This recollection is based on an article that appeared in Observer, the quarterly journal of the Eastbourne Society, in 2010 supplemented by information gleaned from local newspaper reports. The author of the Observer piece, Nicholas Howell, had been an art student at Eversley Court for four years in the 1970s and returned as a lecturer in 1999.
It is ten years since Eversley Court in St Anne’s Road was demolished to make way for a development of flats with the same name built by Berkeley Homes. Eversley Court was built in 1895 and started life as an Edwardian family home before being extended in 1902 to house Ascham School. The latter was one of a number of preparatory schools established in Eastbourne in the last two decades of the nineteenth century; Ascham was a boarding school and at Eversley Court had masters’ bedrooms and dormitories for the 50 boarders on the first floor.
The building was set on a four-acre site on one of the highest points in the town being situated near to South Lynn, the former boys’ school, on the north and the reservoir on the west. The building was entered through a brick and tiled porch into a large reception hall with a fine oak staircase. At the half landing there was a magnificent stained-glass window. Opening on to a balcony. Leading off the reception hall were three large rooms, two of which had arched inglenook fireplaces and deep bay windows with seats overlooking the wooded and lawned grounds.
In 1919 Eversley Court became home to the Eastbourne Municipal Secondary School, later to be renamed as Eastbourne Grammar School, and during the 1920s it was vastly extended to include a new wing housing additional classrooms and a theatre with a proscenium arch.
The Grammar School relocated to a new building in King’s Drive in 1962 and Eversley Court then became the Eastbourne School of Art. The art school had previously occupied temporary premises in Upperton Road following the bombing in 1941 of the Technical Institute (an early home of the Municipal Secondary School) on the site of the Library in Grove Road. It was late renamed as Eastbourne College of Art and Design and subsequently subsumed within Eastbourne College of Arts and Technology (ECAT).
By 1998, following a Government inspection which criticised the Eversley Court site, a decision was made to relocate the art college to the main ECAT campus at Cross Levels Way. Despite a bitter protest campaign by college staff and the local community, the fate of Eversley Court was sealed: planning permission was narrowly passed by the full Town Council for the construction of apartments on the site and for a new building on the ECAT campus. The latter was smaller, had less studio space and had fewer attractive facilities than Eversley Court; added to this, it was thought by some that the old site had been sold below its potential value.
Although Eversley Court was demolished in 2000, not all was lost as the stained-glass window from the landing was saved and incorporated into the new college building; the installation was overseen by Douglas Clowes, the former site architect. In addition, the design of the new flats retained something of the feel of the old building: the carved brick frieze from the porch of Eversley Court was salvaged and incorporated into two porches in the new development while the lodge house was refurbished and the gate posts were retained.
THOSE WERE THE DAYS
This article was produced for the 1974 issue of the EGS Magazine by Eric Dyer, who had a near 50-year association with the school as a pupil from 1920 to 1930 and as a teacher from 1939 until his retirement in 1975 (with an interval for distinguished service in the Second World War).
This is an attempt to convey an impression of what it was like to be a pupil of this school fifty years ago. In those days, the name was the Eastbourne Municipal Secondary School for Boys (the ‘Muni’ for short); the school was housed in Eversley Court, which had started life as a stately home, became a preparatory school and then the EMSSB.
On one side of the buildings were lawns and shrubberies, sacrosanct except for open days and play productions. On the other side was the back field, which was large enough for very junior cricket and football, and was used annually for the mayhem of the Cadet inter-section cup football competition.
There was a small preparatory department where the starting age was about 9, and of the total of 250 boys, as far as I can remember, under half were ‘scholarship boys’, the rest being fee-payers. Together they formed a uniform whole. The entry for fee-paying pupils was by interview and tests by the Headmaster. The classes contained no more than 20-25 pupils and were housed in rooms of all sorts of shapes and sizes in this rambling barn of a place called Eversley Court. There were no science laboratories and, until 192? 2hen the new hall and science block were added, we had to walk down to the Technical Institute, on the site of the Eastbourne Library, for our Physics and Chemistry. In 1939, Mr Blackburn, the Headmaster, was complaining bitterly that the school was becoming too large – there were nearly 300 boys!
There is no room here for the trivial incidents of the classroom. I think that our homework load was heavier and lead to working on some days, after a late return from cricket, to 11 or 12pm. Mr Blackburn’s cane did reverberate through the corridors two or three times a year. His office was strategically placed so that four classrooms could hear what was going on! The ultimate deterrent, expulsion, was used twice during the time that I was at the school.
