Brenda and her husband Ken were the resident wardens of Wensum Lodge from its beginning in 1965 to their retirement in 1993. She talks about the development of Wensum Lodge, from when it was a residential hostel for young students and how it grew as an adult education centre over the years. She also talks about her experiences with youth work in King’s Lynn.
Early life
I was born in Chichester in January 1936. I lived with my mother, father and grandparents in a little two-up two-down cottage. I was an only child so I suppose I was always involved with other children via clubs. I belonged to the local church youth club. I was keen on all sorts of sports; I used to play tennis and netball at school and we went to team matches all the time. In my teenage years I had ambitions to become a nurse so I joined the St John’s Ambulance Cadets. I was very proud that I gained the Grand Prior badge, which was their highest award.
It was through the church youth club that I actually met Ken. We lived very close to each other. Gradually we got together and married in 1955, when I was 19 and Ken was 22.
Youth worker college in Leicester
Because we both had an interest in youth work we took on running a youth club in Donnington. It was just past my high school on the outskirts of Chichester. Through this we met our local West Sussex youth officer who had heard about the opening of a college in Leicester for full time youth workers and she thought we might be interested in it. They seemed to like us there, so we went to the college. I think there were 84 people overall, and we were one of three couples. We spent a year there finding out about all sorts of things. It opened our eyes to a lot. Both of us were fairly restricted in our childhoods and neither of our families had much money. The furthest north I’d been was to London once. Ken had been to London a few times because he was very keen to become a professional singer. (He sang in various clubs and societies all through his life.)
One of the people of interest in Leicester at the time was a man called Richard Hoggart. We were asked to study his book The uses of literacy. It was about the importance of education in distinguishing facts, how to question things to find the truth, and how there is always more than one side to any argument. At the time mass culture was just emerging through things like pop music and magazines, and he was interested in the effect of that on people who were used to having close communities.
Sir Lincoln Ralphs
As we came to the end of our course in Leicester there was a day when a number of adult education officers and chief education officers came to visit the college. We were in a workshop making a canoe which we called the Silmaril (after the vessel in The Lord of the Rings). As we were making this canoe, in came quite a portly gentleman who said ‘what are you doing making a boot?’ I thought ‘a boot? I’m not making boots. I’m making a boat.’
The gentleman turned out to be Sir Lincoln Ralphs, though he wasn’t a Sir yet. He was the chief education officer of Norfolk at the time. He must have gone to the principal of the college who said we would be suitable for a job Lincoln Ralphs had in King’s Lynn. We went to an interview at the Temperance Hotel in King’s Lynn and were offered the job.
King’s Lynn
We moved to King’s Lynn in 1961. Ken became the youth officer in King’s Lynn, which meant he had district responsibilities. I was the leader of the actual youth centre, a building in Tower Street. On the first day we walked through the door of the youth centre there were two rooms with billiard tables on either side. These tables were covered with dead pheasants. We discovered they’d been acquired by a man called Goldsmith. He’d ask for them from the Sandringham Estate and deliver them to clubs and societies in King’s Lynn that catered for the elderly. Through Mr Goldsmith we actually met lots of people involved in social work and youth work in the area, so it was a useful introduction to life in King’s Lynn.
We thoroughly enjoyed ourselves in King’s Lynn. Ken visited youth clubs all around the district. My main responsibility was the youth centre itself, which met every evening of the week. Nowadays they wouldn’t be allowed with health and safety and all the forms, but we had the most wonderful all-night hikes. Teams of three or four came from all over the county, each with a starting point. The end point was a place in Santon Downham, which was in the middle of Thetford Forest. They’d come, walk through the forest and find their way to the end point. This was in the early 1960s.
There was a place in King’s Lynn called the Corn Hall. Now it’s a theatre. It was a big open space and we thought we would use it to run a five-a-side football tournament. On the day, we walked across the Tuesday Marketplace thinking ‘well, there aren’t too many people about. I wonder how many will come.’ We opened the doors and there were 500 kids waiting to play football. It was chaos, but we managed, as we always did. We had to find several local chaps who knew about football to referee, and we got some games going. It was wonderful, there were children from all over the county playing football together. There were one or two brave girls, but there was no single team of girls.
