St Augustine's College & The Abbey School

Most of this information has been derived either from Scholastic Century: St Augustine's Abbey, Ramsgate 1865-1965 by David Parry O.S.B. or from the reminiscences of former students. Particular attention has been paid to Madeley Court, the building occupied by the school from 1939 to 1958. Three groups of buildings used by the school - the original school buildings in Ramsgate, Madeley Court in Huntingdonshire and Assumption House, also in Ramsgate - have all been pulled down: of these Madeley Court was the oldest and most architecturally interesting and yet it seems to be almost completely undocumented.

St Augustine's Abbey in Ramsgate is or was (depending on how you look at it) a Benedictine priory on a windswept cliff-top on the South Coast, close to the original landing site of the original St Augustine, and inhabiting a complex of Victorian Gothic buildings designed and built by the famous architect Augustus Pugin and his son Edward. The Pugins actually lived at The Grange, a large private house which forms part of the Abbey complex, and they designed the magnificent church with its central courtyard in part for their own use. Virtual tours of the monastery and its grounds, provided by the monks themselves, can be found here.

St Augustine's College, the first incarnation of the school associated with the Abbey, opened in 1865 and took boy boarders of public-school age, thirteen to eighteen. The Abbey had been left a sizeable house and grounds by the late Rev. Alfred Luck, to be used as a college, but for the first couple of years the handful of boys who made up the initial intake slept in the monastery itself and ate with the monks. More or less from the outset, the school showed a liking for putting on plays and improving variety shows for the benefit of local residents.

In 1867 the college moved into Rev. Luck's house, later known as St Gregory's. This building no longer exists, but it was in the north-west corner of the gardens which lie just to the north of the monastery,

The school grew to nearly sixty students but by 1876 the Order that ran it had got into financial difficulties, and in 1877 student numbers had dropped to twenty-seven, falling further to nineteen by the following summer, despite the college being supported financially by a generous benefactress. It was during this period, however, that the school nurtured the genius of the great electrical engineer Sebastian Ziani de Ferranti.

Arms of St Augustine's College at Ramsgate

David Parry O.S.B. describes the school at this time as being rather like a gentleman's club. It was quite well thought-of academically, had numerous hobby-clubs run by the boys themselves, and for such a small school it did at least reasonably well at a surprisingly wide range of inter-school sports, although rather less well at football due to an inability to decide what it thought the rules were. Boys who had done well were granted a day off and an outing, called the feria - this custom continued right up until 1939.

Father, later Abbot Erkenwald Egan, from Scholastic Century by David Parry O.S.B.

In 1881 a small preparatory school for boys aged about seven to thirteen was started in St Placid's, but it moved out after a few years, leaving St Placid's free to be used as a hospital ward during a serious measles epidemic in 1883. St Augustine's lost its connection with this prep. school in 1886. Student numbers at the College rose, but fell back to the low twenties by 1888, partly due to the appointment of a Fr Erkenwald Egan as prefect of studies and discipline: Fr Erkenwald was an unpopular choice, although his popularity was to receive a filip in 1892, when it was discovered that on the football pitch he was a goalkeeper of real genius. Also in 1888, an Old Boy named Sir Henry Tichborne payed for the installation of a very luxurious and grown-up school library, with furnishings by Pugin: really like something out of a posh gentlemen's club. The following year a loft-conversion opened up more dormitory rooms, known as the cock-loft, in the roof.

In 1889 a dynamic monk named Fr Jerome Vaughan offered his services to regenerate the school, and then used his aristocratic connections to attract more students. Numbers rose so fast that within one term a house at 1 Royal Crescent was purchased to serve as an overflow dormitory for senior boys, and named St Benet's. Fr Jerome was appointed as rector, in which post he served for a year only,

St Gregory's, the main school building of St Augustione's College, from Scholastic Century by David Parry O.S.B.: Rev. Luck's house is at front left, as far along as the gable-end, with extensions visible to the right and behind it.

Map showing the area around St Augustine's Abbey, Ramsgate in 1907.

