#i've always been fascinated with private schools and boarding schools lel

[nellygwyn]

Just as intriguing as the pairs of women with the same surnames are the pairs with different ones: Chantry Mount in Bishop's Storford run by 'Miss N. Harries and Miss G. M. Fisher' or the Laurels in Rugby run by 'Miss Jolly and Miss Rutter.' With our modern awareness, we can't resist the thought: 'were they lesbians?' The truth is, we shall never know, and some of them probably were. I've lost count of the number of times my interviewees have said to me 'With hindsight, I suppose they must have been lesbians but of course, we hadn't even heard that word in those days.'  Occasionally, a girl caught a glimpse in the dead of night of a schoolmistress, in a lacy nightdress and with her hair down, slipping into the bedroom of another mistress, and these glimpses left lasting impressions. One girl remembered being told off for talking after lights-out, first by the matron and then, five minutes later, by the housemistress, both of them wearing the selfsame pink velour dressing gown. Going to say the obligatory 'good night' to the housemistress Miss Dyer at the evacuated Queen Margaret's, York, in 1947, Angela Mackenzie found the housemistress sitting on the sofa with the domestic-science mistress on the floor beside her, cuddling up to her knees. 'I was so flummoxed that I got their names twisted,' said Angela. 'Miss Dyer looked lovingly down at the domestic-science mistress and said 'It's all the same to us, isn't it?' Patricia Daunt mentioned in passing, in her vivacious recollections of Southover Manor School, Lewes, in the 1950s, that the headmistress Miss Aspden's girlfriend was the school secretary, the French mistress was in love with the game's mistress, and the English mistress was in love with the scripture mistress.

Terms and Conditions: Life in Girls’ Boarding Schools, 1939-1979 // Ysenda Maxtone Graham 

on the sexualities of some schoolmistresses who taught and oversaw mid-20th century English girls’ boarding schools