A typewritten programme preserved in a Canadian university archive brings us back to a largely vanished corner of Cuckfield’s educational life. Its announcement is simple: the pupils of Warden Court School present William Shakespeare’s As You Like It.

Associated with 1954, the production brought together a substantial cast of schoolgirls, supported by adults responsible for its production, dancing and musical accompaniment. Among the performers was a young Jane Smerdon, whose later career would take her into professional theatre, BBC Television and the world of Canadian broadcasting.

The programme offers a glimpse of a school that has disappeared—and leaves some intriguing questions for anyone who remembers it.

A school beside the future Warden Park

Warden Court was a private girls’ school off Broad Street, on a site close to the present Warden Park Secondary Academy. The house was subsequently demolished and its grounds redeveloped for housing. Cuckfield Museum includes the school in its account of the town’s varied educational establishments.

There is some uncertainty about when the school closed. A local historical account gives its operating dates as 1867–1955, while West Sussex Record Office places its closure at approximately 1957. Whichever date proves correct, the Shakespeare production belongs to its final years.

The Record Office supplies a little information about its leadership. Miss Whittle, described as principal until the school’s closure, had previously been secretary at Tortington Park School near Arundel. She entered into partnership at Warden Court with Tortington’s mathematics teacher, although the catalogue does not establish when that arrangement began.

The girls enter the Forest of Arden

The surviving programme names Ann Byrne as Rosalind, Marilyn Wallers as Orlando, Anne Rowe as Celia and Rona Phillips as Touchstone. Diana Spencer played the banished Duke Senior, while Ann Bailey appeared as his usurping brother, Frederick.

Susan Hayes took the part of the melancholy Jaques. Shakespeare also gives the name Jaques to a brother of Oliver and Orlando: this second character was played by Joyce Hocken, with Heidi Marsen as Oliver.

The remaining named roles were:

Diana Woodington also represented Hymen, the figure associated with the marriages at the play’s conclusion.

The supporting cast deserves to be remembered too. Auriel Huber, Ann Firman, Marian-Jean Turner and Joyce Hamilton appeared as lords attending Frederick, with Jacqueline Kay as a page. Lydia Seton, Patricia Peters, Susan Hall, Diana Woodington and Lavinia Hampson played lords attending Duke Senior. Carol Pitcan, Jennifer Lang, Sandra Wilson and Rosemary Monley were listed as pages.

The programme indicates an all-female production, with pupils undertaking the male as well as the female characters. It was a considerable shared undertaking, requiring the cast to learn Shakespeare’s language and coordinate a performance moving between Oliver’s orchard, Frederick’s court and the Forest of Arden.

Experienced help behind the scenes

The production was credited to Miss Muriel Staveacre, L.G.S.M., M.R.S.T. Mrs Munby arranged the dances, with Miss Copeland as accompanist, while Miss Marian Thompson accompanied the songs.

A potentially significant contemporary reference helps place the producer in context. The Banbury Advertiser of 9 April 1947, page 7, names a Miss Muriel Staveacre, L.G.S.M., as an examiner for the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art in a report of pupils’ elocution successes. The matching name and qualification strongly suggest that this was the same woman, although a further connecting record would be needed to make the identification conclusive.

If so, the Warden Court pupils were working with someone experienced in assessing speech and performance.

The programme also preserves the practical arrangements. The play was presented in two parts, separated by a ten-minute interval. Within each part, the curtain would be drawn briefly once. Music, dancing and changes of scene were therefore all elements of the presentation. Whether the performance took place inside the school or elsewhere remains unknown.

From Phebe to the BBC

The participant whose later life can be securely traced is Jane Smerdon, the production’s Phebe.

Born in Windsor on 27 April 1942, Jane Elisabeth Daintry Smerdon would have been eleven or twelve during 1954. Laurier’s catalogue places her Warden Court records in the period 1952–1954; she subsequently attended Sherborne School for Girls in Dorset.

Her involvement with theatre continued into adulthood. Working under the name Elisabeth Dunbar, she performed and worked backstage before moving into BBC Television. In 1968 she married Ian Easterbrook and moved to Canada, where she became a sessional lecturer in the University of Guelph’s Drama Department. Later employment included CBC Television in Toronto and positions as a house mother at colleges in Canada, England and Italy. She died in Fergus, Ontario, on 21 February 2017.

The Warden Court programme is thus an early surviving record of a lifelong involvement in the arts. It cannot tell us whether this particular performance inspired her career, but its preservation among her papers gives the school production a place in that larger story.

Why the programme survives in Canada

The document is held by Laurier Archives and Special Collections at Wilfrid Laurier University, in the Jane Elisabeth Daintry Easterbrook fonds, S514, file 4.3.

Responding to an enquiry, archivist Cindy Preece confirmed that the file contains seven letters written by Jane to her parents in 1953 and 1954, six Warden Court school reports from those years, and the one-page As You Like It programme. The university supplied a scan of the programme but explained that privacy concerns prevented it from providing scans of the childhood letters and reports. It holds no additional Warden Court records.

One qualification matters: the programme page itself carries no visible date. Its association with papers from 1953–1954 supports that period, but does not independently establish the exact date of the performance.

What was everyday life like?

The programme gives us firm evidence of drama, music and dancing at Warden Court. Jane’s surviving reports and correspondence establish the existence of regular assessments and letters home. They do not, without access to their contents, reveal what she thought about school.

We still lack a verified account of its early-1950s timetable, lessons, meals, uniforms, dormitories, discipline or outings. It would be tempting to fill those gaps with familiar images of girls’ boarding-school life, but Warden Court’s own story deserves evidence of its own.

Nor has a contemporary local newspaper review of this production yet been identified. Searches using the school, play title, year and producer’s name have not located one, but the actual 1954 Mid Sussex Times pages have not been examined. The absence of a searchable result is not proof that the performance went unreported.

Further background may survive locally. Cuckfield Museum identifies Joan Ward’s booklet Education in Cuckfield as a source on the town’s schools, and has described school photograph files and a location map among its resources. Maisie Wright’s Cuckfield in Old Picture Postcards also includes the now-demolished Warden Court.

For now, the programme restores a group of young performers to the historical record. Can any reader put faces to these names, remember Miss Whittle or the adults who prepared the production, or supply photographs and memories of Warden Court? Such recollections could help turn this surviving cast list into a fuller account of life at one of Cuckfield’s lost schools.

Programme reproduced courtesy of Laurier Archives and Special Collections, Wilfrid Laurier University, Jane Elisabeth Daintry Easterbrook fonds, S514, file 4.3. Names above follow the surviving typescript; corrections supported by family or school records would be welcome.