█ Main monastery building.	█ St Augustine's RC Church.
█ The Grange.	█ St Gregory's (main building of College).
█ St Placid's ???

during which a second overflow house in West Cliff Road was rented for the purpose of housing parlour boarders, and renamed St Mildred's. Parlour boarders were the children of wealthy parents who were deceased or abroad, and paid for their children to have superior accommodation and perhaps their own servant, and generally to treat the school as a home or hotel where they happened to also receive tuition, rather than a school where they happened also to eat and sleep. Towards the end of 1890, after the departure of Fr Jerome, St Benet's was moved to larger premises at Spencer House, Spencer Square.

In 1893, with student numbers now in the nineties, it was decided to expand St Gregory's, the main school building, by adding add a new wing complete with chapel and purpose-built refectory. Hereafter the boys would attend services mainly in their own chapel rather than using the priory's rather magnificent Arts and Crafts Gothic Pugin church across the road, and the old refectory became a billiards room. Owing to the close proximity of the west side of St Gregory's to Grange Road, a new wing could be added only on the east side, resulting in a somewhat lopsided construction. Another overflow dormitory, later to be re-named St Maur's and used as staff accommodation, was taken on at 1 Bay Villas. Epidemics first of influenza and then of diptheria in 1895 led to the appointment of a school matron.

In 1897, the priory was elevated to the status of an abbey, and over the next few years the school and its associated Old Augustinians Society throve. Some time between 1898 and 1907 (going by the Ordnance Survey Map) the monastery itself gained an extra, east wing, turning it from an L-shape to a T. Around 1900 however St Mildred's was closed and the overflow tranferred to St Placid's, and in 1902 St Benet's also closed due to falling student numbers. The new science laboratories, erected in 1905, had to be done on the cheap, and the school continued to decline owing to a shortage of staff, even though its academic performance was good. In June 1914 the Old Augustinians held a grand celebration, but two months later the western world was at war.

For the first nine months of the war, St Augustine's played host to a group of Belgian refugee students, in a satellite unit called St Gregory's School in Chartham Terrace, but falling student numbers and repeated Zepellin raids and bombardment of Ramsgate made the school's position untenable. The first incarnation of St Augustine's College closed in July 1917.

In 1919, a preparatory school for boys aged seven to thirteen opened under an amiable headmaster named Dom Anthony Flannery, in the same set of buildings as the old college, and with much the same organisation and institutions. The same collections of natural history artefacts, the same trophies, the same photographs the former school had had, still haunted the classrooms and corridors of the new institution. The Old Augustinian Society continued unabated.

The Abbey School, as it was now called, acquired better playing fields in 1921, and in 1922 the students were divided into two "houses", the Blacks and the Whites. In 1924 Dom Anthony was succeeded by headmaster Dom Adrian Taylor and his second master, Fr Edward Hull. In the 1940s Fr Hull was to become both headmaster in his own right and a considerable tyrant: by that point his disposition may have been soured by his wartime experiences in the RAF, but even in 1924 Dom Adrian and Fr Hull introduced a markedly more authoritarian regime. Control of the school clubs and extracurricular activities was taken away from the boys (who admittedly may now have been too young to manage them) and given to the masters, and parents were forbidden to take their children out of school, or visit them, at any time other than half-term.

Interior of the Abbey church, from thanetonline

Nevertheless, the school had an active cultural life, especially drama productions and a flourishing history society, and the boys took a generally enthusiastic part in religious services. The younger boys, those aged seven and eight, were given a less demanding schedule than their elders, but protested angrily, and successfully, when it was suggested that they should be spared from the longer religious services.

In 1925 St Placid's was extended to make a larger infirmary, in time for a chicken-pox epidemic in 1928. In 1932 the school held a particularly memorable mass outing or feria which my father unfortunately started just too late for. This was organised by Abbot Egan - the same Erkenwald Egan who had once been so unpopular, but who now in his age loved to provide the whole school and monastery with treats. Parry quotes somebody - probably a boy writing in the school magazine - who described it thus:

Father, later Abbot David Parry O.S.B., from St Augustine's Abbey Ramsgate: history

The journey was made in a fleet of motor coaches, the weather was superb, and the attractions of Betteshanger – woods, meadows, gardens, meals under trees, a providential local féte, an equally providential ice-cream merchant – combined to give everyone a delightful time. An added zest was imparted to the day by the fact that an Abbot's feria (for that was its characteristically Augustinian name) was for almost all the boys a novel experience. There could be no doubt of the boys' sincerity when, through their captains, they thanked Father Abbot for a day of well-nigh perfect enjoyment.

