VE Day Celebrations at Hanford
Girls and staff came together today to celebrate the 80 th anniversary of Victory in Europe (VE) Day with a picnic lunch on the lawn.
\With wartime music, flags, bunting, lots of different hats raided from the costume cupboard and a great deal of red, white and blue the scene was set for a memorable celebration for the Hanford community.
We were delighted to connect with Wimbledon High School recently and find out more about how some of their students and staff were evacuated to Hanford House during WWII. Pupils from each school waved and virtually said hello to each other as we all enjoyed our respective celebrations (see photo below).
The evacuation was a voluntary one, as Wimbledon was deemed to be in a ‘neutral’ area.
Hanford House was the home of Lt Col Frederick Hamilton Lister DSO and Mrs Mildred Lister and became the second home for many Wimbledonians between September 1939 and July 1940 and beyond.
As Miss Lewis recalled: “The owners of the house offered to store school furniture and beds during the summer. Then provision had to be made for the transport of the children. The Ministry of Health had told us that, as ours was a private evacuation, no provision being made by the Ministry for the evacuation of the Senior School, we must get away from Wimbledon before the roads were needed for Government transport. So at the end of the Summer Term a rota was made of parents willing to take down by car their own children and as many others as possible. …..It was on the night of August 24th … that Miss Rengert and I….decided to give the signal to the cars to start as soon as possible. I left Wales next morning and slept that night at a village ‘pub’ near Hanford. Arriving on Saturday morning at Hanford House, I was delighted to find Miss Wilson already there to help, also a small girl with her Nanny! In the afternoon Miss Taylor arrived, and we worked all that day, moving furniture and putting up beds. Children were arriving till late at night on the 26th and all the following week, some having come from the Continent without time to wash clothes or (bring) hair- brushes!” Source: Reminiscences of Wimbledon High – 75th Jubilee Year, 1956
Hanford was set up as school shortly after the war by Rev Clifford and Enid Canning who were searching for the perfect place to start a girls’ school.
They took a 5 year lease on the magnificent Jacobean Hanford House, near Blandford, and its grounds from Vivian Seymer.
It proved to be such an ideal setting they decided to buy property outright. Rev Canning had previously been a housemaster at Marlborough and Headmaster at Canford School but it was Enid’s dream to run a girls’ school. Her vision was that Hanford should be a school that felt like a family home believing happy girls would be successful.
And the rest, as they say, is history!
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