Creme De La Creme: Girls' Schools of Edinburgh - Softcover

Roberts, Alasdair

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1904246354 ISBN 13: 9781904246350

Publisher: Steve Savage Publishers Limited, 2010

Synopsis

Rare Book

About this title

Review:

'A mix of nostalgia and humour ... A delight.' -- Scotland Magazine, March, 2008

'Insightful ... a story that surely needed to be told ... a most enjoyable book' -- The Scots Magazine, May, 2008

From the Inside Flap:

The capital of Scotland is a unique and beautiful city with many distinctive qualities, but the place where the fictional Miss Jean Brodie taught her girls that they were the 'creme de la creme' has one very unusual claim to fame. For most of the 20th century, nearly a quarter of Edinburgh's schoolchildren were attending fee-paying schools, a far higher proportion than in other Scottish (or English) cities. The schools attended by these children have risen and fallen over the decades, with their high point perhaps being the mid-20th century, but it is still the case, even now, that nearly a quarter of Edinburgh's secondary school pupils are at independent schools.

Concentrating on the girls' schools of Edinburgh, this is the first part of Alasdair Roberts' lively and often amusing survey of a sometimes underestimated feature of the city's life, He reaches back to their Victorian beginnings, starting with the school that became Edinburgh Ladies' College, which opened in 1871 on Queen Street, and recounts how different schools developed into the 20th century, describing the uniforms, the development of this or that particular ethos in this or that particular school; work in the classrooms and play on the games fields, extracurricular activities; trips at home and abroad (including wholesale evacuation in wartime); the literary genre of school stories, and school magazines - aimed at various readers, including old girls.

Former pupils have come forward with their memories which, combined written records and striking photographs, enable Alasdair Roberts to bring to life a vanished era, and illuminate the future for those independent schools that have endured. 'Creme de la Creme' serves as a record of the schools that have passed into history such as St Trinnean's, to give one evocatively named example - and describes a sector of Scotland's education system whose contribution should not be undervalued.

About this edition

• Publisher: Steve Savage Publishers Limited
• Publication date: 2010
• ISBN 10: 1904246354
• ISBN 13: 9781904246350
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 2
• Number of pages: 224