My father, Roderick (Rory) Denis Edward Langford-Rae, started at the Abbey School in 1933 aged six and a half. In 1934 the headmaster, Dom Adrian, was promoted to Abbot of the monastery - a promotion on which some of the boys were said to be running a book. He departed from the school and took Fr Edward Hull with him, which was probably a great relief to all the boys including my father. The new headmaster was Fr David Parry B.A., the author of Scholastic Century, and the new second master, confusingly, was a Fr Oswald Hull.

During the mid to late 1930s, during my father's time there, the school buildings and equipment were renovated and modernised. One noteworthy change was that when my father started there, the school study hall was still using heavy long multi-seat scar-topped desks with no lids or lockers, only shelves or recesses the boys had to scrunch sideways to get at. These were now replaced by individual light oak desks.

The Madeley Court estate in 1926

The school at this time seemed to be thriving, running smoothly and with a high level of academic achievement, but storms were gathering in the wider world. In 1938 it was decided that in the event of war the school would relocate to a large house named Madeley Court a few hundred yards from the River Ouse, in the outstandingly pretty village of Hemingford Grey near St Ives in Huntingdonshire. This house, the centrepiece of a small estate of the same name including outbuildings and grounds and a couple of small fields, had been made available to the school by the owner, a Miss Margeurite Selby. A former student named John Pope recalls hearing that Miss Selby had been housekeeper to the previous owner, who had left it to her in his or her will.

Madeley Court seen from the garden, taken from Scholastic Century by David Parry OSB

The house at Madeley Court was a rather grand three-storey building, with the kind of double-sloped "Second Empire" or Mansard roof which is common in some areas of France and the U.S., but extremely rare in Britain. [That I remember, I've only seen two British examples in my life - Madeley Court itself, and a very similar building, probably by the same architect, at the far west end of Hemingford Grey High Street - plus one gambrel roof, like a Mansard but with flat gable-ends, on a tiny cottage in Doune, opposite the house where my father's mother was born.] Behind the house to the north was a yard or lawn which was to become the school's quadrangle, surrounded by outbuildings and a substantial stable block.

What Madeley Court was not was in good repair, for it had been standing empty for some years. Nothing much was done about this until August 1939, when it was realised that war was imminent, the South Coast was about to become a primary target for enemy bombardment and Madeley Court was still completely unready to receive an entire school.

Main entrance to the former Douai Abbey School seen from the Woolhampton road at the south-west corner of the abbey, from Douai Abbey's website

Douai Abbey\'s website

The school appealed for help to the Catholic public school at Douai Abbey near Reading, and when war broke out in September 1939 and the South Coast was declared a restricted zone, the senior forms, consisting of thirty to forty boys including my father, went with headmaster Parry and three other Fathers to Douai, while the three younger forms went to Madeley Court along with the Abbey's Father Prior - the same Fr Edward Hull who had taught at the school until 1934. Fr Hull and the junior boys set about sorting Madeley Court out and turning what Parry calls "ancient stables" into a classroom block, preparatory to the arrival of the rest of the school. Meanwhile the now vacant school buildings in Ramsgate were at some point taken over by the army, and the tunnels beneath The Grange became an air-raid shelter.

At Douai the senior years were given the use of "a couple of dormitories, three classrooms, and some playing fields", as well as accommodation for the four staff members. When they needed to use other facilities, such as the chapel, refectory and recreation rooms, the two schools were rotated around so that they were never both trying to use the same room. The senior school stayed at Douai for two terms, through what was to prove a very hard winter: snow lay for weeks at Douai, and Hemingford Grey flooded. During the January term many of the boys at Douai and three of the staff were laid low by 'flu', and the Abbot and headmaster of Douai were kind enough to step in and themselves take over the classes of those St Augustine's Fathers who were too sick to teach.

