Miss Mary died in 1962, and twenty years later Miss Knowles retired and went to live in a cottage in a nearby village. Josephine Ferguson summed up Dumbrells in the following terms:
unfortunately for posterity, there will never again be a school like it, and there will probably never again be such remarkable and dedicated characters as the Dumbrell sisters and Miss Knowles, who devoted their lives to teaching just a few of us, out of four generations, to have not only an erudite and resourceful outlook on life, but a compassionate manner towards our fellow beings, at the same time saving us from being priggish goody-goodies by their delightful sense of humour, which they passed on to us. They were unique women, but would never have thought themselves so.
By the time the school closed Camilla was married and living in Wiltshire, but she often came back to Plumpton to see her parents and would occasionally go and visit her old teacher. It was an indication of just how much she’d enjoyed Dumbrells and how much she owed the school for her happy start in life. Miss Knowles had followed her progress in the meantime, as she had no doubt followed that of all her favourite pupils. When one of Camilla’s contemporaries was picking up a nephew from the school in 1973, Miss Knowles excitedly showed her a copy of the Tatler with photographs of Princess Anne’s wedding to Mark Phillips. There in the line-up was Camilla.
7
Quite a lot of little girls who are in love with ponies during their pre-teens transfer their affection when they hit puberty to boys – and their ponies are left to languish in the paddock with matted manes. Not so Camilla’s; she merely spread the love. Her ponies were replaced by bigger ponies and then horses, but she never lost her passion for them – and they were an important link between her and her father. As Annabel’s enthusiasm for horses ebbed away, it was increasingly just the two of them who shared this passion.
But there was room in her heart for boys too. She discovered the attraction of the opposite sex in her early teens. It was all perfectly innocent, but Pony Club dances in Lewes Town Hall and friends’ parties suddenly became way more exciting. When the lights dimmed and the tempo changed, everyone started dancing slowly, kissing and doing a bit of exploratory groping. Girls from good, stable families may have read about sex, thought about it, giggled about it with their friends and developed passionate crushes on boys – they may even have fallen in love with one or two of them – but even so, not many girls like Camilla lost their virginity before the age or seventeen or eighteen. And she was no exception, although she did have a first kiss at just twelve or thirteen. She was a pretty girl with a shy dimpled smile and boys found her very attractive.
By her early teens, Camilla was only at home at the weekends and in school holidays. In 1958, at the age of eleven, she had become a weekly boarder at a fashionable London school in Kensington, named after the street in which it was situated, Queen’s Gate. The difference between the two schools could not have been more extreme. At Dumbrells, the ambient noise was birdsong and farm animals. At Queen’s Gate it was the rumbling of traffic and the bustle of the capital. There were no sheep or cart horses to gaze at out of the window, no gardens to run into at break times, no orchid woods. The nearest open space was Hyde Park, a fifteen-minute walk away across busy roads and through the filth of traffic fumes. But there was a host of museums and other cultural centres on the doorstep. The Natural History Museum, the Science Museum and the Victoria and Albert Museum were just a short walk away; the Royal Albert Hall and the major theatres and galleries were not much further.
Like Dumbrells, Queen’s Gate had started off in the founder’s home, in Stanhope Gardens, in 1891, but a year later the school moved round the corner into a leased building at 132 Queen’s Gate. Its founder was Miss Eleanor Beatrice Wyatt, but she was principal for no more than eight years. The woman who took the school into the twentieth century was Miss Annabel Douglas, an American who had come to the UK as a student. She took the lease of the house next door, no. 133, doubling the capacity, and her own replacement in 1919, Miss Spalding, enlarged it still further by buying no. 131.
Two more houses have been added since then for the junior school but to this day, the school still has its premises in this elegant Victorian terrace, in one of the most sought-after residential areas of London. It is a warren of staircases, mostly small rooms and narrow passageways on five floors. On the face of it, the site is utterly impractical for a school that today has more than 500 pupils, with no playing fields on site and no parking – although who needs playing fields with all those staircases? Yet it has been successfully educating privileged young ladies for 125 years and everyone seems very happy there.
Nowadays, Queen’s Gate is as academic as the next school, and in February 2016, the Duchess made a return visit to officially open an impressive new science laboratory in the basement. But in the late 1950s and early 1960s, when she was there as a pupil, there was no real expectation that any girl would go on to university after school or have a career. There were no high-tech science labs – like most public girls’ schools at that time, there were wooden benches with bunsen burners, and maybe a diagram of the alimentary canal and a frog or two to be dissected in the biology lab. Girls in all but a few fee-paying schools were very disadvantaged compared to their sisters in state grammar schools. In the private system girls were being prepared for marriage and motherhood – a smattering of European languages, a readiness to do good deeds in the community and an ability to cook and sew were deemed more important than academic qualifications. Girls’ education has undergone a revolution in the intervening years, and Camilla just missed it.
Girls who worked hard in those days, moreover, the swots, were definitely not cool. The cool kids mucked about, smoked, drank and bunked off lessons, and they were the ones that had the friends. Camilla was never short of friends and she couldn’t have been less interested in the idea of a career. She wasn’t itching to travel or see the world and had no desire to go to university. She wasn’t ambitious, and she wasn’t influenced by her more aspiring contemporaries. She wanted the life her mother and so many of her mother’s county friends had. She wanted no more from life than to be happily married to an upper-class man and live a sociable life in the country with horses, dogs, children and someone to look after them all and do the hard graft.
‘I cannot believe that Queen’s Gate has been going for 125 years,’ she said after she’d unveiled a plaque marking her visit in 2016. ‘I feel like it’s 125 years since I was here. I wish I could say I was a head girl, or even a prefect or captain of games – I was none of those, I might have been in the swimming team. But I do remember I was a boarder here, which I hear now is abolished. I was a weekly boarder and lived right at the top of the school, quite cold, I think we were always made to have the windows open – fresh air.
‘I did leave when I was sixteen, I didn’t go on to the sixth form. I think in those days we weren’t encouraged to go to university. I think the very, very clever girls went on but nobody seemed to give us much inspiration to go on. So we went off and explored the university of life, and Paris and Florence and London.’
She only boarded for the first couple of years. In 1960, Rosalind bought a flat round the corner in Queen’s Gate Gardens so Camilla could become a day girl while she and Annabel, who followed her to Queen’s Gate, had somewhere to live. To look after the girls, and effectively to chaperone them, she installed an unmarried friend called Cecilia Hay, an interior decorator – and who was nearly sent to an early grave by the experience.
Camilla would often travel up on the train from Lewes at the