In May 1926, Anna Essinger opened a progressive co-educational boarding school at Ulm in Germany. When Hitler came to power in 1933, she realised that the new regime was opposed to everything she stood for and, writes Deborah Cadbury, “resolved to move her entire establishment, lock, stock and barrel, out of Germany, right under the noses of the Nazi authorities”.
So Essinger set off with “an advance party of six teachers and six senior boys and girls to make preparations in England for the arrival of the others. Sixty-five children would follow two weeks later.” To ensure secrecy, each of the three separate groups “masquerad[ed] as day trippers on a picnic with a member of staff”.
Thus was born Bunce Court school. It was inevitably a very “Germanic” institution – most of the teachers and pupils were German and, despite constant exhortations to “Speak English!”, some had strong accents – yet it operated in the Kent countryside and then in Shropshire throughout the second world war. Many of the staff, keen to escape Nazi Germany, were distinctly overqualified: the boiler man had been a director at the Deutsches Theater, while the maths teacher was a distinguished astronomer. And there was also a notable stress on traditional Germanic high culture. (The music teacher almost had a fit when pupils suggested a performance of Gilbert and Sullivan.)