St Augustine's campus at Madeley Court: a)Madeley Court main house b)Angelus bell c)"Colt" temporary wooden chapel, joined on to a vestibule of the main building, which served as a Sacristy d)Driveway at front of house, with oval lawn e)Glass-roofed verandah f)Stables/classroom block g)Games supplies store (cricket/rugger balls, chalk line machine etc.) h)Lavatories, with urinals along the wall nearest the quad and four (?) stalls along the back, partly open to the sky i)Underused classroom (overused by John Pope), part of wooden block j)Fr Robert Biddulph's carpentry workshop, part of wooden block k)Old pig sty (old maps show an adjacent walled structure which may have been an outdoor run, but this had been removed by the 1940s) l)Quad (on at least one occasion this was deliberately flooded and turned into a winter ice-skating rink) m)Wooden garage n)Kitchen garden, separated from the quad by a stone wall with an arch through it near the classroom block; offscreen further to the north-east was a potato field where the boys helped with the harvest o)Playing field: there was another at the nearby village of Hemingford Abbots

Quite why it was the junior boys, children as young as six or seven, who were given the task of helping to build a new school I'm not sure, but I suppose it was felt that the seniors needed to concentrate on doing well in their exams, as they would soon be moving up to higher schools.

Despite the floods Fr Hull and his team had managed to convert the stable block into classrooms, build a "semi-permanent" chapel and install lavatories and a washroom: comparing a sketch-map by an old boy with a detailed Ordnance Survey map from 1926 shows that the lavatories and an adjacent store for games equipment were installed in pre-existing outbuildings. The lavatories, which had a strip of urinals on the side facing into the Quad and four stalls on the outer side, were makeshift and only partially roofed; there was also a wooden garage on the other side of the quadrangle. The accommodation was only finished at Easter, just in time for the senior boys to move in - the monks were disappointed by the boys' failure to be impressed by their efforts.

Parry remembers the boys as having been delighted by the move to the country, and happy to assist in improving the grounds. The recollections of the boys themselves aren't quite so rosy. At some point, however, Fr Edward Hull departed to join the RAF: if his management style was already what it was to be six years later, this must have raised the mood a bit.

Plan of the new housing estate at Madeley Court, circa 1971, with the position of the mansion house and its outbuildings superimposed: the stable block survives as Madeley Lodge

The main house at Madeley Court was pulled down probably in the 1960s: by the early 1970s Madeley Court was a street of modern houses. The former stable-block, converted to classrooms by the school in 1940, survives and is now a private house named Madeley Lodge: the main building was about fifty yards south of Madeley Lodge, lying diagonally across what is now the road running through the estate.

Patrick Hodgson recalls that the main building had a sloping roof with a row of dormer windows above a glass-roofed verandah; a headmaster's study with French windows onto a garden and a beautiful circular stair from the main hall to the first floor. John Pope recalls: "Madeley Court was a family house prior to our advent. It had been bequeathed to someone's Housekeeper; she in turn leased it to the school. The Dormitories might therefore be better described as bedrooms.

Approximate layout of the ground floor of the main house at Madelely Court, as recollected by John Pope

All except the one at the head of [the] rather grand staircase, which had the appearance of a former ballroom. It had a great grate, boarded-in at the far end." The boys normally never went near the kitchens, but Pope has a vague memory of having to wash up in the scullery during some kind of crisis. The front hall and the lower flight of the grand staircase were also out of bounds.

The chapel was wooden, probably supplied by a firm called Colt, with an altar at the east or distal end, and was joined onto the east side of the house, using a pre-existing, protruding lobby or porch as a sacristy. Nearby was a boot and shoe room for storage and polishing, and a general purpose room which the boys had use of. Along the south or verandah side were the staff sitting-room, the staff dining-room and the boys' dining-room: the staff dining-room could be opened up to the larger boys' dining-room in order to double as a stage. The headmaster's study was next to the boys' dining-room, so its French windows must have opened to the east. The staff sitting-room contained a radio, on which some of the boys were allowed to listen to the Royal Wedding in November 1947.

