Isolated in the depths of the Norfolk countryside, tucked between Thetford and Diss, lies Riddlesworth Hall boarding school – originally built for wealthy banker Silvanus Bevan in 1792 as a gentleman’s country house but for the last 77 years, a term-time home to young children of the upper echelons of British society. However, in April, the school was forced to close its doors, admitting that it had failed to maintain the house and 12 acres of parkland due to “the impact of the pandemic and the current economic climate”. This week, it was put up for sale for £3m.
Normally, there’s very little reason to grieve an outdated institution but this one’s a little different. Its most famous alumna was one Lady Diana Spencer, just eight years old when she was dropped outside the grand Georgian mansion in 1970, 100 miles from her family home Althorp. Ostensibly, it was to remove her from the messy wranglings of her parents’ divorce but then the upper classes do have form when it comes to outsourcing the raising of young children.
Still, she was by no means the only one. Louise Harris, 46, joined the school in 1986 when she, like Diana, was eight years old. To Louise’s younger self, the imposing house resembled a mystical castle; she recalls arriving at the foot of the sweeping steps and scampering into the grand hall, a vast room with a roaring fire lined with display cabinets of stuffed badgers and birds. On the walls still hung portraits of the hall’s past residents. Grisly rumours swirled among the children of the manor being haunted, legend had it that a headless rider would roam the halls by night.
The school – a girls’ prep which in 1989 opened its doors to boys too – was rooted in English tradition. It prided itself on academic excellence and enforced rigorous sporting activity. Unconventionally, but perhaps befitting the daughters of wealthy landowners, it also encouraged a range of outdoor pursuits.
“They taught us fishing and fly tying, where we learnt to tie very tricky bits of lace that resembled flies at the end of our fishing rods. We even did claypigeon shooting. Bearing in mind we were all girls under the age of eleven, it was quite strange,” recalls Louise.
“Our teachers were also very eccentric,” she adds. “Our swimming instructor was called Miss Wilkins. She also taught Princess Diana and had been at the school for decades. She wouldn’t let you into the swimming pool until she had spent three weeks shouting, ‘Bend! Stretch! Kick!’ to prove you could do the motions on dry land.”
“We used to have to wear two swimming costumes so that the water would get between them and weigh you down [to] make us faster when we went to competitions.”
Clearly, such leftfield practices worked for the young Lady Diana. While she wasn’t known for her academic excellence, it was at Riddlesworth where she acquired her lifelong love of dancing and a passion for sport – representing her house, Nightingale, at swimming and netball. She also famously won the Legatt Cup for helpfulness.
Diana “adored” her years at Riddlesworth, she told Andrew Morton when he spoke to her for his biography, Diana: Her True Story – In Her own Words.
“I loved being at school. I was very naughty in the sense of always wanting to laugh and muck about rather than sit tight in the four walls of the schoolroom.
[I remember school plays] and the thrill of putting on make-up. It was one of those nativity plays. I was one of the twits who came and paid homage to the baby Jesus. In another I was a Dutch doll or something like that. My big moment.”
Still, the wrench from her beloved father, the 8th Earl Spencer, was no doubt keenly felt. He left her at the school doors with her trunk labelled ‘D. Spencer’ and clutching her favourite green hippo – the girls were only allowed one soft toy – and Peanuts, her pet guinea pig.
Joanna Halford, 56, attended Riddlesworth just after Diana, between 1974-1979, and now, with hindsight, recognises how much the young girls were in desperate need of mothering. “I was the youngest in the school. My mother dropped me there in her Aston Martin DB4 and I shouted at her to come back,” she recalls.
“The dorms were old metal rows of bunk beds and every morning the bell would ring. There was no heating anywhere. It was bloody freezing! We used to wear two pairs of knickers, these grey flannel things, just to keep warm. One of the matrons would have a glass bowl with a lot of thermometers in Dettol and we’d all have our temperatures taken to see whether we were well.”
The staff, who were responsible for approximately 140 pupils, were split between the house masters and mistresses – the senior residential members responsible for teaching – and the matrons, whose primary role was to care for the children.
“They all wore nurse outfits and I remember them prowling the upper corridors. They used to sit in their tiny sewing room at the end of the hallways, smoking lots of fags. They would sprint down the corridor if they heard a single whisper [from the dorms]. They ruled the roost,” recalls Louise.
“There were all these punishments for if you misbehaved,” she continues. “I remember being made to stand on the stairs for hours, or you’d have to go to the sculleries in the old house and scrub all the dishes. There was always a rumour that you’d be made to weed the cobbled courtyard with a spoon.”
But despite the occasional bouts of discipline, many of the teachers assumed a crucial maternal role for the children. Johanna’s headmistress, Mrs Ridsdale, was “wonderful” – she also served as Lady Di’s head. “She was a motherly figure,” she says. “She was gentle and considerate and would listen. She taught art as well.”
Friday was Johanna’s favourite day of the week. The students would lounge on the carpet and listen to “wonderful” classical records from Gershwin to Rachmaninov on the old record player. The only television they were allowed to watch was Doctor Who on a Friday evening. She remembers the school as “very primitive, but very charming” – illustrated perfectly by Riddlesworth’s fire escape drill, which consisted of a lesson on how to abseil down the side of the manor’s walls.
Although there were strict rules – pupils were made to polish their shoes every week – the girls were also encouraged to roam the vast grounds. “We used to climb the huge trees all the time and they all had different names”, remembers Louise. “There was a massive Turkey oak, obviously called Turkey, and they were all equipped with ropes and ladders for us to play on. There were no barriers, there wasn’t a single fence. We were told not to leave the school grounds, but it wasn’t really clear where they ended. We were just really free.”
“We’d spend our time running around, slightly feral, outside. They would just ring this enormous clanger of a bell for everyone to come in in the evenings.”
Naturally, there was great animation when, in 1989, Princess Diana was invited back to Riddlesworth to open its new co-ed pre-preparatory building for four- to seven-year-olds. Louise vividly remembers that day as she unexpectedly ended up playing a pivotal role.
“There was so much preparation, it felt like we didn’t have classes for weeks,” she explains. “There was everything from synchronised swimming routines to everyone being made to buy a new pair of socks. It was all very exciting.”
Diana arrived at the grounds by helicopter, accompanied by her lady-in-waiting Miss Alexandra Lloyd, who had also boarded at Riddlesworth with the princess. Louise had been made to stand away from her class for misbehaving, but, sensing a familiar mischievous streak, Diana picked her out, along with another girl, to give her a tour of the dormitories where she had slept herself.
The princess’s spontaneous decision was not part of the meticulously planned day and the staff descended into panic.
“Obviously this was the headmistress’s worst nightmare. So all this crisis was going on, but Diana just thought that was quite funny. So she stuck with me,” says Louise. “It was just the four of us in there. She laughed a lot and told me all of these stories of how she had been so naughty at school. She said that they used to jump all over the beds, and there was one girl who used to wet her bed, and so it was called the water jump.”
“She really looked like a princess. I remember her being hugely tall. She was so friendly and she was very giggly in the dorm, reliving all these memories with her old friend [Miss Lloyd].”
“It was a sort of strange school, really, but it was brilliant in lots of ways,” Louise remembers. “It was a dying institution even then. I am sad that it had to close, because it’s the end of an era. I just don’t know if people want to drop their small children in the middle of nowhere anymore. Not enough anyway.”
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