Ancillary Staff

In addition to the teachers, matrons, caterers and sickbay personnel (covered elsewhere on the web site), there were several other less 'public' supporting agencies and faces that deserve mention. Please let us have your memories of them.


Office Staff (1987)	Miss Bird (1987)	The Bursar (1987)

Mr Forder (1988)	Mr Williams (1988)	Mrs Lansdell (1988)

He was the brains behind the school admin. Never appeared to flap about anything that I could see.

It needs a lot of effort to keep all the College's services running, but perhaps less now than it did in the final years of the nissen huts when 'made do and mend' was the order of the day. In the early days the staff were part of the Ministry of Public Buildings and Works (MPBW), referred to irreverently as the Ministry of Public Blunders and Wonders. MPBW later became the Department of the Environment (DoE), then the Property Services Agency (PSA). No doubt it's all been privatised now.

There were two workmen I remember c1960 who seemed to be forever in transit from one place to another and they were known by all as 'Thunder and Lightning.' - Ed.

Mr Sheldrake - Lab technician (see also the entries related to Mr Rutherford)

		Your photo
Teachers' Training era (c1948)	Dot retires (1994)

As you will remember we all, both seniors and juniors, went to our respective meals in the old central Dining Hall. Junior meals were supervised by two elderly "Dragons," the Misses Wilson and Edwards, who I believe were ex Sick Bay staff. We all lived in absolute fear of Miss Wilson, nicknamed the "The Battleaxe." She strode up and down the Dining Hall with her hands clasped tightly behind her back and her beady eyes missed nothing, especially anybody who had taken an extra meal. In my first and second years the meals were plated by the kitchen staff at the hotplate and distributed on trolleys by the duty table. Any boy, it was always a boy, who was caught with an extra meal was marched, by Miss Wilson, up High Street with the offending plate to Mr Metcalf's nissen hut. This always resulted in a subsequent visit to the headmaster's office to receive a caning.

During the course of the day the pair were always to be seen making their way via High Street, where they lived in their own nissen hut, towards the playing fields to walk their equally elderly small brown terrier dog.

These two characters seem to have faded from the College collective memory but during my at Wymondham they were larger than life to many of us junior boys.

Flo Wilson and May Edwards ('shot & javelin' to the pupils and 'ebb & flo' to the staff) were Matrons to the women students at the Emergency Teachers' Training College in the late 1940s and, like a few other staff' were inherited by us for general supervisory and admin duties in 1951.

On the west side of the High Street was a chalet (USAAF 16 - the hospital Barber's Shop) where the boys would be shorn in the early days, in the company of either Flo or May who ticked off names and spent the rest of the time knitting in appropriate Madame Defarge style. The two ladies lived next door in a shortened nissen hut that was numbered 23 by the USAAF and was the EEN&T Clinic. USAAF 6 (Dental Centre) was home for Mr & Mrs Metcalfe until a house was built for them at the NW corner of the site. These High Street buildings were demolished to make way for Fry and Cavell Halls.

This photo, taken by Bill Johnson in 1961, shows the last of the mentioned huts (the Metcalfe residence) just before it was dismantled (click to enlarge).

Miss Edwards and Miss 'they call me Horseface' Wilson were kindness itself in spite of formidable appearances.