Past student, Head Girl, past parent, Librarian, volunteer and now Bedales’ Honorary Archivist, Jane Kirby has worn more hats at the school than most people. Here she runs the rule over a life that has encompassed interests as varied as science, weaving and literature and explains how, getting on for 50 years after she first saw Bedales, she remains a part of the fabric of the school.
Like many Old Bedalians, Jane Kirby’s mother retained her feelings of fondness for the school well after she had left it. “Before I went to Bedales, I was at school in Cheadle Hulme, up in Cheshire, but I’m sure that my mother always had it in the back of her mind that I would follow in her footsteps eventually,” Jane reflects. “She wanted me to wait until the time was right, though, and wouldn’t send me to Bedales before Block 3.”
By the time she got her first view of the school at her residential entrance test, Jane was excited at the prospect of what lay ahead. “I knew that my mother had enjoyed herself at Bedales and, although I was a bit scared about being the victim of an apple pie bed, I really liked the idea of not having to wear uniform at school,” she says. “As for the entrance tests themselves, all I can remember are a lot of fun and games, music, art and cakes; when I arrived as a boarder, I had the standard couple of tearful days but after that every letter I sent home was apparently about the food!”
Jane was joining Bedales at a time of transition. The legendary Tim Slack had just retired and the start of the Patrick Nobes era coincided precisely with Jane’s arrival. “Tim was still Head when I was doing the entrance exams, and many years later, a member of staff observed that he had got the school running so smoothly that it seemed to carry on in that vein. As a new student of course I was unable to make any comparisons. It was a great pleasure to meet Tim a few times when I later became Librarian.”
The great outdoors was not high among Jane’s list of Bedales priorities: “Outdoor Work as a concept barely existed in those pre-John Rogers days; if you were working outside, you were doing something like picking up litter as a punishment. Team sports weren’t my thing either and it was the library that was my place. I did a lot of reading, a lot of hanging out with my friends and generally pursued a quiet, gentle life that was undoubtedly much less frenetic than the style that Bedalians of today might enjoy. It’s not that I was particularly shy – I had a good bunch of close-knit friends and I certainly felt confident enough on the academic side.”
It was the library that was my place. I did a lot of reading, a lot of hanging out with my friends and generally pursued a quiet, gentle life
Sufficiently confident, in fact, that Jane does not single out any individual Bedales teacher as a particular mentor, even today. “I’m not the type of person who would admit to drawing that sort of inspiration from others,” she says. “That’s possibly because I never felt out of my depth, although I should emphasise that the standard of teaching I encountered was very high. What I did find amazing, particularly in retrospect, was how Bedales was able to co-operate across all areas of school life so that every student could feel that they were able to try things and that nothing was beyond them. Years later, I remember how surprised my flatmates were that I had been taught weaving and jewellery-making, among other things [Jane has also been the Treasurer of the West Surrey Guild of Spinners, Weavers and Dyers], and I started to appreciate what a privileged education I had enjoyed.”
In her final year, Jane received the accolade of becoming Head Girl at Bedales. “Or Co-Chair of the Committee, as the role was officially described at that time,” she says. “It was all done by a somewhat shadowy selection process; in theory the students voted, the staff voted and a staff veto existed but nobody was all that sure. I tend to think that I got the nod because I was never caught doing anything wrong! The role itself didn’t involve too many duties, as far as I could tell – there was the ambassadorial role of having dinner with various guest speakers and internally, the idea was to be a conduit between staff and students.”
Meanwhile, Jane was focusing on her A Levels in Maths, Biology and Chemistry and the place at university that would follow. “I can’t say that I looked beyond my further education at that point,” she says. “I did seventh-term exams in an attempt to get into Cambridge, didn’t quite make it and spent six months in Munich before going on to Edinburgh to read Biological Sciences. That was supposed to be a four-year course but because I had already taken A Levels, rather than the Scottish Highers, I went straight into the second year, all set for a bit of a party. My contemporaries were by now starting to get serious about their work, unfortunately, so there wasn’t quite as much partying as I’d hoped.”
