Jeremy Paxman’s Great Britain’s Great War is a first glimpse at the author’s four part television series next year marking the 100th anniversary of the First World War.
He has filmed at Talbot Heath School and in the book takes issue with the warning given to its pupils in 1918 that ‘Only one out of ten of you girls can ever hope to marry…nearly all the men who might have married you have been killed’.
Paxman claims that although there was much shared anxiety about the future there were eventually more marriages than expected.
The teacher with the very gloomy fear is now thought to have been the head mistress Mary Broad who was addressing pupils on the old school site near Bournemouth West Station when Talbot Heath was still known as Bournemouth High School.
The record of this incident was made by Rosamund Essex, who lived at Boscombe, and later became the first and so far only woman to edit The Church Times.