We ran one or two dances for the Freedom from Hunger campaign. We found a local group that played quite well, and one or two youth club groups to support them. Again, there were hundreds of youngsters that came to those dances.
Ken’s trip to Russia
We were in King’s Lynn for about three and a half years before moving on to King Street Norwich and Wensum Lodge. Just before we moved, Ken went on a two week trip to Russia. It had been organised by a man called Ron Ingamells who was the church’s youth officer at the time. They landed in St Petersburg and went to Moscow and then to Kiev, which was in Russia at the time but is now in Ukraine. Ken was impressed by the way in which, when they travelled by public transport, everybody seemed to be reading a book. Not just novels, but books from which they wanted to learn something. The other thing that impressed him was the palaces of culture they visited. They were buildings devoted to education and recreation, there were all sorts of activities going on. There were music practice rooms for young people to play whatever their instrument was. There were classes going on, women doing yoga. It was a palace of culture. It was something that stuck with him when we were at Wensum Lodge.
Maddermarket Theatre and International Club
In the upper room of the old music house on the site of what became Wensum Lodge, a man called Nugent Monck put on plays with his theatre group. It was the group that later became the Maddermarket Theatre. I understand he managed to put on most of Shakespeare’s plays in that space, though I don’t know that for certain. It was a successful group and soon they needed more space, moving on to the building that is now the Maddermarket Theatre.
In the lower floor of the old music house there were two rooms, one of which was used by the Norwich International Club. It was organised by a couple who noticed that a lot of people came to Norwich to study but had no home comforts or people to help them outside of their classes. So they formed this club that met monthly, perhaps more frequently. It went on for a long time, I believe they still met in the early days of Wensum Lodge being a residential facility.
The beginning of Wensum Lodge
We were told that Lincoln Ralphs had brought place on King Street that he wanted to turn into a hostel. At the time a lot of young people were wanting to go to college in Norwich but it could be difficult if they lived far away, so he had the idea that there should be a hostel to accommodate them. At the time I think there were some fairly ambitious plans to knock down some of the buildings on the site and build a grand new complex. Thank goodness that didn’t happen. I think somewhere in County Hall the plans still exist.
The site he’d bought was the most recent home of Youngs, Crawshay & Youngs brewery, the Crown Brewery. If you enter from the gate on King Street and look up you will see a crown on the wrought iron gate posts. The brewery had closed in 1958, and was brought by the education committee in 1961. We arrived on the site in August 1965. The day we got there a lorry arrived with 60-odd beds which we had to unload because the hostel building was empty. The kitchen had been fitted, but that was it. A lot had to be done before the students arrived in September. So we started with an empty building and gradually it was filled.
There was a very ancient building on the site called the Music House, which had been built from 1174. There was a long low building that had been a converted maltings building. The brewery had horses to pull its drays so there was an open cart shed and a stable where the horses were tethered and looked after at night. All around the central building were a number of buildings of unknown use. One was called the Tun Room, so I suppose that was where the barrels were stored. The walkways on the site were all cobbles which wasn’t always comfortable to walk on, but were atmospheric. I think that was the joy of it, the atmosphere. There was a big area which was a car park. The whole site was fronted by the River Wensum.
There were a number of buildings not quite on the site but further up the road which had been used by the County Council to store unwanted school equipment. There was unused kitchen equipment and under the building that later became the Sports Hall there was a whole collection of school desks. The Tun Room was being used by the county youth service to store their camping equipment. So the site had been used in that way.
The name
At first it was simply called a residential facility for students. It needed a name so we put our heads together. We thought ‘well, we’re right by the river, which is called the Wensum. And we have people to stay, it’s sort of a hotel- like facility, so why not Lodge?’ And Wensum Lodge seemed to trip off the tongue quite nicely. It’s been that ever since. We do share the name with a hotel in Fakenham which sometimes caused confusion, but I’m not sure who came first.
Residential for students
The first lot of students to arrive were attending the agricultural college in Easton, which at the time did not have residential accommodation. A little later students arrived from the Norwich School of Art (which later became Norwich University of the Arts).The agricultural students were all boys and the art school students were all girls, so it was a good job we could put them in two separate buildings.
