I was aware of this website a number of years ago due to all the reports about it breaking up marriages! People who were at school together were contacting each other after 20,30,40 years & declaring their love for each other, resulting in swift dumping of a spouse or partner.
After searching for information on my much loved convent & her nuns, I found the appropriate page. With the impending closure some valuable information was going to be lost irretrievably. The convent wasn't simply a school. It possessed aesthetics, spirituality, a vitality and ethics that would be hard to find anywhere outside of a large Italian abbey filled with religious art.
Like some other public schools St. Joseph's retained an ambiance of an early age. There was still a sense of Edwardian or late Victorian England present into the 1980s with the addition of whatever ethos a group of French nuns who were born 1870-1920 (a few around 1840) brought to this piece of France in England. It had something of P.G.Wodehouse, or Vivian Stanshall & his Sir Henry Rawlinson character to it.
I was part of the very last 'classic era' of the convent: half of the staff were nuns, the boys had the daily influence of Sister Theresa & Sister Denise, and I knew the founder and sister superior, Sister Marie.
By 1981 half of the nuns I knew were dead or retired to France. There was a shift in the atmosphere of the school as younger and lay teachers were recruited. I visited a couple of times during school hours and the headmistress Mrs Wren had me washing art brushes with her after an art class. But the Convent had become diminished by its lack of women who had taken Holy Orders.
There was a sense of optimism in the final years of St. Joseph's which by 1983 had embraced the Pope's popularity. This was the period when John Paul II was still seen as an internationalist, opposing Communist oppression and had brought vigour back to the Roman Catholic Church. Many bishops were already aware of the reactionary he was; Cardinal Franz Konig who had secured his elevation to the Bishop of Rome, regretted his efforts as former Cardinal Wojtyla removed any progressions obtained by the Vatican II Council.
In the few interviews I have conducted with former pupils, now dating back to the class of 1939, I have always wanted to discuss with the 1988-89 pupils. I have a fancy that St. Joseph's was akin to the last days of Saigon. The inevitable was coming and a very different atmosphere would have descended on a nunnery which will forever be part of me. It's ingrained, inculcated, my spiritual DNA.
On all the St. Joseph's pages right click & 'save as' to read a clearer version off line-
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