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Ruthie-Baby wrote:oh you two are as bad as each other, does anyone sensible know the answer?
Ruthie !
On a serious note - When DBTS and I were at school, (not at the same time, I hasten to add), there WEREN'T any of the softer sex, so marriages did not even become an issue !
BTW ! Is your avatar you ? Very sultry over the shoulder look, if I may make so bold !
Ruthie-Baby wrote:oh you two are as bad as each other, does anyone sensible know the answer?
Ruthie !
On a serious note - When DBTS and I were at school, (not at the same time, I hasten to add), there WEREN'T any of the softer sex, so marriages did not even become an issue !
There have been marriages - at least one to my knowledge, though the source of that information now temporarily escapes me. However, I believe it to have taken place in the early nineteenth or late eighteenth century. I think the school arranged it because neither of the "children" had any other family to go to.
Trouble is, most of you post 1985ers fail to remember that co-education at CH was a very long-standing tradition broken only by a short blip in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when the girls were sent out to Hertford to join the little boys who had already been placed there.
Ruthie-Baby wrote:oh you two are as bad as each other, does anyone sensible know the answer?
Ruthie !
On a serious note - When DBTS and I were at school, (not at the same time, I hasten to add), there WEREN'T any of the softer sex, so marriages did not even become an issue !
There have been marriages - at least one to my knowledge, though the source of that information now temporarily escapes me. However, I believe it to have taken place in the early nineteenth or late eighteenth century. I think the school arranged it because neither of the "children" had any other family to go to.
Trouble is, most of you post 1985ers fail to remember that co-education at CH was a very long-standing tradition broken only by a short blip in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when the girls were sent out to Hertford to join the little boys who had already been placed there.
If I do recall my Verrio tours correctly, CH was one of the first co-educational schools in the country...
The first admission to Christ's Hospital was a girl in 1552. The foundation opened its doors before the Royal Charter was signed. Girls, however, nearly were lost altogether, the lowest point being just some 16 in a foundation of nearly 1000. Only the West Gift (conditional on a minimum number of, I believe, 16 girls), kept the co-education of our forbears intact.
DavebytheSea wrote:The first admission to Christ's Hospital was a girl in 1552. The foundation opened its doors before the Royal Charter was signed. Girls, however, nearly were lost altogether, the lowest point being just some 16 in a foundation of nearly 1000. Only the West Gift (conditional on a minimum number of, I believe, 16 girls), kept the co-education of our forbears intact.
Very interested to read that you knew all of that too. I had wondered whether it was just the girls that were told the first admission was a girl. We were told the story of the school every Founder's Day by DR. She did try to vary the anecdotes that she told so it wasn't an identical recitation every year.
Did you have anything like that for Founder's day?