The Maltings building was the accommodation for the boys. It had bedrooms with four people per room. The music house was the girls’ accommodation, it had three bedrooms with five girls in each. Each room was furnished nicely. They had a nice bed, a bedside locker, a wardrobe. This is 1965, there were no ensuite facilities in those days. There was a room in each building that could be used as a lounge in the evenings, as well as a small kitchen to get a cup of tea or do their ironing. The boys block also had a table tennis table and a piano in the big room at the end of the building. The girls block had carpets. It was a tiled floor throughout for the boys, though they did have a bedside rug as far as I can remember.
Ken and I had the titles of Warden and Assistant Warden. We were expected to live on site all the time young people were in residence. Our flat was in the Victorian part of the building. It had a downstairs living accommodation and our bedrooms were one on top of each other, so it was a standing L shape. It was very comfortable, no objections at all. We had an open door, so the students in residence could find us there. At the time we moved in we had two small children. Rachel was about three and Jason two, because there’s only 14 months between them.
The students were there in the mornings to have their breakfast and they were back in the evenings for an evening meal, both of which were provided by us. They’d spend the evenings, though they were free to go out if they wanted to. The agricultural students had a young man with them who was a tutor from the college. He was largely responsible for their behaviour and they had to get permission from him to go out. The girls had no such restrictions and used to wander off if they wanted to. Some liked to stay indoors and study or whatever they did, but others liked to enjoy the Norwich night life. We did expect them back at a sensible time and the doors were locked about 10.00pm or 10.30pm.
Margaret Thatcher
Lincoln Ralphs was very keen on bringing visitors to see Wensum Lodge. At one point he brought Margaret Thatcher, who was the minister of education at the time. I remember her giving me a bit of advice when we showed her the facilities for the students. She told me that if I got a new cover for the ironing board it should be one of those with a silver cover because they were very good. She was one of a number of visitors who Lincoln Ralphs liked to bring.
The first course
The buildings on the site were largely empty during the daytime. It made us really start thinking about the role they were going to take. The very first course we ran was a year long course for playgroup leaders. I don’t know how it came about. The director of it was a retired head from a Keswick Hall College course for teacher training. It’s interesting when I look back on it because it had about 24 women learning how to run a playgroup. A few years later you could find those women in all sorts of important and responsible jobs in various departments around the city. It was quite telling about what adult education did for them.
The Friends of Wensum Lodge
In the early days of Wensum Lodge we had the opportunity to visit Morley College in London. It was a place full of people doing all sorts of courses. We were told they had a Friends group who were extremely supportive of their work. We felt we should have something like this for Wensum Lodge. Jenny Downing was persuaded to become the first chairman. At the time her husband John was the editor of the Eastern Daily Press (EDP) and she was a journalist herself, so that was a useful connection. She lived across the road and her daughter Claire grew up with my third child, Barley. We used to spend Christmas together and that sort of thing.
Gradually people who attended anything at Wensum Lodge were asked to become members of the Friends of Wensum Lodge. It didn’t involve payment, they just had to sign a form, but they were happy to.
Art courses
The Women’s Institute (WI) came to Wensum Lodge looking to hold art classes. They had Denman College as their own building but they were looking for somewhere to hold classes in Norwich. We thought ‘well, we can’t really hold art classes in the main buildings, but where can we do it?’ There was this wonderful building right by the river, one of the old brewery buildings. The Friends and members of our staff got together to clear it out and paint the walls. We had to install decent electricity and water and we needed easels. We went to the art school and asked if they had any in store and they did, so the first lot of easels we had in the art studio came from the art school. The WI came to the new art studio and held their class, but you can’t just have one class a week in a studio, you need more.
It wasn’t long before the art school gave up doing part time courses, turning their focus on to full time students. This meant there were a lot of people looking for space to have art classes. It was one of the first aspects of the Lodge that really took off – there were so many people who wanted classes. We had a wonderful selection of tutors. There was Gareth who did portrait painting, Peter Baldwin from the 20 group, Diana Lamb who ran two still life classes a week, and a man called Graham Rider who later on became the art advisor for the county.
A lot of people who were very good artists became our tutors. You had to look around for the right people to fit in to the place and teach people the way that was right. I was the one who engaged the tutors, but sometimes they came to us and asked to teach. You had to look at them and research and see if you thought they were right.