The classrooms were in the old stable block or coach house to the north of the mansion, with the Quad between the classroom block and the main building. On the south or verandah side of the mansion there was an extensive lawn which the boys were only allowed onto on special occasions. The school also had a separate house on the main road, where some of the staff slept.

Hemingford Grey High Street looking west © Stephen McKay at Geograph

To judge from this St Augustine's College OA's & Ursuline PP's page, life at Madeley Court had its compensations - Hemingford Grey is considered one of the most picturesque villages in England and the beautiful rural surroundings gave a lot of scope for exploration, playing of conkers etc. - but the accommodation was cold and damp and mouse-haunted, the regime was harsh and nit-pickingly restrictive and the food poor and little of it. The board used to board up the boarded-up grate in the ex ballroom had a hole in it the size of a letterbox, and boys used to smuggle inedible food out of the refectory in the envelopes their letters from home had come in, and post them through the hole into the disused fireplace. This explains why the building had mice.

South-west and south-east faces of Madeley Lodge, once the stable-block of Madeley Court and then the classroom building of the Abbey School, from Google Streetview. The small single-storey block on the end has been added since the school left, and the two-storey white block at the back has replaced a single-storey stable with the same ground area. Most or all of the ground-floor windows at the front are also new: originally there was a central, recessed arch where an opening had been bricked up.

The stable block or coach house still survives as Madeley Lodge, 7 Madeley Court, but it has had a blocky white two-storey extension added at the back, built on the site of what was once probably a single-storey stable. When the building was converted to classrooms, this section still was single-storey, so the downstairs was bigger than the upstairs. Most or all of the row of ground-floor windows along the front are also new additions: in the 1940s there was a recessed archway in the middle of the ground floor frontage, where an entrance had been blocked up. It was on the small size to drive a coach through, so it may be that horses were led in and out here, or quite small carriages; but it was large enough and recessed enough to contain a well-grown, elderly pear-tree in which a boy named Douglas Airey liked to sit and read.

Approximate layout of the classroom block, as recollected by John Pope

Inside the classroom block, about half of the ground floor was taken up by an open hall. This was surrounded by classrooms on one short side and half of one of the long sides, including a large room which eventually became a library and a small one which held a Gestetner and stationery supplies, plus a boiler down the far end from the classrooms, standing openly at the side of the hall; a block of lockers and a staircase under which was a games cupboard, for which John Pope was the keyholder. At one end of the main hall was an aperture through the wall and into a classroom, where there was a long shelf on which Fr Robert Biddulph (who was also the school's tame conjuror) kept a 16mm projector, ready to project films through the aperture and turn the hall into a makeshift cinema. Films were also created: some time in the late '40s the school developed its own Scout troup and they were filmed several times.

Upstairs, the stairs opened onto a short corridor about ten foot wide, lined with bookcases and a notice-board: this initially served as a library before one was installed downstairs, and continued to be known as "The Library". It was not a welcoming space, however, for it doubled as the main venue for boys to be caned. It ran along the front face of the building and was surrounded on three sides by classrooms, off one of which was a walk-in cupboard containing the school tuck-box. John Pope recalls that the tuck was carried out of the tuck box cupboard and sold from the teacher's table in the classroom into which the tuck box cupboard opened. Boys took it in turns to assist in this process - one of the benefits of which was that whoever was responsible for the tuck got the use of an old typewriter.

North-east and south-east faces of Madeley Lodge, showing the new two-storey extension on the site of the stables, from Google Streetview

Beyond and behind the classroom block was a wooden building which was divided between Fr Robert Biddulph's carpentry workshop, and a little-used classroom in which John Pope lurked and amused himself by manufacturing gunpowder. Nearby was a disused pigsty.

The school bell had been installed in a tree at Madeley Court, but from May 1940 the ringing of clappered bells was forbidden, except to signal an invasion. A Chinese gong was used for a while - which probably appealed to my father, who was an eighth part Chinese - but it wasn't very effective and soon wore through. In 1941 - by which point my father had moved on to Ampleforth - electric bells were fitted on the main and classroom blocks, adding to the tangle of overhead wires: the bell on the classroom block was on the front at roof level.

