Miss Tenn? Fenn? Lenn? of Folkestone Kent

[Peneli]

Hi, I was once one of Miss Fenn's pupils, and probably made one of the postings on the page you found of memories. She had some of us round to tea in her house in Cheriton Gardens once - a largish Victorian villa with good quality old furniture, as I recall.  (Worth a look on Google Maps Street View - though the actual house seems to have gone. I'd need to go down there for a close look, but I think it stood where there is now a block of flats. You can get an impression of the sort of house it was from its neighbours.) There was clearly some money behind her ownership of it.
The school was, at the time she was teaching there, Folkestone Technical School for Girls, later Folkestone Technical High School for Girls, before joining with the Girls Grammar School. They were not very good at keeping records of old staff, as I found when trying to get in touch with another retired teacher, and were very dismissive in their response to enquiries.
I was somewhat surprised at the story of the French President, the Golden Arrow train, and the Croix de Guerre, but it did make sense of certain things I remembered from her time there in the 60s.
She would often break off from the lesson plan and spend time telling us about all sorts of things, in French, which I unfortunately remember in English. From these I remember she told us about her oral English exam for her baccalaureate in France, in which she told the examiner she was born in Folkestone. She had been then, for some time, living in the south of France. You have seen the bit about doing a degree in chemistry, and not being able to relearn the terminology in English. I understood that she returned to England at the time of the invasion, but might be wrong about that.
She took groups of girls to Paris every Easter, and showed us around famous places, and shops. Every day a couple of us would be sent to the local boulangerie for long thin baguettes for breakfast, and on the last day, it was the turn of my best friend and me. "Vous etes avec Miss Fenn?" the woman behind the counter asked, and was thrilled at our "oui", turning to her other customers and speaking in very rapid Parisian French told them something very interesting at which they were all excited. We could not understand that taking a group of fifteen year old girls to a student's foyer without any other member of staff to help would have such a reaction, and could not think what they thought she was so remarkable for. She was also greatly respected by the foyer staff. This would make sense if she had been in SOE during the war.
I have been meaning to go to the Imperial War Museum to follow up for some time - I have just started brushing up my French, and started to search on line again, thus finding this page.
Many stories about SOE women include details of how it was their fluency in French that caused them to be recruited, and I find it hard to believe that the powers that be would have let someone as fluent as she was, with skill in chemistry, spend the war in Wales with evacuated schoolgirls.  In fact, as I type this, I realise that some other members of staff told stories of the school during the war (such as the erupting sodium that had been buried under the tennis courts), but she never did.
I am now going to my fridge to eat, in her memory, a Petit Suisse cheese which she taught us how to eat, and which I bought on a visit to Calais the other week, which is what started me on French again - feeling I'd let her down. I'm building up to a Paris trip to whatever museum they have there to research further.
If you had seen her, you would realise that she was absolutely the last person anyone would imagine romantically to have been anything like Violette Szabo. She was very big built, back in the days when it was unusual to see anyone large, and not a fast mover. When it came to crawling through a brigand's cave in the Foret de Fontainbleau, she walked round the outside to meet us at the other end. (I have tried to remember if she said the cave had been used during the war as well as by the fabled brigands, but have no confirmation of that.)
It's going to be very useful to have her Christian names in looking for her history during the war, and I am wondering how that card got to Australia, as are you. I suppose that, if she had no near family, everything in the place would have gone to house clearance, but someone spotted it as collectable.

[kasden]

Hello,..thanks for your reply re Miss Fenn...what a colourful character she has turned out to be...I look at the postcard with all sorts of unanswerable questions now but it still seems bizarre and amazing that it has turned up in Australia for me to ponder over !
Cheers
Kasden

[Peneli]