Pottery Studio
Having got the art studio working well there was a room on the other side that was developed into a pottery studio. That was an interesting one to do. It had to have a tiled floor, it had to have a runnel through the middle so that you could hose the floor down when all the clay got too much, and we had to acquire benches somehow. We had to buy a kiln which was a major expense that the Friends funded. And then we had to find a pottery teacher. I think it was a lady called Wendy. We also had a man teaching sculpting,
Neighbourhood
When we first started out at Wensum Lodge there wasn’t much housing in the area at all. There was a row of cottages across the road from us, there was Raven Yard a bit further down the road, and there were a few dwellings between the boy’s club and the road. All the flats and housing there now didn’t exist yet. There were only three other families with young people, so our children had a very restricted number of friends in the actual area.
Wensum Lodge was very much part of the red light circuit. Cars went along Rouen Road, down King Street, down Mountergate, up Prince of Wales Road, and all round again. It was a continuous circuit, lots of cars. And they invited the girls. It did become quite usual to see them about. There was a lady who was regularly at the entrance to the car park nearest to the Sports Hall. She used to arrive on a lunch time occasionally and stand offering her wares. We used to think she was pushing her luck a bit. There was a lady near Mountergate who unfortunately had a wooden leg and we used to speculate on that occasionally when we were being facetious. Ken used to take the dogs out for a walk in the evening and was frequently greeted quite enthusiastically and usually quite politely by the people walking along. He knew how to greet them politely as well.
It provided a certain amount of entertainment but it could be quite trying at times. When St Peter Mountergate was decommissioned as a church the local curate set it up as a refuge for the ladies of the night. A lot of them were there in unfortunate circumstances and one was killed in the time we were at Wensum Lodge. I think her body was found somewhere else. Some like the sports hall lady seemed to be there from choice, she wasn’t in a disadvantaged condition, but there were others who obviously were. A lot of those prosecuted had come from the Midlands in part because they felt Norwich was a safer place to ply their trade.
Converting the Stable Block
The arts side of Wensum Lodge was going full pelt and we began to look at the other buildings and think about what we could do with them. In 1978 the government started a scheme called the Youth Opportunities Programme (YOP). The young people involved in that were at City College and they needed a project. So we gave them the opportunity to work on what had been the cart shed for the horses. It involved doing a front wall, putting in windows, and dividing the area into two classrooms, an entrance hall and an office. They did this over the course of a year, with the building materials funded largely by the Friends of Wensum Lodge.
After the YOPs scheme came the Training Opportunities Scheme (TOPS), a programme designed to get adults who’d been unemployed for some time ready for work. They did the rest of the stable block, which made a wonderful conversion. It gave us a central lounge area where students could sit, our main offices, and a gallery space so the art classes could display their work. The far side of it was turned into a beautiful conference room. It was our biggest room, able to seat around 150 people. Ken was very good at making links with people and connections with other establishments, so he had a very wide circle of people he knew. In true Ken fashion he found the floor from a dance hall which was about to be demolished, so the conference room had a beautiful floor.
Sometimes we’d be visited by people who had worked at the site when it was a brewery. One day this elderly gentleman came through the door and said he used to be a drayman there. He told us the names of all the horses. In the crown room there are some rings on the wall and they’re the rings where the horses were tethered at night. We put the names of the horses on little plaques under the rings.
We were lucky enough to have a visit from the Duke of Kent to open that facility.
Language classes
The classrooms in the converted stable block were largely used by our language students. That was the next really big flood of students that came to the Lodge. We went from holiday beginner classes to a few A-Level classes. There was even one young lady from the university who would do a French literature class on a Saturday morning.
It was interesting for me, because I was following people’s progress through but also looking to see what languages we should teach. We did French, German, Spanish, Italian, but I thought ‘well, a lot of people go on holiday to Greece. Perhaps we ought to teach a bit of Greek.’ The first time we offered it was in autumn and I had great difficulty finding anyone to teach it. I managed to find a young man. We wondered if anyone would turn up and then on the first day, 60 odd people turned up to learn holiday Greek. Oh dear, it was a bit of a shock. But we managed to cope. We split them in half.
