Winifred Rees

Senior Mistress and English Teacher extraordinary at Aberdare Girls’ Grammar School 1920 – 1961. A purely personal tribute to a woman who was my teacher, my mentor and my friend.
 

Winnie Rees

Winifred Rees, Speech Day 1961

The school celebrates its centenary this year before its gates close for ever, a good time to look back.

I have been living in Vienna for over thirty years but Aberdare is still where I spend most of my dreaming time at night. The time has also come to start clearing the detritus which has been gathering in corners and drawers over the years, and this week I stumbled across a large wad of letters written to me between 1962 and 1989 by my adored Miss Rees. There are a handful of people who really made a difference in my life and she was one of those. There will be many Old Girls who knew not Winifred Rees, and for those of us who did she remains an icon still, over twenty years after her death.

I spent hours re-reading those letters, Miss Rees has risen again, and become very much alive in my thoughts these past days, and memories keep on bubbling to the surface. I felt a strong compulsion to sit down and write about her, as there is not a specific tribute on the school web-page to this unforgettable and unique personality, who spent her whole working life educating hundreds of girls in Aberdare Girls Grammar School, not only in English language and literature but far beyond her classroom subject; how to dress, how to walk elegantly, how to talk, how to behave decorously - the list of what we learned from her is endless, she never gave up trying to make ladies of us.

Winifred Rees was born in 1896 in Pontyberem near Llanelli, and was the eldest child of Walter Rees, a Mechanical Engineer and his wife Margaret née Thomas. Her father was self-educated and held a responsible position as a mining engineer. He designed and built a detached house called “Hillside” at Pontyberem for his family. The family was Welsh-speaking and I remember Miss Rees telling me once that her parents had a habit of speaking English to each other when they were discussing subjects unsuited to the ears of the children. “This meant” said Miss Rees with her wry smile “that we children rapidly learned English, lest we should miss anything”.

After completing her elementary education in the local school at Pontyberem she proceeded to the nearest Grammar School in Llanelli and boarded during the week with a family there. When she was just fifteen years old, disaster struck her family when her father, aged only 39, was killed in an accident at work. During these very hard times besides looking after her bereaved mother and younger siblings Winifred completed her matriculation and then worked as a pupil teacher for two years before applying to study at the University of Wales Aberystwyth. She gained her B.A degree there, and entered the teaching profession in 1920, taking up a post as English mistress at the then Aberdare Girls’ Intermediate School, which had opened seven years earlier in 1913. The headmistress was the renowned Miss Margaret Cook, a Scots lady who was highly respected by pupils and staff alike. Miss Rees always spoke of her as an incomparable mentor who inspired her to take over the school dramatic productions, which she did for many years. (The School Jubilee brochure on this site contains excellent articles by Miss Cook, Miss Rees herself, and many others.)

As a young teacher Miss Rees lived in Trecynon as a boarder, and after saving up for five years she was able to invest in Cynon Cottage in Meirion Street, which she renovated and turned into a beautiful home surrounded by a large garden. She always kept in close contact with her family, and persuaded her mother to come and live with her in Aberdare when her health started to fail. But this arrangement did not last very long as Mrs. Rees died of cancer in 1933 aged only 59, after living for three years in Aberdare. Winifred shared her home also with her younger siblings for several years throughout the war and supported them financially through their studies.

Then she was joined by a close friend, Miss Ray Evans, a local headmistress, who lived at Cynon Cottage for the rest of her life until she died in 1972.The two friends travelled a lot together, and we were the lucky ones to hear all about Greece and Venice, Rome and Paris at a time when travel was not the norm as it is today, and it all sounded so enchanting to us little kids from working-class Aberdare families whose holidays were spent in Porthcawl or visiting relatives.

I think that Winifred Rees was the only mistress at the Grammar School who spent her whole teaching career there, with a dedication unimaginable nowadays. She taught my mother in school in the early thirties, and by the time we arrived, her reputation was legendary, we had all heard that she was very strict and bore no nonsense and were prepared to be cautious.

Winnie Rees 1923

Winifred Rees, 1923

When I and my four friends from Ysgol Gynradd Gymraeg Aberdâr arrived in school on a September day in 1957, we walked down the corridor at break-time marvelling at what seemed to us a cavernous and immense building after our tiny school in Cwmdare. We were of course babbling in Welsh to each other as always, and a striking elderly lady with blue-tinted white hair came up to us and asked in Welsh where we had come from. When we told her, she said that she hoped we would be very happy in our new school, “Diolch” we replied, and with a smile and a gracious nod she went on her way, her gown billowing out behind her. It was only later that day we realised we had been spoken to by the legendary Miss Rees, when she walked into our classroom to give us our first English lesson...

