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Many generations of former Lancing pupils, teaching and support staff and their families, friends and neighbours will be sad to hear that Sarah Woodhouse died on 3 July at the age of 89, just three years after Jim (HM 1981-1993) who once said, ‘it would have been absolutely inconceivable to do the job without her.’
As a Head Master’s wife, Angela Beer was a hard act to follow, but Sarah took up the reins with her own distinctive and inimitable personality. Her early years at Lancing were blighted by serious back pain but she quickly made the Old Farmhouse into a hub for the spouses and children of staff. Coffee mornings, buffet lunches, wild party games, sliding downstairs on tin trays, hiding in cupboards, breathless adventures in the garden, ice-skating on the pond and impromptu tennis tournaments, all depending on your age, athleticism and temperament, are still vividly remembered. The Woodhouses championed the Farm, and their old English sheepdog was exercised by chasing the car up and down the drive – ‘a flying ball of fluff and joy,’ one OL recalls. If there was a touch of the lady of the manor in Sarah’s approach, her obvious love and care for all people, her enthusiasm and generous hospitality were irresistible and endearing. She was indomitable and inexhaustible. She even accompanied Jim on two of those early Malawi expeditions which were characterised by a somewhat cavalier attitude to crocodiles and lions.
A promoter of worthy causes at home and everywhere, Sarah started a Clear Up and Cheer Up Club, taking pupils into the local community to undertake practical projects for the environment. More seriously, she ran a Saturday Club, assisted by pupils, to enable local children with disabilities to benefit from the College facilities. Sarah was especially devoted to the welfare of all young children and continued writing, researching and campaigning to the end of her life. She even designed and produced a new sort of ‘easy-access’ cot. She had a strong social conscience and, rather controversially, established an Amnesty International group for students at Lancing. They met regularly, sometimes commandeering housemasters’ accommodation to write torrents of letters to dictators and they actually succeeded in springing a (disappointingly ungrateful) Russian prisoner-of-conscience from internment. Interesting and challenging guests and speakers were invited to the school and a series of Lancing Lectures was inaugurated by OL Trevor Huddleston (Sanderson’s 1927-1931). Sarah's magazine article about Trevor’s 80th birthday party is a catalogue of revolutionary heroes, and her farewell letter to the Amnesty Group illustrates the breadth of her vision for human rights, justice and education through experience.
Sarah was brave and philosophical, believing that all things were possible and striving for the greater good of humanity throughout her life. She had a very modern attitude to issues of mental health and the work/life balance. She was both a staunch representative of a bygone age and uniquely ahead of her time.
Jeremy Tomlinson (Steward of Lancing Chapel, Fellow of Lancing College, Common Room 1971-2012)