Sizewell Hall (School)
Posted by Peter Warnock on March 11th, 2008
Recently we have had several enquiries about Sizewell Hall when it was a School. Do you know anything about it? This picture was taken about 1956 and was supplied by Virginia Peace, fourth from the left. Elaine and Harry Tuyn are in the centre at the top.
Did you attend either the Boarding School or “The Summer Holiday Course”?
Where are you now?
Do you have any pictures that we can share on the web with other visitors?
Please contact us and perhaps you can be reunited with past friends.
When the School at Sizewell Hall closed in the later 1950s, Harry Tuyn started an English girls’ finishing school in Château d’Oex, near Gstaad. Harry sadley died in Canada many years ago.
I’m glad to see dear old Sizewell Hall is being put to such good use. I was a pupil at Sizewell Hall School in 1952 until it closed in 1955. It was small a coeducational preparatory school for eight to 13-year-olds, joined for the summer by foreign students.
There were only three or four teachers, including the headmaster, Harry Tuyn, a Dutchman who taught us English, French, German, Latin and Greek by turns! It left me, for instance, with a lifelong passion for literature, nature study and music.
We were allowed to make full use of the 35 acres as our playground, except for the area beyond the pond, which was out of bounds in the summer after a boy was bitten by an adder. What was different from other schools I attended is that we seemed to be one community of children, tolerant of our differences in age, sex and background. One fellow pupil was Sheridan Morley, the theatre critic, whom I see in the paper died not long ago.
I would love to get in touch with others who were there at that time. Robert? Wayne? Gijs? Clara? Arnold? Geraldine? Dorothy? Harleh? Karen? Gretel? Mr Hobson? Miss Acheson? I wonder where you are now. Look after yourselves.
Brian
March 21st, 2008 at 7:11 pm
Hi. I am a journalist attempting to write an article about Sizewell Hall School when it first started in the early 1950s. I would appreciate any memories people have including stories about Harry, Elaine, the cook, Joan Chapman and her partner Ron Hobson.
I too grew up on this coast at this time and have fond memories of Harry and Joan. I am interested in the influence the school had on education and why this area of the coast gave rise to such progressive ideas, the school at Sizewell, AS Neil’s and Britten too.
My email is info@bonisones.co.uk and mobile 07703 716961.
March 21st, 2008 at 10:02 pm
Hi I am Richard Lloyd, I was at the school from 1948 until 1952 and would like to get in touch with Nicky Mikleson, Alison Auld and Sebastion Welford. Please contact me on my email address.
rlloyd@holmburysheep.co.uk
March 25th, 2008 at 5:10 pm
What a surprise to read about others who went to Sizewell Hall school. As well as the Tuyns my memories are of Mr Butters (maths & English?), Mrs Prendergast (matron) and our song “Give me a Home …. where Latin is dry and maths makes us cry” etc.
My parents went to North Borneo in about 1947 I think leaving my brother, Michael, and me at Sizewell. I had a wonderful time but sadly Michael became very ill and after 2 years or so we were taken out to Borneo (Sandakan).
Memories: dragons’ teeth and looking for amber on the beach after a storm; climbing the huge Cedar tree; watching tennis matches by climbing on the cut-in-half boat on either side of the court and cutting my leg; riding; enjoyable lessons; playing Jacks in the long school room on wet days and volleyball, wet or dry; the stairs; communal hair washing in a steamy bathroom once a week; the dormitory, my bed and looking glass which I still have and I also have my napkin ring; roller skating down Picadilly and sleeping in Thorpeness old water tower when friends’ kind parents took me out in the holidays - I wonder if anyone remembers me?
I plan to visit Sizewell on 27th June staying for 2 nights at the next door campsite and trying my daughter’s patience showing her the things that I remember so vividly. Unfortunately I do not have any photographs.
Leonie Lorimer
April 24th, 2008 at 10:32 am
Your lovely photograph of the old Sizewell Hall School is of a summer “holiday course” of foreign students, not of the school as such. We were all younger than that and wore some semblance of a school uniform. I recognize the balding young man in the centre of second row of people seated on the steps—a genial Italian, older than the others, who came back several years running, although his English remained rather strange. To the left of Elaine (oh how she left an impression on us!) stands the small, bespectacled Miss Acheson, school secretary and owner of the school’s only car, a little convertible Austin. Everything was delivered and most of the personnel were live-in, although there was some walking to Leiston in the evenings and occasional taxis were called. Perhaps the photograph also shows something of the economic problems that Harry faced. A staff of 13 in a large rented house looking after a holiday course of 34. It can’t have paid, can it? Our school fees, incidentally, were £60 a term when I first went there in 1952.
With best wishes
Brian
I think it might take a book’s worth to tell Boni all my memories, so I’ll email him/her. To Leonie: what fun, have a lovely time on your visit and please report back here in GREAT DETAIL! To Richard: The three names ring a bell with me too. I think Sabby Welford was famous and the other boys were still talking about him when I came in ‘52. Alison and Nicky I remember as benign older pupils. Actually everyone was benign at that school. Extraordinary.
June 9th, 2008 at 12:16 am
Hi Leonni
I was there with you and remember you well.
You may remember me as I was 3 years younger than my brother David. He and the French boy Jeal (spelling?) decided to run away and persuaded me, a non swimmer of 8 yrs old, to go with them in the middle of the night. The three of us walked along the beach in the middle of the night, pinched a boat and rowed down the East Coast, eventually getting wrecked. I clambered ashore……. The story goes on because you then featured in it when we eventually got caught and returned to the school, but I’ll tell you the details another time. Perhaps Boni would like to put it in her book; I have intended to write the whole issue into a book at sometime.
I went back to Sizewell a couple of years ago so prob won’t be going there again in the near future.
Where do you live?
I am in East Sussex and run the Brownbread Horse Rescue Centre, near Battle.
www.brownbreadhorserescue.com
and
www.brownbreadstud.com
Tel: 01424 892381 893922
June 9th, 2008 at 12:34 am
My email is tony.brownbread@tesco.net
June 9th, 2008 at 9:54 pm
Hi Richard
Thanks for ringing this morning; absolutely fascinating to hear names and incidents from the past that were nearly, but not quite, forgotten.
After we rang off I remembered the girls name that I was friendly with; it was Kenreth. Do you remember her?
Wasn’t there a girl called****** Pendergast? I think my brother kept in contact with her after he left. Have a feeling she went to the States.
I slept in a 2 bed dormitory for a while with a lad from London.
Two of the other girls I mentioned were Lee who may or not have been Swiss but certainly had connections there.
There was a boy called Alistaire who nearly drowned me by climbing up on me and shouting for help. We were both rescued at the same time by Harry Tuyn, who swam along carrying us both!
There was once a boy who sang at the table and for a punishment had to sing all through a lunch; he sang “Buttons & Bows” over & over again. Eventually the grandmar (was it Harry’s mother or his wife’s?) got up and played the piano to accompany him as he started to go out of tune.
Best wishes
Tony
Brownbread Stud
01424 892381 893922