The school had its full share of recurring events. The School Orchestra, though small by today’s standards, was good and active and much in evidence on Speech Days and Open Days. It also spawned a vigorous offspring in Cecil Sapsiel’s Dance Band, which was good enough to be booked for the Winter Garden to play at dances there.
The Cadet Corps was very active and paraded weekly. In addition to the weekly parade ground drilling there was the excellent drum and bugle band, first aid courses and miniature rifle shooting at the Ordnance Yard. The Handicraft Guild was for the production of more ambitious items than were attempted during normal classwork; for me it led to the making of a succession of wireless sets of increasing complexity, culminating with the ‘blowing’ of two expensive valves during an injudicious adjustment. The making of the pendulum of an electric clock that still functions at the school was my part in that particular project.
These activities were interspersed with cricket or football practices according to the season. There were also some boxing lessons at one stage and a period when a group of us used to go to the Old Town Baths before morning school with a packed breakfast and a flask of tea. If you have ever done a bellyflop, euphemistically called a racing start, on the absolutely flat calm of a pool you will know just what pain is!
There did not seem to be any particular time for play productions although the ‘Merrie Muffins’ concert party use to entertain us at Christmas and perform at village halls round and about. A short play, sometimes in French, formed part and parcel of every Speech Day programme. In my time there were two memorable open-air productions of ‘The Tempest’ and ‘A Midsummer Night’s dream’ performed against the backcloth of the shrubbery, behind which was concealed the orchestra. The interest in drama led to the formation of The Eversley Players, who functioned for a while from the school hall and then took wings with a production of ‘The Scarlet Pimpernel’ in the Winter Garden for a week. The Group was a happy combination of the school past and present and for some years used to open the theatrical season at the Pier Theatre. I hesitate to mention that my stage clock which, during a vital scene of ‘The Scarlet Pimpernel’, proceeded to go backwards for a while and had to be made to go at double time in order to reach midnight at the correct moment in the script!
Our football was played at Hampden Park where we changed in those little huts about the place. It was a cold and muddy occupation; the luxury of showers is a post-war development. Mr Blackburn was a cricket fanatic; no mean performer himself, he would do anything in his power to see that we boys played as well and as often as possible. There were and are very few grammar schools where the first eleven played three matches a week for the greater part of the summer term. There were inter-school matches on Tuesdays and Thursdays while on Saturdays we toured the villages or played the less enlightened schools. All our home matches were on The Saffrons. The standard of play was high, starting with net practice at the school and The Saffrons during the Easter holidays. A place in the side could be lost more easily by bad behaviour than by dropping a catch. One member of the side was so dealt with when he was discovered winning a bet that he could eat a doughnut in one mouthful! There was a working arrangement with Eastbourne CC that members of the 1st XI would go down to The Saffrons and field before lunch for those members of the side who were unable to take the morning off for whole-day fixtures. The idea was that the boys would return to school for the afternoon. But it frequently happened that Eastbourne were short of a player or two; a phone call from the Secretary t o the Headmaster would obtain the necessary permission, and we would be in for a whole day’s cricket. So for several weeks of the term some of us played on four days a week – and there was no Sunday cricket in those days! These absences led one master, whose lessons I had missed, to tell me “Cricket won’t keep you. You’ll play until you are 40; then you’ll take a country pub and vegetate. There are times when I wish I had!
The annual Cadet Camp was held under canvas at Firle. We fed very well and performed all sorts of military exercises on the Downs. In the evenings we played the locals at cricket and stoolball. There was a marquee for the use of Old Boys who used to turn up for a somewhat alcoholic weekend. One Old Boy regularly used to make his way to the village church and play ghostly music on the organ at midnight. He was a great musician – and locksmith! The high spot of the Cadet year was the 6-a-side football cup. The final, played before the whole school, was fiercer than anything seen on ‘Match of the Day’.
One event that I cannot imagine taking place today was the School Picnic, when groups walk, cycle or train part of the way to the foot of the Wilmington Giant. There we had lunch, had races and took part in ‘no quarter asked’ cycle races round the dewpond. The Staff race was to go round the top of the Giant and back. Try it sometime! Then on to tea at Wilmington Tea gardens. A good day.
All this and, so far, no mention of academic work or the characters on the Staff. One had to aim high in those days as there was much less help available towards university education than there is today. There were two scholarships awarded annually, worth £60 pa, on the results of Higher School Certificate and Inter-BSc examinations. Your tuition fees were looked after if you contracted to become a teacher, but our parents had to find the rest, and these were the years of the Great Depression. The Staff were magnificent, both in quality and variety. Altogether it was a very happy place in which to grow up.