The poor young man was a bit overwhelmed so I had to go hunting for a proper tutor and found one at the university, a Greek teacher. And then I thought perhaps there are people who’d like to learn Ancient Greek or Ancient Latin. I had a look around for that and found a tutor in one of our education officers who had studied classics as a young man. He was very pleased to come and do a course in Latin, which about ten people turned up to. I suppose now we would be teaching Chinese, Japanese, or Arabic, but one had to look out for what was needed at the time.
The Extramural Board
I should talk now about our co-operation with other providers of education that came to use Wensum Lodge as their centre. The first was the extramural board. Chris Barringer transferred from Cambridge to UEA, becoming the UEA director of extramural studies. There were about ten extramural board courses that ran each year including Chris’ own course. He was an excellent tutor on the development of communities and had done a lot of work in various villages around the county. He’s even done a study on King Street.
WEA
The Workers’ Educational Association (WEA) were well established in the county. Their organiser at the time was a man called David Yaxley, and he used to run a range of courses across the county. There were a few at Wensum Lodge each year, but the majority of his courses in Norwich were run at Ivory House. That was not too far from Wensum Lodge, but it was in the hands of the City College, who leased the building and ran a lot of their business courses there. WEA used it in the evenings.
David was a part of Wensum Lodge’s management committee. We had a number of users of the Lodge come into a management committee, though it was more of an advisory committee than one directly managing. They were involved and helped in their own way.
Open University
A very big one that came to join us was the Open University (OU). The OU started in 1969. The first courses were the A-Level courses, there were four of them at the time. I did the literature course the first year and then social science the next. There were monthly meetings. My first tutor was a man called Richard Joby who won Mastermind one year. He was an expert on railways as well as what he was teaching me.
I suppose in that way I made the connection with the organisation. They were looking for a home for a study centre in Norwich and Wensum Lodge became that. It was one of the first OU study centres. We had a very large number of students from the OU using the Lodge, not on a regular basis because that’s not how the OU worked. As the OU developed more courses came on stream and people needed perhaps three tutorials a year or something like that. We were fitting them into various rooms on Saturdays. Gradually there were around 400 OU students involved with Wensum Lodge and all of these needed somewhere to meet and congregate.
Jurnet’s Bar
When our first young students came to Wensum Lodge, right at the very beginning, there were some of them who liked to explore. In the entrance of the Music House they opened a door and found a dark space filled with barrels and cobwebs. It was dirty and scruffy and they thought, as you do when you’re 17-18, what a super place for a party. We emptied it of trash and cleaned it out and thought we had quite an interesting space.
As our residential site with young students began to diminish, we were getting more and more adults coming in. Jurnet’s Bar was obviously a good place to develop. There were things that had to be done. We had to get electricity put in so we could light it up, and then we started to think about where things were going to come from and what we could do about it. At the same time there were various courses that happened at weekends with the youth service. For several weekends young people came and did various things in the cellars which was jolly useful. They didn’t have to build anything but the place did need to be made a bit respectable.
St Etheldreda’s church over the road was being cleared out for a group of artists to take over. They didn’t want the pews so we acquired those. There was a pub closing down somewhere else, so Ken managed to source a bar from there. Our caretaker at the time was a dab hand at carpentry. He made the tables in Jurnet’s out of some wonderful pieces of wood that were all uneven shapes and sizes. They made some lovely tables, I imagine they’re still in Jurnet’s. So it was all self-help really, and it became a very happy and gregarious place.
I think it must have been 1984 when we actually applied for a licence. We had a lot of help with the application from the Watney’s brewery down the road, who were interested in the development of Jurnet’s. Ken had to become the licensee. We got the licence and could then develop Jurnet’s as a licenced facility. We wanted to use it as much as we could so lunch time service was developed. A wonderful couple became our bar stewards, Marian and Bill. They were there right until the end, and were very friendly people. Bill looked after the pipes and things, did all the barrel work, and Marian did the bar with help. The lunchtime service was popular, it was a nice place to eat, and it was very popular in the evenings. It was normal licensing hours, we opened until about 10.30pm.
