Special Collections & Archives

Snapshot from the Archives: "A Diary of Beginnings" - Springtime at Froebel

As springtime returns once again to the beautiful Roehampton campus, with birdsong and blossoms blooming, it seems timely to revisit the nature notebooks kept by Froebel students over 100 years ago. Nature study is very much part of the Froebelian philosophy of education, and we are fortunate to hold, in the Froebel Archive, the exquisitely illustrated diaries kept by students Hilda Millar and Dorothy Coates.   This post follows a previous story that featured extracts from the same 1922 notebooks. 

Hilda Millar's "Diary of Beginnings in the Animal and Bird World, Grove House, 1922", documents the flora and fauna that would emerge on campus at this time of year, much of which is still to be found today. On this charmingly decorated page, she writes about the bird life:
 

"Birds, too many for me to enumerate, fly about uttering their joyous songs -  the whole garden is filled with life.

We are very fortunate and very proud to have so many different kinds of birds in the grounds; and we hope that we may entice more and more to visit us as we want our trees and bushes to provide a real bird-sanctuary. As spring approaches, one by one the birds begin to sing – the males in their most glorious plumage, singing with all their might - oblivious of all else but the mate they desire to win.

A little later comes the busy time of nest-building, and we see the birds flying tirelessly backwards and forwards, carrying straw, twigs and grass in their beaks, to make the home that is to be – then the eggs are laid. Nests of all the following birds were found this spring – the house sparrow, hedge sparrow, chaffinch, blue tit, song-thrush, mistle thrush, blackbird, swallow, robin, skylark, wild duck and moorhen. Every day through the summer we hear a chiffchaff calling from the trees near Court and tits of at least three different kinds sing shrilly outside the nature rooms, while a family of nuthatches tap the trees in the woodland."

On the following pages she lists all the birds and their nests found on campus, plus mammals, insects and amphibians (including a "human swarm" on fete day!) 

Most exciting is the sighting of a baby cuckoo being fed by its hoodwinked and hardworking foster parents:

"We were very fortunate in seeing [for several days] a fully fledged young cuckoo being fed by robins. The cuckoo sat on a post crying out incessantly, like a spoilt child, while the robins hurried to feed it, and dropped the dainty morsels they found into its huge mouth - as they did so they stood on his shoulders to get a better perch."

Coates must have witnessed the same scene, or a very similar one, which she illustrated with this charming pen and ink cartoon of "a baby cuckoo being 'fed' by its foster parents!":

Her talent for caricature is also evident in this illustration of some other campus birds: "The wagtails are the smartest birds that 'walk' and have quite a distinguished appearance beside the sparrow family, who can only hop:"

Millar writes this colourful description of "Grove House grounds from the zoologists’ point of view":

"Grove House, standing in its thirty-four acres of ground, affords countless opportunities for the study of animal life, and the more one looks the more inhabitants one finds on the ground, tree and bush. Even the hockey field, much used as it is, provides a home for numberless earthworms of every size which, even if they are invisible during the day, leave their obvious, sinuous tracks on the ground; and after dark, the searcher by torchlight may see them travelling about or hard at work, pulling leaves into their burrows to protect and keep them warm.

Outside the sheds and greenhouses, common cross spiders make their wonderful webs. Brightly coloured moths and butterflies of many species flit about the herbaceous border – our garden is glorious to them as well as to us! The more humble caterpillars, particularly the cabbage white -  one of our first friends, eat silently and steadily at the cabbage and nasturtium leaves, getting ready for the metamorphosis which we shall watch with such interest – little they know of the attention we shall focus on them then! Newts, fish, snails, beetles and tadpoles inhabit the lake, and the blue agra dragonfly flits over it, his wings glinting in the sunlight."

Her sightings are also set out in a calendar format, so you can see the flora and fauna develop through the seasons. February's sightings include a dormouse, many birds, and two tortoises in the pond spotted by the Froebel librarian, Miss Barnard: 

Whilst many of the species recorded in these century-old diaries are sadly no longer seen in our grounds, there are many which still persist. Although the "water tortoises" described by Millar may be long gone, one of our current librarians was surprised to see this mature terrapin sunning itself on a log on Froebel lake last week: 

This terrapin has been a resident here for years, thankfully solo as a breeding pair would quickly decimate the local wildlife. This year we also have a new pair of Greylag geese on the lake, to join our Egyptian and Canadian families; one of the newcomers seems to be tagged: 

We still have plenty of common (smooth) newts on campus, like the one Millar paints here alongside a "Triton" (the now much rarer crested newt) - though sadly we find many young ones become dangerously dehydrated as they make their perilous way across campus to their breeding ground in the Digby pond at this time of year. If you find one (like this one, below) that seems lifeless, you can gently pick it up and drop it in the water - they will often revive and swim away to live and breed another day.

The Froebel students of 1922 helped to create a woodland garden on the College grounds, as described in Millar's diary:

"Week by week, almost day by day our little wild corner is becoming steadily more like a real woodland". She goes on to quote a verse from Amphion by Tennyson (but without citing her sources, which today would result in marks lost for plagiarism!):

'And I must work through months of toil

And years of cultivation

Upon my proper patch of soil

To grow my own plantation.

I'll take the showers as they fall,

I will not vex my bosom

Enough if at the end of all

A little garden blossom."

In recent years, the pioneering Growhampton project, led by Roehampton students, created a similar forest garden, with fruit trees and bushes bearing berries and herbs. Sadly this sustainable food project, which ran from 2013 to 2024, has recently closed down due to loss of funding, although the last of the much-loved rescue hens will remain to live out their lives here. Rather like their forebears a hundred years ago, when Froebel College had its own food sources -  these notebooks record the kitchen gardens, orchards and chickens kept at the time. We still have the ancient orchard, abundant with blossom and bird life this time of year, and with apples in the autumn.

Some snapshots of the campus in spring today: Above, an ancient apple tree blossoms in the old orchard, and another by the henhouse; a view across the Froebel lake to Grove House. 

Below, spring blooms in the Growhampton forest garden.

It is always a joy to celebrate the return of spring life to our lovely green and wooded campus, just as Dorothy and Hilda did 102 years ago.