A school, Isabella Drummond suggested in her 1937 Founder’s Day address, is like a person. Over time every element of it changes, yet the essence remains recognisable. She used this image deliberately, because she was preparing the community for the news that NLCS would be leaving its long established Camden home for Canons. She wanted them to understand that what gives a school its identity is not stone or uniform or geography, but character, and that character is durable even through profound transition. Her reassurance rested on the belief that permanence and change are not opposites but partners, and that evolution is sometimes required to protect what is most deeply rooted.
Her own leadership embodied exactly that principle. The idea of moving the school first came to her not through strategy but through a simple walk taken in 1927 with two NLCS teachers after travelling on the newly extended Edgware branch of the Northern Line. Edgware was then still a small Middlesex village surrounded by open fields. They walked for miles through farmland until encountering a beautiful old house with a sign that it was for sale. It must have felt improbable that this landscape could ever belong to NLCS, yet something in it lodged in her imagination. She returned to the idea again and again, walking out on Saturdays in search of a site that might secure the school’s future. The Camden neighbourhood of the 1920s was no longer prosperous and pupil numbers had begun to fall as families moved outward. Commuting conditions were difficult, and the air quality was poor. She knew the school needed something bold, and she committed herself to the search with a patience that would last more than a decade.
By the time the school finally moved in 1939, the world had shifted around her. War was imminent. The buildings at Canons were not yet ready. Girls were placed with families who lived near Edgware, and Hilda Stoneley, née Cox (ONL 1945) who is now ninety-nine years of age boarded with a doctor. Her memories of that time offer a vivid, personal window into the kind of leader Miss Drummond was. She recalls her as kind and strict, busy and friendly, and absolutely determined that every girl should do well. She remembers a neat and tidy presence who wanted her pupils not only to be orderly but to be interested in everything around them and to possess a sense of humour. Her three guiding rules were simple. Rules must be observed. Be friendly and approachable. Always think of others. They were, as Hilda puts it, exactly the sort of principles Miss Buss would have approved of.
Hilda’s handwritten memories of Isabella Drummond
What stands out in Hilda’s recollection is the spirit behind those rules. Miss Drummond urged the girls to look out for anyone shy or unhappy and insisted that no teasing be tolerated. Her strictness was rooted in the seriousness of the times. Hilda tells the story of her aunt, who had sent a box of spring flowers from Devon to the school, believing the London girls would enjoy them. The parcel was thrown away because regulations forbade anything being sent to the school. The girls never saw the flowers and only learned the story later. Hilda reflects that they did not grasp the gravity of the political climate on the eve of war, but Miss Drummond did, and her carefulness was an act of responsibility rather than severity.
Hilda also remembers the atmosphere of those final Camden days, including a familiar set of posters in the Underground. She and other girls could recite by heart the advertising rhyme about Guinness that appeared on the walls of Camden Town station, learned while waiting for trains. When Miss Drummond asked her to recite a poem, she nervously offered that one. The reply was a rare smile and the phrase she never forgot, that it would do. It is a small story, yet it captures the warmth beneath her reserve.
A poem from a 1930’s Guinness Advert
The historical record confirms the magnitude of what she achieved. She transformed science teaching at NLCS, established Frances Mary Buss House in Bromley by Bow to support communities in the East End, guided the school through evacuation to Luton at the onset of the Second World War, and held leadership from the final months of the First World War through to the opening year of the second. Her move to Canons was radical in the truest sense of the word, a return to the roots of the school’s early setting, when primroses could still be picked on Primrose Hill and green fields lay between Camden and Hampstead. Yet she carried all of this out without any desire for prominence. The photograph she commissioned upon her retirement still hangs in the Old House, modest and unassuming. Contemporary accounts describe a headmistress free from pride, prejudice or love of prestige. She never required pupils to rise when she entered a room and would stand quietly at the back during lessons, unobtrusive but attentive. Her pupils sometimes forgot she was the headmistress at all, so little did she demand deference. Her leadership was defined by service rather than authority, and by the belief that staff and pupils should feel they had achieved things themselves.
Frances Mary Buss House in Bromley by Bow
What makes her example resonant today is not simply the scale of her decisions, but her approach to uncertainty. She acted without knowing outcomes, held her course through difficulty, and believed that safeguarding the school’s identity required thoughtful change rather than the preservation of externals. She recognised that every generation must interpret its inheritance rather than replicate it, and that upheaval is not a sign of failing tradition but often its necessary ally.
Hilda’s memories, set against the archival record, offer a portrait of a leader whose influence continues not because she sought to be remembered but because she shaped the patterns of thought and behaviour that still define the school. Her legacy is present in the landscape we inhabit, in the ethos we recognise, and in the quiet conviction that a school’s personality endures through its willingness to evolve. It is an inheritance made from courage, attentiveness and humility, and remains ours to carry forward.
