New Home for the Chalet School

[Vintagejazz]

Welome everyone. Dormy lists on the board as usual and I know you are all hoping like mad that you are all not in the same dormitory as Mary Lou. But only some of you can be the un lucky ones and the rest of us will have to make do with each other.

Oh, and the good news is that Joey has sabotaged discovered something wrong with the roof on her house and believe it or not, the only property available to rent is right next door to the school.

Shit Hurrah, lucky us.

Got to go. Matey wants me for unpacking.

I think green would have totally suited her in her adolescent goblin-looking days!

Can someone explain to me who Winnie Embury the house-end actually is, please? I know that she lives within reach of the Platz and both Jo and Hilda seem to visit her sometimes but she's not actually an Old Girl, is she? How did she come to exist in CS world?

Winnie Embury is Winnie Silksworth who was at St Scholastika's but she and her sister Irene had left before the CS took over. AFAIR Irene was a 'demon' at tennis! They are both mentioned in Rivals, I think.

Irene becomes the matron at San I think?

Winnie has about a hundred boys And then a baby girl after having her appendix out. Joey mentions that her recovery is slow as they had to cut so deep. Presumably because she's such a bloater.

Nell my lamb no and no. Goblins in green are bad. Better a red or a tan colour.

The brown uniform wouldnt be too bad but the blue with touches of crimson would make Cheryl Cole look like a dog.

Winnie and Irene were at school with Maisy Gomm the pretty but dim mother of Jo Scott. You know another child named after Jo and her unofficial god mother blah blah.

Her husband is the boss of Melanie Lucas's uncle!!!

Tmi now.

I always thought the blue/crimson sounded better than brown/flame but then I know as much about fashion as Jack Lambert

Blue/crimson sounds a bit more unique, although maybe I am only assuming that brown/"flame" is more normal because I'm imagining sepia photographs.

Thank you all for Winnie information. I still don't entirely understand how she comes to be the only non-school/San entity in Switzerland - seems a v random choice. Just as confusing as Maisie Gomme naming her daughter after Jo...

Also thanks for colour advice: goblins should be in red, angels should be in an array of colours with non-fast dye (or with halos sticking to their hair due to sisterly incompetence), demons should be in black, and all Jo's minions should be in lime green. Got it.

Actually I think jade green would have suited Joeys "winter or cool/deep" colouring very well.

Btw, anyone read the Emily of New Moon books? LM Montgomery. Dean Priest, a man the same age as Emily's dad, decides when Emily is 11 that he'll "wait for (her)". Niiiice. Luckily she sees sense in the end and dumps him, but ugh, talk about grooming!

I always imagined the Blue/Crimson was mostly blue but with a thread of crimson through the fabric, so a very small amount of fabric, bit like a very small pin stripe I suppose.

The brown/flame is a sharper version of a girls school that was local to us. They were brown and orange, both looked like they'd been through the wash and faded though. It was totally hideous. They joined with a local boys school at one point (whose uniform was navy) and desperately tried to persuade them that they ought to take on the brown/orange uniform as it was "iconic". Sanity (or a more dominant staff from the boys' side) prevailed.

I made dd2 a Chalet School costume for book day (she wanted to be Len) and it actually looked quite nice. I chose to go for the brown one as:

1. I didn't have blue with crimson stripe fabric
2. It was more distinctive
3. Hopefully she will use it this year as a Mallory towers costume and save me scrabbling round for something complicated.

I know a school that has this as its school skirt...think I'd have preferred the blue and crimson myself :o

Oh gosh, a school near me has something very similar. I'd possibly even have taken gentian blue, crimson and lime green over that.

Lucky/sensible DD2, DeWee. Can you use it year after year? What uniform do they have at Kingscote?

I was trawling Flickr for something completely unrelated earlier, and found Bill! Or at least, the closest approximation I've yet found. None of the casting suggestions worked for me...

I think I've seen tartan monstrosities somewhere too! There's some great ones here www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-29047752 Poor kids at Christ's Hospital!

Now on this I am an expert. From age 7 to 11, I wore brown skirt, flame (well wishy-washy apricot to be accurate) blouse with revers, fawn jumper, brown blazer, brown felt hat, brown coat and compulsory brown flannel knickers (with pocket). Brown divided skirt for lacrosse, and in summer brown and white stripe dress.
I can honestly say I have never worn brown since. The skirts were even known as the n word brown.

Kingscote is navy at the start, but reverts to scarlet which it was before the war. Nicola and Lawrie however still wear navy as they don't have to change until they need new clothes and they have all their sister's stuff mothballed away....

Seven to eleven should have read seven to eighteen!

Haha, I love that link you posted, EatingMyWords, especially the boy in the 1970s tank top subtitled 'Today some schools say they consult pupils over their uniform policy'. Really?

As a child I pictured the early CS tie as light yellow at the bottom, giving way to darker yellow, then orange then red.

My mums school uniform was described as n word brown. Bottle green was popular in my area, my school wasn't the only one known as greenflies.

One of the books I've read recently (so somewhere between Tom Tackles and Three Go) describes the uniform as essentially a brown pinafore over a cream blouse with a flame-coloured tie. That doesn't sound too bad.

Emily I've never been able to bring myself to wear the precise shade of grey of my middle school uniform either.

One school near us was known as the Tomatoes due to their uniform.

There's an interesting conversation which I think comes to nothing, in one of the later books, about the uniform: Miss Annersley says something along the lines of the days of gymslips being past, since they don't even wear them for gym any more, and Peggy Burnett (I think) agrees but then wonders what you would replace it with? - And that, unless it is my fault for skimming or abandoning the book in favour of another (this is a v distant memory!), is the end of that. (Do they ever abandon the gymslip?)

I wished for a gymslip when I was at school. Really I should have been grateful - white shirt, black trousers/skirt, blue and green tie, black blazer - there's not an awful lot there to complain about.

Ha! Ignore me, I've just looked it up. It's Ruey and indeed half the bloody book is taken up with ruminations on uniforms, which they do indeed change. I don't know why I'd so comprehensively forgotten it - I think I may have actually not really read it, which is v unusual for me-as-a-child and esp with the Chalet School. Possibly a case of book confiscation...

I know I shouldn't really expect anything else of EBD by now, but her aging of the triplets really is the limit! In Highland Twins , which comes after a few years gap, and is the Autumn term, they're nearly two in an early chapter, and then for the rest of the book they're nearly three. Fair enough...

In Lavender , which is the following Spring term, they're "two and a bit" and "not three til November". Sigh.

And now, I've just started Gay , which is very clearly the Summer term following Lavender ... and they're three and a bit again!

Your flame ties sound lovely Mornington.

What is a gym slip exactly?