How I still thank my lucky stars for those English lessons! What she instilled into us at that impressionable age has remained with me for the rest of my life. I have just flicked through my first year English homework book and been awestruck at the ground she covered even in that first year at school. Our first essay was entitled “About Myself”, and that was her way of getting to know about us .I chuckled at a sentence I wrote at the age of 11 “Now I am on the verge of womanhood”, little did I know how far there was to go, I’m still working on it!

We wrote essays, poems, learnt grammar, how to analyse sentences, we read books - “Cranford”, “Jane Eyre” (I remember struggling then with the 19th century English which I soon grew to love), we did lots of vocabulary work, and even started Shakespeare’s, “Twelfth Night”.

What captured my imagination most of all was poetry, what magic casements that opened for me! Palgrave’s Golden Treasury was our anthology, and many homework tasks consisted of learning poems by heart. A lovely anecdote came years later from Miss Rees who wrote to me that she had been visited by an old girl reminiscing about a girl in her class who had referred to “Palethorpe’s Golden Treasury”. Miss Rees with a mixture of horror and amusement, advised the girl not to confuse English Literature with Sausages! In form two, I was so transported by Keats’s “Ode to the Nightingale”, that when we were told to learn one stanza for homework I couldn’t decide which one I liked best, so I learnt it all. I told no-one then, though, having learned already by bitter experience that peer approval would not be gained by voluntary diligence. I told Miss Rees many years afterwards about the poems in my personal library in my head which she had planted all those years ago, and which I still could recite to myself on sleepless nights, in fact I still do, more than half a century later!

Drama lessons were always great fun too, and Miss Rees would encourage us to think about going inside other characters, changing our accents, the pitch of our voices and our posture accordingly. In summer I remember we would go out onto the top hockey field where there was a back door into College Street, approached by a flight of steps and we would enact our crowd scenes there. Whoever was reading Mark Anthony would stand on the top of the steps burying Caesar and praising him, and the rest of the rabble would create the atmosphere of an assenting or objecting crowd by muttering “cabbages” or “potatoes”, by each girl having permission to choose her own words and repeat them in a crescendo or diminuendo to order. It was very creative and very effective. Miss Rees was a gifted actress, and thrilled us by reading Lady Bracknell in “The Importance of Being Earnest” with a magic rivalling Edith Evans.

Miss Rees invested so much energy into her classes, and she was a strict disciplinarian who would get very cross if anyone in the class was not paying attention. If she spotted someone in the back turning round in her seat to whisper to her neighbour, she would immediately pick up a piece of chalk from her desk and aim it with uncanny precision ,catching the culprit on her back, who would jump out of her skin and redden with guilt. Miss Rees would then grandly say “Return my ammunition if you please.”

She was very concerned that we learned to speak properly; an educated Welsh accent was fine but Aberdare dialect was frowned upon. One of her particular red rags was “ba there”. She would protest energetically that there is no such place as “Ba there”. “Either your book is there or it’s not there, it can’t be by there”. One girl in our class uttered the forbidden “ba-there” one day in response to the query as to the whereabouts of her neat book, and Miss Rees irritably asked “What did you say ?”, whereupon the embarrassed girl said “Oh, Sorry Miss Rees, “BY there I meant“. “English as she is spoke” retorted the exasperated Miss Rees, eyes to the ceiling!

Miss Rees deplored noisy behaviour, and in school we were expected to conduct ourselves in an orderly manner, walking quietly down corridors and never running. She had a most remarkable way of silencing a noisy host of girls. She did nothing, but as soon as she appeared through the door a hush would fall. At speech day, the whole school plus parents would be congregated in the Coliseum and while waiting for the proceedings to begin all the girls would be chattering and laughing. Miss Rees would walk out on to the stage and before she took more than two steps, her magical presence would have silenced the whole place. She was magnificently in charge, and we all had an awesome respect for her. I have never encountered anyone who had this remarkable charisma in any school since.

