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Senior Girls class photos 1948/1949

I have been looking, with interest and enjoyment, at the history of Elm Grove School. I thought I would some of my own memories. 

The Headmistress was Miss Mills and I remember Miss Jolliff, Miss Dobbie and Mrs Jones. We didn’t have enough classrooms, so we did some lessons in the corridor. Eventually they built a new classroom in the playground, next to the railway line.  When someone heard a train, there was a scramble to close the windows before the steam came in. 

These photos were taken in 1948 and 1949. I left school the next Easter.   I am sure some of these girls will recognise themselves. If you can identify yourself, or even put some names to faces, please leave a comment below. 

Elm Grove Senior Girls 1948
From the private collection of Margaret Palmer
Elm Grove Senior Girls 1949
From the private collection of Margaret Palmer

Comments about this page

  • This is just a research question: how old would the senior girls be? What was the oldest group of girls in this school? thank you!! Cat

    By Catherine Hummel (01/11/2011)
  • When I started here in the mid fifties it was Elm Grove Secondary Modern School for Girls. I remember Miss Dobbie and Miss Jolliff who gave me lines for talking, 100 of ‘I must not talk in history’. I was in the school netball team, this would have been 1959/1960. We went for domestic science lessons to Sussex St school on a Wednesday afternoon.

    By Jackie Thomas/Parker nee Jones (08/05/2013)
  • I recognise several girls and can name at least three. In the first picture in 1948 the girl in the front row, 4th from the right is Cynthia Rist? In the second picture, 1949 3rd row down the girl wearing gym slip at the end of the row on the left hand side is Margaret Plenty nowTummons.

    By Pauline Bacon, nee BISH (02/05/2016)
  • If the girl in the 1948 picture is Cynthia Rist, I think I met her 3 or 4 times through work, about 4 years later. Her surname is quite uncommon so it might be the same person. If her middle name is Annette and she worked in a stationer’s shop in Duke Street, Brighton, it probably is the same person. I would be grateful for any news of her.   

    By David Robertson (03/05/2016)
  • Rear rank, fourth from the left, looks staggeringly like my mother (Mary Margaret Alison Power), however, she would have been 19 and long since left the school in 1948. Are you sure that this photograph is not from the early or mid-1940s?

    By Robert L. Thompsett (10/03/2020)
  • Sadly my Mum, Margaret Palmer whose photo this was, passed away in 2017 and I have just looked at this page. The photos were definitely the date she said as she left school aged 15 in 1950 – she was born in 1935 which makes the timeline correct.

    By Sue Goldin (05/02/2021)

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