I thought it was important to write something about the last year of WHS. I wasn't there, so if anything below is inaccurate or misleading I hope to be corrected pdq!
As Barry Clark confirms below, the last year was rather strange - and must have been sad. Despite all the best efforts of Dick Woollett and others, the school was closed by Force Majeur. It was the end of an extraordinary and mostly successful experiment, but forces against us were overpowering. Especially after the enforced change to a comprehensive, the numbers were simply too small to sustain a viable 6th form. In addition, on one visit to Ipswich Dick Woollett explained to some of us that the upkeep of the Hall and estate was very complicated and expensive. Finance was a huge problem in the final years, and the death of the school magazine "Janus" in 1976 was just one sign of this.
And so it closed, and its final decade saw, too the retirement of a number of very long-serving teachers such as Malcolm Poole, Michael Shakeshaft, Taffy Evans, Peter Sadler, Barry Salmon and others. I felt sad, too, for Irene Chaplin, who played a huge and probable indispensable role in the creation of the school in 1950, but lived just long enough to see her beautiful project die - as she herself did in its final year.
WHS was indeed extraordinary, but you had to be there to really understand how much so. For me, Woolverstone Hall remains my spiritual home, where the happiest, saddest and certainly most dramatic days of my young life were spent. Each time I return it feels in a sense like going home.
For this reason, I hugely appreciate the fact that IHS has ALWAYS made us most welcome on our regular returns. We do not have the luxury like the boys of Eton, for example - with whom we were once famously compared - of being able to return year after year to our still-functioning alma mater - but the special days arranged for WHS Old Boys by IHS have been a wonderful substitute.
Barry Clark was a peer of mine from 58 to 65 and in 1984 was appointed to WHS as a master. His WHS career thus paralleled that of Dick Woollett himself, who was a young teacher there from 1962 to 1964, but persuaded to come back as Head on the tragic death of Patrick Richardson.
Barry writes: "The main school closed at the end of 1989. There was no new intake in 1990, but the Year 11s – about 45 of them stayed - on to do their GCSEs - and so left in July 1990. A skeleton staff remained with a few part-time coming in to do some subjects: French for example.
The boys all moved to Hansons, where Simon Rutt (a member of Care staff ) ran the house and I was his deputy. I moved into the Housemaster’s house and did the night sleep-ins. I think Simon lived in the courtyard, as he was single. Dick, Stuart and Andy all did nights in. We often took some of the boys to Ipswich in the evening in the minibus. It was a very different experience.
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