South Hampstead High School is marking 150 years since Miss Allen-Olney became the first headmistress of what was then St John's Wood High School for Girls. The school, located in Winchester Road, opened with just 27 pupils who were educated in three classes in a room divided by a curtain. It was the ninth institution established by the Girls Public Day School Trust, founded by a group of inspirational women who believed that girls should have the same education as their brothers.
Early Growth and Expansion
Within six years, pupil numbers had reached 300, prompting a move to a larger site at 3 Maresfield Gardens. There, girls studied history, geography, English grammar, mathematics, RE, French, Latin, and chemistry. Physical education involved drill in the classroom, with girls wearing navy pleated blue serge skirts and long black stockings, performing marching on the spot, turning, lunging, and breathing exercises. School finished at lunchtime, though some stayed for extra music or drawing lessons. Education cost five guineas, with five shillings for stationary.
By 1887, the school was retitled South Hampstead High. Under headteacher Mary Benton, who led the school from the 1880s to 1918, it began to grow its academic reputation, adding science labs, music rooms, a playground, and fives courts. Benton oversaw a period of struggle for female empowerment, with an increasing number of girls going on to university, including Dr Ellen Farrer, one of the first women to qualify as a doctor. Along with most of her staff, Benton backed the suffragist campaign for the right to vote, while one staff member was a more militant suffragette sent to Holloway Prison for activism.
War Years and Changing Times
By the time Miss Walker became headmistress in 1918, girls were playing tennis, hockey, and netball, and past pupils had served as nurses and medical officers, while current pupils knitted socks for soldiers. In the 1920s, the school gained a new library, gym, and separate sixth form. Outside classes, girls wrote in their Letts Diaries about having a 'spiffing' or 'ripping' time, often cycling on Hampstead Heath, swimming in the ponds, attending the cinema, and getting haircuts in Selfridges.
The purchase of 1 Maresfield Gardens allowed the school to take pupils from age five. By its 50th birthday, South Hampstead had 457 students, with a cohort increasingly likely to attend university. The school took in refugees who escaped Nazi Germany on the Kindertransport, and during the Blitz, it moved for safety to Berkhamsted School for Girls, with some girls and teachers travelling back to London every night. Stage and screen actors Angela Lansbury and Glynis Johns were among students in the 1930s, while by the 1940s, the Direct Grant Grammar School scheme allowed many places to be offered free to state school pupils.
Modern Era and Celebrating Feminist Past
By its 75th birthday, the uniform was the now-familiar blue skirt and yellow blouse, and the school had expanded with the junior school in Netherhall Gardens. Girls were awarded sashes for good posture and deportment, but by the end of the swinging sixties, skirts were shorter, and trips roamed as far as Russia and Norway. The new science block was opened in 1971 by Nobel Prize winner Prof Dorothy Hodgkin, and over following decades, South Hampstead added more labs and sports facilities. When Victorian buildings were replaced by the new senior school in 2014, the building was opened by another alumna, Helena Bonham Carter. Writers Fay Weldon and Naomi Alderman, actor Olivia Williams, and Baroness Neuberger are also past pupils.
Current head Anna Paul emphasises that the thread of female empowerment runs through the school's history. "The school had a number of suffragettes on the teaching staff and some were imprisoned," she said. "We want to recognise the school's feminist past. I feel as though the founding headmistresses are still a part of the school, the houses are named after them and we talk about their courageous spirit and to communicate just how brave and radical they were and how committed to promoting women's education." Ms Paul describes fostering an atmosphere of "joyful scholarship" offering a holistic education with "unashamedly high academic expectations" for the girls, alongside broad opportunities outside the classroom and an approach to learning that celebrates everyone "finding their niche and exploring what they are passionate about". "It's a very value led school," she says, citing kindness, bravery, respectfulness, and a sense of purpose. Giving girls a voice is also a massive part of South Hampstead High: "We have a huge debating and oracy programme here. The founding heads would be really supportive, they wanted girls to have a say and be treated equally in society. I still talk about feminism, about the progress that has been made and the progress that needs to be made."