I've modified the above after thinking more carefully about her house - I'm not sure it is still there.
I've done a bit more research on the state visit of President Auriol. There are images in ebay of a programme for the 1950 visit (in Argentina!) which do not mention a stop in Folkestone. Sites about Pullman rail cars (!) specify the Orient Express as the train, not the Golden Arrow, and the programme has it leaving from Dover. It would be unusual, but not unheard of, to go from Dover to London through Folkestone. The programme gives the journey as 2 hours, and we used to reckon an hour and a half, so there could be time available. There is a Pathe news clip of the visit, which has the President arriving at Dover, and then skips to his being met at Victoria Station. (Folkestone trains usually go into London via Waterloo, but I expect they re-routed it out of politeness.) There is nothing about a stop in Folkestone. The poster on Friends Reunited names the President correctly, which I would suggest implies that the memory is more than fantasy. One point that needs checking is the location of the field. At the time I was at the school there was no field near the railway.
I'm very grateful for finding this site and your puzzle as it is going to give me the kick I needed to do the research. I live the other end of Kent, nearer London, which would be convenient for the War Museum, but means a whole day out to Folkestone, where I will try to get at the local paper archives - I now have a date for Auriol's passing the town, which will improve the search time. Isn't the internet wonderful? (I know the distances are nothing compared with Australia - my sister once met some friends out back of Perth just popping out to see neighbours about 200 km away, but now I'm retired I tend to follow teenage diurnal patterns, which does cut down the available time a bit!.)
I'm inclined to believe there was something she did during the war - though she would have been rather older than the women we have been hearing about recently. Her absence from the Croix de Guerre lists is curious, in the circumstances. But what is clear from those, and references in the press recently following the death of someone who definitely was out there, is that there were a lot of women sent out by SOE, and there are very few on the list. Most of the lists seem to be confined to people serving in the military, though.

[kasden]

Yes indeed,the internet IS wonderful...and wouldn't the indominable Miss Fenn be amazed at the interest she has generated !!...I am looking at the postcard now and wonder again who the 'Mary' was that sent it to Miss Fenn.
It is not in a child's hand writing and was obviously sent to Miss Fenn on the occaison of her birthday as the message simply reads.......'Many many of them. Lots of love from Mary'......
There's a little verse printed in gold on the front that says ' May happiness bright be yours today.
Like a star at night shine o'er your way with unclouded light.
Perhaps a fellow teacher??...who knows.
In any case it's a rather delightful thing altogether, and very much of it's time.
Good luck with your research...I'd naturally be very interested in anything you would be kind enough to share...Cheers
Kasden
P.S..Distances in Western Australia where Perth is situated can be vast indeed...happily for me I live on the east coast about an hour out of Sydney NSW in the suburbs so distance is not the 'tyranny'that it could be.

[Peneli]

The puzzle about the proximity of the railway line has been solved on this page.http://www.warrenpress.net/FolkestoneThenNow/FolkestoneBuildings.html
About halfway down the page, on the left, is a brief summary of the history of the movements of the school, initially in a building called The Grange, in Shornecliffe Road, where it would have backed onto the railway line, enabling the event described to be possible. As far as I recall - I travelled along that line twice a day during my schooling at the Tech - it is on an embankment, so dismounting and getting down to the field would have been a bit of a performance. I can't see that it would have been a  surprise for Miss Fenn, if it happened. And someone had to teach the girls La Marseillaise. (Every year, on Bastille Day, we had a French assembly, with The Lord's Prayer in French, and the national anthem, which I can still sing.)

[Peneli]

I've been down to Folkestone today, and have good news, not so good news, and a feeling of sadness myself, having seen what has happened to the town. Once an elegant resort, backdrop to H G Wells stories, it is now tatty. trashy, with boarded up shops, dusty shops, loads of young mums smoking, and a museum which one could once spend many happy hours in but in which could now see everything in half an hour.

However, after a quick look at my childhood home, I tracked down Miss Fenn's, and photographed them. I had to go back to the first as someone was packing their car outside.

27 Park Road is a bungalow, and looks very unlikely for 1901, an interwar style tacked on to a two floor house which looks more fitting for date. I know Edwardian properties which look forward to the later style, so it isn't an impossible property. I checked the numbers to make sure it wasn't an insertion. There's no trace on the side of the taller property of any previous connection, nor any suggestion of, for example, bomb damage. It's rather a scruffy part of Cheriton, close to the railway line.

