Image: Charlotte Mason College staff and students 1947. Ruth can be seen second row from top, second right in the striped dress.
Ruth Wildbur was born in King’s Lynn in Norfolk in March 1928. She went to primary school in King’s Lynn, and then, at the age of 11 at the outbreak of the Second World War, she went to Eastlands Boarding School in Sutton-on-Sea on the coast of Lincolnshire. After boarding school, Ruth attended Charlotte Mason College in Ambleside in the Lake District for three years between 1946 and 1948, and became a qualified teacher. She made many good friends at the college, and she kept up with several of her contemporaries; they would occasionally meet for lunch in London, as well as circulating a round-robin letter every year to update each other with their news. This lasted until Ruth was the only survivor some five years ago.
Image: Ruth Ivy Wildbur as a student
Ruth’s first teaching job after college was at St Hilda’s PNEU School in Bushey in Hertfordshire, a boarding school for young girls, which had been founded in 1918 with the objective of “educating girls for the future”. It is still flourishing as an independent Prep School today.
A year after starting her teaching career, Ruth went on an exciting adventure – when she was selected for a year-long teaching job in Abadan in Iran (then called Persia), looking after a class of eight year olds, children of the office workers at the Anglo-Persian Oil Company’s huge Abadan refinery.
On her return home, Ruth started teaching at an independent girls’ school at 3, Queen’s Gardens, Bayswater, in London. She stayed in accommodation just off the King’s Road, and there she met her future husband, David Somerset. They married in King’s Lynn in 1955 and subsequently had two children, Louise and Henry. David worked at The Bank of England for his whole career, culminating in a spell as Chief Cashier of the Bank of England from 1980 to 1988, when his signature appeared on all our bank notes.
Image: Charlotte Mason College Ambleside, taken in 1947 by Ruth Ivy Wildbur
Following the birth of her first child, Ruth paused her professional teaching career to bring up her children, based in a family home in East Sussex. But she gave both her children an excellent head start, teaching them the basics of reading and writing from a very young age, well before they went to school.
Ruth subsequently became increasingly interested in dyslexia, and in 1973 she attended a “Course for Teachers of Dyslexic Children” at the Helen Arkell Dyslexia Centre in London, thus qualifying as one of the first specialist dyslexia teachers in the UK. After a few years teaching young pupils at home, she became a peripatetic special needs teacher at Temple Grove, an independent Prep School in East Sussex. She continued teaching there well into her 70s, but even then, didn’t completely retire, as she spent many hours giving her five grandchildren the same head start as she had given to her two children.
Image: Charlotte Mason College staff and students 1948. Ruth can be seen in the centre of the middle row in the spotty dress.
Ruth died in September 2022 at the age of 94, some eight years after her husband. Her teaching skills and expertise, first learned at Charlotte Mason College in the late 1940s, had a hugely positive influence on the very many people she taught during her life.
A special thank you to Ruth’s family who kindly donated her original Charlotte Mason College blazer together with a collection of books to the University of Cumbria archives.
Share your own memories here.