Wilson Gaudion!” an excited, retired judge, Geoffrey Heggs, exclaimed. He was pointing to a room in a building where Elizabeth College was in exile during the German occupation of Guernsey. Seventy years on, several other Old Elizabethans have spent a weekend in the Buxton area of Derbyshire to relive their experiences after leaving their homes in Guernsey for an enforced five years away from the island.

Were they miserable about being taken away from their families ? Well, surprisingly, in many cases, apparently not. The ageing OEs – they’re now mostly in their late seventies and early eighties - were making light of their enforced exile. “Actually, they were the happiest moments of my life,” Derek Robert told me. “I suddenly felt free”.

You can see what he means when you’re on an October weekend trip to the Derbyshire Dales. The rolling countryside is a world away from Guernsey. Look to the horizon and there’s hardly a building in sight. The Cat and Fiddle, the pub where the Guernsey visitors were having lunch, after their flight from Guernsey, was isolated from the outside world last winter when snow blocked roads for twelve days.

The snow drifts last January, ten feet deep, didn’t make the news bulletins because that’s what happens every so often in the Peaks of Derbyshire. It’s the sort of thing the Guernsey boys had to get used to when they arrived, in 1940, in what was, to them, a foreign land with a foreign climate.

Joining the OEs in Buxton was Elizabeth Grantham, the daughter of Henry Milnes, the College Principal who masterminded the evacuation of Elizabeth College in June 1940 together with several hundred other Guernsey children. It’s widely acknowledged, now, that while many senior personnel in both Guernsey and Jersey dithered, Henry Milnes rolled up his sleeves, got down to business and virtually took over the whole operation.

John Davis, a retired headmaster, said that when they boarded a cattle boat in St Peter Port harbour, they didn’t have a clue where they were going, except to Weymouth. “We were told we might be going to Canada and when my parents heard that, they burst into tears.”

After a long train journey, the young Elizabethans ended up in Oldham where refugees from Belgium had been expected rather than groups of Channel Islanders. Milnes quickly realised that the conditions they were faced with in an industrial city such as Oldham were simply not suitable, especially for Channel Island children.

Milnes soon found living accommodation for the College in the village of Great Hucklow, high up in the Derbyshire Peak District in glorious countryside. Elizabeth Grantham remembers that, after the terrible conditions in Oldham, she simply rolled in the grass at Hucklow. “I can still remember the sweet smell of that lovely grass,” she says.

A gliding club hall and an assortment of other buildings might have been suitable for the middle of the summer in 1940 but something much more substantial would be needed for the rigours of a Derbyshire winter 1,200 feet above sea level.

Milnes resisted attempts to join up the College with other schools and turned down offers to have boys taken in by local families. Eventually, he succeeded in securing the lease on a large country house, Whitehall, three miles outside Buxton. While the Senior School established itself at White Hall, the Juniors were found more substantial buildings in Great Hucklow, the stone-built Florence Nightingale Homes.

The former OE inmates of White Hall were delighted to find that their home for five years, apart from an extension on the front, has hardly changed.

“While Henry and the other masters were lecturing us upstairs about the dangers of smoking”, said one octogenarian, “the boys were in the basement smoking their hearts out.” Exchanging memories of their unexpected school life away from Guernsey, the picture was one of adventure rather than deprivation although life was clearly hard.

John Davis remembered how hard it was to get up at 5.30 in the morning to peel potatoes if you were on ‘potato’ duty – the boys kidnapped a local dog to catch rabbits which supplemented their dire food rations.

His memories are not, though, of any real deprivation. “Life was for living and it was an adventure. I was a bit of a mummy’s boy and the whole experience ‘made’ me. My parents were loving but they were Victorian and disciplinarians and so coming here gave me independence and I grew up immediately.”

At a Derbyshire Exile Commemoration Dinner at the Old Hall Hotel in Buxton, the present College Principal, George Hartley, reminded diners of the great debt they owed to Henry Milnes who, a young man at the time, had taken on such responsibility without any possible knowledge of what the outcome was likely to be.

The Principal had brought with him the College Senior Prefect, Sam Frank, and the Second Senior Prefect, Max Barber. “They are listening to your stories with complete and utter admiration” he told the OE exiles.

An Old Elizabethan clergyman, Richard Hamilton, conducted an Exile Commemoration Service at Tideswell Church where seventy years before, young Elizabethans had gathered to give thanks for the liberation of their island home. The service ended with the whole congregation singing the Elizabeth College Carmen, “In Antiqua Insula, Stat Praeclarum Fanum ...

Chris Meinke, who organised the Derbyshire visit was delighted with the success of the event. “The weather could not have been better with bright blue sunshine for the whole two-days. Sadly, this is probably the last opportunity for so many OE exiles to be able to get together to talk about the biggest adventure of their lives. So, we’ve been very lucky.”

Read Chris Meinke's report of the weekend

Read Gillian Mawson's article

Pictures of the weekend

Exile memories - our virtual memorabila exhibition

Derbyshire reminiscences - individual memories of the exiles

Derbyshire Times article part 1

Derbyshire Times article part 2

An interesting article about our time at Oldham