All the cushions and hangings in there were made by students of Wensum Lodge. The hangings were made by the embroidery class and they had the insignia of all the families that lived on the site over the years. We followed the history as far back as we could with that sort of thing. The lights were made by a blacksmith we knew. When the Watney’s brewery closed down the last lid of the still was cut off and wheeled down the road and it’s by the door of Jurnet’s.
Jurnet’s was often used for functions in various ways. People would ask if they could have a birthday party or a wedding reception there. There were music events on a Friday evening, but the jazz club didn’t start there until after we retired. I think Jurnet’s lasted 40 years, closing in 2024 when the Lodge sadly came to an end.
Other food facilities at Wensum Lodge
Provision of food has been part and parcel of Wensum Lodge from the very beginning, even before Jurnet’s. Initially we provided breakfast and an evening meal to the residential students. Then, as our adult education classes developed, we had a provision at lunchtime from the same kitchen facilities. It was simply a cup of coffee and a biscuit but it was very popular. People liked to finish their classes with a cup of coffee.
Wensum Lodge was lucky enough to have a river frontage and we did feel we ought to make the most of it. There was a little space right at the end of the maltings building by the river where there were old ovens. They used to be used to heat the building. We developed it into a coffee bar. It was fairly basic, we had to supply it from the main kitchen, but we put in a coffee machine, a counter, and a few tables. It made a very nice place to go and have a cup of coffee when there was a bit of sun. You could watch the swans go by, which was always nice especially when they flew along the river and you could hear their wings.
So yes, the provision of food was important at the Lodge. Food and a social atmosphere always go together and it’s an important part of the learning process. The very fact that people could go and sit down in comfortable spaces to talk about what they’d done in their class. Perhaps they’d discuss a controversial subject they came across in their class or they might further their language learning by talking in French or German.
The Sports Hall
The sports hall building was there when we first went to the Lodge, but it wasn’t functioning as a sports hall to any degree. I don’t know what Lincoln Ralphs had in mind for it. The ground floor was full of obsolete school furniture. In the very early days Lincoln Ralphs did bring Dennis Howell the Minister of Sport to look at it.
We thought obviously sports provision is important and we ought to do something about it. We had a lot of people wanting to play badminton and that was the start of it really. We’d have hundreds of kids rampaging round the hall during the school holidays. We also had a five-a-side football league for youngsters. The rest of the time it was mostly badminton in the top hall. Occasionally a bit of indoor football but not a lot.
Squash was developing in the city and at the time was very much a rising fashion. There was a dearth of public facilities in the city, both the community centres had squash courts but there wasn’t much else. So we brought it up with the Friends and adding on to the sports centre was obviously the right thing to do. It would also provide some better toilet and shower facilities and maybe eventually become a financial addition. The Friends set about raising the money for it and the plans were all laid and it was built. I think it cost about £70,000. It opened in 1968. The expanded sports hall became part of the facility at the Lodge. A member of our staff was in the office, a part time job of running the squash club and the facilities bookings.
In 2010 there was a move by the county to close the sports hall as they didn’t want to fund it any longer. Ken and I had retired by then. There were members of the squash club who worried about what would happen to the club if the sports hall stopped. They set about forming a trust and did very well. I think they negotiated a ten year contract with the county for the use of both the sports hall and the squash courts. They got funding somehow to refloor the sports hall part of it.
It reopened in 2012 under the trust, and it’s gone from strength to strength. They managed to get the underneath of the hall cleared out. Now there is a gym there with all sorts of equipment and provision. It’s wonderful, they did incredibly well. I think now their job is to continue negotiating with the county to keep it open because the rest of the Lodge is shut but the sports hall remains open. Good luck to them, and as far as I’m concerned, it’s wonderful. They’ve managed to do what we wanted to but weren’t able to do so much of.
Dry ski slope at Wensum Lodge
A man called Ivan Palfrey who we knew through our youth work was a very keen skier and wanted to start some sort of learning provision for skiers in Norwich. He came along to Wensum Lodge and asked ‘do you think there would be space on the car park to build a ski slope?’ We said ‘well, why not?’ So the dry ski slope was built in the corner of the car park nearest to one of the buildings in 1974. He formed a ski club and it became very popular. Gradually, he got the funding to build a facility in Whitlingham, Trowse. That’s developed very successfully over the years. But it all started at Wensum Lodge.
