Read Online The Nightingale Shore Murder by Rosemary Cook - Free Book Online

line, Frances Wilkinson, great-great-grand-daughter of Thomas, and widow of the Reverend Edward Leigh, left to move into one of her properties in the village of Dringhouses, and Middlethorpe Hall was let out to tenants.
    The census of 1851 shows that the Hall was being used as a private school for girls. Sisters Lucy and Eleanor Walker were the tenants, and there were 21 pupils aged between nine and 18. Ten years later, the school was in different hands. Anna M Johnson, aged 42, is listed in the census return as the teacher, with her cousin Susan Steel, ‘Mamselle Laurency’, the French teacher, and Elizabeth Pearson. There are 35 pupils and seven servants in residence. It is not certain that Florence Shore attended Middlethorpe Hall when it was a school, as no school records survive and she is not listed on the 1871 census – she would only have been six years old at the time. And in the 1881 census, she is a ‘visitor’ although her occupation is given as ‘scholar’. But her application to the Queen Alexandra’s Imperial Military Nursing Reserve, some years later, gives York as the place of her schooling, so it is possible that she would previously have been at Middlethorpe Hall as a pupil – particularly as the Shore family was related to the Wilkinsons by marriage.
    Coincidentally, another famous nurse named Ethel Manson, later Ethel Bedford Fenwick, also went to school at Middlethorpe Hall a few years before Florence, and recorded the fact in her ‘Who’s Who’ entry. Mrs Bedford Fenwick would be the leading light in the campaign that led to a formal register of qualified nurses being set up in the 1920s. Her path would also cross again with Florence’s in the deployment of nurses to the field hospitals of the First World War.
    Florence’s position as distant cousin and regular visitor to the Wilkinsons is underlined in the slightly exasperated tone of a letter from Frances Wilkinson to her mother Louisa in January 1884, when Florence Shore was 19. Frances Wilkinson was ten years older than Florence Shore, and had just completed a course in landscape gardening – she was on her way to becoming England’s first professional landscape gardener, known as Fanny Rollo Wilkinson, responsible for Vauxhall Park in London, and, with her sister Louisa M. Garrett, a notable supporter of votes for women. She wrote: ‘
There seems no help for it but Florence’s coming here before she goes to you. I do not believe she ought to use her eyes without an alteration in her glasses. She says she always squints.’
    Interestingly, while her family home was being used for the private education of girls with families who could pay school fees, Frances Leigh (nee Barlow, later Wilkinson) was founding and supporting a school for the children of the village of Dringhouses, just across the Knavesmire racecourse from Middlethorpe Hall. ‘St Edward’s National School, Dringhouses’ had opened in 1849 in a brick schoolroom next to the church, and later moved to a new building paid for by Leigh across the village street.
    From 1862, it was compulsory for the principal teacher of a school to keep a daily log book of events concerning the school and its teachers. The log book for Dringhouses School dates back to 1863, and records some of the local events and issues which might also have affected the girls at Middlethorpe Hall, on the other side of the Knavesmire. The scarlet fever outbreak in the village, which saw 24 children absent from school on 30th January 1871, must have equally concerned the teachers at Middlethorpe. In January 1876, the log records: ‘
Very small attendance this week due probably to the cold weather and to the fact that one of the children has died of an infectious disease
.’ In June: ‘
There appears to be fever of some kind in the village, which seriously affects attendance. The Acomb school is closed on the same account
.’