| Rebecca Reinhardt Craighill (1897-1947) was St. Margaret's
School Headmistress from 1943 to 1947, when she
died at the age of 50. She is loyally and lovingly remembered
by her class of 1947 in their 50th reunion year,
which marks also the 100th anniversary of her birth. |
| Mrs. Craighill's tenure at St. Margaret's and that of our class
coincided exactly. These were the years central to the decade
of the forties, half in time of war, half in time of peace,
all in time of deeply formative influence on our lives as lived
during the half-century since elapsed. Yet how little we knew of
this gentle, strong, tenacious lady, whose influence still
affects our ways of seeing, thinking and doing! |
| In a May 1943 article in The Virginia Churchman, written
when Mrs. Craighill was appointed headmistress of our school,
Natalie Blanton, a St. Catherine's colleague, chronicles her
life: Just a year after her 1919 graduation from Bryn Mawr
(where friends knew her as 'Becky'), a year during which she
taught at the school that she had attended in
her home town of Wilmington, Delaware, she sailed for
devastated France with Miss Anne Morgan's Committee. For
eighteen months she served with the Committee, stationed
first at Soissons, then at Blerancourt. She drove a Model-T
Ford truck, called 'The Jack Rabbit' over war-torn roads,
minding its vagaries carefully, for she considered it a
disgrace to be towed in, and counting it a privilege to
follow the nurses into a sick room, to boil instruments
or help as need arose. |
Yet for all the intimacy of life in a small boarding school,
where we shared talk at the table and at numerous other times
and places, with faculty and other students, I, for one, never
knew of this instance of independence, courage, dedication, and
idealism on Rebecca Craighill's part. Nor did I know much about
her beyond the facts that she taught for a number of years (16,
in fact; 8 full-time) at our sister school, St. Catherine's in
Richmond; that she was a widow (she married Maurice Langhorne
Craighill in 1923); that she had two children, Langhorne (b.
1925) and Margaret (Peggy, b. 1930). But now I know that after
both her third child, George (b. 1931), and her husband died in
February and July 1937, she took herself that very summer and
during three succeeding summers to Columbia University, where in
1940 she received her MA in teaching history. During these years,
Mrs. Craighill and her two children lived on the St. Catherine's
campus. And now she had prepared and qualified herself for the
move she would soon make to Tappahannock. The school she came to
in 1943 had an enrollment of some 100 girls, mostly boarders,
divided among the four high-school years. We were often four
students to a room, with strict lights out at, I think, 10 o'clock.
With almost no individual privacy, we valued the white-flag system,
whereby any room or object that bore the words 'white flag' was
sacrosanct, not to be touched or gazed upon. The custom also
instilled in us the habit of honor. |
| Seniors, who occupied the Cottage, could sleep late on Sundays,
but we all went to church at St. John's, where we formed the
choir and where one of us would serve as crucifer. Weekday
chapel was comprised of announcements, scripture reading, a
few prayers, and a hymn or two before the school day and before
study hall at night. Having no chapel, we used the study hall
in St. Margaret's Hall, as we did for all communal purposes, except
dining.
|
| Once a week we boarders lined up and went into Mrs. Craighill's
office to collect from her personally our modest allowance. I
think we did this class by class, seniors first, and that
my own allowance reached the princely sum of 75 cents by my senior
year. This method of payment enabled Mrs. Craighill to see and
speak to each of us, individually, at least once a week.
Characteristically, she would ask about and comment on our
problems, triumphs, and personal situations. We would usually
spend our allowance at Peoples Drug Store, having signed out
to leave campus in the company of at least one other girl, and never
crossing the boundaries within which our forays into town were
strictly contained. Seniors presided over nightly study hall,
during which talking was prohibited, and from which we signed
out, in limited numbers, to use the washroom. We appreciated our
beautiful campus, but were honor bound not to put so much as a
toe into the Rappahannock River. Hockey and basketball were the
principal sports, 1942-43 marking the establishment of the Blue
and Grey teams. The 1945 yearbook's calendar notes for November
28, 'Gym suits arrive,' and for February 24, 'St. Catherine's
plays us in basketball.' I suspect that the arrival of gym suits
heralded the beginning of extra-mural sports! |
| During those wartime and post-wartime years, social life was usually
limited to what our own resources could supply. On many Saturday
nights there were readings or movies in the gym; and there were
traditional activities, such as a fall hayride and pageant, stunt
night, Christmas caroling in the town, a spring horse show, class
picnics, the junior-senior banquet (during which the juniors'
prophecy for the seniors and the seniors' bequests to the juniors
were greeted with hilarity), and May Day. There were also several
school plays each year. And there was the junior-senior dance in
the winter, suspended, apparently, 'for the duration,' as we used
to say, and resumed in 1946. At that time it wasn't easy for
everyone to find an eligible male to invite, especially for those
of us who lived far away, or for those of us who, because our
fathers were in the service, had no steady home base or community
to draw from. What joy we felt when a student's father, stationed
at the U.S. Naval Academy, sent a flotilla of midshipmen to the
1946 dance! |
Over all of this Mrs. Craighill presided, bringing in faculty from
colleges along the Eastern Seaboard, as well as from the Seven
Sisters. Activities increased in number, from 10 pictured in the
1945 yearbook, to 16 in the next. We finally had a school newspaper,
albeit mimeographed "The Campus Tides", established in October 1944;
the yearbook, launched in 1945, was composed of pages of typed copy
and black-and-white snapshots, with students' artwork decorating
key divisions. It was then 'lithoprinted' or photostated, bound
in a soft blue cover with a badge containing SMS and 1945 in gray.