Clubs at Wensum Lodge
As things at Wensum Lodge grew, our actual facilities grew. We had a lot of formal classes going on, but there was space and it wasn’t used continuously. We did begin to get requests from groups who wanted to meet at the Lodge and some of them wanted particular facilities. The Rifle Club comes to mind because a group of people who liked to shoot came along one day and asked if I thought there was a facility amongst the buildings on the site that would be suitable for a rifle range. There was a space under the Tun Room, so I took them to have a look at it. It was a long room with a low ceiling, very dark, and they thought it was wonderful. A range was set up, they did it all themselves, and it was quite popular. We had to provide storage for guns if necessary, which we did, we had a secure cupboard in other parts of the building. So that was another group that found a home at Wensum Lodge.
There was a special group of professional artists who used to meet on a Saturday morning to use the facilities. They were organised by Peter Baldwin, the well known Norfolk artist who was involved in the 20 group. There was a choir group that met regularly in the cellar for a number of years on a Wednesday evening. There was the military vehicles club who met once a month. When people came to ask if there was space for their group to meet, if I could find the room for them I would. I really felt we had such a wonderful facility that if there was space and time for people to use it, so much the better. And of course, it supported the bar and catering facilities.
Annual Open Day
We used to have an annual open day where classes could display their work if they wanted to. They could have a stall if they wanted to sell anything and there was always a bit of entertainment going on. One of our caretakers at the time used to breed big horses. He had a Percheron and a Shire and he’d bring one of them along. We used to have a competition about guess the weight of whichever horse it was or guess how big it was around the middle. It was wonderful to see them about, because when they went clippety cloppety on the cobbles it was a lovely reminder of what the original sounds of the building must have been like.
Mural
We had a wonderful bare wall on the side of one of the buildings where we thought a mural would be wonderful. Through one of the art school tutors we managed to contact a man called Walter Kershaw, who’d done murals all over the place. And he put together this wonderful mural that is still on the wall of Wensum Lodge today. It’s got lots of references to the industry in the city, like Boulton & Paul and the shoe people. I’m sure it needs some tender loving care now, it’s got very faded.
Changes in adult education over the years
We were appointed by Sir Lincoln Ralphs, and he was very supportive of us at the Lodge. He very much enjoyed the development of Jurnet’s. He brought a number of important visitors to look around what was happening at Wensum Lodge. Margaret Thatcher sticks out in my mind. There were other officers at County Hall who we were involved with and on the whole they were very supportive. The further education officer at the time was a man called Derrick Bishop, and he was very friendly.
Obviously with a historical building like Wensum Lodge there were a lot of things that had to be done correctly. Our building inspector was very helpful in advising us and coming to see what we wanted to do and helping us along the way. We had an auditor who used to come along and do what he had to do every so many years. There were a number of people who helped us along.
A man called Mike Crook became the adult education officer for the county and he was helpful. Lincoln Ralphs retired and a few years later a man called Mike Edwards was appointed. He was a real supporter. I do remember meeting him because I was doing an evening shift in the little room we used as an office and this gentleman walked in the door. I said ‘oh, hello Mr Edwards.’ I’d seen his photograph in the paper that morning so I recognised him. And he was really a very good friend over the years, as was his wife, Sheila. He was as helpful as he could be. There was the education committee of councillors and for a number of years the education committee chairman was also the chairman of our committee at Wensum Lodge. He was Mike Carttiss, the MP for Great Yarmouth. A great supporter, he often dropped by the Lodge and had a cup of tea.
But things changed in adult education over the years. People retired gradually and the actual structure at county hall changed. Councillors changed, committee chairmen changed, and ideas from the government itself changed. I think there was an emerging feeling that non vocational adult education wasn’t as important as those of us who worked in it thought it was. Funds gradually disappeared. It became a more and more self-supporting service, which presents its own problems. The whole atmosphere changed. People were friendly and supportive as much as they could be, but their ability to support went. It was disheartening. We fought as hard as we could. Ken was very good at finding funds and means of keeping things going, but it was rather fighting a losing battle by the time we retired. And things changed significantly after we left.
