Stoatley Rough
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 funding and running of the school. Four of the Boys attended the school.
THE HOUSE
The school was in a large country house with extensive gardens. It is now a private house.
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 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 exile 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.
The Boys
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The Staff
Dr Hilde Lion, a German Jewish teacher, was the headmistress.
Bertha Bracey, a member of the Quaker Germany Emergency Committee, found a donor for the school building. She 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 Thereseinstadt and flew with them to Windermere.