From The Clock of Praise: A Day in the Life of a Poor Clare Nun

In a corner of the Quad up by the house there was also the Angelus bell (traditionally rung three times a day to call the faithful to prayer and spread goodwill): John Pope recalls this as a "good skive" because whichever boy's turn it was to ring the bell could just walk out of class to do so. He also recalls that Peter Hodgson (one of the Hodgsons who were my father's surrogate family) later became responsible for the Angelus bell: he was also responsible for taking the school's post to the village Post Office every day, a job which had been my father's when the school was at Ramsgate.

In time of war it was more or less literally "all hands to the pump" and in place of the rifle-shooting and billiards they had enjoyed at Ramsgate, the boys laid their own drains, harvested hay and then dug and bagged potatoes in the fields immediately west and north of Madeley Court. Other fields around the house served as games pitches, although the school-in-exile's main playing field was at the neighbouring village of Hemmingford Abbots.

The choir at Madeley Court in the mid to late 1940s:

In the summer boys collected butterflies and birds' eggs, very un-PC nowadays, and played their usual sports: the school choir had become a tribe within a tribe and took on the rest of the school at games. Fr Anselm kept chickens, and Fr Ambrose kept a mysterious lawn - Parry refers to it but doesn't say where it was. Some boys stayed on at the school over the holidays, as being in an area where there was little risk of bombing: at Christmas the monks tied pillowcases of presents to these boys' bed-rails, and put on as good and home-like a celebration as they could.

Supplies became increasingly hard to get, but rightly or wrongly Fr Parry considered the school to be a happy place during the war. The school was given three days off to celebrate the end of hostilities: on VE Day itself they went down to the river, where the older boys messed about in boats and the younger ones rummaged about on the banks, before trooping back to the school to listen to Churchill's broadcast at 3pm. In the evening they lit a bonfire in one of the fields and then fell asleep listening to the distant sound of dancing and music in the High Street.

By this point my father, of course, was a Guardsman in the Grenadiers.

In 1946 David Parry was removed as headmaster, for reasons he said had nothing to do with the school: whatever they were they cannot have been anything damaging to his career, for he was later to become Abbot of St Augustine's 1957-1972. The new head was Fr Edward Hull, now a Wing Commander. At the same time, the school acquired its own scout troop.

Parry had been a benign headmaster, but Fr Hull introduced a much harsher regime. It's not clear whether he had always been so aggressive and controlling, or whether his wartime experiences had deranged him - it was probably impossible to rise to Wing Commander during wartime without being traumatised in some way. John Pope believes Hull to have been an RAF chaplain, and this is born out by the mention of a "Wing Commander Hull, a Benedictine Father, Chaplain of the Air Force" in Action this Day: Letters from the fighitng Fronts by Francis J Spellman: but even being a chaplain would be quite traumatic, because one would be counselling young men many of whom would be dead in a couple of weeks.

Group of boys at Madeley Court in the mid to late 1940s: John Pope lists them as "my goodself; Peerless hiding his lack of bootlace; Ward of the Dormitory lighting; Milner [and] Michael McAvoy with Father Aidan McArdle"

Some of the staff were obviously very good fun, both interesting and interested. John Pope recalls that in the late '40s the "nice boys" formed two factions around Fr Robert Biddulph and Fr Aidan McArdle, both "very agreeable and spiritual men". Fr Aidan was a House Master and the School Bursar; Fr Robert later transferred to Douai.

On the other hand many of the masters were overly fond of the cane, applied with vicious enthusiasm, and the old boys of that period who were discussing it online refer to themselves as "Madeley Court survivors". John Pope, who was at Madelely Court in the mid to late '40s, speaks of individuality being discouraged; of the students being cut off from any news from outside the school and having to resort to subterfuge to send letters to their families; of an unreasonably early bedtime which left them awake in the dormitories for hours with nothing to do except make trouble; of boys being thrashed for offences as minor as wetting the bed, and of students being sent to the headmaster's study to fetch the cane with which they would be beaten.