Silver Jubilee celebration
Not long before we retired Wensum Lodge had a silver jubilee celebration. We had a lovely party in the evening, it was very nice. They did a This is your life for Ken on one occasion which I think might have been at the same time.
There was a painting commissioned as part of the celebration. I think the original is still at the Lodge, but I don’t know what’s happened to it since the Lodge closed. I have a small reproduction of it on my wall at home, much smaller. It was painted by one of our tutors at the time, a man called Graham Rider. It depicts a lot of the characters of Wensum Lodge.
Honorary degree from UEA
UEA awarded Ken and me honorary degrees. That was very nice. Keith Clayton proposed us for it, he was an environmental studies professor and was very interested in what we were doing. It was lovely for us both. We received the honorary degree at the same time as Barry Norman, the film critic. It was a big honour and we were excited to receive it. The OU also awarded Ken a degree.
Retirement
We retired in 1993. We had both become a bit despondent about what was obviously beginning to happen and happening quite fast really. It became pretty obvious that Wensum Lodge wasn’t going to be able to continue the way we wanted it to. We thought ‘we cannot work in this atmosphere.’ We’d done 28 years at that point and I think we’d done as much as we could do. All the buildings were in use and done, projects had come to an end, we’d had a wonderful time. Added to that, Ken had always wanted to retire when he got to 60 at any rate. We looked forward to being able to travel and do a few things we wanted to for ourselves really.
We didn’t maintain any contact with the Lodge afterwards. The young man who took over from us had very different ideas about things, and we’d decided it was up to the new people to do as they felt right. We really felt we’d had enough of the world of adult education. We remained in touch with friends, and heard things through them.
Garden Party at Buckingham Palace
We were invited to a garden party at Buckingham Palace before we retired. It was a lovely surprise. I think it was about 1986 or 1987. The invitation came to me, but it included Ken and any daughters under the age of 18. Barley was 16, so she got to go, much to the annoyance of her older sister. It was a lovely day.
Portraits by David Poole
There were some portraits painted of Ken and me by David Poole. We’ve known David for a very long time, right back to when we still lived in Chichester. We lived in West Street and we had a little garden by a fence, and David came along one day and saw me. He asked if I’d model for him for a magazine he was doing, it was a women’s own thing. So I did one or two modelling sessions for him. And then we moved to Wensum Lodge, he moved on in the world of art.
One day he came in and asked if he could do a portrait of me and Ken. I have one of Ken. I did have one of me, but I didn’t like it very much. They were both at the Lodge. Whether they’re still there or not I don’t. It’s closed up and there was redecoration done, so I don’t know what happened to all the art work that was there.
Looking back
Ken and I worked very well together. I used to say that Ken was the builder and I was the filler-upper. I was the oil that made the machine work and got people in and did things. Ken had a wonderful way of going out to people and making contacts that lasted and that he took advantage of from time to time. People always seemed very willing and he was a great one for finding things on the way to being lost and making use of them. I’ve a fairly even temperament and I get on with people and I just get on and do things. So I’m the practical one in the family. We very rarely argued about anything and when we did, we argued it out and came to the right conclusions.
I suppose the one thing that is difficult when you’ve got a family is you’re so engrossed in work that you might not spend the time with them you ought to sometimes. But we tried to include them, and they roamed around the Lodge very happily. They had some lovely birthday parties in various places like the cellars, and Jason and his pals used to run riot in the sports hall. Barley became a local champion for badminton. Jason played squash.
As the children grew, Ken and I used to go out on Friday evenings as a relaxation and go for a meal out. We usually went to Pizza One, Pancakes too. It was Hy Kurzner’s place, who we knew. We did know an awful lot of people in the city really. Ken joined the Norwich Rotary Club early on and that was a wonderful contact with so many different people.
You know, when you look back over the times, I think we were excited to go to Wensum Lodge when we got the opportunity. It was wonderful to be able to develop things in the way that we did. It was lovely as a life to be able to work together and we were happy there, we truly were. It gave us a good life and it gave us safety in retirement so we were thankful for it and I still am. It’s been interesting to relive some of it.
Brenda Davis (b.1936) talking to WISEArchive in Watton on 16th December 2024 and 22nd January 2025. © 2025 WISEArchive. All Rights Reserved.