100 Radnor Park Road is a larger property, still modest, and has suffered from unsympathetic extension, probably to convert into flats. It is at the foot of a steep slope, almost a cliff, so its back garden is probably small. From its mirror image semi next door, it looks as if the back door was an entrance to a part of the property which could be used as a dwelling for a general maid - I've seen places like that in S E London, though they were usually bigger. Was there any trace of someone else there in the census?

31 Cheriton Gardens is now a block of flats which look vaguely 60s or early 70s. Blocky, cereal packet design, stretching back into what would have been the garden. At the time I visited, it was a split property. The electoral roll shows Miss Fenn, and a Marjorie M Hughman in 31, with a Frank R Mount and Kathleen A Mount in 31a. (I can't remember a Miss Hughman at school - and in the early days of Dr Who, jokes would have been made.)

I looked in the local papers for the dates of interest. Though the local gossip purveyor (example of style - people are complaining that council tenants can afford carpets and televisions while others who have worked to buy can't - plus ca change) wrote a lot about the Presidential visit as seen in Dover, nothing was reported about the account in Friends Reunited. I found, and photographed, what I think was probably the Grange site, and it is barely any distance from Folkestone Central station, so it could have been done, but there is no evidence in the Folkestone Herald that it was.

Under the guise of South Kent Gazetteer, there was a small ad report of Miss Fenn's death on April 7the 1982.

Fenn - On March 30th, 1982, peacefully after a long illness, Ada Constance, aged 83 years, of Folkestone. Former teacher of French at Folkestone Junior Technical School and a founder member of the Amities Francaises. Interred at Hawkinge.
 
I'm not sure about the school name having been that at any stage of the school's history.

So nothing about any wartime activities, unless the Amities conceal something interesting.

For 1981, the year before she died, her name is shown is shown at 10 Millfield, as given in the London Gazette notice posted above, which is just round the corner from her previous home, and is aka Red Lodge. I thought it might have been a care home - there's a number about, though it currently, despite being very large, seems to be in single ownership - but there is only one other voter there, a Winifred F Newing.

But, the electoral roll of 1929 for 31 Cheriton Gardens shows an undivided property having five voters: Miss Fenn, Charlotte Fenn, William Fenn, and also William Henry Blessley and Mary Ann Blessley.

I think we may have Mary, though what her relationship to the Fenns might be is speculative. Lodger? Servant?

When I was a schoolgirl, we used to joke about the generation who lost their chance of marriage in the first world war. Looking at those house sharers, it seem sintensely sad. I do hope that all the fuss about 14-18 that our government is determined to launch, I hope they remember the women.

[IgorStrav]

But, the electoral roll of 1929 for 31 Cheriton Gardens shows an undivided property having five voters: Miss Fenn, Charlotte Fenn, William Fenn, and also William Henry Blessley and Mary Ann Blessley.

I think we may have Mary, though what her relationship to the Fenns might be is speculative. Lodger? Servant?

Thank you for the update, it's been fascinating catching up with this family.  The 1929 Electoral roll will be for our Ada Constance and Charlotte and William are her parents.

As you say the Blessleys may be servants of one kind or another - another set of people to research!

[casalguidi]

27 Park Road

This wouldn't be the (now) Park Road in Cheriton but near/part of Radnor Park Road in Folkestone.  I can't recall exactly but it may be that the stretch of Radnor Park Road from the late Castle Pub to the fire station traffic lights was formerly known as Park Road ............ certainly Jesmond Street was originally Park Street.

A fascinating area of research ....... Miss FENN was before my time at the school.

Casalguidi

[Peneli]

That's the stretch of Radnor Park Road that 100 is in, about three semis down from the lights by the fire station and the place for climbing over the Pent and catching fresh water shrimps by the conduit.

I wonder if 27 Park Road and 100 Radnor Park Road are actually the same property, renumbered when the road was renamed. Road name change would explain why it is so odd looking that the major road down the hill turns sharply into a minor more scruffy road. (Not apropos of Miss Fenn, for years there was a teddy bear on the outside window sill of a house on the right as one went up Radnor Park Road, looking down the hill as if waiting for someone.)

Forgot to add, I asked a local ex-Techie (we seem to get everywhere!) about Miss Fenn - she did overlap, didn't have any special memories, but is going to ask a contact in the Old Girls.