Paddy Angus/Scott-Clark

Paddy (Patricia) was the second of the Angus daughters, and a pupil at the school from 1943 to 1950. On the 1st of September 1964, she married Ian Scott-Clark, who became the deputy headmaster after Mr Angus retired, and she sometimes taught at the school herself. They had a son named Kim, who appears in one of the photos that John Morris contributed.

I've been in touch with her by e-mail in recent months; she's been friendly and helpful, and sent me four Stouts Hill Magazines for scanning. She still lives at Stouts Hill.

Update from Kim Scott-Clark, received on the 21st of October 2014:

I am very sorry to say that my mother Paddy Scott-Clark passed away last Saturday. She died at Gloucester hospital ten days after undergoing emergency stomach surgery. Although her death was not sudden and her family were able to be with her it is obviously a shock to everyone that knew her ... There will be a Thanksgiving service at St Giles Church, Uley, on Friday October 31st at 12.30pm and anyone will be very welcome.

Carol Angus

Carol was the first of the Angus daughters, and a pupil at the school from 1942 to 1950. Paddy says of her:

Sadly my older sister Carol died in June 2003 of cancer. She was full of life and would have been delighted with your web and would certainly have contributed some funny stories. She remained friends with many of the boys later in life. She herself became a nurse in the London hospitals.

The 1964 Stouts Hill Magazine notes that she was working in the Princess Louise Hospital for children at that time.

John Morris says he was told that Carol was an air stewardess; it seems unlikely that she had two different careers, but quite possible of course.

I don't know whether she ever married.

Some early-1960s photos

Jeremy Cape (in Australia) has sent three black-and-white small-group photos from the early 1960s, which I added to Flickr with the other photos on the 3rd. Thanks, Jeremy!

Today I decided that the photos were too dark, so I've taken steps to lighten them and uploaded the new lighter versions.

Stouts Hill group on LinkedIn

Those of you who are members of LinkedIn, the international Web site for professional contacts, may like to know that there's now a Stouts Hill group that you can join. It was set up by Richard Guha, not by me.

Oliver!

John has provided the following photo of Oliver!, the school play in 1969, with Mr Cromie as Fagin.

Oliver! was performed again in 1974, but rather oddly the 1974 Stouts Hill Magazine offers only a blurred photo and a brief incoherent article by a participant: no cast list and no review.

Salad Days

This was the school play twice: in March 1967 and also in 1973 (as remembered by John and Huw). The first one was in my time; I didn't appear in the play, but I remember listening to a record of the songs that was lying around.

See an outline of the play and Wikipedia's page on it.

Site map

Blog entries are arranged in chronological order by date of posting, which doesn't make for convenient reference. I've now provided a site map to give an overview of what's here and enable you to find particular topics more easily. There's a link to the site map in the right pane.

History of the school

This is largely based on information from Nicholas Barton's A history of Stouts Hill (2006, 128 pages), as mentioned by Alan Davis, which I bought in 2007 from the Stouts Hill Cotswold Timeshare.

The Stouts Hill site was occupied in the 13th century by a family called Stut or Stout; hence the name. However, Timothy Gyde inherited the place from his father in 1743 and built the main building that we know now, perhaps using some parts of whatever building had been there before.

Timothy Gyde had expensive tastes and died insolvent; the place was bought by William Lloyd Baker in 1786. A descendant of his, Olive Lloyd-Baker, was still in possession in 1935 when Robert Angus was looking for a place to start a school. At that time the property “had been empty for two years and had no electricity or main drainage (only septic tanks)”, so Miss Olive Lloyd-Baker asked a modest rent for it.

Stouts Hill School thus started in 1935 with 12 pupils, Mr and Mrs Angus, two other teachers, and a matron. By 1939 it had 60 pupils. At that point war broke out and Mr Angus joined the Army. He was released from the Army to return to the school “at the request of influential parents”, upon which he joined the Uley Home Guard.

By the 1960s, the school had about 120 pupils aged from 6 to 13; some boys stayed on an extra year, reaching 14.

Barton reports that Mr Angus bought the property from Miss Lloyd-Baker in the early 1970s and made it into a charitable trust. In fact the 1964 Stouts Hill Magazine reports that the school was already a charitable trust at that time; it seems to have happened during the 1963/64 academic year.

The Angus Wing or New Wing was added to the school in 1968 (after I left), containing classrooms, dormitories, and staff bedrooms. Beech House and South Bend in Uley were no longer needed.

Mr Angus retired in 1969 and moved into a new bungalow constructed in the grounds; Mr Cromie took over as headmaster. Later, a new assembly hall was built (now used for badminton and other games).

The school closed after the first term of 1979, and the property was taken over by the present owners, the Stouts Hill Cotswold Timeshare. Barton reports that the number of pupils had declined to 80 because times were changing and the school hadn't changed with them sufficiently. In particular, he thinks that parents were becoming unhappy with single-sex education and felt somewhat less need for boarding schools. (I was sent to boarding schools because my parents lived in Nigeria and didn't think I'd get an adequate education there.)

I've heard rumours of some kind of financial scandal around the time that the school closed, but I don't know the details.

The Angus Wing was demolished in 2000 as it was “always considered an eyesore by visitors to the timeshare”.

Photos 2004

Emile Farhi has contributed eight photos of Stouts Hill taken in December 2004, and I've added them to Flickr with the others—please use the Stouts Hill photos link in the right pane.

These are relatively small photos (640 × 480), but nice to have. I don't have many modern colour photos of the place. You can also see Emile here, looking quite recognizable from forty years earlier.

Mr Bruce

Stephen Fry mentions a Scottish master called Jim Bruce who taught history with a Scottish emphasis, and divinity. He had been a prisoner of the Japanese during the Second World War, and died in about 1995.

According to the 1966 Stouts Hill Magazine, he was due to arrive at the school in September 1966, so he was there throughout my final year; but I don't remember him, I suppose because he never taught me.

John has provided this link to a 36-page PDF file written by Mr Bruce about his experiences as a teenage prisoner of the Japanese. He was apparently born in about 1926.