It had no title. Our goal was to get each one lavishly annotated
and inscribed by every student, teacher, administrator, and
maintenance person we could collar. The messages in mine pledge
eternal memories, undying affection, profound admiration, and
contain inside jokes. The second had the newly designed school
seal in gray on its floppy blue cover; and the third, in gray
hardcover, with the seal in blue, was our class's farewell. We
dedicated it to our class sponsor, Mrs. Judith Ham, teacher of
French and Spanish. She became acting head toward the end of our
senior year. The yearbook, having gone to press before the final
days of Mrs. Craighill's terminal illness, doesn't mention these
circumstances. The school seal that graced the second yearbook
also graced the seniors' newly designed school rings in 1946,
before which time there was no class ring. For the seal it was
necessary to discover which St. Margaret was our patron. That
she proved to be St. Margaret of Scotland
provided the school with a theme that it has enjoyed and exploited
ever since. As these traditions and innovations became part of the school,
they brought with them cohesion and strengthened morale. |
| Some of us from Mrs. Craighill's time have felt that her short
tenure caused her strong contribution to be eclipsed in the
collective memory. Indeed, after her time, there were difficult
days, with a threateningly diminished enrollment and other problems.
Mrs. Craighill herself had to solidify her own base with her own
appointees and with her tact and spine. As one of her appointees,
English teacher and '46 class sponsor Barbara Wiggin Gent,
recently wrote on learning of '47's gift of a memorial bench
to the school, "She was a really kind and capable boss-lady as well
as an excellent head of the school . . . .". The first yearbook was
created with her blessing, as was the first school ring, and the
school seal. I can attest to that because I was part of all of them. |
| In addition, those years brought shortages and rationing, as well as
the constant backdrop of the war and the adjustments necessary
during it and its aftermath. (Military marching was added to
activities presented during spring's gym exhibition.) That many
fathers were in the armed forces affected the school's enrollment,
as St. Margaret's provided academic and social stability during
those years of uncertainty. Keeping the school staffed and
supplied in a time of human and material shortages must have
provided Mrs. Craighill with serious challenges; and ingenuity
and optimism were as essential as a sense of humor. Yet
we felt a security, a serenity, a solidarity at the school. |
| Then, with our headmistress's untimely death, from a lymphoma, on
April 26, 1947, we felt a great loss. She was buried in Hollywood
Cemetery in Richmond, after a funeral service at St. Stephen's
Church on April 30. We seniors were taken to her funeral, where
joyful hymns, complete with alleluias, celebrated her life and
spirit. White was everywhere, including in the masses of flowers.
For me, an abiding memory is seeing her children singing along,
with straight backs and clear gazes, reflecting her legacy of strength
and courage. |
| During her life, she continued to grow in grace; it is the school's
loss and ours that she did not also grow in age to, at the very
least, the biblical three score years and ten. Her gift to
us and to the school was the example of her personal life, the
enrichment of the school's stature, and her values that endowed
our individual lives with reverence for the habit of honor. |
About the Author Dr. Joan Fillmore Hooker '47 has a Ph.D.
in English from the New York University where she received the
Seigel Award for Distinguished Undergraduate Teaching in the
Humanities in 1982. When Joan is not teaching Shakespeare and
20th century American literature to NYU students, she operates
a bed and breakfast in her home located in the historic Brooklyn
Heights neighborhood.
During her three years as a boarding student at St. Margaret's School,
Joan served as secretary of her Junior class and president of her
senior year. Her favorite extracurricular activities included
working on the school yearbook and newspaper.
1947 photo of Joan Fillmore Hooker courtesy of
Anne Libby Atkinson '46.
|
The class of '47 honored their headmistress, Rebecca Craighill, by making a gift of an elegant loveseat on St. Margaret's campus overlooking the Rappahannock River. Current headmistress Margaret Broad enjoys the restfull view.
