became second nature to work hard at everything. At Malvern Frances attained Grade 8 at the piano and, in middle school, she would accompany the hymn-singing in house prayers. Having begun piano lessons when very young, Frances’s love of music, particularly classical music – Schubert, Chopin, Bach, Mozart, Beethoven – was to last throughout her life.
Sport also continued to play a big part in her life until it was crowded out by work. Frances competed for Summerside, and for the school, in tennis, and also played lacrosse. She loved the rivalry of sports, and the fun of piling into coaches for away games. Malvern life contrasted so starkly with life at Bovey Tracey.
In her Vth form, Frances was made a prefect, and appointed Head of Summerside House, a role involving some discipline of younger girls, supervisory duties, and arranging walks for Sunday afternoons. She was evidently showing both leadership and administrative gifts. In her oversight of the girls she worked to reflect the values instilled by her father. He urged her to be honest about what she had done at all times and never to tell untruths, no matter how bad the situation seemed.
The eleven commandments
From the time Evelyn left home, Claude Whitehead would take Frances with him to bridge parties in the school holidays. It was a natural progression for him, as he wanted her to learn his wide range of skills. In addition Claude and Frances began to go up to Welstor Farm after church each week, for Sunday lunch with her cousins. Frances would drive the Austin Seven from Beara to the main road, as was now customary, and then take the wheel again when they were up on Dartmoor, as soon as they turned off the road into the half-mile-long drive up to the farmhouse.
Welstor, one of several farms owned by the Whitley family, had a large, old-fashioned farmhouse, and other houses on its land. Frances’s Uncle William was Master of the South Devon foxhounds, and a keen huntsman. Frances, a competent horsewoman from her early teens, would join the foxhunt. The family had wide interests in the natural world and in history. Frances’s Aunt Nonny (her father’s sister) was a keen collector of flint stone-age arrowheads to be found among early settlers on Dartmoor.
William Whitley was highly-regarded in the county, both as a landowner and for an unusual initiative he took in 1928. A staunch Anglican, he was troubled by attempts to introduce a new Book of Common Prayer, considered to have a ‘popish trend’. Stanley Baldwin’s government rejected the move, to his relief. To mark this outcome, Frances’s Uncle commissioned a well-known sculptor, W A Clement, to engrave the Ten Commandments on two ‘tablets of stone’, two adjacent rock faces which lay up at Buckland Beacon, just above Welstor; this was a major undertaking on a very exposed promontory. The work, now a local landmark, was completed on 31 August that year.
As some space on the stones remained, Clement suggested that Mr Whitley might like to add an eleventh commandment, which he did. So the Ten Commandments end with John 13:34: ‘A new commandment I give unto you, That ye love one another, as I have loved you, that ye also love one another.’ The engraving is completed by a verse from the hymn ‘O God, our help in ages past.’
The closeness Frances shared with her father was precious to both of them, and she always remembered him with deep affection. Shortly after leaving school, unexpected tragedy would bring an end to her Beara days, and to this special bond.
10. Pamela Hurle: Malvern Girls’ College: A Centenary History (Phillimore and Co Ltd, 1993) p65.
11. A term used in the UK to refer to some of the oldest-established schools offering an elite education.
CHAPTER FOUR
Massive changes: 1943–47
Frances left Malvern Girls’ College aged 18, in the summer of 1943, and immediately joined the war effort. Her first job was in Malvern Link, in the government’s Radar Research and Development Establishment (RRDE). Here she was one of a team of thirty men and women.
Part of their work was to investigate what lay behind ‘anomalous propagation’, that is, the way searchlights perform differently according to weather conditions and pressure in the atmosphere. This information, gained through simulators, provided a ‘reasonable expectation’ on how effective searchlights would be in differing weather patterns.
The data collected would be used in deciding how and when the allies should send out their aircraft. Surprise was obviously a critical element in air raids. This data from simulated sources gave the RAF the best guess on the extent to which cloud cover would hide aircrafts; further, it showed how far distant their own craft needed to remain to fly undetected by enemy radar.
Frances, who excelled in maths, was designated to the team’s Mathematics Department, acting essentially as a human computer. She would be given equations with different variables, and, with the help of a slide-rule, plot points on a graph.
Frances’s father wrote weekly, responding to news he received from Frances, updating her on local happenings, and often mentioning what he had been reading. His letter of 21 January 1944 opened with his usual fond greeting, ‘My Darling old girl’. Claude Whitehead was the local Commander of Special Constables, and halfway through the letter, he explained how he had been called out three days earlier at about 8 p.m., to investigate a reported light in Bovey which was infringing the blackout regulations. He wrote:
I thought I had just enough petrol to get me into Bovey and back. I found no light, and coming back my car stopped at the bottom of Atway and I found I had run out of petrol!! I knew one of my special patrols was coming along, so I just waited for them, and with the help of another man we pushed the car up the hill into the lane and left it there for the night. What a game! It took some pushing up the hill.
Then he closed with news of high winds. While the incident was relayed in a ‘by the way’ fashion, Claude must have been in significant discomfort as the strenuous effort in pushing the car uphill had caused his heart to move two and a half inches. A few weeks later, as he was still unwell, Frances sought compassionate leave, and special permission to travel, which was granted. Her father was delighted at the prospect of seeing her, but there is still no trace in his letter of the seriousness of his situation.
‘Darling old girl’ he wrote on 16 March, ‘How delightful to think of seeing you on Saturday, but am afraid you are getting a wangler!’ He told her that a car had been arranged to meet her at Newton Abbott station on the mainline, and she would need to look out for the driver.
On the morning of Saturday 18 March, Frances made her way to Malvern station to take a 10.30 train down to the West Country, looking forward to seeing her father. When she reached Newton Abbott, her aunt Dolly, her father’s sister, was unexpectedly there to meet her.12
How’s Daddy?
‘How’s Daddy?’ asked Frances as soon as they were both in the car. She could barely take in her aunt’s words. Her beloved father, suffering from a coronary thrombosis, had died earlier that afternoon. Having no indication from his letters of his condition being serious, let alone terminal, this news came as a profound and terrible shock. Frances arrived in Beara to find her father laid out, surrounded by candles, in the room in which she had received her first lessons from a governess. She felt totally desolate.
Her mother, by then engaged in war work and living in Leamington Spa, arrived the following day, and the funeral took place in Bovey Tracey Parish Church. Claude was buried alongside Pamela in the local cemetery. In the numbness of the days following, Frances found it hard to grasp that Beara would have to be sold. This proved another painful loss.
It was decided that Frances
