Stoatley Rough School

The Boys were teenage and child-Holocaust survivors, who were brought to the UK after the war for rest and rehabilitation.

The Boys had survived the Holocaust as slave labourers in the Nazi concentration camp system, in hiding and by living alone. 

After arrival in the UK, members of the Boys spent time in the reception centres before being moved to children’s homes known as hostels. Others were sent direct to boarding school or yeshivas, and those who were sick spent time in sanatoriums.

Some of the Boys attended the Stoatley Rough School.

Overview

Stoatley Rough School was in Haslemere in Surrey, on the South Downs in southern England. Founded in 1934, it was a mixed boarding school and catered mainly for refugee Jewish children.

The school functioned between 1934 and 1960. The Quaker Germany Emergency Committee was involved in the running of the school. Four of the Boys attended the school. The school was in a large country house with extensive gardens. It is now a private house.

The Staff

Dr Hilde Lion, a German Jewish teacher, was the headmistress.

Bertha Bracey, a member of the Quaker Germany Emergency Committee, chaired the board of governors from 1938 to 1945 and was a school governor until 1960. Bracey was one of the first aid workers on the ground in Germany after the war. She was with the Boys in Theresienstadt and flew with them to Windermere.

The Stoatley Rough Story
Teachers and educators who were forced out of Germany after 1933 on political grounds or as a result of their Jewish ancestry founded more than 20 schools, like Stoatley Rough, in exile across the world. These were largely boarding schools oriented towards the German progressive educational reform tradition of Landerziehungsheime (literally “countryside educational homes”).

In Britain alone there were seven such schools, among them Bunce Court and Butcombe Court, where other members of the Boys were educated. The schools differed from one another conceptually and organisationally in several respects but they all had one common task: to support the uprooted and confused refugee children as they developed a new and complex identity and came to terms with an alien environment.

The sole survivor of these schools in the UK is Gordonstoun in Scotland, which was founded by Kurt Hahn, a relation of the CBF’s Lola Harn-Warburg.

In 1960, the refugee charity the Ockenden Venture took over the school and renamed it Quartermaine.