Graduating with first-class honours, Jane promptly took herself off to London to do a Master’s at City University in Information Science. “These were the very early days of dialling up research data bases and essentially curating the information that you found there,” she explains. “Some might think that it wasn’t very different from being a librarian of sorts but if you had said such a thing at City, no-one would ever have spoken to you again!”
What I did find amazing, particularly in retrospect, was how Bedales was able to co-operate across all areas of school life so that every student could feel that they were able to try things and that nothing was beyond them
The working world now loomed for Jane. “Getting a job wasn’t all that easy in the early 1980s and I got the odd knock-back along the way, including, rather strangely, from the Medical Research Council,” she remembers. “One of the interviewers noted that I had been to Bedales and dismissed it as ‘the place with no discipline’! Eventually I started work with PJB Publications, which specialised in producing market research information and reports for the pharmaceutical industry. Later I went on to Smith Kline & French, again as a market researcher, and then became a Project Manager for IMS Health. I can’t say that I was ever a super-ambitious person but I certainly enjoyed what I was doing.”
In due course, marriage and a family arrived for Jane, whose own working patterns changed as a result. “My husband got a job outside London and I carried on doing some freelance work for IMS but that gradually tailed off and by the time the children were of school age, I wanted to get back into doing something else,” Jane relates. “As I had enjoyed my own school days at Bedales so much, I took my own children along to open days to see whether they might fancy it in their turn. It wasn’t for my son but my daughter liked what she saw and made us into a third-generation Bedales family.”
In 1999, Jane had renewed her acquaintance with Bedales by volunteering to assist Dennis Archer in cataloguing the school’s compendious archives and remains as Honorary Archivist to the present day. “It was very much a part-time thing, compared with other schools. Winchester, for example has a full-time archivist,” she says. “There is so much interesting stuff to keep track of at a place which is so important in the history of education in this country. Not many schools had co-ed boarding places before World War I, for instance. Raising money remains important – there’s still a lot of work to be done for us to store the entire archive electronically – but it’s an enjoyable challenge and one of the pleasures of the job for me is that it allows me to correct common misapprehensions about Bedales. The myth that students never sang hymns at Bedales would be one and I’ve always been irritated by the old chestnut about Bedales not being good at the sciences. My father would never have let me come to Bedales if that had been the case.”
In 2008, Jane took up yet another role with her alma mater. “As well as working in the Archive with Dennis, I had helped Anne Archer to transfer the Library’s card catalogue onto a computerised system. It became clear that Anne and Dennis were starting to think about their retirement, so I made sure that I would be in a position to apply for the post of Librarian in due course. I did some supply work with Surrey Libraries and then got proper experience in a school library at Ditcham Park. When Anne retired I was appointed to the post of Librarian, though the school recognised that the hours required added up to far more than a normal working week, so it became a job-share post. I then ended up spending eleven years working at Bedales in a place that retains the most wonderful memories for me. The difficulty in such a place was always to keep the old spirit intact at the same time as we attempted to make the Library both modern and relevant. You can’t please everyone all the time but it was very satisfying to see the positive effect that the Library continues to have on so many Bedalians. One thing that I always did insist on was the idea of silence in the Library as the norm – I’m not sure whether everyone would agree with that stance these days!”
When I look back at my time here, it is with a mixture of pleasure and a little guilt that I should have been so privileged while most other children never had access to such extraordinary opportunities
For someone who once approvingly watched a Steely Dan tribute band singing ‘I’m never going back to my old school’, Jane is both mildly surprised and quietly pleased that her second Bedales spell has now lasted more than two decades. “Bedales, more than most schools, was great at not putting limits on its students,” she muses. “It’s still better than most in that way, although society and health & safety have had their understandable say on what is allowable in 2021. No-one is going to let students paint their own dorms or drive tractors any more, even at Bedales!”
“There are also so many more outside influences these days than there ever were and Bedalian lives are lived beyond the school far more than ours used to be,” Jane continues. “When I look back at my time here, it is with a mixture of pleasure and a little guilt that I should have been so privileged while most other children never had access to such extraordinary opportunities. I don’t have the answer to what society can do about that but I do know how lucky I was.”
Jane Kirby was interviewed by James Fairweather in Summer 2021.