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This book celebrates the lives of the students and former students of Southend High School for Girls during its first one hundred years. Through their words we are able to experience key events of the twentieth century and come to understand how much has been achieved by them. In 1913 women did not even have the vote, including the highly educated and formidable Head Mistress. One year later World War I broke out. Sister Mary Ruth Brewster, on her hundredth birthday in 2005, wrote from South Africa about the air raids, 'we had to get out of our desks, sit cross-legged on the floor on the side away from the window, with our big atlases open and held over our heads.' In World War II the Old Girls faced even more dangers, including imprisonment by the Germans in France and internment by the Japanese in China. Others who went out as teachers and missionaries in the final days of the British Empire also faced dangers from those fighting for their independence. Finally, this would not be a true history of the school without chapters on the uniform, success in sport, and the School Birthday in October with its cards, presents, cakes and celebrations.
Too young to prosecute, Charlie Zubryd was adopted after his confession and a brief stay in a mental ward. A childless couple gave Zubryd a new name and identity. It would be twenty years before Charlie Zubryd - now going by the name Chuck Duffy - would have any contact with his blood family. When Zubyrd/Duffy made an effort to get his real family back, he was rejected because his relatives still believed he had murdered his mother. Until Fisher began to investigate the case in 1989, Chuck Duffy was not sure he had not killed his mother during some kind of mental blackout.
While Southend-on-Sea, like many seaside towns, may not have been at the forefront of the struggle for suffrage and equal rights in the lives of women between 1850 and 1950, there are surprisingly famous names linked to the town and its women. Novelist Rebecca West, living in nearby Leigh-on-Sea during the First World War (and her lover, H.G. Wells) played a key role in the suffrage and feminist movements and in women’s entry into the scientific and literary professions. Princess Louise, a visitor to the town, was known to be a feminist, regardless of her position, and Mrs Margaret Kineton-Parkes (founder member of the Women’s Tax Resistance League and involved in the Women’s Freedom L...
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