Fr Hull was not the only master who used the cane as a first resort, and one or two at least were outright abusive. It's not clear whether the regime was this harsh when they were in Ramsgate, or whether it was the case that an unusually difficult set of masters had been chosen to lead the evacuation - or that the masters that went with the boys were in a foul mood because they too had been uprooted from their usual home and sent a couple of hundred miles away to live on thin rations and sleep in damp, mouse-haunted attics. If it was as bad as that when it was in Ramsgate it seems an odd choice for the Hodgson family, who clearly doted on their children and yet sent all their boys to St Augustine's: although I suppose that while it was in Ramsgate it had the advantage of being only about an hour and a half by train from visiting the family.

Madeley Court seen from the garden, taken by John Pope on a Baby Brownie camera during the 1946 Lent term: the shadow across the building between the ground and first floors is cast by the verandah

But it probably wasn't as bad as that when it was at Ramsgate: the staff who went to Madeley Court probably became so control-freaky because the disruption of the sudden enforced move and the war had left them feeling out of control of their own lives. And some of the boys undoubtedly did put a strain on their nerves: Patrick Hodgson recalls boys in the late '40s being publicly caned to dissuade them from daring each other to clamber about on the sloping roof from dormer to dormer above a glass-roofed verandah which would have cut their throats if they'd fallen through it, and John Pope recalls boys experimenting with home-made bombs. It must have been like trying to control a flock of educated goats.

During the 1940s there were three deaths - a boy with polio, a boy who drowned, and a young master, Gerald Sharples, who himself drowned while assisting a student who had got into difficulties in the Ouse. Harsh though some of them sometimes were, the school magazine shows the staff taking a lively interest in students long after they had left the school, which suggests genuine affection from at least some of them, and they were willing at least to some extent to behave like family to the boys. Eight years after my father left St Augustine's he was still storing a trunk with them which he would sometimes turn up and rummage through, somewhat to the staff's bemusement. They seem never to have given way to temptation and looked inside - or if they did they didn't admit to it - but family circumstances suggest that it may have contained a consignment of Burmese rubies, to be sold piecemeal whenever he ran out of cash.

The Grange, from Archaeology Review 1996 - 97

The school continued at Madeley Court into the 1950s, and made many improvements in its infrastructure there, but in the end the building still wasn't really adequate. In September 1951 the junior boys were moved back to Ramsgate and placed in The Grange, the grand house belonging to the Abbey on the opposite side of St Augustine's Road from the original school. By this point the tunnels under The Grange had been declared unsafe and sealed off, and much of the system had been filled with concrete.

In 1953 the original school building in Ramsgate, St Gregory's, was re-opened, but this time as a day school for local boys, under Fr David Parry. In the same year a model village opened only a couple of minutes' walk from the school, which must have provided the boys with a lot of harmless amusement. In 1957 the junior boys from this day school were merged with the junior boarders at The Grange over the road. The Abbey now had one junior school at The Grange, with both boarders and day pupils, and the older years split between day boys at St Gregory's and boarders at Madeley Court.

Assumption House seen from the south-west, from Scholastic Century by David Parry O.S.B.

Assumption House seen from the south, from Photos de la famille Desbois

In 1957 under a new head, Fr Bernard Waldron, St Gregory's was substantially re-modelled to create more dormitories and classrooms, and the boys from Madeley Court were shoe-horned into it. By 1960 the school was taking some older boys and seeking recognition as an independent grammar school, but this was refused at that time because its age demographic was too confused.

In September 1960 St Augustine's purchased a newly vacant convent-school complex called Assumption House from the Sisters of the Assumption at Goodwin Road, Pegwell Bay, about a thousand yards west of the Abbey. The prep-school boys of the Abbey School were moved to Assumption House, and St Augustine's College was reborn as an independent grammar school occupying both The Grange and St Gregory's.

Map showing Assumption House on Goodwin Road, Ramsgate, with playing fields and tennis courts, as at 1956.