One day in Form 2 we were coming out of someone’s lesson in the classroom opposite the library and making an inordinate amount of noise. Unfortunately Miss Rees was in the library opposite, heard our noise, and knocked on the window to show us she was there, and disapproved of the clamour we were producing. We were taken completely by surprise when the offended window pane fell out of its frame smashing onto the playground, and had to exert serious self-discipline to stop the giggles surfacing, beating a smart retreat into the main building as fast as we could go, without running and not letting our giggles out until we had reached safety! Thankfully Miss Rees was not injured and the windowpane was replaced in due course.

Miss Rees was not a tall person though her bearing made her appear so. She was always immaculately dressed and well-groomed. At the time, it had become fashionable for ladies of advanced years to have their hair tinted with delicate blue, pink or purple streaks, and Miss Rees often experimented. I do remember pink and purple, but blue suited her best and was the usual choice. She had a wonderful head, which she carried high, giving her a proud look. Her expressive brown eyes were deep-set and could mist over when she was moved, glitter with rage when she was angry, or sparkle with amusement. Her strongest feature was perhaps her beautiful, prominent high cheek-bones. In my mind’s eye I have a large store of Miss Rees’s flexible facial expressions, she was beautiful and regal. She had a lively sense of humour and would see the funny side of a situation. She often told us funny stories too. Winston Churchill was a favourite, and she often quoted him. One anecdote which I remember is that Churchill met Mrs Bessie Braddock, the ever-campaigning labour MP for Liverpool who was enormously overweight, at a function in the houses of Parliament. She took one look at him and said, “Mr Churchill, you are very drunk” Churchill replied, “Mrs Braddock, you are very ugly but I shall be sober in the morning.”

She was human and sympathetic in troubled times, we always knew that she genuinely cared about us and wanted to bring out the best in us. We also knew that we could approach her when we needed advice or guidance; there were many, many facets of Miss Winifred Rees.

She must have had a far-reaching influence on many of the girls she taught in Aberdare. She certainly had a profound influence on my life, from the time I hero-worshipped her as a schoolgirl. One day, which proved very memorable for me as it changed my life, I sat in the back seat of the Hirwaun bus on the way to visit my friend Helen when Miss Rees, loaded with shopping sank into the seat beside me. In the ensuing conversation, Miss Rees asked me what I was intending to do on leaving school and I replied that I wanted to be a nurse. “Nursing is a very noble profession Susan, but I think your particular talents could be put to better use elsewhere. Have you never considered going to University?” I had never even entertained going to University until that moment in time, but Miss Rees’s suggestion awoke all sorts of dreams and aroused in me a curiosity about another self, the girl Miss Rees saw, who had University potential. Up until then I had wasted a lot of time in school giggling and being generally tiresome (NEVER in Miss Rees’s lessons though!) So my thoughts turned to University and becoming an English teacher, because English was what I loved best. I wanted to be worthy of the faith she had placed in me.

As the time of her retirement drew nearer, I dreaded not having her around any longer. I considered her to have a crucial role in the organisation of the school; to possess a charisma which included an astonishing talent for discipline and for teaching, and she had a personality which commanded respect. She certainly cut a majestic figure throughout the school.

At Miss Rees’s last Speech Day in May 1961, the guest speaker, an old girl, Lady Linstead, the former Marjorie Walters who was an Oxford Don, spoke very warmly of her and her coming retirement, which resulted in the whole congregation in the packed Coliseum rising to their feet and applauding emotionally and enthusiastically. She was visibly moved but succeeded in not losing her equanimity; dignity always prevailed with Miss Rees.

School was never the same after she retired, and I later linked up with her again as she would regularly book flights to visit her sister in Jersey with my mother who ran the only travel bureau in town at the Co-op. She always asked after me and one day sent me a note inviting me to come up and have tea with her as my mother had told her I was having some problems at school.

So started a friendship which lasted until the end of her days, and I never failed to visit her when I went home to Aberdare. She was unfailingly supportive throughout my time at University, was always interested in my study programmes and regularly lent me books. Then afterwards in my other career as a singer, she always came to concerts and Opera productions when she could, and never missed a broadcast. She became an honorary grandmother, and after my marriage embraced Wolfgang and our little Angharad too. When my husband asked her: “Miss Rees, was Susan really as naughty in school as she says she was?” she gave one of her mysterious smiles and replied “I wouldn’t go as far as saying she was naughty Wolfgang, but you always knew she was there!” We visited her for the last time the summer before she died in February 1990. She had become very frail and bent with osteoporosis by that time.

I am still full of gratitude for the privilege of having had her in my life, and shall always remember her.

 

Susan Dennis Gabriel,
Vienna, Austria, 2013.


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