Stocks House - School

School

In 1944, Stocks House became a residential school when the oldest finishing school in England for upper-class girls, Brondesbury, moved to Stocks manor house from its previous manor estate in Surrey, where it had been located since 1865. The school moved to Stocks House due to the danger of bombing raids toward the south of England during WW II. At that time, the school was under the direction of Brondesbury's headmistress, Frances Abbott, who had been headmistress since 1916. Upon moving to Stocks in 1944, the school was then dubbed Brondesbury-at-Stocks. Abbott was succeeded in 1956 by Katharina Forbes-Dunlop, a British author.

Brondesbury-at-Stocks school was limited to 48 girls, aged 7 through 16, often from the same families for several generations. The girls prepared for college preparatory exams under the Oxford and Cambridge Schools Examinations Board and were tutored in etiquette, daily adherence to the complex system of British hierarchical protocols, world affairs, Imperial and Parliamentary affairs, speech, conversation, social tact, history, languages, literature, art, history of art and architecture, philosophy of the enlightenment, lawn tennis, lacrosse, drawing, botany, embroidery, voice, opera, music, ballet, ballroom dancing and equestrian skills. The girls sang Anglican hymns twice a day every day in the Stocks chapel and held a formal attire ballroom dance in the Great Hall of Stocks in long dresses once a week. They were taught the art of the deep curtsey (for presentation at Buckingham Palace and at Queen Charlotte's Ball before the Queen was pressured to modernize and abolish the tradition) and learned their ballroom at Brondesbury-at-Stocks under Madame Vacani, who was dancing mistress to Queen Elizabeth, Prince Charles, and other royals, including Princess Diana who worked for Madame Vacani in her early ambition to be a dancer. The girls kept their own ponies at Stocks and could ride everyday. Stocks had stables, saddles, a tack room, paddocks and a resident riding mistress. Dressage and jumping events were held. The girls could join the local fox hunts established by British banking families: Baron Rothschild, Barclays, and the Marchioness of Salisbury. Girls would begin learning to hunt by chasing the foxhounds and mounted horses on foot.

Each room of Stocks had a special name given during the Napoleonic era and those names were used throughout the Brondesbury years. In keeping with the fashionable neoclassical revival of the Napoleonic era, each room was named after a Roman province or other revered place of antiquity. For example, four of the names of the large rooms on the second story of Stocks were: Perugia, Urbino, Venetia and Petra.

In 1972 Forbes-Dunlop, the last Brondesbury headmistress, retired. She died at age 100.