In 1961 the two senior years were moved into The Grange and St Placid's was turned into an art department. By the end of 1962 the house next to St Maur's was bought and converted into staff quarters, leaving St Maur's free to be used by the Sixth Form; the Fifth Form moved into the top floor of St Gregory's (known as the "cock-loft") and the junior boys were rotated into The Grange.

This was not necessarily a happy arrangement. Robert Yorke-Starkey, who attended St Augustine's from 1963 to 1971,

The gate to Assumption House, halfway down the west side of Goodwin Road, from Google Streetview

calls his time there "unbearable" and speaks of The Grange as having "an effect that can drag you down. There is a negative energy there that is tangible. Something is very wrong there [cut], that place is alive with something awful." This could be due to some kind of occult presence, but it's also possible that the wind from the sea getting into the tunnels under the building sets up unpleasant subsonic vibrations.

Ultimately, even this elaborate game of musical chairs in and around the streets of Ramsgate wasn't enough.

In September 1971 both the Abbey School and St Augustine's College relocated to Westgate-on-Sea, where they took over another former convent school, close to and twinned with the Ursuline Convent School for Girls. Assumption House was pulled down, although its ornate entrance survives as a listed building, halfway down the west side of Goodwin Road.

The Tower House, part of St Augustine's College at Westgate, from Google Streetview

The chapel of St Augustine's Abbey School and College at Westgate, from Google Streetview

St Augustine's Abbey School and presbytry at Westgate, from Google Streetview

Part of the back of the Abbey School at Westgate, from David Fugurally, a former pupil

Physically, St Augustine's campus at Westgate was arranged rather like Ronald Searle's famously depraved cartoon girls' boarding school St Trinian's, with the school buildings fronting onto a main road and having just a narrow band of forecourt between them and the street, but extensive playing fields stretching away behind the buildings, hidden from casual passersby. If you stand on the Canterbury Road and look south at the school buildings you see Tower House, which was part of the College, on the left, then the chapel, then the School on the right. Tower House predates both the college and the convent, and was originally a charitable retreat for recovering alcoholics, who were issued with their own specially-minted currency which enabled them to buy food and other goods in the town, but not alcohol.

Forecourt of the Abbey School at Westgate, from David Fugurally, a former pupil

On Friday 30^th May 1980 the Catholic Herald reported that on the previous Friday, 23^rd May 1980, Fr Edward Hull (88), former headmaster of the Abbey School, and his housekeeper Miss Maud Lelean, a former matron at the school, had been attacked with a club by a criminally insane escaped prisoner called Henry Gallagher at the presbytry of St Ethelbert's church, Ramsgate. Fr Hull died at the scene and Miss Lelean died in hospital the following Monday.

Arms of St Augustine's College at Westgate The press reports say Miss Lelean was seventy-two: the Register of Births, Deaths and Marriages reveals that her full name was Ethel Maud Lelean and she was seventy-three.

Everybody who reminisces about the school or college in this final, Westgate phase of their existence seems to do so fondly, but nevertheless St Augustine's closed down in 1995, a hundred and thirty years after it opened. The parent Abbey in Ramsgate itself closed in 2011, and the monks moved to a former Franciscan Friary at Chilworth, Surrey, which itself had been left vacant when the friars moved to smaller premises. This relocation happened in part because the number of monks at the Abbey was not enough to maintain the complex of deteriorating Grade I Listed buildings which Pugin had built for them, and so they moved on and left Pugin's masterwork to be restored by English Heritage and the Heritage Lottery Fund.

Additional reading:

Scholastic Century: St Augustine's Abbey, Ramsgate 1865-1965 by Abbot David Parry O.S.B..

A Privileged Boyhood by Michael Ware: Ware, himself an Old Augustinian, collected these memories of Madeley Court in the early to mid 1940s from another semi-anonymous Augustinian a year or two older than himself.

Former Augustinian schoolboy John Pope recalls the school in the mid to late 1940s.

Madeley Court "survivors" reminisce on the Old Augustinians' website

St Augustine's College & The Abbey School:

a brief history of my father's old prep school