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AROUND TOWN


COMMUNITY & EDUCATION


Manor


Ladies of the


It’s been the domestic dwelling of many Members of Parliament, a couple of Prime Ministers and even a former Lord Mayor of Sheffield.


But amidst the aristocratic wealth predominantly associated with the UK’s largest private residence, the rooms within Wentworth Woodhouse were also once the not-so-humble abode of hundreds of young women who attended Lady Mabel College. Until recently, Wentworth


Woodhouse’s scholastic era has been relatively untold, the memories of which have remained with the many student cohorts from its almost 40-year tenure. But thanks to one alumnus, the academic story is being brought back into the frame with the launch of the new Lady Mabel College tours this September. Leading visitors through the specialist monthly tours will be house volunteer and former Lady Mabel student, Sue Gravil, who wanted


to finally unveil those educational years often elapsed from the history books but which provided principal grounding for so many young women.


As with all tales shrouded in


mystery, the red cloaked Lady Mabel story has been somewhat exaggerated over time and Sue’s belief is that it is better to hear what happened from first-hand accounts. Many people hear the words college and instantly associate the big grey concrete blocks at the top of the drive. But this is just the closing chapter of a story written into the majestic walls of Wentworth Woodhouse.


The new tours will focus on which areas of the house students lived, studied and trained and what daily


life was like as a Lady Mabel student, pieced together like a complex puzzle from the many differing anecdotes and memories of each new intake of students.


Before members of the public step inside many previously unseen areas of the house during the new tour, we spoke to a handful of the Old Students’ Association members who have helped Sue in collating information for the upcoming tours. Lady Mabel College of Physical Education officially opened as a training provider for female PE teachers in September 1949 thanks


compared to the eight other privately owned PE colleges in Britain at that time. Fees were minimal, if any at all, with training, accommodation and meals ‘on the house’, so to speak. Students mainly just had to pay for their uniforms and any day-to-day living costs but low-income families were entitled to grants to help subsidise this.


“This allowed young women like me, who came from a council estate in Grimsby, to aspire towards being a teacher. I was one of six and my parents were not able to fund such a dream. But thanks to


‘‘All I could think was, wow - look at the size of this place, how will I survive in such grace. I remember the first dinner and the table was laid with all this cutlery when we usually just had a knife and fork at home’’


to the generosity of Lady Mabel Fitzwilliam, or Smith, the sister of the 7th Earl Fitzwilliam, William ‘Billy’ Wentworth-Fitzwilliam. Unlike her brother, one of the richest men in Britain and whose extravagant lifestyle she reportedly deplored, Lady Mabel had a social conscience having seen the living conditions of the estate’s working families while growing up in the contrasting grandeur of the ‘Big House’.


She became a socialist politician and later an alderman who brokered a deal with Sir Alec Clegg of West Riding County Council to lease most of her family’s home for use as an educational facility, leaving 26 rooms for the Fitzwilliams’ apartment. Lady Mabel College became the first of its kind to be council-funded


46 aroundtownmagazine.co.uk


Lady Mabel College, I was the first family member to go onto further education,” Sue says.


And how fortunate the students were to call the magnificent Wentworth Woodhouse their new home for the next three years. No other PE college had such a unique and stately building.


Sue says that when her mum pulled up to drop her off for her first term in 1967, she was sure they’d arrived at the wrong place. “She just kept saying, ‘Susan, we’ve gone wrong here. This can’t possibly be it.’ But, of course, it was. All I could think was, wow - look at the size of this place, how will I survive in such grace. I remember the first dinner, the table was laid with all this cutlery when we usually just had a knife and fork at home.”


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